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This podcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Well, well, well.

After midnight on July sixth, 2012, three teenage girls walked into the thick Appalachian woods somewhere along the Mason Dixon County Line. Hours later, under the glow of a nearly full moon, only two walked out. Driving down the narrow back road, the headlights of the car bore holes through the dark. What's done was done. The surrounding forest had muffled the sounds of the sudden unthinkable violence, where there was laughing then screaming, there is now silence. Where there was struggle and carnage, there is now stillness. But listen closely. 6 feet from where Skyler's body has been abandoned, the faint babbling of a creek. A cell phone, lost in the chaos, fell between the creek and Skyler, whose multicolored blouse and yellow shorts are thick with blood and mud. For months, her body lay decomposing, hidden beneath a canopy of pine and oak trees, first absorbing humidity, then freezing over with ice. For months, she waited for someone to find her, but no one knew she was there. No one could imagine what had actually happened. For months, rumors swirled, and still no one came.

Anybody who has any information, we're urging them to call. If you've seen this young lady anywhere. By the way, there have been 172 sightings, and law enforcement told us just a couple of minutes ago that none of them have panned out thus far.

The 16-year-old girl quietly slipped out of her room last July but never came home.

Investigating Writers pulled the video from Skyler's apartment building and saw her jumping into a car parked near her Oh, man, this is a mess.

Let me get this stuff out of here. I am so sorry. My friend's car broke down, and a true mess.

Dave Nies has just finished unloading trucks and running the forklift at Menards, a home improvement store, and is driving me from Morgantown, West Virginia, through Blacksville, to an obscure corner of the woods in brave Pennsylvania. Dave is a sturdy, muscular, soft-hearted man with dark eyes and a thick head of hair. He hasn't changed much since the last time I saw him, though he's grown more gray and he has lost some weight. We've stayed in touch over the years, and now we're headed to Skyler's Memorial site, the place where his 16-year-old daughter was murdered.

Oh, man, that's hot in there. I apologize.

There we go.

I'm so happy you know your way around because...

Yeah, it's... I'm going to take you the way that Sheila and Rachel started to go.

When I first came to Morgantown, a college community nestled in the hills along the Monongahela River. It was January 2014. The air was bitter cold. The sky, gray. Snow was falling. Through the barren trees surrounding the town center, the coal trains labored along the tracks, sounding their mournful whistle. A warning. I was there reporting a story I'd pitched to El magazine titled Trial by Twitter, the piece examines social media and its impact on teens and Empathy, and what that lack of empathy can lead to. During the months I reported and wrote the I met Justine.

I was an editor at Elle. Holly's Story was one of the longest run by the magazine, and certainly one of the most well-read online. I tracked it, topping chartbeat for months, and it went on to win a prestigious front page award. Your story examined the early days of social media, and you saw the matrix. You knew that these digital artifacts of their young emotional lives would live on forever. For years, we talked about this piece of three friends, of girls, of social media, of one night that no one could take back.

The case was a global obsession, and much of what has been reported always felt off to us. A complex case involving three teens that deserved closer analysis beyond just a shocking headline. Ten years later, nearly everyone we interviewed, from Skyler's family and friends to law enforcement, recall new factual and emotional details, giving us an inside look at what really happened. With hindsight, even the most dissected moments find new shape and take on new meaning.

The very last time Dave and Mary Nies saw their only child, Skyler, was in a grainy black and white video. In it, she's sneaking out of her ground floor bedroom window in the middle of the night. Her purse over her shoulder, her brown hair swinging as she hurries across the small parking lot to a waiting car. Watching Skyler climb into the back seat during those last few seconds of footage retrieved from the apartment building's security camera, there's an urge to call out to her, Don't go. But the door closes, the car pulls away, and she's gone.

It's August 2023. The temperature, 83 degrees. The humidity, sky high. Dave and I are driving West down Route 7.

We're now entering Blacksville. You can tell by the airplane, that's been up there for years and years and years.

Over 60 years, actually, the 43-foot Korean War fighter plane marks the entrance into Blacksville, a town born in 1829 and once famous for its rich native clay pottery. January. In the '60s, Blacksville turned into a coal mining enclave, the last mine closed in 2021, draining the small population down to 118. It's one of a cluster of tiny township that crisscross the line between West Virginia and Pennsylvania so fast. It's easy to lose track of which state you're in around here.

Right up here on the left-hand side is Shack Neighborhood house. We took Skyler there for two or three summers because it was sheep, and it was swimming, and she loved swimming. And that's where she met the little sick psychopath Sheila Eddie, right there.

Now we're on Eddie's Run Road. Note the name. There are a lot of Eddie's out here. The road is 2.3 miles long and coils through Wayne Township, Pennsylvania.

There ain't no self-coverage out here. I mean, turn on your cell phone, you're not going to get any service.

It was around this once wooded stretch that some of the bloodiest Civil War battles were fought. It was here that Skyler's body was discovered.

They don't know it, but they left Skyler in her element. I mean, she loved the wilderness. She loved the outdoors. So when you first go around this turn, you say, Oh, there it is. That's Skyler's site. And that's the big tree. That's where they found her From Waveland, I'm Holly Mallet.

And I'm Justine Harmon. This is Three. Episode One, Skyler is missing.

You bring her flowers. She'll love you. Oh, did I lock you in? I think I have to. I got it. Did you get her? Okay. From what I was understood, Good. The cadaver dog, when it came out here to search for Skyler, they couldn't find her, couldn't find her, couldn't find her. Well, there was a bunch of brush right here, and the cadaver dog came over to this tree, looked straight up at the tree, and its necklace, GPS necklace broke and fell off for no reason at all, right on top of Skyler. That's how they found Skyler. Skyler wanted to be found. It's amazing. It's truly amazing.

The site where his only child's life ended has been turned into a memorial. What started with a wooden bench inscribed in loving memory of Skyler A. Nies, 1996 to 2012, has grown into a shrine filled with flowers, angel statues, metal butterflies, and painted purple rocks. Mementos left by the pilgrims that journey to this now sacred place. Leaning against the towering oak tree is a granite slab, a headstone of sorts, engraved with a drawing of Skyler's dog, Lillou, and a message for Skyler. We will love you forever and always. Up and down the great tree trunk, visitors have mounted actual license plates from across the country, Ohio, Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, along with angel wings, rosaries, wreaths, stars, and crosses. In the middle of it all is Skyler's high school picture. She's smiling, dimpled, Forever 16. It's the same photo used in her missing person's flyer. Just below it, also attached to the tree, is a locked green mailbox with the initial S. Dave hands me a key.

It's a busy mail day for the kid. She loves mail. Is That's what we're doing now, is that all? Yeah. Okay, now we know we had the wrong keys.

Now you know. There we go. Okay.

You want to go ahead and read them? I always read her mail.

Well, do you want to read it?

No, go ahead.

Okay. Hi, Skyler. I'm sorry for what happened to you. I hope that you are doing good. You are so...

So...

Loved.

You can tell a young kid wrote that. Yeah. Oh, they even spelled Skyler wrong. And the stickers.

The stickers.

Oh, that is so sweet.

Can you take that to Mary?

Yeah, I will. No. Here we go. Another one. Let's see.

Skyler, I'm so sorry what happened to you. They should be sorry. You're so pretty. You're amazing from Ivory. Skyler.

Isn't that gorgeous?

I mean, so many people she They're just touched, huh?

Yeah, they just- They're total strangers.

She loved to be outside, anything outside. She liked to pretend to play ball. She wasn't very good at it, but she liked to go to the mall, of course. Every teenager does. She loved to shop, and I hate to shop, so that didn't work so well.

That's Skyler's mom and Dave's wife, Mary, who, with her black hair and violet eyes, calls to mind Elizabeth Taylor. We had to interview Mary over the phone as she wasn't feeling well when we interviewed Dave in person.

Clothes, of course. She was a clothes freak. She loved bright colors and rainbow stuff. She would mix and match, and she did that for her wall decoration. She got wall art, win, purple, and green. Oh, my Lord, it's beautiful.

Skyler was a total mid-aughts teen. She loved Snoop Dogg and Tyga, Forever 21, The twilight Series, and her white fluffy Maltese, Lillou. She was also an honors student at University High School, exhaling in math and science, two subjects she couldn't stand. Early in the summer before her junior year, She'd gotten a jump on the required reading, Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, and Saul Bello's 1959 surrealist novel, Henderson the Rain King, in which the protagonist declares, If I don't get carried away, I never accomplish anything. And, alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay. And every teenager's rally cry, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want.

Over the July fourth holiday, 2012, all Skyler wanted was to be hanging out with Sheila and Rachel. Sheila was her childhood best friend since the second grade when they bonded at the Shack, an after-school community center. Though they'd never gone to the same school, that changed when Sheila's mom, Tara, and her new husband, Jim, moved the family from Blacksville to Morgantown. Suddenly, Skyler and Sheila were freshmen together at University High. That's where they met Rachel Shoff, an unknown newbie who lived in an upscale development and had previously attended St. Francis Central Catholic School.

All three teens were their parents' only child, and all were attractive in distinct ways, straight out of a CW Network casting call. Rachel, a tall, bright, red-headed beauty with a deep religious bend that complimented her flair for drama. She started school plays and musicals, always breaking up and making up with her musician boyfriend, McKinsey Boggs. Her mom, Patricia, often bragged about a Broadway connection who could one day make her only daughter a star in New York City. Sheila, spelled S-H-E-L-I-A, was sometimes bottle blonde, sometimes raven haired, and had small, lovely features, a heart-shaped chin, and a belly button ring. Charismatic and game for anything, Sheila could be fierce one moment and warm the next, keeping everyone on eggshells, vying for her approval. Like Rachel, her parents divorced when she was young after her biological father suffered a traumatic car accident. But unlike Rachel, whose mother Patricia was strict and demanding, Sheila and her mom, Tara, were extremely close, more like best friends than mother and daughter.

And then there was Skyler, Brunette, Cheruva, rubic with sparkly blue eyes and deep dimples. A daddy's girl, the kid who has a soft spot for animals and insects, anything with a heartbeat. For years, she wrote her hopes and fears and petty grievances in a diary. That is until she took to Twitter, which all of the girls used as a stream of consciousness that never turned off. On Wednesday, July fourth, Skyler tweeted, Three of my best My friends are going out of town this weekend, leaving me with no plans.

Fml.

And before going to sleep that night, Stress will be the death of me. While they lived in different suburbs of Morgantown, Skyler, Rachel, and Sheila all lived together on their phones. They spent their waking lives posting, texting, tweeting, retweeting, having whole consuming conversations in 140 characters. And they were completely unfiltered, as if they believed both no one and everyone could peer into their lives. And it wasn't just an occasional text or tweet. It was hundreds every day. As Skyler tweeted on April fourth, 2012, Twitter seems to like, Swallow me at times. Skyler may have lived out her teen angst online, but beneath it was a deep empathy, an empathy that, much like Twitter, could overwhelm her. As a young girl, she was a champion of the underdog, of everyone, actually.

She didn't care what family you had. She was about you and how you were. She didn't care if you were gay or if you weren't gay. She just loved everybody.

That's Carole Michaud, Skyler's aunt and Mary's slightly younger sister. Carole is the youngest of 15.

Fifteen. We have 10 brothers and 4 sisters.

Oh, my goodness. Can you name them all?

If I do it on my fingers. Okay, let's hear it. There's Deline Delane, Bernadda, Eugene, William, Anthony, Lyle, Michael, Kevin, Brenda, Robert, Calvin, Ray, Mary.

Aunt Carol was like a second mom to Skyler. Even they look alike. Talking with Carol, you can almost picture Skyler all grown up. During a rough patch with Dave, Mary and Skyler moved in with Carol and her husband and their son, Kyle.

If my son wouldn't get in trouble, it was like she was the one getting in trouble. She would cry with him and sat with him if he'd be in trouble. It was just like she was so caring of everybody. She was so much fun as well. She liked to pull pranks on me. One of them, me and Mary worked together and I was decorate for Christmas dinner, and I put this somewhere in a jar, and I wanted to make the tissue paper look like little burn around the edges. I didn't realize how fast tissue paper burnt. And I lit that thing on fire and it went up in this big old thing of smoke. Well, Mary went home and told Skyler about it, so she started calling me Sparky. And for Christmas, she couldn't wait for me to open up this gift she got me. And here she took a spark plug and made it into a Christmas tournament for me for Christmas. I was like, Oh, my goodness.

There she is as a baby. Skyler as a baby. And of course, everybody thinks her kid's beautiful, but mine really is.

That's Dave again. He's showing off Skyler's baby picture. She's perfectly angelic with a halo of pearls. We meet David Jeans, the oldest bar in Morgantown, complete with a speakeasy in the basement. Dogs are not only allowed, but given free hot dogs. Some mornings, you can find a group of wagging tails outside waiting for the place to open. Lucy, the Irish bartender, is from Tipperari and makes a mean pepperoni roll. On the back wall is a big screen, where on game nights, you can watch the West Virginia University Mountaineers play. The town is so team crazy that when they win, fans set couches on fire. The tradition was such a hazard, couch burning became a felony in 2011. Just having a polstered furniture outdoors could get you a $500 fine. Like everyone else in Morgantown, Dave is a football fanatic. Skyler not so much.

I'm screaming for the mountaineers, and I'm getting so mad because they're not doing what they're supposed to do. She came down the steps and she looked at me and said, Dad, can I ask you a question? I said, Yeah. She said, How is your life going to change tomorrow if they win? I said, Well, it'll just be better. She said, No, tell me how your life's going to change. How is that going to affect you, dad? I said, Go back upstairs. I mean, she was that girl. She wanted answers. Why? I want to know why. When you tell her why, that wasn't good enough.

He tries to act like Mr. Badass, and he is just a big old Teddy bear. He'll lose his temper and bear his teeth. Even Skyler would tell him, Go sit down, dad. He didn't scare her either.

There was one way to look at things, and that was Skyler's way. Any other way, you were wrong. I'm sorry, you can be Einstein, but you're still wrong.

In keeping with her age, Skyler's tweets were a little romantic, sometimes dramatic, and often spot on. Justine, take it away.

Okay, (coughs) Mosquitos are disgusting creatures from hell. Everything about my parents driving pisses me off. Rach's singing is breathtaking. Wrapping presents for Sheila's family, even though I never do for my own. I like Obama. Shout out to my dad for getting me McDonald's. O-m-g. Saved by the Bell is on. Every dude at Walmart right now smells like a God.

(texting) Skyler was less experienced than most teens her age. Never having had a boyfriend, she was in no rush to cross the Rubicon into womanhood. Sheila, on the other hand, was way ahead of the curve. I'll let her tweets do the talking.

I wish it was acceptable to be naked all the time. There's a reason why sober and so bored sound almost exactly the same. Love having the upper hand. Megan Fox is the definition of perfection. Let's be honest. This generation is fucked. Imagine what it'll be like when our kids have kids. If you talk about how you're madly in love with Justin Bieber, I probably want to stab you. You fuel my determination to not have feelings.

Rachel, always the actress, was all feelings. Her digital self-portrait sounds like this.

Sometimes I wish I didn't fall in love. I want to to Hogwarts more than anything. A day with me and Sheila is never a dull day. L-o-l. Don't make a permanent decision for a temporary emotion. Giving up crying for lent. Tangled is such a good movie Then he cuts her hair off and I'm like, Eew, WTF. No. Snow makes everything more quiet. I have the most realistic nightmares. I can't remember what's a dream and what's reality anymore.

It's no accident that shows like Sex in the City and Girls revolve around four friends instead of three. Three is a crowd, especially if you are a teenage girl, and four or five or more, against all mathematical reason, isn't. Any girl who's been caught in a social triangle knows this. She knows, too, the undercurrent of anxiety felt by all, recognizing that the degrees of love and the balance of power are always shifting. Thinking you are being left off a text thread, being ghosted, being casually excluded from a sleepover. When it was just Skyler and Sheila, the two were in sync.

Never even knocked on the door when Skyler was home. She just come over and open the door and come in. We didn't care because she was that close to Skyler, that close to us.

So close Skyler often went with Sheila and her mom to Myrtle Beach, a nine-hour drive from Morgantown. Former Dominion Post crime reporter Alex Lange, now an editor at dailymail. Com, covered the area and the case at length.

Everybody needs a place they can go on vacation for $1,000 with a family. That's what Myrtle Beach is. It caters to the working families in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, who don't have a ton of money but want to take the family on vacation. It's just built that reputation, and everybody goes there, and they love it because you could do those things and you don't break the pain.

Every summer, they went on vacation. We give Scott her a couple of hundred bucks, whatever she needed, and she would go down with Sheila. I guess for a longest time, they had a good time.

When Rachel entered the picture, she made three. Sheila, the natural alpha, took her place at the top of the pyramid. She wouldn't have it any other way. But what made it so easy for her to assume the position was the simple fact that she was the only one among the girls with her own car. She had the power, the control. She held the keys to a great escape away from boredom, parents, and boundaries.

She would make the decisions of what they were doing or where they were going. She was more of a rig leader and the head of the group. Just I think she was more jealous of Skyler. If Rachael and Skyler were together, you didn't see that one being over the other.

Aunt Carol's son, Kyle, Skyler's cousin, attended U High with the girls. A senior to the sophomores, he didn't like what he was seeing.

He came home and he told me, He said, You need to tell Aunt Mary not to let her run around with those two. And I said, I can't do that. And he said, They're bad news, Mom. They're not good for her. Yes, she started being a little bit more secretive and not as outgoing as she was before. We'd ask her, Is something wrong? And she'd be like, No, nothing's wrong. I know one time I was over at her house and she had bruises across her legs. I said, Skyla, what's your bruises from?

Tom Bloom, their tanned and white-toothed high school counselor and current Monengalia County Commission President, witnessed the trio's dynamic.

Whenever I see a problem really developing, it's usually an odd number, three or five or seven. I try and warn parents, Have two or four, because everyone can work together. You can find that other partner. What usually happens, and growing up with everything going on right now, two gang up against one. And that's what seemed to happen. What What happened was Sheila wasn't known at the school, but she was very pretty, and Rachel was outgoing, so Sheila wanted to be friends with Rachel, and then Skyler came, too. So you had a threesome until it became apparent that Rachel wanted to get into even a higher group of partying individuals. Sheila was that group. Sheila knew those people, and Skyler tagged along. So what happens in high school, everyone plays the role. Skyler always reminded me of the girl next door, the one that you make fun of and stuff like that. But if anyone ever touch her or do anything to her, you were the first one there. And she was always like the kid's sister. I really, truly believe that somewhere along the line, Skyla started to speak out for herself and started to disrupt that threesome.

When they fought, everyone knew they fought. Then you have the whole thing Facebook and Twitter and stuff. That's a whole separate. But at the time, it really bothered Skyler, probably more than the other two realized it. And she started writing in her journal.

At home, in her purple and green bedroom, Skyler poured her hurt feelings onto the page in girlish print. She wrote in pencil and dotted her eyes with circles. When investigators were looking for clues, the Dust Gray Diary with the embossed heart on the cover provided an alternate window into the weeks leading up to Skyler's disappearance, including that final trip to Myrtle Beach with Sheila. Here's Skyler's dad, Dave, again.

And then the last trip, there was friction, and I don't know. It talked about it briefly in her diary, but it didn't go in the depth. I think the fight was about Sheila telling her, You never saw what she saw.

Whatever happened at Myrtle Beach, Skyler was pissed. On June ninth, two days after she got Home, she retweeted this, Won't miss anyone from school over summer because if we're really friends, we'll hang out.

If we aren't, we won't.

But by July fourth, her insecurity was apparent.

Sick of being at fucking home. Thanks, friends. Love hanging out with you all, too.

Two days later, on July sixth, after working the evening shift at Wendy's, Skyler came home to her parents watching television. Mary sitting in a recliner and Dave lying on the couch. Skyler kissed them both and told them she loved them and that she was tired and going to bed. When she kissed Dave good night, she was wearing her necklace with a gold maple leaf charm.

The last thing she ever hug me, that necklace fell out. It hit me in the chin. I was like, What's that necklace? She's going to give me a chin bleed.

The next morning, Dave went to work while Skyler slept in, or so they thought.

I came Home from work to give her the car. She didn't really have a license, but she had her permit, and she drove my car, but she was really safe and a good kid. I knocked on the door. I said, Scott, let's go. Come on. I got to get back to work. No answer. I tried the door and it was locked. I grabbed the coat hangar and popped it through a little hole and popped the lock open. Her bed hadn't been slept in. I said, then it panic hits immediately. I looked at the window and it was about this far open and I said, Oh, shit. I looked outside the window and there was nothing but over that little retaining wall, there was her black bench that she used for her makeup. I said, What the hell is going on? The first thing I do is call Mary, and I said, Mary, she's got her right here. Where's she at? I was praying. She'd say, Oh, what? She called me.

I just thought because it was summer, and I just thought she had went somewhere with the girls and didn't tell us. She had a history of sneaking out, and either she forgot to ask or she just decided she was doing it. I just thought they went shopping or something. That's what I told Dave. I said, Well, I'll call Sheila.

So I did. I called Sheila. I said, When's the last time you talked to Skyler? I don't know. Last night, it was just That last time I talked to her. It was just so reversed, almost. I said, So you haven't seen her? No. You haven't talked to her? Then I sent her a couple of text, but she didn't answer.

Then when Sheila didn't know. I had him call some of the other girls that she used to hang with. I even told him at the time. I said, Well, she has to be at work at 4:00. I said, Maybe she's just going to go straight to work. I said, If she don't show up at work, then we'll worry. Well, then by the time I got home, it was four o'clock, and her work had called us. Something's wrong. Call 911.

All anyone knew was what Sheila and Rachel would later tell Mary and Dave, and then the police, that Skyler snuck out to meet them at around 11:00 PM to go for a ride and smoke some weed before Rachel went off to church camp. Before midnight, the girl said, Skyler insisted they drop her off at the end of her street so she wouldn't wake Dave and Mary.

As for the car that picked her up in the grainy videotape, whoever she snuck back out to meet around 12:31 AM, well, for months, that would be anybody's guess. Adding to the speculation were Skyler's last two tweets posted before she left for work at Wendy's on the night of July fifth.

You doing shit like that is why I never completely trust you.

And then a retweet.

All I do is hope.

Sheila, who had the lion's share of their tweets, over 4,000, was quiet all of July fourth and July fifth. On July sixth, at 6:09 AM, she logged back online to fire off one cryptic message.

Always keep your cool.

Coming up on three, I just kept hearing things from my neighbor, and she would be like, Why isn't your daughter's friend cooperating?

I started thinking, Yeah, why isn't... What's going on?

I'm telling you, that's serial killer stuff right there. It's scary. It's crazy as hell. It really is. You're somebody that young to be that evil. Are you born with it or did you grow into it?

That's not a typical reaction of someone that's just been picked up for murder. It wasn't, Oh, what's happening to me next? It was, Okay, am I going to miss my hair appointment?

We were terrified, and we were screaming and crying and vomiting and losing our minds over this whole situation, freaking out as soon as it happened. 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. I haven't told anyone.

Not even Skyla?

No.

Three is an original production of Waveland. 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 and 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.