Dear Diary | Chapter 3

Hi everyone, I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra.

And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most

stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.

From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of

cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts.
High Five Casino is the top choice for social casino gaming that's free to play. With chances to win and redeem for real cash prizes, free spin rewards, and tons of exclusive games, you can experience more high five moments than ever before.
You're going to want to high five everyone neighbors, the mailman, all your co-workers, of course your friends. Well, you get the point.
Your high-five moment awaits at highfivecasino.com. No purchase necessary.
Voidware prohibited by law. Must be 21 years or older.
Terms and conditions apply. Hi, I'm Jason Hope, and you might know me as the behind-the-scenes maker and producer of such shows as Three, Noble, Atlanta Monster, and so many more.

Well, I'm excited to introduce you to my latest show, Deadly Fortune, which I know you're going to love.

She said, Tex, what did you do? You shot me.

Guns just don't magically go off on their own.

There's a million things in life that are hard to explain.

Dive into Deadly Fortune, the true crime story you don't want to miss. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Way, way. In a video uploaded to YouTube in May of 2012, less than two months before Skylar went missing, Sheila and Rachel filmed themselves driving around Morgantown in Sheila's silver 2006 Toyota Camry.
They primp in front of the camera before seeming to forget its presence entirely. They proceed to take hits from a stashed bowl and have looping, circuitous conversations.
First, Rachel's worried she's too stoned to perform during rehearsal. Oh my God, I have to go to singing.
6.30. I have to go to singing and do a dance and do a song.
Two songs. So then why? I can't sing when I'm high.
Then she brags about her floppy-haired boyfriend, Mackenzie Boggs, a musician and frontman for the rock band, call us next Tuesday. Go all the way back in that corner.
That the trees look whizzing past their windows. That looks so cool! That looks so fucking cool! Look at the outside of my window.
Holy fucking shit! They're quite high. At the time when they were taken, the videos were part road journal, part amateur self-portrait, and part confessional.
It's a really high song.

Oh my God, you know what? I need to tell you a secret. I just forgot.
You have a secret from me? Well, I mean, I've never told anyone. Not even Skylar? No.
Okay. I didn't even tell Skylar that I get high.
The videos, like everything the three girls touched, would become evidence. From Waveland, I'm Holly Millay.
And I'm Justine Harmon. This is Three.
Episode Three. Dear Diary.
While law enforcement now knew it was Sheila's Camry in the apartment security video, they were left asking, what happened next? Where did they go? What are they hiding? We thought the girls witnessed something. If you're being threatened, you're 100% safe with us, we'll take care of you and all that.
Tell us who the bad guys are, we'll go after them. That's our job.
When I first met State Trooper Chris Berry, he was 29, boyishly handsome, wearing jeans, long-sleeved white tee, and heavy boots. He was young enough to navigate the earliest days of social media, and he could easily pass for one of the 30,000 West Virginia University students who swell Morgantown every autumn.
He still could today. We meet at Surfside Charlie's in Myrtle Beach.
I would say social media has gotten 10 times worse. Jesus, when you interviewed me, it was right there at the beginning.
Tell me how you set up a fake Facebook page. Better attachments.
We set up a fake Facebook profile, and that's how we taught bad guys. We taught where all the drug dealers were,

where all this was.

And these kids would just friend you

and tell you anything.

Throw a couple stuff with like marijuana leaves

or something like that

to make it look like we're just a bunch of dopers.

And I had one kid one time,

like, you get a warrant on it?

I'm like, yeah.

And they said, well, I get a warrant on it.

I've never seen you.

And like last second, I was like,

well, I'm always skipping class.

That's why you never see me.

And I'm always skipping class and getting stoned.

And they're like, hell yeah, that's awesome.

It was just fun and easy like that.

It was through the girls' friends and friends of friends

that a better sketch of the teens and how they lived on and offline began to emerge.

When Skylar hung out with, say, Shania Amens, the hijinks were more or less PG-13. I think ninth grade was the Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa.
So Skylar and I went together. It was my grandmother had bought our tickets and, you know, Skylar lived in Morgantown.
So that was the first time that Skylar and I had ever stayed just the two of us by ourselves and had ever done anything where it was just Skylar and I Sheila wasn't there I stayed at Skylar's and we had a great time um that was our first concert like that like I said we were freshmen so I think we were like 14, 15 years old, probably 14. And there was a lot of smoking in the Coliseum for the concert.
And we were like smoking with complete strangers. But in those days, it wasn't as likely to get handed something that was much more dangerous than marijuana.
There's a picture of Skylar and I from that concert. And, you know, we showed up in, like, jeans and Wiz Khalifa t-shirts thinking we were all cool.
Yeah, that was definitely not the aesthetic that we were expecting. We were at a rap concert in Morgantown.
So we got kind of a shock there. Normal teen stuff.
Being and feeling younger than everyone else. Awkwardly asking strangers, can I hit that? And learning from it all.
But add Sheila, and the dynamics changed. The hijinks suddenly turned rated R.
so then our 10th grade year Sheila had her license first

and her mom had given her her old car

so she was able to get around

and that's when we went to the Tiger concert. Sheila posted a picture of her, Skylar, and Shania in a bathroom mirror selfie before the concert.
They're all wearing slightly different black dresses. Skylar's looks to be strapless, Sheila is in a short t-shirt dress, and Shania is wearing a long-sleeve design with holes down the sleeves.

There are two giant big gulps in front of them. The caption? A simple heart.
And they were all excited because they had tickets. Skyler and I both got our dresses from Forever 21.
oh these girls bought brand new dresses spiked heels special jewelry and

skylar had on a little black dress with gold shoes and that gold necklace. And she had bought it special for that concert.
It was a leaf, a gold leaf, like a maple leaf, but in a pot leaf. So we all ended up with a black dress and heels to go to this concert in 10th grade and sheila driving and we knew that we could get weed in ourselves so snuck in blunts to smoke in the coliseum like you know we had seen the year before and it was a blast now sheila like side swiped a pole almost wrecked i swear we probably almost died 100 times that Once we got home, we all stayed at Sheila's house.
Her mom was a little more lenient about some things. That night, Sheila tweeted, ain't no rest for the wicked.
Skylar was always a sounding board for Sheila and her exploits, and she was happy to have a front row seat. She chronicled everything in her diary.
Back in 2014, Jessica Colbank put it to me this way, quote, a lot of her diary seemed not jealous of Sheila. Skylar was very pretty, but Sheila had all the guys and could do whatever she wanted.
Sheila got all the attention. Skylar could live vicariously through Sheila, writing about what she called Sheila's sexcapades because she didn't have any of her own, and Sheila was not shy when it came to the details.
According to Colbank, Sheila told Skylar who she did it with, how they did it, if it was good, if it was bad, if he was big, if he was small. That's another reason Skylar wasn't sexually active.
She didn't need to be because she could live off of the stories that Sheila was telling. The girl's outward appearance, bonded, happy, aligned, was often in sharp contrast with what Skylar had written.
The dissonance spoke volumes. It put in perspective a little bit the dynamics between Sheila and Skylar, because again, photos, they all looked happy.
They were all smiling in photos. They put

their best face forward because Sheila is a very vain person. Extremely vain.

One entry in particular stands out. On August 21st, 2011, at 2.34 in the morning,

Skylar wrote about a vodka-soaked sleepover with Rachel and Sheila at Rachel's house. I remember that night.
That is so weird because Rachel was never allowed to do anything. And she was allowed to have a sleepover, which I thought was bizarre, you know, as far as Patricia mothering.
That's Rachel's former next-door neighbor, Kim Keener. And so anyway, I remember her coming to my house.
And I think the girls had been smoking pot down there that night because she said the windows were wide open and you know and I mean big deal kids smoke pot in high school but and I mean but it but she told me that she was awakened at five o'clock in the morning screaming a screaming fight between the three girls. While holding her daughter's diary in 2014 Mary told me what Skylar had written about on that raucous night.
Skylar, Sheila, and Rachel were all at Rachel's house one night, and they wanted to party. So, they snuck downstairs, got liquor out of her mom's liquor cabinet, went upstairs, locked themselves in so Patricia couldn't walk in and catch them.
And they were drinking. And she said that they got drunk and Sheila and Rachel proceeded to make out, she said, in every way that you possibly can outside of actually effing.
And she said the word. And she said she was locked in the room with them and was afraid to leave because she was afraid then that Patricia would find out they'd gotten into the liquor.
I know that the night that she talked about her diary about those two being lesbians. They were all three drunk.

That's Dave Nesigan, Skyler's dad.

I think the night that those two had relations,

Skyler talks about it in her diary,

and she decided then, I'm the third wheel.

I'm the one that's, they're talking about.

And it was true.

I mean, they were, after that encounter, she said said in her diary, it made her sick to her stomach. And she hoped she never has to watch anything like that again.
Her private testimonial revealed a painful, permanent fissure in the friendship. Something Skylar's parents would only realize after their daughter had gone missing.
One of the things I've found out this go-round is Skyler had a temper. She did.
We noticed that too in her diary. But knowing she had a temper, she also was very forgiving.
Very forgiving. She was very quick to bite, but then bring it back.

Then she'd hope for the best and go from there.

Well, then, boom, something else would happen.

It was just constant.

Two weeks after Rachel and Sheila hooked up in front of her,

Skylar took to Twitter.

I tell the whole school all the shit I have on everyone,

which is a lot.

Hashtag, if I could get away with it. High Five Casino is the top choice for social casino gaming that's free to play.
With chances to win and redeem for real cash prizes, free spin rewards, and tons of exclusive games, you can experience more high five moments than ever before. You're going to want to high five everyone.
The neighbors, the mailman, all your coworkers, of course, your friends. Well, you get the point.
Your high five moment awaits at high five casino.com. No purchase necessary.
Voidware prohibited by law must be 21 years older. Terms and conditions apply.
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. And that listener could be you.
Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. By September of junior year, the school had become a pressure cooker.

From the get-go, the principal and staff discouraged all chatter regarding Skyler's disappearance.

Here's Tom Bloom again.

We had kids who needed to talk to people.

And I will be point blank.

I blame it on the principal and, you know, the administration.

They put a ban on all talking. Couldn't help.
And why the hell would you do that? The teachers weren't allowed to talk. So now you had the teachers who couldn't help the kids.
It was more important to keep the image of university high school than help the kids at that time. And that's one of my real angers of the school system.
I'm bitter on that. While discussion of Skylar was restricted, there was no keeping law enforcement from coming into the school and questioning students.
At 16, juveniles can be interviewed as adults without the presence of a parent or guardian. Yet Rachel and Sheila's mothers both resisted their daughter's cooperation.
And before long, the teens each had their own attorney. They were the only students who did.
Under increasing pressure, the two girls turned to each other, leaving their peers behind. They were both acting weird, really weird.
Like they stopped hanging out with a lot of people. It was just Rachel and Sheila.
Just them, no one else. mind.
to stop thinking about. So that was another trigger for me because they definitely, before that happened, they smoked weed on occasion at parties and stuff.
After all this happened, they were smoking every day. After school, before school, during school.
Daniel Hovater, a friend of Schuyler's since childhood, grew close to Rachel while spending so much time with her during theater rehearsals. Sheila, he kept at a distance.
Sheila's definitely the queen bee. I never really liked Sheila because she was controlling.
She wasn't my type of person. Like the authorities, Daniel thought the girls were holding back, and he wasn't afraid to hear it.
I've been questioned by the FBI so much lately that I can't even take it. And I was like, well, I'm just letting you know that if you know something, you need to let them know because they're going to find out.
They're the FBI. It's not a game anymore, Rachel.
On October 2nd, 2012, nearly three months after Skyler's disappearance, Sheila posted a plea on the Team Skylar Facebook page with a picture of Skylar. The two are sitting on the floor with Sheila leaning back between Skylar's legs, eyes closed, as Skylar's kissing her cheek.
She wrote, Skylar, sorry I haven't posted in a while. School has been taking up all my time.
Me and Rachel miss you so much, especially at lunch. We sit at a lunch table alone.
Come back so we don't look like loners anymore. LOL, school is so hard without you.
Actually, everything is hard without you. I seriously think about you 24-7 and miss talking to you on the phone day and night.
I know you wouldn't like some of the things that are being said lately. While law enforcement was tracking the girls online, watching them post in real time, other forces were hard at work.
Two people, using the pseudonyms at Josie Snyder and at Mia Bar 8, started following Sheila and Rachel on Twitter and, with obvious relish, were taunting them. On October 10th, 2012, at MiaBar8 tweeted, Luke 12-2, nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.
On October 26th, Josie Snyder tweeted back to MiaBar8, Bring pretty little liars down together. Hashtag promise to never leave you cold.
Feeling attacked, Sheila fired off a tweet that was clearly a warning to all. No one on this earth can handle me and Rachel, and if you think you can, you're wrong.
Rachel and Sheila were finding the hassle from the police, the phantom posters, and the kids at school unendurable. By mid-December, they were no longer attending UHS and were homeschooling online.
Patricia was going to a party down in Virginia, and she had just left the house. She gets a call to the FBI or there to question Rachel, And she calls me and tells me to get over to the house.
That's Rachel's family friend, Kelly Kearns again. Instead of even turning around and coming home, she goes on to her party.
And I get there. The neighbor, Kim, is there.
Rachel's boyfriend is there. They're up in the living room.
I don't really

know what to do. I've never dealt with anything like this before.
So I'm talking with Kim and

the boyfriend. And finally, I don't know, about 30 minutes later, I go upstairs and I say, okay,

I need to know what's going on. And they were like, you know, we're done.
It's the only time

I had Rachel to myself in all those years. And she gave me some cock and bull story about

Thank you. But the entries in Rachel's diary revealed a very different story.
Up until July 6, she would write the typical musings of a hormone-fueled teen. But on July 6th, Rachel began writing in code of the Schuyler situation and not wanting that to happen and how she wanted to be rebaptized.
Here's Chris Berry. She had a diary that Ronnie and I found on the first search when we did at her house.
And her pages, she dated them, everything. Rachel was just straightforward.
Talking about smoking weed, having sex for the first time, this, this, and this. Her diary screwed her first.
The day after Skylar went missing, she talked like this deep religious saying of like, Dear God, please take me down the golden path for the sins I've committed and all that stuff. I'm looking around like, what the fuck do we got here? High Five Casino lets you play your favorite slot and live table games like Blackjack with the chance to redeem for real cash prizes.
High Five Casino has a giant selection of over 1,200 games, including hundreds of exclusive games only found on High Five Casino. It's always free to play and free coins are given out every four hours.
Ready to have your own high five moment? Visit highfivecasino.com. That's high, the number five, casino.com.
No purchase necessary. Voidware prohibited by law.
Must be 21 years or older terms and conditions apply shopping is hard I can never find anything in my size I don't even know my size I buy my clothes the same place I buy my groceries there's a better way make it easy with Stitch Fix just share your size style budget and done your personal stylist sends pieces picked just for you that was easy stitch fix online personal styling for everyone free shipping and returns no subscription required get started today at stitchfix.com would you guys rather suffocate or get shot get shot shot as a. Wait, it depends on where.
Would you rather get in the head? Shot. There would be no suffering at all.
Eaten by ants or suffocated? Suffocated. In this clip, Sheila casually asks Rachel and Schuyler how they'd prefer to die.
Eaten by ants or suffocated? Drowning or suffocating? Sheila appears to delight in hosting the morbid game show. Drowning or suffocating? Suffocating.
It's almost the same thing. I know, but it's not.
We interviewed her. You could look straight in her eyes.
There was nothing there there. Like, you'd ask her questions, and she'd be like,

nope, anything else you want to ask?

Like, that creepy response is back.

As the investigation progressed,

the consensus among all was that Rachel and Sheila

knew more than they were letting on.

In her interviews, Rachel was clearly uncomfortable,

exhibiting nonverbal cues in conflict with what she was saying. When I interviewed Trooper Ronnie Gaskins in 2014, he described watching her slowly falling apart.
Things weren't adding up from what she was telling us before. So when we would approach her with more evidence, then she would, you know, start to get more nervous.
So, you know, there was, you know, the one occasion where she blocked herself out from the interview. She looked down, she went and looked at us.
She had a pencil in her hand. She was playing with the pencil.
It just seemed like she wasn't engaging in the interview with us. She just kind of blocked herself out.
So, I mean, you could just tell looking at her, you know, something was bothering her. Sheila, unfazed, seemed to revel in the process.
Here's FBI agent Morgan Spurlock in 2014. Sheila, you know, she had great posture.
She had her hands folded on the table. She looked you in the eye and just beat you, matter of fact, you know, almost.

You know, she would apologize for, you know, changing her story so many times.

And, you know, she would try and layer her perception of the events that happened with, you know, a cloud of doubt over some of the facts that we didn't stick to her.

Sometimes I even see that with the career criminals. I told Ronnie, I said, she's one of those crazy bitches that it got to the point I had to start watching when I was going home.
And because my house, she like had a little section that goes to the back door, but it was covered because we lived on a mountain. So we had a patio, or a breezeway, went back, easy to hide into.
It was nice. I was taking my gun out with my flashlight and kind of peeking around the corner because I said this crazy bitch would come out and stab me.
There were only two directions Sheila and Rachel could have gone after picking up Skylar. They said they drove east.
On a hunch, Barry went to two different Sheetz gas stations and scanned hours of surveillance tape until boom, there it was, Sheila's car driving west towards Blacksville, Eddie's home turf. So then we went to the crossroads of the other Sheetz to see if they went on the interstate or kept going out.
Well, it showed that she kept going out on Route 7 towards Blacksville. So right there we knew, 12.30, 1 o'clock in the morning, they were heading out to Blacksville.
And we just got Sheila and Rachel in the line. Star City Police Officer Jessica Colbank decided it was time to turn up the heat to confront the inconsistencies in Rachel and Sheila's stories once and for all.

So we made arrangements because we're like, we know these girls are lying. We need to hem them up.
And we'd been pushing that, especially me and Chris. We need to get these girls separated because they were like glue.
And their parents were not helping separate them. And so with everything going on, the state police had their polygraph examiner available at their office.
Sheila took the polygraph test first and was confident she'd passed. As Colbank told me in 2014, she was big-headed.
She thought she could beat it. Sheila even texted Rachel, all nonchalance.
Police station probably going to fail because of nerves. No big fucking deal.
To which Rachel responded, As long as you don't fail because you're lying, you can ask to take it again because you were nervous the first time. Sheila shot back, Oh well, I'm definitely not scared about lying, but it's not like they'd know the difference, lol.
Sheila failed the polygraph test not once, but twice, for withholding information from law enforcement. The questions the examiner asked assumed that she knew what happened to Skylar that night, but was either afraid to say or being threatened by those involved.
What Sheila actually did know was so beyond comprehension, she was never asked if she had murdered her. But when they started hitting them with lie detector tests, that Eddie girl took two of them and the only thing she got right was her name.
Okay, I mean, it was, the whole thing was a lie so they couldn't compare it to anything else. You know, everything she said was a lie.
So how can you compare a liar to what's telling the truth? Through it all, she kept on tweeting, you're fat because I hate you. I cannot express how much I love being naked.
Ah, law and order SVU will always bring joy to my life.

On December 12th, it was Rachel's turn to take the lie detector test.

But on the way downtown, she panicked.

The day that Rachel was supposed to be polygraphed,

she jumped out of a moving car to not go and ran down the street, which her dad called and said, hey, she just jumped out of the car. I don't know what's going on.
I don't know where she went. But he did not want to file a missing persons report because he said she'll show up somewhere.
I'm not that concerned. She skipped on the polygraph.
That pissed me off. God, that pissed me off.
And because Ronnie and Lauren's like, well, screw it. She don't want to do the pod girl.
We can't force her to.

So we'll just, you know, call it off.

Sheila's mom, Tara, had also been of little help.

We're hitting dead ends after dead ends after dead ends.

This girl's been missing and they're fucking around with us.

I hate to say it, it's like I got two 60-year-old girls and a dipshit mother who's pulling her dicks.

Tara, she had been calling incessantly, you know, you're depriving my daughter of her electronics and I need my computer and everything like that. And so I said, you can come get them.
I'm done with them. We've gotten all the information we need off of them.
Tara comes up to the office. We were upstairs at the time and I'm getting a box of things and I just happened to ask her, do you know where Rachel's at? She said, yeah, she's in my car in the parking lot.
So I said, hold on a second. So I called the state police because they said she didn't show up and I said, she's in my parking lot right now.
Come get her. And the FBI was there and they had a discussion and they called her dad to see if they wanted them to come get her.
And he said, no, she's fine with Tara and Sheila. That's when Jessica just started going off and Karen called her a fucking tool bag and all that.
I'll never forget. I was sitting there at the table and I'm just kind of like this to say that it's good.
You're not about a fucking tool bag.

I was like, damn.

I was like, all right, here we go.

And I was like, you go, girl.

You keep going.

You do your thing.

And she just laid in and Tara was crying.

And I called her a fucking tool.

I said, you are a tool for your daughter

and her friend to get away with

whatever they're trying to get away with.

They are using you.

They are manipulating you.

And you are letting them.

There is no question in my mind that you know something and it needs to stop. And I told the FBI that and the state police and they said, yeah, that's not quite how we want to run the show.
You know, let us just take it over. And just like that, Colbank was kicked off the case.
All the while, the phantom posters applied steady pressure.

At Josie Snyder said,

Failed lie detector.

Ooh, no, no. Hiding from Popo.

At Mia Bar 8, clearly connected to someone in the know, heckled.

At Rach, you know Sheila is pointing the finger at you.

And then?

Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? Next time on 3. She said, get your shit together, Rachel, and slapped her.
That's why she said, get your shit together.

She said she picked up a lit candelabra and hit me in the face.

She told us exactly where to find Skylar.

She needs to be put to rest the proper way.

She says, what do you mean?

And I said, you know exactly what I mean.

Three. the proper way.
She says, what do you mean? And I said, you know exactly what I mean. Three is an original production of Wavelength.
The series is created and written by Holly Malay and me, Justine Harmon. The executive producer is Jason Hoke, who produced and edited the series.
Associate producers are Lydia Horn and Leo Culp. Fact-checking by Lydia Horn.
Sound engineering by Shane Freeman. Music by Robert Ellis.
Studio recording at CDM Studios in New York and Wildwood's Picture and Sound in Los Angeles. Special thanks to Dave and Mary Neese and the city of Morgantown, West Virginia.

If you love this series, leave a review and please tell your friends.

Follow Waveland on Instagram at Waveland Media for more on gaming that's free to play. With chances to win and redeem for real cash prizes, free spend rewards, and tons of exclusive games, you can experience more high-five moments than ever before.

You're going to want to high-five everyone.

The neighbors, the mailman, all your coworkers, of course your friends.

Well, you get the point.

Your high-five moment awaits at highfivecasino.com.

No purchase necessary.

Void where prohibited by law.

Must be 21 years or older.

Terms and conditions apply.

Hi, I'm Jason Hope, and you might know me as the behind-the-scenes maker and producer

of such shows as Three, Noble, Atlanta Monster, and so many more. Well, I'm excited to introduce you to my latest show, Deadly Fortune, which I know you're going to love.
She said, Tex, what did you do? You shot me. Guns just don't magically go off on their own.
There's a million things in life that are hard to explain. Dive into Deadly Fortune, the true crime story you don't want to miss.

Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.