 Rachel Mellon Skemp was 13 years old when she went missing after staying home from school one day in 1996 because of a sore throat. She was curled up in a blanket with pillows when she went missing later that day. 26 years later there's no trace of her. Not even the blanket or the pillows have been found. But detectives did find a disturbing diary entry written just days before she vanished and it might reveal her kidnapper. Rachel Mellon Skemp was born in October 1982. She lived in Bowlingbrook Illinois and attended the B.J. Ward Middle School. While she was doing great in school, managing to get amazing grades and make her way onto the honors list, her home life was a much darker story. Rachel had been the victim of abuse for most of her childhood. Her parents, Jeff and Amy Skemp, had split up when Rachel was very young, less than three years old. By 1985, Amy had moved on to someone else, a man named Vincent Mellon. Vincent offered to take Rachel in and raise her as his own, hence how her last name ended up being hyphenated as Mellon Skemp. Before long, Amy and Vincent had two more children, a son named Jason, who was born in 1988 and a daughter, Ashley, who was born in 1990. While the family kept good appearances from the outside, what was happening behind closed doors was far worse than any of their peers could have imagined. Rachel was being raised in a literal house of horrors, being subjected to unspeakable evils at the hands of her parents, most notably her supposedly kind and caring stepfather. Amy and Vincent had been together for around five years when the true colors of Vincent had begun to show. To people like you and I, he doesn't look like anything other than your average guy, no one you'd really think twice about. However, for Rachel and for the rest of the family, they couldn't help but think of every hour of the day, mostly because they were scared. They were afraid of his explosive personality. Vincent was a time bomb just waiting to blow. It was 1990 when things began to take a turn for the family. Vincent and Amy had been arguing about God knows what when Vincent began to grow more and more angry with each passing moment. In a fit of blind rage, a feeling Vince knew all too well, he backed Amy up to the staircase of their home and pushed her down the stairs. Amy went tumbling down, but thankfully she wasn't injured too badly. After she recovered, she went straight to the police and filed for a restraining order against Vince, which appears to have been granted to her. Before long though, Amy decided that she wanted to make amends with Vince and decided to drop the charges against him. I can't say I would have agreed with this decision, but that's what she decided to do. But as you might expect, their reignited love didn't last long, and Vince very quickly put an end to what could have been a new beginning when he continued his abuse towards the family, now turning his attention towards Rachel as well. Before long, Vince was back to his old habits and had now begun to make threats against the lives of both Amy and Rachel. It seemed that contrary to what he led Amy to believe, he never truly accepted Rachel as his own and always kept her at a safe distance using her as leverage any time the two got into a disagreement. By 1995, Rachel had finally had enough. She was only 12 years old when she ran away from home. She kept running until she made her way to a friend's house. She never went inside the house and it doesn't even seem like she ever knocked on the door. She found a safe place outside the home and slept there for the night, waiting until the next morning to reach out to her grandparents for help. Her grandparents showed up and took her home, placing her right back into the hands of her cold and callous abuser. Later that summer, Rachel was allowed to spend a few weeks with her biological father, who now lived in Texas. While she was in Texas, she begged her uncle to allow her to move to Dallas. It doesn't seem like she explained the full details of the situation to him because surely he would have helped her out if he'd known just how bad things truly were. But unfortunately, her pleas fell on deaf ears. No matter how hard Rachel begged, she was later forced to go back home to live with her mother and the living, breathing monster that she called her stepdad. By the fall of 1995, Rachel had begun her seventh year of school at the B.J. Ward Middle School. Rachel was quite popular at school and to an outsider, she was a little girl who seemed to have it all. She was a great kid with good grades, countless friends, and seemed to be super happy. Only her closest friends knew about the darkness that overshadowed her home life. Rachel's best friend was a girl named Carrie. Carrie remembers Rachel as being full of joy in life. Nothing ever seemed to bring Rachel down. In more recent months, Rachel had taken an interest in recycling and protecting the environment and even began to dip her toes into the world of music and dance. Her school life and social life was looking up, but her home life was about to take a grim turn. A few months later, in January of 1996, Carrie found Rachel crying by her locker. This wasn't something Rachel had ever done before. No one had ever seen the happy-go-lucky girl cry before. When a few of her friends asked what was wrong, Rachel wouldn't tell them. All she would explain was that she wasn't feeling well and had a problem that she would take care of herself. She shut her friends out and wouldn't answer any other questions. This was the last time that any of her friends would ever see Rachel. After she left school that day, she never returned. She called in sick the following day with a sore throat, then she vanished. It was January 31st, 1996. Rachel was home from school alongside her stepdad, Vince, who had been unemployed for a while. This was a particularly chilly winter day, with temperatures reaching around negative 20, with strong gusts of wind and snow flurries. Rachel and her stepfather were essentially snowed in with nowhere else to go. At around 10.45 that morning, Rachel called her grandmother to thank her for the Christmas gifts that she'd recently sent over for. I can't tell for sure, but this conversation appears to have been with her maternal grandmother or her mother's mother. The reason I say this is because towards the end of the call, her grandmother Lucy noticed that Rachel had begun to get very quiet. Lucy picked up on this and asked, is he there? Referring to Vince. Rachel simply replied, yes, and a moment later, she said that she needed to go. According to Vince, Rachel hung up the phone and the two played Nintendo for a while. After about an hour, Vince says that Rachel decided to go to her room for a nap. She was wearing yellow pants, red slippers, and a pink sweatshirt. She wrapped herself in a blue blanket, hopped onto her bed, and went to sleep. This was allegedly the last time anyone saw Rachel, but her story only gets more twisted and disturbing from here. At around 2.30pm, Vince says that he checked in on Rachel and noticed that she was still sleeping. The following series of events takes place from Vince's point of view, detailing the information that he relayed to police later on that day. Vince says that he left the home after checking on Rachel and headed out to walk the dog. Keep in mind, it's negative 20 degrees with strong winds and serious snowfall. He says that despite this, he walked the dog for a full 30 minutes before heading back home. But on his way back home, their dog, a German shepherd named Duke, noticed a rabbit running through a field that they passed by. Vince says that Duke slipped out of his collar and took off after the rabbit. Vince didn't even try to get Duke back on his leash. He just walked away and left him there, running off into the unknown. Vince explained that he felt that Duke would find his way home later that day, but he didn't. Vince returned home around 3pm that afternoon. He says he didn't bother to check in on Rachel. He just went about his daily do-ings. By 315, Rachel's young sister had returned home from school and immediately noticed that Rachel was missing from her bedroom. Her sister asked about her, but Vince wasn't concerned. We don't know if he made up an excuse or genuinely just couldn't care less, but either way, Vince never looked for her. Several hours later, a real estate agent was passing by the area when she noticed a dog running in a field near the Mellenholm. She recognized the dog as Duke and quickly called him over, taking him back to his family. This was some time between 4.30 and 5pm. Amy, Rachel's mother, returned home around the same time alongside their son, Jason. When Amy noticed that Rachel was missing, she immediately called the police to help investigate. Now, fair warning, this case is about to get extremely dark. You guys know I won't get into any details that are too gruesome, but the implications here are going to be very clear. When police arrived at the family's home a couple hours later, they began their investigation with a search of Rachel's bedroom. It didn't take them long to realize that something wasn't quite right here. The evidence that had been left behind, coupled with the information that Vince provided, just didn't add up. Something was wrong and the police were determined to get to the bottom of it. Police found several key pieces of evidence that pointed toward Rachel being kidnapped. For starters, they noticed that her coat, shoes, wallet, purse, and her Sony Walkman were all left behind. These were items that Rachel took everywhere with her, regardless of where she was going. Plus, on a negative 20-degree day, why would Rachel have left behind her coat and especially her shoes? The blue blanket that she kept on her bed was also missing, as were two of her favorite pillows. After being alarmed by the missing items, the police checked the front door of the home and found that there were no signs of forced entry. Vince explained that when he left to take the dog for a walk, he left the door unlocked, so if someone had snuck in while he was gone, this would explain why there was no damage done to the door. But investigators soon noticed something very strange. Vince's arms had been covered in scratch marks, some of which looked quite painful. When the detectives asked where these marks had come from, he said that he'd been working on a car earlier that day and had gotten scraped and cut or reaching inside the engine bay. If you ask me, this information doesn't make much sense. As someone who works on vehicles more days than not, a couple bumps and scrapes and bruises are common, but these types of minor injuries don't compare to the scratches and cuts that were described as being on Vince's arms. An intense search of the area was conducted by police, both on the ground and by air. No signs of Rachel ever turned up. Police even went as far as checking with local airports to make sure that she didn't try to book a flight to Dallas to visit her father, but there was no sign of her during their investigation. But this is where things really began to paint a chilling portrait of Vince. Now, if you're a survivor of abuse, I want to make sure to let you know that this next segment might trigger you, so maybe skip ahead a little bit and just know that Vince had feelings for Rachel that extended far beyond her simply being his stepdaughter. Police began investigating Rachel's room and soon found her diary. She wrote in her diary quite often and would detail all of her emotions, experiences, and her abuse. Police were particularly shaken by one particular page in which she revealed several crimes that her father had committed against her. Rachel explained that one day in August of 1995, Vince had entered her room and begun to kiss her, among other things. According to her diary, Vince said that he was doing this so that she would know how predators acted so that she could avoid them. But there was no avoiding her father. Police also found an out-of-print book titled Daddy Kisses that details father-daughter relationships for lack of a better phrase, but most chilling of all, police found one particularly shocking piece of evidence under Rachel's pillow, a knife. I wanted to add something that I remember while editing this video. A viewer named Ashley McCoy pointed out that Drew Peterson was one of the lead investigators on this case working for the Bollingbrook PD. Drew was a man with a very dark history. He'd been married four times and he's currently in prison for the murder of his third wife, but get this, his fourth wife went missing and she's never been found. I say all of this because there are rumors circulating online that the detective may have been friends with Rachel's stepdad. Now, I haven't been able to find any evidence to confirm this, but it's a rumor that's been circulating for a while. I don't want to be the one to point fingers in the wrong direction, but the implications here are very serious. At 6pm on the evening that Rachel went missing, Carey, Rachel's best friend, heard the news. Carey gathered a group of friends from school and explained what had happened and they all headed out to help search for her. They spent over an hour outside in the blistering cold, desperately searching for their lost friend, but they came up empty-handed. They searched all of the nearby streets and parks, but she had simply vanished. Carey says that at this moment, all of the friends huddled together and began crying, realizing that their friend was truly gone, but hopefully not forever. It was around this same time that Jeff Skempt, Rachel's biological father, received the call, telling him that his daughter was missing. Jeff quit his job effective immediately and got on the first flight that he could to Illinois so that he could help search for her. While Jeff may not have been around for much of Rachel's childhood, he was the father that Rachel had needed all along, not Vince. But the time he arrived at the home of Amy and Vince, there wasn't much that could be done. He headed to Rachel's room and laid down on her bed. He grabbed her Walkman and put on the headphones, then pressed play. Rachel had been listening to a song called Hand in My Pocket. It was her favorite. She'd mentioned how much she liked the song when she spent the summer with her father just a few months earlier. Jeff says that while he was at Rachel's home, he confronted Vince about what had happened. Jeff says that the only response that Vince offered was that Rachel must have been snatched while he was out walking the dog. By all means, Vince seemed largely unconcerned. Ever since that day in 1996, Jeff has kept the same phone number, hoping that at some point Rachel may try to reach out to him. But she never has. In January of 2000, a grand jury managed to retrieve a warrant to take DNA samples from Vince. On January 29th, police picked up Vince from his home and kept him in custody for more than nine hours while they interrogated him and took the aforementioned samples. During their time speaking with Vince, he refused to answer many of the questions pertaining to Rachel's disappearance. He was ultimately forced to hand over samples of his DNA and hair, and police had officially begun to investigate him under suspicion of first-degree murder. This investigation came after rumors had begun to spread, claiming that Rachel may have been pregnant, and the baby may have belonged to Vince. Granted, without Rachel being found, there's no tangible evidence to support this theory. However, the entries in Rachel's diary are seriously concerning, and personally, this is a theory I could easily get behind. Vince was also given a lie detector test, and he failed. Amy was questioned by police later on as well, but she found no reason to believe that Vince may have been involved. This may have been because she was blinded by her love for him, or it could have been because she knew him better than anyone, and while he may have had his flaws, he wasn't a murderer. If you ask me, I don't believe that for one second, though. Amy was given a lie detector test as well, and she passed. But after this, both Amy and Vince have refused to help police with the investigation, which was a seriously unexpected turn. Amy and Vince both refused to hold any memorial services for Rachel. It wouldn't be until 2002 when the city of Bowlingbrook took matters into their own hands, planting a tree and directing a plaque in honor of Rachel, placing it directly across the street from her former home. To take things a step further, the Bowlingbrook police department has openly and clearly stated that they have every reason to believe that Vince murdered his daughter. However, without finding her body, they can't charge him. Both Jeff and Carrie have cemented themselves at the forefront of this investigation. While Amy and Vince have refused to help in any way since 1996, neither Jeff nor Carrie have forgotten, and they continue to press on with bringing awareness to Rachel's disappearance, hoping that one day the case may finally see justice. And Vince will be arrested, or whoever Rachel's kidnapper was, if Vince truly is proven to be innocent. The Bowlingbrook police still consider the disappearance of Rachel Mellon to be an active investigation. So if you have any information in Rachel's case, absolutely anything at all, you're asked to reach out to the Bowlingbrook police at 630-226-0600. Wherever Rachel may be, it's my hope and prayer that she finally found the peace that she so desperately had been longing for. But that's the video for today, you guys. I appreciate you tuning in to True Crime Stories. 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