BESTFRIENDS WORST ENEMIES

INSIDE THE CASE OF TWO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS WHO PLOTTED TO KILL ANOTHER TEEN BECAUSE THEY WERE TIRED OF HANGING OUT WITH HER

- CHRISTINE PELISEK

She was the kind of teenager friends turned to with their problems. A straight-A student at University High School in Morgantown, W.Va., 16-year-old Skylar Neese worked part-time at a fast-food chain and spent much of her free time chatting with her closest confidants on social media. Around 10 p.m on July 5, 2012, she hugged her parents, Mary and Dave Neese, goodnight before taking a shower and going to bed.

"She would tell us she was going to bed, but a lot of times that would mean she was going in to be on her phone or on the computer," recalls Mary, 64. "She seemed to be, according to her friends, a child psychologist. She was always addressing their problems and giving them advice." Sadly, that would be the last time Skylar logged on to her laptop: Sometime during that warm summer night, she disappeared from her family's apartment, seemingly without a trace. "Her bed hadn't been slept in, and a screen was taken out of the window," says Dave, 62, who checked in on his daughter on his lunch break from Walmart around noon the following day. At 4 p.m., when Skylar failed to show up for her shift at Wendy's-which she had never done in the past-her parents called the police to report her missing.