Free The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese: The Truth Behind the Headlines by Daleen Berry, Geoffrey C. Fuller Page B

out of bed in the morning and to go to sleep in the evening. Their days had become nothing more than a string of minutes or hours, allocated to whatever needed to be done next. Maybe Dave had to give another interview, or Mary had to chase down another Facebook lead. Or they had to meet with police. Before long, they weren’t even sure what day of the week it was.
    One day Star City cops again told Mary and Dave they had received word of several Skylar sightings in the Sabraton area. The Morgantown police, a much larger force, had been monitoring the tips, but Dave felt the need to do something. Anything.
    So he decided to stake out a supposed “drug house” in Sabraton for several days. It was in a run-down part of the neighborhood commonly known as an easy place to get drugs. Many of the rumors Dave had heard connected Skylar’s disappearance to drugs. Because Dave had once been addicted to prescription painkillers following a work-related injury, he knew what to look for. He knew which people to watch on the street, what their reddened eyes would reveal, how the desperation on their faces could betray them.
    For days on end, Dave faithfully staked out the house. And when he saw someone who had all the signs of an addict, Dave got out of his car to investigate. Sometimes they mistook him for a dealer, and asked what he was selling. Other times he was mistaken for a buyer, and they offered to sell him something. They occasionally believed he was an undercover cop—and then they usually turned and ran.
    Except for the time he saw a woman so ravaged by her addiction she couldn’t stop shaking. She and the man with her looked at Dave with eyes full of fear when he approached them on the street.
    “Listen, I’m not a cop. I’m just a father looking for my daughter,” Dave said as he held up Skylar’s photo. “Have you seen her? Please, I have to know.”
    During the times people believed he was a junkie, it was almost tempting to take what they were offering. But Dave refused to return to that life. Despite knowing that drugs would envelop his conscious thoughts in a wad of cotton so thick he would no longer feel the pain, Dave still couldn’t do it.
    He’d made a promise to Skylar and he intended to keep it. He was going to be clean for the day when she finally came home.
    It was hard work. And the toll it took was even harder. No matter how many times Dave handed out Skylar’s picture or begged the junkies to tell him if they had seen her, they never could. They didn’t even know her. And they certainly hadn’t seen her. Not in Sabraton.
    Still Dave kept waiting and watching—but finding nothing.
    ***
    While Mary and Dave were feeling angry and frustrated in the real world, so were their online counterparts. It’s ironic that as much as people say they hate crime, they love to talk about it. Which explains why crime discussion sites see some of the heaviest traffic on the Internet.
    Websleuths is one of the largest, with hundreds of threads. The discussions range from high-profile cases like the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder to obscure unsolved crimes, and anyone can start a thread on any topic.
    Someone named “kmartin96” started a Websleuths thread about Skylar one week after the teen disappeared.
WV - Skylar Neese, 16, Star City, 6 July 2012.
He included a brief description of Skylar and a link to one of the MISSING posters. The earliest participants on the thread tried to expand on what little information was available.
    Then, on July 25, “Sheromom” voiced her aggravation:
I don’t understand why some cases are followed so closely that I can’t keep up and yet here is this beautiful young lady that no one seems to care about?
    Wherever Skylar’s name was mentioned on social media, you could find people like Sheromom. Their written posts revealed a common pet peeve: they were angry over law enforcement’s perceived failure to do anything. They were annoyed about the lack of information about the case.