Silent Snow, Secret Snow | Chapter 6

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Would you mind telling me how you met? Want to take that, honey? Come on. We met at a bar I was working at.
Yeah? What was the name? The name was The Blue Room 2. The Blue Room 2.
I got jumped by four tonight. They broke my jaw here, here, here, and here.
Plus, they broke my nose. Plus, they got a bunch of stitches.
Anyway, I was choking to death on my own blood. And if it hadn't been for murder, I'd have died.
She came over and got the hell beat out of me. I mean, bad.
Really? Because you looked kind of tough. I was.
He was more than one jumped in. I walked out and he's laying there on the ground and blood's gurgling out his mouth.
I'm like, roll him over, roll him over. So she pretty much saved my life.
So the next day I said, hey, will you give me a ride home? There was some girl that would not leave me alone. And I mean, she kept bugging me and bugging me and bugging me.
Go home with me, go home with me.

I said, Mary, come right home. She said, sure.
We've been together just about ever since.

From Waveland, I'm Justine Harmon. And I'm Holly Millay.
This is Three.

Episode Six, Silent Snow, Secret Snow. Still together after 28 years, Dave and Mary Nese's marriage is like the moon.
It began with an act of violence, goes through many phases, yet remains constant and true. Both born and raised in West Virginia, they embody the history of this dark, beautiful country, the only state entirely embraced by the Appalachian woods, where the past feels somehow present.
It was on this ground that the Civil War began in 1861. Two years later, Western Virginians formed their own state and joined the Union, one of five border states to fight against the Confederacy in some of the bloodiest battles along the Mason-Dixon County line, not far from where Schuyler was finally found on January 16.
Once the FBI lab confirmed through DNA testing that the remains were indeed Schuyler's, Tessa Cooper, an advocate for the FBI, contacted Dave. She said, Dave, go get Mary from work and bring her and we'll meet you at your apartment.
And I said, why? I can't tell you. And I said, it got so frustrating.
And she said, you need to go get Mary and I'll meet you at your apartment. And I said, OK.
So when we. So when I picked Mary up, we didn't say a word to each other the whole way home.
It was, I'll never forget the silence. It was almost deafening.
We both knew what was coming. Tess Cooper, she told us, she said, through investigation, I'll never forget these words.
They haunt me every damn day. Through investigation, we think we found Skyler.
And the first thing out of our mouths was, is she alive? And no, she's not. It's something we both knew was going to happen, but you can't be prepared for that.
It did. Did somebody tell you you just died? That's what it's like.
And I said, what happened? We can't tell you. And I said, oh, Jesus.
You can't be prepared for that kind of news. And you can't, there's no way, no one can tell you how to live that.
I mean, no one can tell you the emptiness you feel. Twelve days after Skyler's remains were found, Rachel tweeted, on January 28, 2013, There's so much I regret, but I'm on a new path, and I seriously couldn't be happier.
The following day, she tweeted to her boyfriend. Shout out to McKinsey for being the best boyfriend ever and sticking with me through all this shit.
Love you. Kissy face emoji.
On February 2nd. This bitch is not going to ruin my life all over again.
February 10th, 2013, the day Skylar would have turned 17, Sheila tweeted about how much she just loves to eat curly fries and wings. Rachel, who'd confessed a month earlier to killing her best friend, tweeted, Happy birthday, Skylar.
They had the birthday party, and they had plainclothes policemen all through the party because rumor was that Rachel and Sheila were going to show up. And to imagine us and just play along like, we're still out there trying to help you, and we're still going to look for you, knowing that your daughter was murdered by these two individuals.

And they couldn't do anything yet because they were still building the evidence up.

Skyler's 17th birthday was somber, more of a vigil,

held in the apartment parking lot with family, friends,

and scores of strangers who had read about the upcoming event in the Dominion Post,

holding lit children's life. parking lot with family, friends, and scores of strangers who had read about the upcoming event in the Dominion Post.
Holding lit Chinese lanterns, everyone mingled, smiling sad smiles, encouraging Mary and Dave to stay positive and hold out hope, not knowing what they already knew. And you threw that party, birthday party for Skylar, knowing

what had happened to her, but you had to put on this false front. Is that accurate? Yes, it is.
And you know what? God loved Tom Bloom. He was our saving grace through a lot of that.
he would tell us things that we probably weren't well we definitely weren't supposed to know but he had an in with the state police and he would find out information and pass along to us and i gotta say i don't know if we would have made it not knowing a lot of that evening that Dave found out exactly how Skyler had died.

Always desperate for information, Dave asked County Commissioner Tom Bloom,

who'd actually been his former high school counselor, if he knew anything more.

Father to father, Tom revealed what he'd heard on good authority.

While Dave always thought Sheila and Rachel knew more than they were letting on, he was both numb and shocked by the facts.

And he couldn't bring himself to tell Mary what he'd learned until days later.

On March 6th, Rachel tweeted in what seemed like a feverish pace.

Imagine there's no heaven.

It's easy if you try.

No hell below us and above us only sky.

Imagine all the people living for today. Snow makes everything more quiet.
Happy moments, praise God. Difficult moments, seek God.
Painful moments, trust God. Every moment, thank God.
And then on March 8th.

My past is my past. Move the fuck on.
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Downtown along High Street, older women, some mothers, some grandmothers now raising their grandchildren, stand on corners near stop signs, tapping on car windows, distributing literature

and free Narcan to any and everyone with the hope that a life might be saved.

Morgantown has been hit hard by the opioid epidemic in the last 10 years.

A little further down the street is the Monongalia County Justice Center,

which back in 2014 was a defunct post office built in the 70s.

The sun streams through the large windows of the renovated building

where we meet Judge Perry Joe DeChristopher and retired prosecuting attorney Marsha Ashdown in a large third floor conference room.

Perry Jo resembles actress Marissa Tomei, attractive, dressed in a black top with a tiny checked black and white Chanel-esque jacket.

While Marsha, in black readers, wears a crisp white button-down blouse

and black slacks. She's a ringer for Martha Stewart.
The room is chilly, but the two friends and colleagues who worked together for so many years exude warmth. Like, we're truly, it's like it's been

we spent

lots of time

days

nights

evenings

weekends

lots

of Truly, it's like it's been, we spent lots of time, days, nights, evenings, weekends, lots and lots and lots of times. Lots of fun times, lots of tears, lots of hard times.
Lots of worry, lots of stress, quite a few laughs. Are you trauma bonded? Absolutely.
Absolutely. People don't realize that.
Like, it's a, like, in our world, we know that secondary trauma. But, like, out in the world, people don't realize that.
Like, you know, you do murder cases, and murder cases are hard. You know, you deal with victims' families.
But, you know, we did kid cases, kid cases. You do get callous to seeing horrible things.
I mean, things that would horrify the average person. You know, you see a body photographed all carved up and their head mostly cut off.
You have to.

Oh, it's a picture.

Right.

You can't go through it alone, which is how we survived it.

It's super surprising when you realize from this end, from our view of the world,

that we've done murders where people have been killed over snowballs, over leaning against someone's car, over a spilled drink.

In a bar.

In a bar.

We had a veteran that did two tours of duty in Afghanistan and was killed on High Street over a spilled drink.

Girls hating each other or worrying about a rumor, but it's just as ridiculous as all those other motives for murder. In every one of those that I just said, it's intense, and those are teenage girls.
And so you can just imagine how that was huge in their mind. And so while it's certainly not a justification for murder, motive for murder is usually ridiculous.
Ten years ago, in the Morgantown courthouse, I was waiting for the elevator when Marsha Ashdown, who hadn't returned my phone calls, suddenly appeared. As we stood there waiting, I introduced myself, pulled out my recorder and asked,

why would Rachel and Sheila murder Skylar instead of just dropping the friendship?

I've never forgotten her answer.

It's shocking, she said.

But then, some people kill their spouse rather than getting divorced, for example.

And it's not always because of an insurance policy. It's because they want to kill them.
Years ago, when Holly and I first started to talk about this story, we would spend hours on the phone sharing our own adolescent experiences. Holly would tell me all about this slam book her classmates circulated in Rapid City, South Dakota, a mean girl style burn book in which her peers would

share their most unvarnished thoughts and then pass it on for others to add their anonymous

vitriol. We had something like that at my school too.
A simple three by five note card the boys

circulated about the girls in which they critiqued our bodies, our brains, our faces, our worth. An entire teenager's existence boiled down to a scathing chicken scratch review.
University high school was no different. 1,300 or so teenagers grappling with social issues, the precipice of adulthood, and whatever the hell was happening at home.
They were ranked academically, pitted against one another on sports teams, and reminded of all the potential they were squandering. How do you not feel the urge to claim your stake, your place in line, your right to exist? I remember still the rush of rage when I heard what was written about me back then, the same rage I felt when one of my closest friends betrayed me by sharing a secret that wasn't theirs to tell, or trashed me to the boy whose name I would scrawl like a sacred talisman inside of my notebooks.
A toxic cocktail of anger and hurt and insecurity that felt overwhelming and singularly mine. But the raw impulse to retaliate, to inflict fatal harm on a perceived enemy, is so taboo, so outside the realm of possibility, we don't even dare acknowledge it.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world it doesn't exist. On March 14th, the headline on the Dominion Post read, Skylar's Remains ID'd.
And beneath it, Star City teenager missing eight months, family devastated. Rachel stayed as silent as the snow.
But Sheila immediately went into survival mode, sending out a series of tweets. The pain is real.
Rest easy, Skylar. You'll always be my best friend.
I miss you more than you could ever know. Mary, not wanting Skyler's close friend to read the news or hear it from someone else, told Daniel Hovader personally.
Mary messaged me and was like, okay, bud, they found a body. She didn't tell me that Rachel had led them to the body, though.
She just told me that the FBI had found the body and that it was more than likely Skyler's. And that's whenever shit got real.
I was just like, great. One of my friends was dead.
And then once that was, that's whenever it was on the news and the school found out. Because the news let it out right before school had ended.
And everyone started talking about it and everyone was walking around the school crying and freaking out and saying the shower was dead and it was just a sad day at school because i would have freaked out if mary hadn't have told me i was driving and i was on a mile ground road passing the Subaru shop and I heard on the radio they said breaking news you have Skyler's body been found and I was like shit and I heard that that day I I was like, wow, this is...

She's home.

We'll bring her home.

What was fortunate about finding her when we did was we were able to locate a lot of the remains.

You know, over time, however, animals months until they discovered Skylar's skull. On March 29th, Gaskins returned to the site, determined to reunite all of Skylar's remains.
Walking the area, he found her skull on a small path some 80 yards away from where her body had been. Sheila, socially isolated and no longer the center of attention in a high school universe, filled her days homeschooling online, watching Law & Order SVU marathons, and hanging with her cousin Alexis Eddy and Shania Amens, her childhood friend.
A lot of people were angry with me because I was defending Sheila. Even the police were like, you need to get away from her when they would come to interview me.
But nobody would give me any proof. And I was 16 and I was stubborn and I was, you know, confused.
And I was like, you know what? I've already lost one of my best friends. I'm not just going to drop the other one when nobody's giving me an actual reason to.
On March 31st, 2013, Sheila, as if goading the authorities, was tweeting back and forth with a friend about something unrelated when she wrote, We really did go on three. Right there's a proven fact.
Blatantly on Twitter, we went on three. You literally just confessed to the whole world and did it for fun and a thrill to see if anybody catch on.
Kim Keener knew something was seriously up, given the constant police presence outside the shelf home. In fact, the neighbor grew so anxious, she began self-medicating.
Oh, I was not. I was bananas.
I ate chocolate all the time. I was smoking pot all the time.
I mean, just trying to bring myself down. As scared as I was and as paranoid as I was, I didn't want to make things hard on them either because they were going through their own sweet hell.
You know what I mean? And I still loved them. You know, I did.
And so it was

crazy.

So I was afraid

of a few things. I kept saying, okay, you know,

I never voted for that chemical execution

office again because, you know, they let her

walk after she admitted that she

killed this girl. She

roamed around the county

like a free bird for

months, okay? And she had nothing to lose. Okay, there are my cute little girls in their cute little beds next door.
My dogs would have never barked if she walked in my house. It was like she lived there.
And then, you know, my husband worked nights. I was, we were, we put an alarm system in, we put cameras in.
While the authorities built their case against Sheila and worked to move the girls from juvenile to adult status, they struck a deal with Rachel. In exchange for her cooperation and testimony against Sheila, she agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder.
They allowed a trip to Virginia Beach in April for Rachel to see her grandmother.

To those following her on social media, she appeared to be on a carefree vacation. I do remember that she and her mother wanted to go to Florida.
Yeah, I forgot about that. And I think we weren't in a position to try to stop that, I guess, because we would have had to have her in custody, I suppose, and we weren't ready to do that.
Did we let her go? Did she go? I believe so, because I think I remember photographs from... Her Instagram account.

Yes.

Right.

Thinking of something.

On April 21st, she tweeted a picture of a mimosa and wrote,

I need a mimosa or 10.

There are some cases so infamous that we have all heard about them. But some of the coldest cases, the most mysterious, are the ones that you've never heard of before.
I'm Ashley Flowers, and every Wednesday on my show The Deck, I dive into the coldest of cold cases. Many of these victims didn't get the press coverage they deserved during the initial investigations, but I'm sharing what our reporting team has found on these stories in hopes that someone listening may have the information needed to bring answers to light.
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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Throughout the month of April, Sheila was also very online, tweeting what read like other veiled references to the murder.
On April 23rd, if only you knew, you'd shit right down your leg. April 24th, I hate when people blame their own actions and choices on others.
Deal with it. April 27th, ain't no rest for the wicked.
April 28th, I hate seeing or hearing things that remind me of you because you're the last person I want to be reminded of April 30th I've closed enough windows to know you can never look back Despite everything they'd heard secondhand Dave and Mary still didn't toes off until she confessed. And Tom Bloom called me first.
He said, Dave, where are you at? And I was so pissed. I was mad.
I said, Tom, it ain't going to do any good. By the time you get here, it's going to be done.
And I said, don't worry about it. Then Ronnie called me, and Ronnie was pissed.
Oh, I'd never seen Ronnie mad up until that point. He goes, where are you? And I said, it doesn't matter where I'm at.
It doesn't make any difference. He said, Dave, I'm going to tell you right now, don't make this hard on yourself.
He said, what is Mary going to do without you? And that hit a strong boom. That hit me hard.
And I said, oh my God, I never thought about that. Not one time did I think about that.
I had both my guns with me, and they were going to die that day. There was no doubt in my mind until Ronnie said that, that what is Mary going to do without you? Shook me up.
The next day, May 1st, 2013,

Shania Amons was looking forward to her Clay Battelle High School prom,

which was less than two weeks away.

Sheila, always up to see and be seen,

was prom hopping.

She went with her cousin, Alexis Eddy,

to the North Marion High Dance

in nearby Farmington. And now, Sheila was planning to go in a group with Shania to hers.
So she was going to take, and ironically, she is a lesbian, but it wasn't like that when I say this. But she was going to take Sheila as her date so Sheila could come to our prom.
And I was taking one of our friends that was a freshman, you know, that was a female so that she could come to the prom. And I was trying to figure out what hairstyle because, you know, I went, I went dress shopping.
I found my dress up in Clarksburg is where I got it. I had gotten shoes and Morgantown that matched the perfect.
So I wanted everything to like perfect so on that day i was at the fairmont beauty college getting a trial done on my hair and my lifelong best friend her name's maggie um she called me and she said where the fuck is sheila and i said i said i don't know i talked to her a couple hours ago and she was with her mom at the doctor waiting for her her mom to get blood work done or something. Why? And she said, I don't know.
I talked to her a couple hours ago and she was with her mom at the doctor waiting for her mom to get blood work done or something. Why? And she said, you haven't heard anything.
And I said, what are you talking about? And she said, it's on the radio right now that Rachel Schoen pled guilty to murder and is in custody. Skyler's close friend, 16-year-old Rachel Schelf, has admitted to planning the murder and is in custody.
Skyler's close friend, 16-year-old Rachel Schoef, has admitted to planning the murder and stabbing the victim in a remote part of Wayne Township, Pennsylvania. Rachel confessed and everybody went, holy crap, it actually happened.
It just came out of complete left field. Everybody's working on something else and then i think it was

a phone call came in that she had needed and it was like what um kind of thing and there's another juvenile in custody that they are not you know um giving the name i said are you serious and she He said, yeah.

I said, I'll call you right now.

So I immediately hung up and I tried to call Sheila and there was no answer. And I texted Sheila and there was no answer.
Earlier that morning, Rachel Schoaf, accompanied by her mother Patricia, had turned herself in and in accordance with her plea deal pled guilty to second-degree murder. She called me the day before it like you know came out or you know whatever she said I just wanted to let you know before you know everything went bananas Rachel has confessed to second-degree murder.
Now the the girls had already come home from school, though, and told me, Mom, they stabbed her, and I said, listen to me. They may have done something to her, but there is no way my Rachel stabbed anyone.
Okay, now that's just stories. How about I'm telling my kid this? You believe that? Because I just couldn't believe.
Kim immediately told Kelly Kearns. And the neighbor said something about them stabbing her.
And that's when I jumped in the car and raced to their house and knocked on the door. Kelly sent us pictures of Rachel over the years, several in which Kelly is holding or hugging her.
As a grinning toddler with flame red hair and a dimpled smile. At about four, she's radiant in a pretty party dress, holding a wicker basket full of daisies.
At five, on a lake, posing in the middle of an inner tube, smiling and wearing a life vest. Then, in a flash, she's around twelve, a mouth full of braces and cheeks full of freckles.
In an instant, the red-haired baby Kelly held moments after she was born is now a head taller than her surrogate mom. And look, it's Rachel and Sheila and Skylar smiling, posing, laughing at Rachel's 15th birthday party.
Even as Rachel wraps her arm around her, Kelly has a sense that the teen has become someone else, a girl whose mind is somewhere else. Knocked on the door and there's Patricia and Rachel standing on the steps and I'm outside yelling, Tell me you didn't do this.
And Patricia told Rachel to go on and Patricia said it's bad. And she didn't give me many details and I left.
I just left. With Rachel in custody, it was finally time to capture Sheila.
Just before noon, Morgan Spurlock and Ronnie Gaskins pulled into the Cracker Barrel parking lot in Granville, West Virginia, just as Sheila and her mother were walking to their car. We were over at Sheila's house in the beginning, and then we realized that she was over at the Cracker Barrel, and the state troopers responded in time to stop her.
And then that's when Ronnie, putting a cuss on her, told her what she was arrested for. And I talked to her mother to let her know what was happening the rest of the day.
We brought her to the county court, like the Montegay Lake County Sheriff's Department. And she was held there while arrangements were being made with the court.
And then she had her appearance and then we drove her along with Jessica Colbank down to the detention center. They gave me the opportunity to ride with her on the way to jail in the car.
So after they picked her up, because she was actually picked up at Cracker

Barrel, just up the road here with her mom. And we think she was trying to leave the state

with her. So I instructed her mom, Tara, to call Mike Vinegar because they're going to have a hearing for her initial appearance later on that afternoon.

For 10 months, Sheila had so often repeated and impressed upon others her version of events,

to the authorities, to family, to friends, to Twitter followers,

that she'd convinced herself she'd gotten away with the crime.

Slapped into her new reality, Sheila was finally scared.

Well, sort of.

That's what she was worried about.

Was she going to be with, you know, bad people?

You know, like, that's what she would say.

Am I going to be with anybody that's mean?

Don't put me with any mean people.

And, you know, me and Ronnie were kind of looking at each other like,

you know, I'm serious.

You know, this is kind of like she didn't want to be seen in the back of the squad car.

I remember that, too.

And, like, she would try to, I don't know, she would try to duck down, but she definitely, you know, raised those concerns that, you know, people can see me.

Yeah, she was more worried about appearances.

She wanted to make sure she looked good for her mugshot. Are they taking my picture? Is everyone going to see it? Everything like that.
So she was solely worried about her image. She was more worried about getting her hair done for prom on the way to jail.
It wasn't, oh, you know, what's happening to me next? It was, okay, am I going to miss my hair appointment? It's not a typical reaction of someone that's just been picked up for murder. Next time on three.
in her life. I don't know if there's a proper way to make this apology, because there are not even words to describe the guilt and remorse that I feel each day for what I've done.
Sheila and Rachel first joked about killing Skylar during science class, when one of them said, we should kill her. And they looked at each other with a sense of agreement tell your

friends. Follow Waveland on Instagram at Waveland Media for more on this series and upcoming new

shows. Thanks for listening.
Thank you. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
And I'm Anasega Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor. We've each spent decades on the front lines of crime, witnessing the devastation that violence leaves behind.
And for us, the heart of these cases is the people involved, the victims whose stories deserve to be told and not forgotten. Every week on Anatomy of Murder,

we dissect the layers of a homicide

through the lens of those who know them best,

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