- Valerie Tindall and her family moved to rural Arlington, Virginia
- She soon took a job mowing lawns for her neighbour Patrick Scott
- Valerie told her parents she was working a shift with Patrick, but the teen never came home
Valerie Tindall had a smile that lit up every room she walked into.
The 17-year-old loved spending time with her family, including her four siblings and little cousins.
Valerie was in her final years of school and had already been accepted into uni.
She loved animals and hoped to become a veterinarian.
When she wasn’t busy playing video games or singing, Valerie was working hard, juggling part-time jobs at Macca’s and Domino’s, but it was a gig in lawn-mowing that she most enjoyed.
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She’d landed the job two years earlier after her parents, Shena Sandefur and Jack Tindall had made the move from Indianapolis, US, to rural Arlington, Virginia, to escape the escalating violence in the big city.
Her boss was their neighbour, Patrick Scott, 59, who ran his own landscaping business.
A family man, Patrick was married with a daughter of his own, so Valerie’s parents knew she was in good hands.
However in time, Shena became concerned about Patrick’s behaviour towards her daughter, when she discovered he’d been tracking Valerie’s phone.
‘Valerie didn’t return home.’
She spoke to Valerie about their neighbour’s ‘jealous’ demeanour, but the teen brushed it off.
Then in June 2023, during the school holidays, Valerie told her parents that she had a shift working with Patrick. When later that day Valerie hadn’t returned home, Shena began to worry.
She phoned her daughter multiple times, but Valerie didn’t pick up.
Panicked, Shena then contacted Patrick, who claimed he hadn’t seen Valerie all day.
So Shena and Jack went to the police to report that their girl was missing.
Initially, detectives suspected Valerie may have run away, but that theory was quickly debunked.
The teen’s phone was turned off and her once-active social media accounts were now deadly silent.
Later, Patrick and his wife visited Valerie’s parents, consoling them about their missing daughter.
But in the following days, police discovered a photo of Valerie and Patrick at an aquarium. Valerie’s parents knew about the trip, and had been led to believe that Patrick’s grandkids were also attending, but the photo showed just the two of them together.
A witness also claimed that they had spotted Patrick driving Valerie’s green Honda Accord, which hadn’t been seen since she’d disappeared.
When questioned, Patrick changed his story, telling police that he had seen Valerie on the day that she went missing. He claimed he dropped her off in the town of Homer, near Arlington, and saw her get into a vehicle with an unknown man.
Patrick Scott was charged with obstruction of justice and giving false information to law enforcement.
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But why would the family man and friend of Valerie concoct such lies?
That October, police took dogs to his property and they alerted officers to a pond.
Searching the area, nothing was found, but detectives were still convinced the neighbour was hiding something.
Using aerial surveillance, police determined that there were several areas of disturbed ground on Patrick Scott’s property that raised concern.
Finally, in November 2023, more than five months after Valerie was last seen, detectives executed a search warrant on Scott’s home.
‘Detectives found decaying remains.’
Shockingly, they discovered two homemade wooden boxes buried under a pile of rubble.
One box was crammed with papers and old VHS tapes.
In the other were the decaying remains of a human body.
Authorities noted the deceased had orange nail polish – the same shade Valerie had been wearing before she went missing.
When police took Scott in for questioning, he confessed to killing Valerie by strangling her with his belt in his bedroom.
‘I put it around her neck and held onto it until she quit,’ he told police.
Chillingly, he continued to wear the belt days and weeks after Valerie had died. Scott then wrapped Valerie in plastic and put her in the box, before screwing it shut and burying it in his backyard.
‘Valerie had been rotting just metres from home.’
He told police that he had no plans to kill her, but that it had ‘just kind of happened’.
All the while Valerie’s devastated family had been praying for her to return home safely, her body had been rotting just metres from their home.
Court documents revealed that Scott claimed Valerie was going to try and seduce and blackmail him into buying her a car.
Police then charged Patrick Scott with the murder of Valerie Tindall.
In January 2024, Scott entered a plea deal, admitting to murder, while the previous charges were dropped.
Two months later in Rush County Court, Patrick Scott, 59, was sentenced to 57 years behind bars.
He was also ordered to pay $15,500 in restitution to Valerie’s family.
Speaking to WXIN, Valerie’s dad, Jack said, ‘[Scott] had no remorse. She worked for him for two years and there’s no remorse at all.’
Mum Shena added, ‘We moved to get away from violence. And we moved across the street from her predator’.
