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We recommend listening to this bonus content only after you've completed episodes one through nine of three, as there may be some spoilers.

From Waveland, this is three, the bonus episode. When Justine and I went to Morgantown, West Virginia, to interview Skyler's family, investigators, court officials, and others, we ended every interview with the same question, Why? Why would two such promising teenage girls murder their best friend? Everyone had a theory, but as reporters, we knew we needed to pose the question to experts.

At 16, teenage brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that sits right behind the forehead, houses executive functions, those skills that help us focus, plan, self-regulate behavior and emotions. But that area of the brain doesn't fully evolve until around age 24, which is why teenagers naturally test boundaries. Their impulse control is constantly challenged by their sense of invincible, their urge to live in the moment, and take risks with sex, drugs, and leaking out. But the uptick of personality disorders, which can manifest in depression, anxiety, acts of self-harm, or even violence, raises serious questions. Is social media a contributing factor. How do we determine where that line exists? And most importantly, how can we recognize these behaviors early enough to catch them?

Ten years ago, while writing this story for L magazine, I spoke with retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent and profiler, Jim Clemente, now the co-host of two popular podcasts, Real Crime Profile and Best Case, Worst Case. In the FBI, Clemente solved high-profile cases. He has a gift for reverse engineering a crime that occurs back to the person who committed it. In the 2002 DC sniper case, he realized that for the first time in US history, there wasn't just one sniper, there was a team. Tracing the evidence back, he deduced there was an older dominant person controlling a younger submissive person. He had a hunch the teenager had been groomed by an adult. Child sexual victimization is another area of Clemente's expertise. His theory proved right. A few weeks ago, we reconnected with him to discuss psychopathy, the dominant submissive dynamic, and the difference between psychopaths and sociopaths.

But I like to say that when you have somebody who murders somebody else, the way they get there is that genetics loads the gun, psychology and personality aim it, and experience pull the trigger. So it's a biopsychosocial mix that creates that perfect storm. And in this case, part of that perfect storm was this dominant, submissive relationship that was going on between Sheila and Rachel. Typically, a dominant person will want to find somebody who they can control and manipulate. That power and control that they have over the other person feeds their own desires. And submissive people will, because they want to be part of something, actually let themselves be drawn in and manipulated by somebody who's more dominant. A lot of people use the term psychopath and sociopath indiscriminately. They think they're exactly the same thing, and they're not. They're very different. So they don't use sociopathy or sociopath anymore. They think of that as a negative term, so they changed it to antisocial personality disorder. And basically, that means that you've been diagnosed with a pattern of behavior that shows disregard for other people, violation of laws and the rights of others. And typically, that starts around the age of 15.

You have to find three or more of the following things: failure to conform to social norms, as in lawful behaviors, deception, impulsivity, or vulnerability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility, and lack of remorse. Whereas, psychopathy, for somebody to be seen as a psychopath bath, there's a totally different test. So the biggest thing with psychopathy is that there's no human empathy. They literally don't connect to other human beings. The smart ones have the ability to realize that they don't feel human attachment or human emotions, but they see in other people the strange interaction, this emotional connection. Then mimic it. They acted out. So you'll see psychopaths love bombing somebody else. Love bombing means really coming, oh, my God, you're the most amazing person I've ever met in my life. You've changed my life. I can't live without you throwing affection and gifts and time and attention at them. And then as soon as they have them locked in a relationship, they flip the script.

Sheila Eddy be wildly charming and convincing, able to get what she wanted from everyone around her, convincing Mary and Dave she was grieving, convincing everyone she didn't do anything wrong that night. Psychopaths are expert manipulators, constantly faking emotions. The world's their stage, and it's sometimes hard to know when you've been cast among them.

Then if you look back and you go through, did she have glibness and superficial charm? Was her self-worth grandiose? Was she a pathological liar? Was she cutting and manipulative? Based on this case alone, it looks like she has all of these traits. No remorse or guilt, shallow affect, lack of empathy. So, yes, I believe that she could be diagnosed today as a psychopath. Psychopaths are fun to be around because they always want to do. They want to push the limits. They want to do things that are exciting. They They have the jet skis. They jump out of airplanes and parachutes. They are hang gliding and doing all sorts of exciting things because that is one thing they can feel. They have a lack of the ability to feel other things like other human beings do. And so they fill that void with this need for excitement. They need stimulation. It It's an excessive need for new and exciting risk-taking. I believe for Sheila, planning this murder of their friend, and I use air quotes for friend, Skyler, is how she could feel excitement. The planning of it, the fantasizing about it, the nuanced details, and then the All right, we're going to go on three, and then bragging about, Yeah, we actually did go on three later.

That shows me that that is the major motivation for committing this murder, not some desire to hide your relationship.

At Rachel's parole hearing, she said, We killed Skyler because I'm Catholic, and I was afraid my parents in our school would find out that Sheila and I were in a lesbian relationship.

If that were true, they would never have admitted it to Skyler in the first place. They never would have engaged in it in front of any other witnesses. They would have acted in secrecy. I believe that it is a convenient excuse. It doesn't justify the behavior in any way, shape, or You can't murder somebody because you're afraid they might say something.

Clemente says there are CEOs who are psychopaths, some US presidents, and corrupt billionaires like Bernie Madoff. While these people don't care who they have to hurt to get to the top, most won't commit a violent crime.

It's a culmination of the tens of thousands of decisions we make in the privacy of our own brain. When we realize we're doing something that takes advantage of somebody else, hurts somebody else, hurts society, when we realize that and we embrace it, we are starting that snowball rolling down the hill. And eventually it's going to be so big and so heavy, nothing can stop it. If you go back years in that person's brain, you will see that at some point, and at many points, there are decisions that embraced the dark side rather than rejecting it. And that's where when somebody says, Oh, I couldn't help myself, or I felt like I had to do it, or it wasn't a choice. Well, it was a choice. It was thousands of choices that you made along the way that got you to this point. And I'm certain that with Sheila, this is That's the case. I'm not certain with Rachel because I believe that Sheila convinced Rachel to do it. Now, one thing is making a decision to murder your friend. It's another thing to actually take kitchen knives and stab that friend multiple times and then being pissed off that she's not dying immediately.

That just shows a complete and utter callous disregard hard for other human life. And that, again, is a major red flag of psychopathy.

Dr. Alexander Hamlet is a clinical psychologist in Manhattan who specializes in adolescents and young adults with mood disorders. Prior to going into private practice, Hamlet worked in the Mood and Anxiety Disorder Center at the Child Mind Institute. There, she developed a special interest in social media and the teenage brain.

And what drew you to work with teenagers?

Honestly, I think they are the best combination of still being open enough and interested enough in change, unlike some adults, but then cognitively still developed enough to really be able to speak more to change and be able to have deeper, harder conversations.

When teenagers interact on social media, they're deprived of those real conversations. Their text, tweets, posts are easily and so often taken out of context, which can lead to miscommunication, supposition, even anxiety.

I think that with three girls, there felt to me a very strong competitive nature between the three of them, and also a strong capacity for triangulation. When I was then hearing about all of the tweets that were going back and forth. One of the first things I thought about was this is a platform that is being used to enhance the competitiveness, but also potentially as a way of regulating their emotions. It felt like any time one of the girls was tweeting, they were getting their message out, and they might have temporarily felt more regulated for having that message go out. And it felt to me like over time, this was really... It grew the problem that there was a lot of a compulsive need to share how they felt as a way of temporary temporarily regulating their emotions, but then also inadvertently growing the emotional competitiveness between the three girls.

One of the big questions in our minds is, why did Skyler sneak out with these two girls when they were clearly fighting over social media? Twitter.

Yeah.

Why would she risk it? Why?

So if we were to take the same idea of fearing social exclusion. My prediction is that Skyler probably felt excluded. She probably felt like her place in the group was threatened, and she likely made decisions to approach and try and rejoin the tribe or the group of girls. She was more concerned about her own place in the social group than she was concerned about her own safety potentially or how she felt about the girls. I remember in the podcast hearing that Skyler said something like, I'm wrapping gifts for Sheila's family, even though I don't do anything like that for my own family. So it's just suggestive of such a desperate urge to really feel like she belongs and going to a certain length to do that. My guess is Sheila was withholding any attention to provoke this.

In 2017, I actually attended the New York Police Academy for a story I was working on. In the class on domestic violence, they taught us that the silent treatment can be a form of actionable psychological abuse, which still amazes me. But is it possible that Sheila weaponized this behavior to control Skyler?

I believe it's very possible. What ends up happening is, even if it's a subconscious decision, things get reinforced. So if on any given day, Sheila was less talkative and didn't even mean to be, and then the reaction was someone like a Skyler coming back and saying, Sheila, what's going on? Can I hang out with you? That could be enough for that type of distance or lack of communication to have been reinforcing to continue to happen. And so I think Sheila might have, without even realizing it, have created some distance as a way of gaining power.

How do you explain the psychology of Rachel and Sheila looking at each other and going, Let's kill her. And then over the next three months, they never abandon that plan.

So that behavior is less what we would see in terms of the developing brain and impulse control. In fact, we would see the careful planning as more of a compulsive behavior, similar to sending out a tweet and feeling regulated emotionally. I think that the two girls, really, they took their confirmation bias, which was, Skyler is someone we no longer like, and here's our plan to kill her. They use that as almost a fixed-minded compulsive strategy of continuing to find reasons in the environment to continue their plan.

Jim Clemente said there was some inevitability here that these three girls were on a crash course to collision one way or another. I asked Dr. Hamlet, if these teens had never triangulated, was someone like Sheila Eddy bound to go off and commit a murder sooner or later?

I think with this case, it was a perfect storm of factors such as their age, the fact that social media was at their fingertips, and a newer-ish technology the fact that there was potentially a little bit more boredom in their teenage lives wanting to create drama. I think even the pop culture at the time was suggestive of shows like Pretty Little Liars and Mean Girl type behavior. And I think that Sheila is the type of person, if you look at her profile and the conduct disorder behavior that she was exhibiting even with animals, that this was a matter of when, not a matter of if she would have eventually inflict harm.

They had a countdown. They had a timeline. Did that, in your opinion, feel like... Can you speak to that? Was that a gaming mentality?

So essentially, the idea of a gaming mentality is no different than over time, an individual being able to divorce the human from the content that they're seeing online. It's a very similar our idea where over time it doesn't feel as real because it really isn't as real. There's no human connection that's really being forged. It's really just this content that takes on a life of its own and is very dehumanizing. It's a very common thing that we're noticing in today's social media discourse, is that there's a lot of vague language that's being used, which also adds to this ability to create a story that confirms a bias. So there was some language that said, don't make permanent decisions for temporary emotions, and vague cryptic statements that only the individual could determine who they thought that was geared towards or what exactly it meant. And so I think that's another piece that's really interesting about this story and about social media in general, that the nature of language hasn't been as precise and direct on social media. And that can also exacerbate this idea of dehumanizing and creating a story that's different than reality. I do think that if we go back to, you the fear of social exclusion, that Rachel, even if it's not reality, Rachel could have genuinely been scared, that she wouldn't have been accepted by her family or community.

And is that a reason to kill someone? Of course not. But given what we know about how important social inclusion is, especially for teenagers, and how black and white their thinking can be because their brain isn't fully developed, I could see a world where for Rachel, that might have been a big part of it. Of course, though, deep down, there is the understanding that I think any balanced teenager has, that that's not a reason to kill someone.

Skyler Neis had an intact family unit, a strong work ethic, a challenging spirit and an abundance of love at home. These blessings also made her a target.

Skyler wasn't perfect. No teenager is or ever will be. It's all part of growing up. She was raised in the real world with a multitude of distractions and social media and friends she didn't know weren't really her friends.

So all humans fear social exclusion, especially teens, struggle with this. And I think what happens with social media is that the fear of being included or excluded is pronounced and exacerbated. And what ends up happening to any human, but especially a teenager, is that they may start to act in ways to make sure that they are either part of a specific group or population within their social circle if they feel like they have been excluded or they're at risk of being excluded. And they may go to certain lengths to do that that aren't necessarily always part of their character. They might become a little bit more anxious or desperate to make sure that they're still part of that tribal unit. And there are times where it's not even surely the case that the person has been excluded So the fact that Sheila was likely egging on the situation and saying, see, isn't this another reason why? Look at this behavior. And, oh, let's send out another tweet and likely get a response that we don't like as a yet another reason why we don't think that Skyler should be alive anymore. So, yeah, I think the two fed off of each other and created even more of this spiral of confirmation bias.

And I think just like a tweet or a post over time can really become divorced from the individual and the humanity of the individual, the same thing started to happen with Sheila and Rachel's collusion with each other. They really, over time, divorced Skyler from her humanity. She became this other thing that was not even human anymore.

Three is an original production of Wavelamp. The series is created and written by Holly Mallet and me, Justine Harmon. The executive producer is Jason Hoke, who produced and edited the series. Associate producers are Lydia Horn and Leo Kolp. Fact-checking by Lydia Horn. Sound Engineering by Shane Freeman. Music by Robert Ellis. Studio recording at CDM Studios in New York and Wildwoods Picture and Sound in Los Angeles. Special thanks to Dave and Mary Nees in the city of Morgantown, West Virginia. If you love this series, leave a review and please tell your friends. Follow Waveland on Instagram @WavelandMedia for more on this series and upcoming news shows. Thanks for listening.