The body of a 17-year-old girl was found buried in her neighbor and boss’s backyard six months after she went missing.
Valerie Tindall’s remains were found on Tuesday afternoon in a barrel underground less than a hundred yards away from her family’s home, Fox 59 reported.
Patrick Scott, 59, of Arlington, Indiana, was arrested on Tuesday evening after federal agents raided his home in search of Tindall, who was last seen on June 7.
Scott admitted to cops that he strangled Tindall that day using a belt and buried her in a homemade box, court documents showed. He put the belt back on himself afterward.
‘I put it around her neck and I held onto it until she quit,’ Scott allegedly told cops.
The remains were identified as Tindall’s by the Rush County coroner on Thursday.
‘This is not the outcome we had all hoped for, but I want to stress to the public that this case is far from over,’ stated Sheriff Allan Rice. ‘Justice will be sought.’
Tindall had worked for Scott’s landscaping company in the summer mowing lawns. Scott told cops that the two had spent time outside of work going out to eat and shopping, and that he did not hate her.
Scott claimed that he thought Tindall planned to seduce him or blackmail him into purchasing a new car for her.
‘I just knew she wasn’t going to blackmail me,’ Scott allegedly told police, adding that he did not plan to kill her and it ‘just kind of happened’.
Investigators found that Scott bought boards from Home Depot the day Tindall vanished and that Tindall’s body was in his office before he assembled a box. He said he wrapped Tindall’s body in plastic and screwed the box closed and wheeled it out of his office using a dolly. Scott said he put the box in a hole and shoveled over it. He said he kept a second box in the hole since July to ‘put s*** in’.
Asked if it bothered him that he killed Tindall, Scott apparently said: ‘Well, I wasn’t too crazy about it.’
Tindall’s mom, Shena Sandefur, said her daughter and the whole family had trusted Scott.
‘She and him had a bond. They were friends. She worked for him, but she also hung out with his family,’ Sandefur told WRTV. ‘His granddaughter was her friend, and we went places with them.’
Scott has been charged with murder and obstruction of justice. He made his initial court appearance on Thursday and was denied bond.
It crime after the bodies of ‘Doomsday mom’ Lori Vallow Daybell’s two youngest children were found buried in her husband’s backyard in June 2020.
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