Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the night of June 7, 2023, a family in Arlington, Indiana, sat waiting for their 17-year-old daughter to come home.
Valerie Tindall had left that day telling her parents she was going to work. Hours later there was still no sign of her, and no sign of her car, a green 2000 Honda Accord.
That evening, the neighbors came over. Patrick Scott, 59, and his wife lived on the property behind the family’s home. Scott was Valerie’s boss. According to court records, he and his wife came to the house “in an attempt to support” Valerie’s family.
Over the following weeks, Scott and his wife kept telling the family the same thing, Valerie’s mother later said. She had probably run away. She would come home.
The girl next door
Arlington is a small rural town in Rush County, about 30 miles southeast of Indianapolis. Valerie’s mother, Shena Sandefur, later said the family had moved there from Indianapolis on purpose, to get their children away from violence.
Valerie had been working for Scott for more than two years. He ran a lawn mowing business, and she mowed lawns for him. She was also friends with his granddaughter.
The two families were close. “She and him had a bond. They were friends,” Sandefur told WRTV. The families went places together. One photo the family shared later shows Valerie and Scott standing side by side in front of a big aquarium tank, Valerie in a black hoodie, Scott in a green sweatshirt.
Not everything about the friendship sat right with Valerie’s mother. She later said Scott acted like a “jealous boyfriend” and kept track of Valerie’s phone. Investigators would eventually write that Scott gave Valerie money, food and gas and took her on trips, and that the relationship looked “questionable” to them because the two seemed so close.
“She probably ran away”
Valerie’s family reported her missing on June 8. On June 10, Indiana State Police issued a statewide Silver Alert for her. It described a 17-year-old girl, 5 feet 6, with brown hair and hazel eyes, last seen in a light blue shirt, jean shorts and sandals, and believed to be driving her green Honda Accord.
Detectives went to the last person known to have seen her: her boss.
At first, Scott told them he hadn’t seen Valerie at all on June 7, and that she hadn’t worked for him that day. Then his story changed. In one version, he had dropped her off in Homer, a few miles from Arlington, where she got into a car with a man he didn’t know. He described the car as pale blue. He said he couldn’t make out the driver’s face. In another version, he had dropped her at his own house and gone back to work, and when he returned she was gone.
Again and again, he raised the same idea with investigators: maybe Valerie had simply run away.
The changing stories earned him a charge of giving false information to police. But a charge for lying is not a murder charge, and Valerie was still missing.
Hiding?
Summer went on. Valerie’s sister graduated. Valerie didn’t come. Her 18th birthday, August 29, came and went with no phone call and no message.
On August 9, the Rush County Sheriff’s Department put out an update. Investigators, it said, “believe it is possible that Valerie has been receiving aid from individual(s) whose goal is to keep her hidden.”
To the public, it sounded like a teenager who didn’t want to be found, maybe staying with friends, maybe being helped by someone. Her mother never believed it. She was sure Valerie would have come home for her sister’s graduation, or for her own birthday.
Behind the scenes, the sheriff’s department, the Rushville Police Department, the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI kept working. Over the months, investigators served more than 50 search warrants in the case. And they kept coming back to the man next door.
The dogs at the pond
On October 11, investigators brought cadaver dogs to the land around Scott’s home. The dogs alerted at a pond on a neighboring property, signaling the smell of human remains.
Dive teams searched the pond. They found nothing.
A dog handler told investigators that water can hold odor, and that the scent might have come from runoff draining into the pond from somewhere else.
The next day, October 12, investigators flew over Scott’s properties. From the air, they could see several areas of disturbed ground on two of them.
It took weeks more to get what they needed. On November 27, they asked a judge for search warrants for Scott’s two properties in Arlington.
On the morning of November 28, nearly 40 officers and federal agents walked onto the land behind Valerie’s house. Scott wasn’t home. Investigators had him under watch at another house near Shelbyville.
On his property, about 100 yards from the Tindalls’ front door, they found a large mound of dirt and rubble. Under it was a hole.
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