The infamous murder of Skylar Niece is one of the most
horrifying true crime cases in recent years.
And in fact, what helped to solve this crime was the
killer's own cryptic tweets about how they killed her
outlaw. So today's video is going to be
another solved true crime case on the murder of Skylar Niece.
This is a really talked about case within the true crime
community. You might have heard of it
before. But before we go ahead with the
case, I just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
video. This video is for educational
purposes and everything that I'm about to say is just information
that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
one video. Just a couple of smaller content
warnings before we get into this case.
Today we're going to be talking about themes of drug use and
threats of suicide. So if any of that is something
that you don't want to hear about right now, I completely
understand. Click out of this video now.
But all that being said, let's get into the case.
Today's case takes place in West Virginia, USA in 2012, where 16
year old Skylar niece lived with her mum Mary and her dad Dave.
Skylar Annette niece was born on February 10th, 1996.
She was an only child and she was the apple of her parents
eye. Her mum said that the day that
Skylar was born, that was the greatest moment of her whole
life. Skylar was a very, very sweet
girl. Right from being tiny, tiny.
She just had a lovely temperament.
You know those kids that are just angelic.
She was just sweet and kind and smiley and bubbly.
She had a heart of gold. She was just so pure and so cute
and she loved animals. She would stop to pet every
animal that she passed on the street.
So Skylar and her family lived in a small town called Star City
in West Virginia. And this was a small town, so
small, in fact, it was one of those places that just had a
really good like community feel to it.
Like kind of everyone knew each other kind of vibes.
And in this particular area of Star City, they had what was
known as the neighborhood shack, which was like a more informal
version of a town hall where they would throw like mini
events and activities and stuff. And there was a lot of stuff
going on for the neighborhood kids there.
They would organize a lot of things over the weekends and
over school holidays so that the kids could go to these different
things while the parents had some time off or the parents
went to work or whatever. They would organize like sports
and arts and craft days and you know, whatever kids do.
And Skylar went to all of these events at the neighborhood shack
and naturally she made quite a few friends there, including an
8 year old girl named Sheila Eddie, who very quickly became
Skylar's best friend. Sheila was actually from out of
town. She lived about 20 miles away,
but her family was in quite a disadvantaged financial
situation. They didn't have a lot of money.
Her parents didn't have a lot of money to, like, take her places
and do different things. And a lot of the activities at
the neighborhood shack were free.
So her parents would take her 20 miles to this neighborhood shack
so that Sheila could have all these other, all these, like,
experiences with the other kids and feel like a normal kid, you
know? And yeah, that was where Sheila,
Eddie and Skylar Niece met, and the two of them became
inseparable. They did absolutely everything
together. They would have moving nights,
they would go to the park together.
They grew up together. They became like sisters.
But actually these two girls were kind of like complete
opposites of each other. It was like an opposites attract
kind of situation. Sheila was very outgoing.
She was kind of like a wild child.
She was a little bit like rebellious, you know, talked
back a little bit. Whereas Skyler, on the other
hand, was like, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but like a
goodie too. She was, she was like well
behaved. She cared very much about like,
what her parents, parents thought of her, what her
teachers thought of her. But like I said, opposites do
attract sometimes. And these girls got on like a
house on fire. And then in 2010, when the girls
were about 14 years old, Sheila, Eddie's mother remarried and
actually moved so much closer to Skyla.
So now these two girls could spend even more time together.
And actually, that meant that they were going to be going to
the same high school. This was so exciting for them.
And actually, when they did start this high school, that was
when they met another girl and their duo became a trio.
This New Girl was named Rachel Schuff.
She was the same age as the other two, and she fit in really
well with this group. But again, Rachel was very
different to the other two. All three of them were so
different to each other. Rachel was a lot wealthier.
She was a lot more privileged. I think she went to a private
school in the past. So again, very different
experiences to the other two girls.
But again, they all got on really well.
Rachel was more similar to Sheila Eddie than she was to
Skylar, Nice because Rachel had that same like outgoing, kind of
fiery kind of rebellious energy that Skylar didn't have.
And this made for a really interesting dynamic within this
group. So Rachel and Sheila, the two
outgoing ones, because they were kind of attention seeky in
nature, they would butt heads a lot because they wanted to be
the leader of the group. They wanted all the attention.
Whereas Skylar wasn't so interested in that.
So she kind of acted more as a mediator for the group.
No one ever had a problem with Skylar.
She was kind of like the glue that held that trio together for
a while. And as a trio, these three girls
were quite popular. They were well known, they had a
lot of friends within that school.
They were really well liked. But as the girls got into their
freshman year of high school, Sheila Eddie started to change.
So she'd always been a rebellious, wild child, but now
it was like in a bad way. It wasn't just like a little
misbehaving kid. Now, she was kind of getting a
bit reckless because at the this age when you're a teenager,
that's when really kind of almost scary elements start
getting involved in your life, Partying, alcohol, drugs, older
boys, you know, she would go out and sneak out and meet these
boys and things like that. Things were getting serious and
Skylar couldn't relate. She like wasn't interested in
all that. She wasn't interested in getting
drunk and going out and doing drugs and whatever.
Bear in mind they're about 15 years old at this point, so they
were getting into this kind of young, I would say.
And Sheila told her parents about this.
She told them about the path that Sheila Eddie seemed to be
taking and none of them approved.
Skylar herself didn't approve, Her parents didn't approve.
And actually they advised her to maybe try and distance herself
from Sheila Eddie. Skylar was a very ambitious girl
and she had dreams of going on to get a really strong career as
a criminal defence lawyer. And as Sheila started kind of
misbehaving and taking this wrong path, they saw this as a
possible hindrance to Skyler's life and her her path and her
promising future that she was going to have.
So yeah, Skyler agreed with her parents that it probably was
time to make some new friends. But it wasn't that easy because
Sheila Eddie had been her best friend since they were what,
like 8 years old? That friendship meant a lot to
Skyler. It's not one of those things
that you want to drop so easily. She knew that this friend was
not healthy for her, but she also didn't want to ditch her
completely. It was going to be kind of a
long term, like, distancing kind of process, I guess.
So, yeah. The following year at school,
Skyler starts, you know, getting herself out there, making
friends with new girls, different people.
And I think Sheila and Rachel started to notice this, and this
started to cause a bit of a rift in the trio.
I don't think Sheila and Rachel liked that Skylar was doing
this. I think they were a little bit
jealous. They saw Skylar's potential.
They saw that she was really well behaved.
She was really intelligent. She had this promising future.
And maybe they didn't see that in themselves.
And in retaliation to Skylar trying to like distance from
them, they started being mean to her.
They became a close duo without Skylar.
I mean, Skylar was very much still involved, but they wanted
her to feel left out. They wanted her to feel like the
odd one out. So Sheila and Rachel would plan
kind of matching outfits that they would wear to school.
They would both wear like stripy jumpers and not tell Skylar
about it. So she would turn up at school
and feel really left out from this trio.
They started going out without her on weekends, having
sleepovers without her. They would go to lunch without
her and stuff like that, not all the time because they wanted her
to still want to be friends with them, but they were just trying
to make her life a little bit like hell, you know?
And this did make Skylar really upset because like I said, she
did want to stay friends with these girls.
She knew it was for the best, that she should distance, but at
the same time, these were still her best friends and she was
really upset that they were doing this.
And Skylar actually tweeted about this dynamic as it was
happening, saying sick of being fucking.
Thanks a lot friends, love hanging out with you all too.
But Skyler knew it was for the best.
And so she tried to keep herself busy, tried to just push forward
with her life, keep meeting new people, keep putting herself out
there. She even got a part time job at
Wendy's. She was about 16 years old at
this point, so she's really starting to like grow up and and
mature. She usually worked late shifts
at Wendy's. Obviously because she had
school, she couldn't work during the day, so she would work in
the afternoons and evenings. She would usually finish at
about 10:00 PM, and July 5th, 2012 was no different.
She was on one of these late shifts.
Actually, this was the day after she wrote that tweet that I just
read out. So yeah, on July 5th, 2012, she
went to her late shift at Wendy's.
She finished at about 10:00 PM and she just came straight home.
She was exhausted. She went to bed early.
I think she went in the living room and spoke to her parents a
little bit before she went to bed, but they knew that she was
always tired whenever she would get back from her shift.
So Skylar took herself off up to bed, and she had the same shift
the following. So her parents didn't really
bother her the next morning. They thought just let her rest.
So her dad went out to work, and then he came back later that
day. And this was around the time
that Skylar would be getting ready for her next shift.
And so he expected to walk in and see her, like, running
around the house, getting her uniform ready, doing her hair,
getting ready, but she wasn't. So he went up to Skylar's
bedroom and just knocked on the door and just said hi, you know,
I'm home. And she didn't respond.
So he knocked again. And again she didn't respond.
So now he's a little bit worried, thinking, Oh my God,
she's still asleep. She's going to like miss her
shift. And so he tried to just go
straight in and open the door, but it was locked from the
inside. So her dad, Dave is a bit
worried at this point. He can't even hear her inside.
He can't hear her moving around, can't hear her breathing.
So he decides to like try and pick his way into this room, try
and pick the lock. He went and grabbed a wire coat
hanger, came back, fiddled with this lock, and eventually got
the door open. And when he went inside, Skylar
wasn't there. Her bedroom was locked from the
inside, but she wasn't in there. It didn't make sense.
That was until Dave looked over at the window and saw that it
was open only by about that much.
But it seemed that Skylar had snuck out of her bedroom.
And actually, what was even more confusing was that her bed was
still made, and her Wendy's uniform was literally laid on
the end of the bed. It seemed like she hadn't even
slept there the night before. So now her dad's thinking maybe
she got home from her shift last night, took her uniform off, got
changed, and then snuck out of the house and maybe spent the
night somewhere else. Maybe she'd gone to a party or
stayed over at a boy's house or something.
But now it was midday the next day and she still hadn't
returned home and she had her next shift at Wendy's in like a
couple of hours. And this wasn't like Skylar.
Like I said, she was kind of a goodie, 2 shoes.
She would never miss a shift at work, ever.
So Skylar's dad is panicking by now and he calls up his wife,
Skylar's mother, Mary. And Mary had her own theory and
that was obviously she knew that her parents didn't really like
Sheila and Rachel at this point. They were bad influences on her.
They told her to stop spending as much time with them.
And so Mary thought maybe she'd snuck out to go and see those
girls because she knew that her parents wouldn't approve.
So Skyler's parents got in touch with both Sheila's parents and
Rachel's parents and asked them if they'd seen Skyler, ask the
girls if they'd seen Skyler, and they all said no.
She, she wasn't with us. She didn't sneak out and spend
time with us. So no one had seen Skyler since
the day before. And this was like their only
theory as well. So now they're really panicking.
It's not like she was going to be with anyone else.
She didn't really have many other close, close friends that
she could have been with, and her parents are like trying to
call Skyler's phone over and over and she's not picking up.
Now, at this point, the theory was that maybe she was just
intentionally ignoring them. Because clearly if this theory
was right, that maybe she'd gone to a party or to a boy's house.
She was having quite a rebellious streak that day.
So maybe she's seeing her parents calling her phone over
and over again and she's choosing to ignore it.
Maybe she knew she'd been called because her parents are calling
her over and over again and she just doesn't want to deal with
it. So that was what they were
thinking right now. Her parents were just kind of
holding out hope that she would return home in the next like
hour or so. Her shift at Wendy's started at
4:00 PM. And like I said, she'd never
missed a shift before, ever. So they were hoping that she was
going to return home, they were going to get an answer, and then
she'd be able to go to work as normal.
But then 4:00 PM rolled round, her parents got a call from her
manager asking where's Skylar? Is she OK?
Is she going to come into work? She hadn't shown up for her
shift and she still wasn't answering her phone.
She still hadn't been in contact with anyone.
So now her parents are thinking she must have been with Sheila
and Rachel. That is the only explanation
that they could think of. And maybe when they asked the
girls the first time, they were just lying because they didn't
want to be in trouble because Skylar had snuck out and clearly
she'd gotten caught. They didn't want to get involved
in that. So now Skylar's parents called
once again and they were like, look, we kind of know that she
was with you. And finally Sheila, Eddie
cracked and told the truth. Skylar had snuck out of her room
last night to go and meet her and Rachel.
Sheila told Skylar's parents that she and Rachel had driven
to Skylar's house the night before and picked her up at
about 11:00 PM. She'd snuck out of her bedroom
window to come and go on a drive with them.
I think they were literally just driving around, just chatting
for a few hours. They said that they were only
out for like 2 hours maximum. And so they dropped her off her
home about midnight or 1:00 AM, and that was the last time they
saw her. Sheila told Skylar's parents
that Skylar had actually specifically requested that
Sheila drop her off at the end of the road, not directly
outside of her house, just in case the noise or the lights
from the car woke her parents up.
Obviously, she didn't want to get caught sneaking back in.
So they dropped her off at the end of the road that night, and
they hadn't seen or heard from her since.
The girls hadn't seen or heard from her.
Her parents hadn't. Her coworkers hadn't.
No one had had contact with Skylar Nice, which meant that
she's missing and had been for about nearly 24 hours at this
point. So her parents called the
police, reported Skylar Nice as missing, and then with the help
of volunteers and the police force, they started searching
for her. Just like walking the streets,
shouting her name. One of the first things that
police did was grab all of the CCTV footage from Skylar Nice's
apartment building because obviously that was going to show
where she went and what time she left and everything.
And actually, they were really lucky because there was 1 camera
that pointed specifically at her bedroom window.
So they were going to see her sneak out.
And they did. The camera caught Skyler
sneaking out of her room at about midnight.
There was a bench just outside her bedroom window that she,
like, climbed out onto her. She pulled the window back down.
She left herself a little gap in the bottom so that she'd be able
to get back in. And then she walked down the
street and towards a car that she presumably got in.
It was Sheila and Rachel's car. Now, this CCTV footage, while it
seems like it should be a good piece of evidence for this case,
this specific clip of Skylar leaving the house actually
hindered this investigation so much because this showed that
Skylar niece left her house that night of her own free will.
She chose to sneak out. She walked to this car, got in
voluntarily. She wasn't dragged in.
She wasn't abducted. She left her house because she
wanted to, and this meant that police couldn't actually issue
an Amber Alert for her. If you're unfamiliar with Amber
Alerts, it's a system over in the States for when a child goes
missing and they're in danger. It's basically a broadcast that
is sent out to every news station, every radio station.
People in the area even get a text on their phones.
Everyone gets a text with all the information of this child,
where they were last seen, a description, all that kind of
stuff. And it's to basically help the
news get out to as many people as possible to have the best
chances of saving that child that's in danger.
But the criteria to be able to send out an Amber Alert, at
least back then, was that the child has to be deemed to be in
danger. And Skylar niece wasn't because
she left her House of her own free will.
She didn't seem to be in danger. She wasn't abducted.
She wasn't dragged into that car.
Like I said, she got in voluntarily, and police even had
her friends admitting that it was them driving the car.
She'd gotten into a car with her own friends.
She didn't seem to be in danger from the evidence that they had
anyway. So an Amber Alert was never
issued for Skylar Nice. Which meant that most people in
that area didn't even know that there was a missing child, which
meant that not everyone was on the lookout.
And this investigation just didn't have the manpower that it
needed in the beginning, the manpower that it would have had
had this Amber Alert gone out. And police did actually try and
appeal this. Like the police working on this
case wanted an umbrella sent out.
They tried to appeal it with whoever they go to higher up
somewhere, and it was rejected so many times.
How disgusting is that? Like, who is making that
decision? Who gets this appeal that there
is a missing child that's not been seen for like over 24
hours, going on 48 hours as this case was going on?
And they're thinking, no, that's not important enough for an
umbrella. Who makes that decision?
That is awful. But it happened multiple times.
This appeal was rejected and rejected and rejected, and an
Amber Alert was never sent out. So it was just whatever
investigation, whatever manpower that small police force in Star
City could pull together. So Skyler's friends and family
kind of had to just take matters into their own hands.
They formed their own search parties.
They printed their own missing persons posters.
Everyone was out on the streets giving these things out, talking
to people about Skylar, telling them to be on the lookout for
her. Loads of people from Skylar's
school turned up to help as well, including Sheila Eddie,
who was one of the last people to see her.
Rachel Schuff was actually away at like church camp over the
summer, so she wasn't as involved in the searches, but
Sheila was very much involved. She was coming out every single
day in this search to help, to try and find her best friend.
And Sheila was very, very shaken by this whole thing.
She was like crying every day in these searches.
She was constantly asking the niece family for like updates
and things like that. She would call Skylar's father
nearly every day, asking them how they were doing, offering
her help, asking is there anything I can do to help you
and make this easier? In fact, there was one day kind
of early on in the investigation where Sheila Eddie went round to
the niece household and just asked Skylar's parents if she
could go up to Skylar's bedroom and just sit in there for a
minute just to feel like she was like.
Closer to Skylar. And her parents, of course,
said, yeah, go on, go up. And Sheila went and sat on
Skylar's bed and just broke down in tears.
She was just sobbing in Skylar's room.
Skylar's mother Mary came in, and the two of them had like a
real close mom. And they were talking about
Skylar. They were hugging.
They were crying together. Everyone was so connected in
their grief at this point in time.
And I say grief because they didn't know what had happened to
Skylar, so they didn't know how to feel, but they knew that they
were missing her and they knew that they were scared for her.
Everyone was so scared, and they were supporting each other in
this. So as all of this was going on
with like the family and Skylar's friends, police were of
course trying so many different tactics to try and locate
Skylar. They kept calling her phone and
it was actually ringing through, which meant it was still
switched on, which is a good sign.
That means it should be easy to locate.
So police got in touch with Apple.
Since Skylar had an iPhone, they got in touch with Apple and they
asked if they could like locate it, send them the location, but
Apple refused. And again, this was a similar
situation to the Amber Alert because Skylar was actually
officially deemed a runaway because she snuck out and left
voluntarily. Apple couldn't give over that
information because she wasn't kidnapped, she wasn't abducted,
she wasn't deemed to be in danger.
So it's confidential Apple wouldn't give over the location
of Skylar niece's phone. The FBI even got involved.
The FBI contacted Apple themselves and they were like,
look, this is a serious thing. Like I know you've got your
policies, but come on, like give us the location of this phone.
And still Apple wouldn't even answer to the FBI.
There was no way in hell they were given over that location.
And for some reason there was nothing else police could do.
I don't I don't know. I thought they had like other
tactics of how they could like locate her phone.
But anyway, they could actually never look at her phone.
They had no other way of doing it.
But one thing they were able to look look at was her phone
records. I think they'd gotten in touch
with like her network provider, and they found that Skyler's
phone had been completely inactive since she went missing
the night before. Not only that, but her bank had
been completely inactive. She wasn't calling anyone,
texting anyone. She wasn't spending any money.
She wasn't buying food or anything.
It wasn't like she'd run away and she was trying to live by
herself. It's never a good sign when bank
accounts and phone records are completely inactive because
there's no sign that that person is alive right now.
This was a really, really frustrating case because
everyone just knew that Skyler hadn't run away.
She wasn't that kind of girl. As I've kept saying, she was
kind of a goody 2 shoes. She was so well behaved.
This was so out of her character.
Everyone knew that something must have happened to her at
some point. But because of that evidence,
because of that CCTV footage of her leaving voluntarily, there
was nothing that could be done. It was a huge, huge hindrance, a
huge block from police being able to investigate this whole
situation to the fullest extent. And because of that, this
investigation continued on for months, months and months and
months. And no one had seen or heard
from Skylar Nice in so long at this point that everyone was
starting to lose hope. And deep down, once it gets
months into a missing persons investigation, deep down,
everyone just kind of knew that this wasn't going to be a happy
ending. And by then, life kind of has to
go back to normal or as normal as it can get.
Obviously, that's harder for Skyler's closer family.
But you know, her friends, Sheila and Rachel, they have to
go back to school. They have to continue with their
in like their education. They can't just put their life
on hold until they have answers. And everyone at that school said
that Sheila Eddie and Rachel Schuff were not the same girls
that they they were before Skylar went missing.
They were a lot more reserved, a lot more quiet.
They just, they weren't their usual selves, but they were
still normal teenage girls at the end of the day.
They did the same things that all the other teenage girls did,
and that included social media. They used social media kind of
as a coping mechanism to deal with this whole ordeal.
Sheila Eddie used social media more so than Rachel.
They were both very much on Twitter, very much on Facebook.
Sheila Eddie was posting every single day, multiple times a
day. Not necessarily about Skylar,
although quite a lot of her posts were about Skylar.
She would post about how much she missed her.
Some of the things she wrote were even addressed to Skylar as
if she was talking to her. Like I said, she would use it as
a coping mechanism to like feel like she was close to Skylar
again. She would beg her to come back.
Like Skylar, if you're reading this, come home.
No one's mad at you. And Skylar's father Dave even
commented on a couple of Sheila Eddie's posts saying like, don't
worry, we we will find her, she will come home.
And I actually have one of Sheila Eddie's Facebook statuses
here. I'm going to condense it a
little bit because a lot of the ones that she wrote were like
big full on paragraphs. So I'm going to read a few
quotes from this one. Skyler, sorry I haven't posted
in a while. School has been taking up all my
time. I miss you so much in school.
Me and Rachel miss you so much, especially at lunch.
We sit at the lunch table alone, come back so we don't look like
learners 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 don't know why you haven't
come home yet, but if you're scared that people will be mad
at you, they won't be. We just want you home safely.
I miss you so so so much more than you could ever imagine.
And you will always, always, always be my best friend.
Remember that. So throughout this
investigation, Sheila, Eddie and Rachel Schuff were regularly
interviewed by the police because they were the last
people to see Skylar. So they were their best bet of
getting like, a new lead, I guess.
And their stories completely matched.
They stayed consistent every single time they were asked.
The facts never wavered. I mean, the girls were a little
bit anxious. Police did notice, but they just
kind of put it down to them being young girls in the
presence of serious authority. They would fidget in their
chairs and kind of play with their hair, avoid eye contact.
But like I said, they were 16 years old.
They were being regularly questioned by policemen about
the disappearance of their best friend.
It's natural that they would be quite nervous and anxious in
that situation. So police didn't think too much
of it. That was until Sheila Eddie made
quite an interesting comment in one of her interviews.
Completely unprovoked, Sheila said to the police that she
would be willing to take a lie detector test and she would pass
it because she wasn't lying. And like up until now, no one
had accused her of lying. No one even thought that.
So it was weird that she said that off her own back.
Now, police were kind of suspicious.
If you're not lying, why would you feel the need to clarify
that you're not lying when no one's accused you of lying?
You know what I mean? So now police were a little bit
alert about Sheila Eddie. And so they started to look a
little bit closer into both Sheila and Rachel because the
main theory at this point in the case was actually quite a big
rumour that had been going around the neighborhood for a
little while at this point. And that was that maybe Skyla
niece had died of some sort of drug overdose and now her
friends were trying to cover it up because maybe they were
scared and it kind of made sense.
I mean, she snuck out of the house late at night, 11:00 PM,
went and met her friends. All three of them went out.
Two of them returned and Skylar didn't.
Maybe they'd gone out to a party, like a wild house party.
They were experimenting with drugs, mixing with alcohol.
And maybe it had been fatal for 16 year old Skylar.
And I don't know about you, but I've definitely heard of these
kind of situations happening before where this kind of thing
happens. A young person died from drugs
and then their friends just kind of freak out and they don't know
what to do. And maybe they ditch the body
somewhere. And then they pretend like their
friend is missing because they're scared of getting in
trouble for what they've done, like taking the drugs and
sneaking out and stuff like that.
Maybe Sheila and Rachel just didn't want to admit to their
parents and police and Skyler's parents, who would have been
heartbroken that they were all out at a party.
They snuck out and they were doing all these illegal things.
Maybe in their teenage brains this seemed like an easier thing
to do, to like just cover it up. And that was most people's
theory right now. A lot of the people in the
neighborhood thought that Sheila and Rachel knew more than they
were letting on about what had happened to Skylar.
Like even a lot of the parents in the neighborhood thought
this. So police wanted to dig a little
bit deeper into this theory. And they seized both of the
girls mobile phones so that they could search through them, maybe
see what they've been texting each other over the last few
months. And this was when cracks started
to show. So in both of the girls stories.
So if you remember right in the beginning when Skylar first went
missing and those girls admitted that they picked her up in the
car. They said that they picked
Skylar up at 11:00 PM, but their phones showed that they were
texting Skylar for about an hour after that, up until midnight,
which like, if you're in the car with her, why are you texting
her? Surely not Like, surely you're
not sat 2 feet away from each other and you're texting on your
phones. Even Sheila, Sheila would have
been driving the car if her story was correct.
So how was she texting on her phone?
So police decided to go back and look at that CCTV footage, you
know, the footage that they got of Skyla sneaking out of her
house and going and getting into the car.
And luckily it had the time that it was recorded on it and Skyla
snuck out around midnight. So why had she and Rachel given
police the wrong time an hour earlier?
And every single time they'd told police this story, they'd
given them the same time. 11 PM. 11:00 PM.
Like I said, the facts never wavered and I know that this is
only a small discrepancy. They they gave the wrong timing
by an hour. It's not that big of a deal, but
it's still odd, no? And to kind of give them the
benefit of the doubt, that was the only discrepancy that police
could find at all in their stories.
Both of the girls stories were the exact same as each other,
and that was the only little thing that was a little bit
weird. That was until December of 2012,
when Rachel Shoaf changed her story a little bit and Sheila
Eddie didn't keep up. Rachel was now telling police
that instead of just driving around for a couple of hours and
then dropping Skylar off at the end of the night, she changed
her story. And now she was saying that
they'd all driven out to a woods, like a forest, and they'd
all gotten out to talk because obviously their friendships were
a little bit rocky towards the end, You know, none of them were
happy. Skylar had literally tweeted the
night before she went missing about how she was unhappy with
her friends, so Rachel was saying that they picked her up
so that they could talk this through.
They drove to this forest, got out to speak, but when they all
got out of the car to have this conversation, Rachel told police
that Skylar just turned around and ran off into the forest.
Just ran off into the trees, didn't say anything to the
girls, didn't say where she was going, why she was doing this.
She just ran out into the trees. And Rachel and Sheila were just
kind of left at the car and they didn't, they didn't follow her
straight away, Rachel said. After a moment or two, the girls
decided to then and run into the trees after Skylar, but by then
she was too far ahead of them. They couldn't find her.
It was dark. They were running around looking
for her for a little while, but eventually Sheila and Rachel
just got tired. It was late, it was dark, it was
cold, and they decided to just go back home without Skylar.
So they said that she just run off into this forest and they
never saw her again after that. So this was a very interesting
development in the case. This was like a whole new part
of the story unlocked randomly, and it also just didn't really
make that much sense. But anyway, that aside, police
decided to bring Sheila Eddie back in for another questioning.
They were just going to ask her the whole story again to see
what she said. And they asked her if she had
anything to add, if she had anything else to tell them.
But she said she didn't. She said she'd already told them
everything. So now police are really
suspicious of these two girls now their stories are different.
And so once again, maybe about a week later, they called both of
them in again, get them to go through the whole stories again.
And now Sheila's story had caught up with Rachel's.
It seemed that now the girls had had chance to speak to each
other. They'd gotten their story
straight, and now their story's matched again.
Which was weird because didn't Sheila just tell police that she
told them everything and she had nothing else to say?
Suspicion of these two girls was growing by the week, and so
eventually police decided to send both of the girls off for a
polygraph test. A lie detector test.
You know the test that Sheila Reddy was so confident that she
would pass? Well, it turns out she failed
it. Now, we know that polygraph
tests are not entirely accurate. They're not admissible in court
because they're not 100% accurate, but there's still a
relatively good indicator of whether someone's lying or not.
So this was odd. But then it gets even weirder
when it comes to Rachel Shoff's polygraph test, or should I say
attempted polygraph test. Because on the way to the police
station to go and take this polygraph test, Rachel was in
the car with her dad. He stopped at a red light and
Rachel just freaked out, jumped out of the car and ran away.
I think she ran to Sheila's house.
She tried to escape because she didn't want to take that lie
detector test, so she never actually took it.
But I think that in itself is more telling than any polygraph
result she could have gotten. The fact that she was too scared
to even get there and take it. And once Skyla niece's family
found out about this, found out that Rachel was trying to dodge
the lie detector test, they decided to go public with all
the information that they had on this investigation because up
until now, they've been staying relatively private, you know,
just letting police do their thing, letting police do the
investigation. But now they weren't staying
quiet any longer. And Skylar's mother, Mary,
decided to write a Facebook status.
In this status, she talked about all the weird little things that
had happened throughout this investigation, the changing
story, the lie detector tests. And she shared her suspicions
that she thought Sheila and Rachel knew more than they were
letting on. And she even said in this
status, and this is absolutely heartbreaking, she said that she
knew it was unlikely that her daughter was going to come back
alive, but at the very least she just wanted Skylar found because
then at least they could give her like a proper send off, a
proper funeral and lay her body to rest if she was dead.
And this Facebook status that Mary posted went somewhat
locally viral in that like town in that neighborhood.
And news of this status ended up getting back to Sheila and
Rachel, and they both took it very differently.
Sheila was pretty good at hiding her emotions.
She was quite like stone Cold. Whereas Rachel, as we've seen
when it came up to the polygraph test, she was a very anxious
person. And this status pretty much sent
her into a like a mental breakdown.
Her mental state was just getting worse and worse and
worse, day by day by day, until three days after Christmas when
her mother actually had to call 911 because her daughter was
having a full blown nervous breakdown.
She just didn't know what to do with Rachel anymore.
She was being violent, she was erratic, she was throwing
things, screaming at family members, sobbing, crying.
She was threatening to kill herself.
And following this phone call to 911, Rachel Shoaf was admitted
to a psychiatric unit where she was kept for the next week.
And actually, on the day of her discharge from this hospital,
she asked her parents if they could take her straight to her
attorney's office because she had a confession to make.
And from there, Rachel and her lawyer went together to the
police station to tell them the truth once and for all.
And when she arrived, Rachel was very visibly anxious.
She was pale white. She was shaking uncontrollably.
And before she even sat down in the interview room with police,
because they were going to, like, record all of this, they
needed this on record, she asked them if she could have a trash
can next to her in the interview room because she felt like she
was going to throw up at any minute.
She was that nervous. And when she did sit down to
talk to them, she just could not get her words out.
She was just completely frozen. She was like stumbling over her
words. She, she couldn't get anything
out. And so investigators were trying
to ask her, like, leading questions, trying to pull it out
of her. They were asking, did Skylar
fall and hit her head? Did she overdose?
Were you afraid? And Rachel just looked at them,
shook her head and said, we stabbed her.
And police were just gobsmacked at this admission.
They'd known for a while that Sheila and Rachel weren't
telling them the whole story, but they never expected the
whole story to be murder. Like I said, they thought that
Skyler had probably overdosed and the girls were just trying
to cover it up. But now they were learning that
these two teenage girls were murderers.
So police just said tell us everything right from the
beginning. Tell us everything in as much
detail as you possibly can, starting from when you first got
the idea to murder Skylar niece. And Rachel told police that they
had been premeditating this for nine months, nine whole months.
They had been planning to murder their best friend.
They murdered her in July and they had been planning it since
the September, since the September before.
She said it all started when Sheila and Rachel were sat next
to each other in a science class one day and they realized that
Skylar was just always in their way.
Because like I said, the two of them were closer than they were
to Skylar, and they felt like Skylar was just a bit of an
annoyance in this trio. And they joked between each
other did Rachel and Sheila about how much it would be
easier if they could just kill Skylar and then she'd be gone
and they wouldn't have to worry about it.
Rachel said it was just a dark joke in passing that was just
made very flippantly. But then as time went on, Sheila
kept bringing it up again, like, oh wouldn't it be easier if we
could just kill Skyler? And then she'd bring it up again
the next day and then the next day and eventually it wasn't a
joke anymore and she was saying we should kill Skyler.
It'd just be so much easier if we just killed her.
At this point in their friendships, Sheila Eddie
genuinely didn't like Skyler niece anymore.
She was just kind of putting up with her because they were very
different girls. Skyler was still that well
behaved good girl with a promising future that she'd
always been. But Sheila was taking this wrong
path. She was, you know, going out to
parties, doing all these drugs, meeting all these older boys.
She was becoming very different from Skylar.
And she was just growing a general distaste for this girl
that had always been her best friend.
And so Rachel suggested to Sheila that, well, let's just
stop hanging out with her then. Let's just hang out just me and
you let's, you know, cut her off.
But that wasn't enough for Sheila, Eddie.
And it was the spring of 2012 when the girls started taking
this much more seriously. And they were actually putting
plans to murder Skylar niece in action.
Sheila Eddie had started doing research at home.
She was Googling all different things about about how to murder
someone. She was Googling things like how
to dispose of a body, how to feed a human body to pigs.
She was even asking, like her classmates, just in science
class, how would you dispose of a body, you know, if you had to?
And the two of them even went as far to ask.
Skyla needs herself how she would want to die, they asked
her. If you could die like this or
like this, which one would you choose?
Between them, Rachel and Sheila decided that the best time to
kill Skyla would be in the summer holidays, right before
Rachel was due to go to church camp.
Because then that way when she goes missing, all of the fuss
would die down by the time they got back to school in the fall.
Or at least that's what they thought.
I don't know why they thought that everyone would just forget
that Skylar was missing by by September.
So that was the vague plan, although they never planned a
specific date and then rolled around July 5th, 2012.
And on this particular day, it was now or never for this plan
because Rachel was due to go to church camp the very next day,
actually no two days later, but the very next day she had to go
out on the lakes with her family.
They hired a bull or whatever. So if they didn't kill Skylar on
July 5th, they couldn't do it at all.
And they knew that they wanted to do it.
They knew that Skylar was working at Wendy's that evening,
that she was on a late shift. And so earlier in the day,
Rachel and Sheila met up and created what Rachel called a
serial killer kit to put in the back of Sheila's car.
And this serial killer kit comprised of towels, bleach,
cleaning clothes, paper towels, a shovel, and a fresh change of
clothes for each of the girls. So they prepared the car because
they knew that Sheila was going to be driving and they were
going to go and pick Skylar up, and then they both went back to
their individual houses live the rest of the day as if they
weren't planning to murder someone that same evening.
And then that night, before they left the house again, both
Sheila and Rachel went to their kitchens and picked out the
biggest, sharpest knife that they possibly could, put it in
their bags, and then set off to go and pick up Skylar.
When they got to Skylar's road, they text her letting her know
that they were there, and before she could arrive at the car, the
two of them slipped their kitchen knives up their sleeves
so that they would have easy access in the moment when they
needed to use them. They managed to get Skylar out
of her house on the premise that they were all going to go out
and smoke weed. They all used to go to this one
particular place in Pennsylvania.
It was just like a forest and apparently they smoked weed
there often. And so they text Skylar about an
hour before they picked her up, just basically telling her, do
you want, do you want to come? Do you want to come and smoke
weed with us? And they kind of did it on the
premise that they wanted to talk through their friendship.
They wanted to like, patch things up and, and make things
OK again. So yeah, Skylar agreed to that.
They went and picked her up around midnight.
They all drove out to Pennsylvania, to this forest.
And then they all got out of the car to walk into the forest a
little bit and go to their usual smoke spot.
But as they started walking off into the trees, Sheila Eddie
realized that she'd forgotten her lighter.
She'd left her at home. And so she asked the other two
girls if either of them had one. Skylar didn't, but Rachel said
she did. She had one in the car, and this
was all part of the plan. This was kind of like the queue.
I think they'd kind of agreed to do this beforehand so that they
would be able to walk back up to the car together, just the two
of them, and kind of leave Skyler lagging behind.
And as the two of them turned to kind of walk back up to the car,
they gave each other a look. The look.
And with that, they counted 123. And the two of them turned on
their friend Skyler. Before Skyler could even
register what was happening, Sheila and Rachel had pulled
these knives out of their sleeves and started frenzied
stabbing Skylar niece in the back.
Skylar screamed in horror and tried to run away, but it was
two against one. These two girls had more
physical power over her and she couldn't get away.
They just kept stabbing her. They managed to get her down
onto the floor and Rachel told police that Skylar couldn't even
get any words out. She was trying to utter some
kind of sentence, anything, but she couldn't say anything.
She could actually only say one word over and over again.
She was just asking why. She really tried her best
though. She was really fighting for her
life against these two girls. And actually at one point she
managed to wrestle one of the knives out of one of the girl's
hands. And she was kind of using it in
self-defense. She was kind of just waving it
about in front of her, doing what she could.
And in that she managed to make quite a nasty cut on Rachel's
leg. And with this, Rachel, Rachel
kind of fell backwards and she stopped stabbing Skylar.
I think Rachel fell to the ground.
And she watched as Sheila just kept going and going and going.
And at this point, she changed the focus from Skylar's back to
her neck. Now she was trying to finish
this once and for all. Eventually Sheila stopped, she
stepped back, came and stood with Rachel, and the two of them
just watched, stared at Skylar niece as she died, as she bled
out on the floor of this forest. And it was a relatively slow
death as well, which is absolutely heartbreaking that
they were getting enjoyment out of watching her die, watching
the life drain from her. They didn't put her out of her
misery, they wanted to watch her slowly and painfully die.
In fact, they said she was still making gurgling noises for quite
a while because she she'd been stabbed in the throat and she
was desperately trying to breathe.
And they just watched until she eventually stopped.
And finally, when the girls were sure that Skyla Nice was dead,
they walked back up to Sheila's car and grabbed that serial
killer kit with all the towels and the clothes and the spare
change of clothes so that they could start covering this up.
And this is where their plan went slightly off track because
their initial plan was that they were going to, they brought
shovels, didn't they? So they were going to try and
dig A and bury their 16 year old friend in a shallow grave in
this random forest in Pennsylvania, miles and miles
away from her family. But as they started trying to
dig this hole, they realized that the ground was far too
rocky. There was no way they were going
to be able to dig a hole big enough to fit Skyler in it.
So instead they had to improvise.
And so they just dragged Skyler's body over to a tree.
They kind of propped her up by it and then just tried to cover
her up as best as they could with like leaves and rocks and
branches so that no one could see it.
The two teenage girls then washed the blood off themselves,
got changed into their clean clothes, and then just drove
off, drove back home, leaving their best friend's body just in
that forest alone, hoping that it would just eventually decay
away into nothing. Between them, Sheila, Eddie and
Rachel Schauf had stabbed Skylar niece over 50 times and most of
those were done by Sheila. And like I said, the two of them
just drove home after this and went to bed like nothing had
happened. The next day, Rachel woke up and
and went out on the lake with her family and then after that
she went to church camp. Imagine that, a murderer, a
little literal murderer at church camp.
But Sheila wasn't so lucky. She didn't get to just escape
and run as far away from this investigation as she could.
She was stuck in that town. And so now she had to make it
look as though she actually cared about Skyler and she had
to get involved with the search and just remember everything
that she was doing. She was giving out missing
persons posters, calling up the niece family every single day,
asking for, asking how they were doing, offering her help.
She went and sat on Skyler's bed with her mother and they sobbed
and they hugged and they talked it out.
And this whole time, Skyler's mum had no idea that this was
her daughter's murderer. And that was Rachel Schuff's
whole confession to the police. Once she'd finished telling them
that whole story, police just had one question for her.
Why? Why on earth did you 2 girls do
this to your best friend? And the only reason that Rachel
Shove could give them was that they just didn't like Skyler
anymore. So police asked for
clarification. They were like, what do?
What do you mean you don't like her?
So you murdered her. And she just couldn't, she
couldn't elaborate. She couldn't give them any more
than just, I don't know, we don't like her.
That was her only reason for murdering this girl, taking this
young girl's life so brutally. They just didn't like her.
After she'd given this full confession to the police, they
then drove Rachel Show out to that forest in Pennsylvania so
that she could take them to the exact location of Skylar Niece's
body, and then they could finally lay her to rest and
confirm this whole story. But frustratingly, when they
went out there, turns out that Pennsylvania had had a huge
snowstorm and this whole forest was just covered in a big
blanket of white. And I mean, Rachel tried to take
them somewhere, but she was just so disorientated.
She didn't recognize any of the forest, and she couldn't
remember exactly where Skylar's body was.
She gave them kind of the best verbal description that she
could. But police couldn't do anything
now until the snow had melted. And they had to wait weeks,
weeks and weeks and weeks until eventually the snow melted.
They went back out there and they were able to find Skylar's
remains. Finally, on the 16th of January
2013, six months after the murder took place, police took
sniffer dogs out to that forest and they found Skylar.
And it was just as Rachel Schuff had described in her confession.
Skylar's skeleton was propped up against a tree just covered in
branches and leaves and rocks. Forensic teams were brought in
to the scene to like, try and confirm that this was Skylar's
skeleton. And around that kind of area
they found traces of her blood still on different rocks and
stuff. And so they could confirm that
this was exactly where the murder had taken place.
At this point, Sheila Eddie kind of knew that the net was closing
in on her. I don't know if she knew that
Rachel had confessed, but I think she could tell based on
the way that everyone was acting around her.
And she was getting more questionings.
And she knew that searches were going on in that field.
She knew that Rachel had confessed, yet she was still
maintaining her innocence. Sheila was saying that she still
had nothing to do with any of it.
And when Sheila heard that Skyler's skeletal remains had
been found in that forest, she actually tweeted about it.
She wrote Rest easy Skylar, you will always be my best friend.
I miss you more than you could ever know.
And she followed up that tweet with worst day of my whole life.
And police and Skylar's family are literally watching this all
unfold in real time. They knew by now that that was
Skylar's murderer and she was still trying to pull the wool
over everyone's eyes. She was acting like the the
innocent, heartbroken best friend.
But everyone knew that it was a facade by now.
Even Sheila knew that everyone knew she was lying, but she was
still trying to keep this up and it just made all her previous
behaviour so sickening. Everyone just felt sick to their
stomachs that they had been so supportive and loving with this
girl the whole time. Skylar's own family had hugged
her most days throughout that investigation.
Their own daughter's murderer. But it wasn't just these couple
of tweets that related to Skylar.
Because now that police knew the full story based on Rachel's
confession, they went back and looked at the girls social media
posts and it turns out they've been cryptically tweeting about
the murder that they committed the whole time for months.
Some of them were a little bit more vague than others.
Sheila tweeted at one point. No one on this earth can handle
me and Rachel. If you think you can, you're
wrong. But then there was one very
obvious tweet from Sheila Eddie, which is only obvious in
retrospect. Now that we know the confession
Sheila tweeted, we really did go on three.
If you remember, Rachel told the police that the two of them gave
each other that look and then they counted 123.
And then they turned and started stabbing Skylar.
It was part of their plan that they were going to count to 3
and then murder their best friend.
So now police needed more evidence against Sheila Eddie to
be able to finally arrest and charge her for her part in the
murder. And so they got a search warrant
for both her house and her car. There wasn't much to be found
inside Sheila's house. However, in her car, forensic
teams found traces of Skylar niece's blood.
And this just confirmed Rachel Schuff's confession story.
But it was something that police found in Skylar's own bedroom
that really flipped this investigation on its head.
It finally gave police a better understanding of this case and
the real motive behind the murder.
Because like I said, Rachel said their motive was that they just
didn't Skylar anymore. They just didn't like her.
She was annoying, she was in the way, but that didn't make sense.
People get annoyed by people all the time.
People stop liking people all the time, but no one turns
around and murders them. That just didn't make sense to
police. They knew there had to be more
to it. And now that they found Skylar's
diary, they realized that there was way more to it.
In Skylar's own diary, she had written about how Rachel and
Sheila, her two murderers, were actually way more than just
friends. In fact, an exact quote from
that diary is that they'd tried everything that 2 girls could
try together. Sheila, Eddie and Rachel Schuff
were in a secret relationship. Well, maybe not an exact
relationship, but they were certainly a thing.
And a lot of the things that they would do together
romantically and sexually, they would do in front of Skylar.
And this would make her feel quite uncomfortable because the
girls would literally be like naked making out on the sofa
next to Skylar. And I think that would make
anyone uncomfortable. She was not consenting to be in
the room witnessing that. You know, there was even one
story about how they locked her in the bathroom with them as
they were like making out in the bath or something.
No one wants to be in that situation.
And Skylar didn't. And Skylar wrote about this in
her journal, in her diary quite a few times that this made her
feel so uncomfortable. But then there was one
particular diary entry about one situation where Skylar had taken
a selfie, I think. I think they were all having a
sleepover. Skylar had taken a selfie, and
in the background was Sheila and Rachel making out.
And when they found out that Skylar had taken this picture,
those girls went crazy. Like they didn't want that photo
getting out for kind of obvious reasons, because Rachel's family
were very religious. They were not supportive of LGBT
communities at all. And Rachel knew that if this got
out, it would be a huge problem. And police think that this
picture was the trigger for them to switch from their plan, you
know, their original plan of just cutting her off and, you
know, becoming best friends without her.
That was no longer enough. They needed to make sure that
there was no way that picture would ever get out.
And if they did just cut Skyler off and, you know, move on
without her, there was always the chance that she could take
it quite badly and retaliate by maybe posting that picture
online or sending it to the girls parents or something like
that. And they couldn't risk that
happening. And police think that that was
when the girls took matters into their own hands and started
seriously planning Skyla Niece's murder.
Finally, on May 1st, 2013, Sheila Eddy was arrested and
charged with the murder of Skyla niece.
And she was actually arrested while she was out for lunch with
her mother. And so people saw this
happening. You know, people in that
restaurant saw it happening and the news travelled so fast.
Like people were posting on social media straight away.
And so Rachel actually wasn't arrested at this point.
I don't know why because she literally confessed to murder.
But anyway, she was just at home and she heard that Sheila had
been arrested through social media.
And I think she just panicked and she knew that she didn't
want to go through the whole ordeal of being arrested in
public and, you know, police handcuffing her and having to go
down to the station. So instead Rachel just took
herself to the police station and handed herself in.
So now police had both of these girls arrested and charged, and
suddenly news was hit in the media that these two teenage
girls had been charged with the murder of their 16 year old best
friend. And all of a sudden different
people start coming out of the woodwork to tell police
different things about these two girls, mainly students from
their school that knew both Skylar and Sheila and Rachel.
This one boy told the police that he'd heard Rachel and
Sheila talking about disposing a body.
They were discussing how they would dispose of a body, and he
thought that they were just joking at the time.
But now that all of this was coming to light, he realized
that he was listening in to a real conversation about a real
murder that they were planning. It was so much more sinister
now. Another report was actually from
a teacher. A teacher came to police and
said that she also had heard these two girls discussing
disposing a body. But at that time, when the
teacher overheard this conversation, there had actually
been a body found in in Star City.
I don't really know the details behind that, but the teacher
just thought that the girls were talking about that.
And so she didn't think much into it.
And now she realized that they probably were.
So now it came to the girls murder trials.
First up was Rachel Schuff, and Rachel was actually offered a
plea deal because she'd been so cooperative with police.
She'd given them a full confession.
She'd told them where Skylar's body was.
I mean, I personally have a problem with that because no,
she wasn't cooperative. She'd lied for six months.
Maybe she was cooperative in the end, but I don't think she
should have gotten a plea deal for sitting on such horrific
information for six months. But anyway, she was offered this
plea deal. And if she pled guilty, she
would get second degree murder rather than first degree murder.
So Rachel Shove pled guilty to 2nd degree murder.
And I have a little bit of her statement here that she read out
in court. She said, I am so sorry.
I don't know if there is any way to make this apology because
there are not. Not even words to describe the
guilt and remorse that I feel each day for what I have done.
The person that did that was not the real me.
I became scared and caught up in something I did not want to do.
May God bring eternal peace to Skylar and the entire niece
family. After reading out that
statement, Rachel Shove just sat down next to her attorney and
for the rest of the entire hearing she just sat and sobbed.
After she gave that statement, Skylar's father Dave then stood
up and spoke directly to the judge and pled with him not to
give Rachel that plea deal. He said that she should be up
for the full sentence just like Sheila.
And I agree because she wasn't cooperative.
She waited six months. She put that family through six
months of hell searching for their daughter when she knew
that she had murdered her, that they had premeditated this
murder for nine months. But unfortunately, the decision
was already made that Rachel Shoff was going to get this plea
and the judge didn't change his mind.
And so Rachel was sentenced to 30 years in prison with
eligibility for parole after just 10 years.
So that's. Pretty bloody soon Sheila
Eddie's trial was next and of course she wasn't given a plea
deal and so hers was about to be a lot stricter.
One of the main pieces of evidence that was used against
Sheila Eddie was Rachel Shoffs confession.
It was all read out fully and at the end, the judge or whoever
asked Sheila if she agreed with everything that Rachel said and
Sheila said yes. So in essence, they kind of got
a confession from Sheila as well.
But Sheila was nowhere near as emotional as Rachel was in her
trial. They didn't get a single tear
out of Sheila the whole entire time.
In fact, she actually smiled like a few times during this
trial. How and why can you be smiling
during your murder trial? In the end, Sheila Eddie was
found guilty of first degree murder and she was sentenced to
life in prison with a minimum of just 15 years, which is
horrifying. As of May of 2013, there's
actually a new law in West Virginia named Skylar's Law,
which means that an Amber Alert can and will be issued for any
missing child, no matter what the situation, whether they
believe they're in danger or not, whether they're a runaway
or not. And this means that any children
in Skylar's position or position similar to hers will be treated
just as seriously as abduction cases.
And hopefully in turn, this can save a a lot more lives.
After all of this came to an end, the niece family ended up
suing both the show family and the Eddie family for the
wrongful death of their child. They won this lawsuit and they
were awarded $5 million from both of those families.
Now the niece family know that they are never going to see that
money. Of course not the Eddie family,
the show family do not have $5,000,000.
But it's not about the money, actually this lawsuit, because
that's not the only benefit from the lawsuit.
Another one of the outcomes is that both Rachel and Sheila will
never be able to make money off of Skyla niece's murder.
That means they can't write a book about it.
They can't do like documentary appearances or any other way
that they could possibly make money off of this murder that
they committed. It's all taken away because of
this lawsuit. And that's why the niece family
did it. And that is all I have on this
case. Thank you so, so much for
watching. It really means a lot to me.