Two West Virginia teen girls are now doing hard time for brutally stabbing their best friend to death, ABC News reported Thursday.
Shelia Eddy and Rachel Shoaf were just 16 when they stabbed and killed Skylar Neese, 16, in 2012. The three Morgantown girls were said to be inseparable, but somewhere along the way the longtime friendship turned sour and they murdered Neese. According to state investigators, Shoaf said they did it because they disliked her.
"They're bot sickos, and they're both exactly where the need to be: away from civilization, locked up like animals," Dave Neese, the victim's father, told ABC News. "Because that's what they are, they're animals."
Dave Neese and his wife Mary first reported their daughter missing on July 6, 2012. Eddy helped Skylar Neese's parents search the neighborhood for their daughter. Eddy also told them the last time she saw their daughter was when they dropped her off the night before.
"She proceeded to tell me that her, Skylar and Rachel had snuck out the night before and that they had driven around Star City, were getting high, and that the two girls had dropped her back off at the house," Mary Neese told ABC News.
That was apparently the same story the girls stuck with for the next several months. But to investigator Jessica Colebank, something wasn't right. She noticed Eddy showed no emotions whenever she spoke to the teenager and Shoaf acted as if she was afraid of something.
"Their stories were verbatim, the same," Colebank told the station. "No one's story is exactly the same, unless it's rehearsed."
By December, Shoaf suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. When she was released in January 2013 she confessed to police what she and Eddy had done.
"We asked Rachel, 'Why did you guys kill Skylar?' And her only answer to that was, 'We just didn't like her,' " State Police Corporal Ronnie Gaskin said.
Shoaf led police to Skylar Neese's body and turned herself in on May 1, while Eddy was arrested that same day in a restaurant parking lot, ABC News reported. Both girls, now 18, were charged as adults with second-degree murder and are now incarcerated- Shoaf faces 30 years and Eddy was sentenced to life.
As the West Virginia girls are serving their sentences, two Wisconsin pre-teen girls are currently facing attempted murder charges for nearly stabbing their friend to death in a park in late May. They face being tried as adults.