Speaker 1: Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence, and is
not intended for all audiences.
Speaker 2: Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3: You can start smelling the decomposition. Then it's a smell.
Anybody's ever smelled it. It's a smell that will never
exit their brain.
Speaker 1: I think some of you are a little confused. You see,
SNS isn't a tree crime podcast. It's a bus. Yeah,
a bus. You can't change its trajectory. You can't change
its makeup, can't make it blue instead of yellow. And uh,
you can't change the driver I'm driving. I mean you
can get off the bus. You can get on the bus.
That's about the extent of your power here, Karen. Basically,
you're not in charge here, So sit the fuck down
and shut the fuck up. Try to listen for once
in your miserable life. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. This
is episode three oh eight. And uh, if you don't
know what podcast you're listening to, I think that's your problem.
The Tyndalls are an ordinary middle class family living in Arlington, Indiana,
which is part of Rush County. Rush County is about
forty miles southeast of the state capital of Indianapolis. It's
a rural area and the town of Arlington is a tiny,
unincorporated community, meaning it's not really a town and it's
not really a village. Doesn't really know what it is.
It's just kind of a place that you might want
to raise kids. Though it gives the vibe that nothing
much has ever changed. The nearest big city is miles away,
and as peaceful as this area is, it's also somewhat isolated.
Speaker 3: My name is Riandy Meek. I'm a detective with the
Rush County Sheriff's Department and I've been in law enforcement
for nearly nineteen years, and fourteen of those have been
in some form of investigations, whether narcotics investigations or general investigations.
Rush County itself is a small farming community, so we
have a population roughly seventeen thousand people, and it is
one of those communities that everybody knows everybody and we're
we're you know, we're a proud community. We have a
low crime rate. We still escort a lot of the
basketball teams, football team, and things like that. We have
one high school in our community, and our number one
business here is agriculture, so we have a lot of
farmers and we have far more farmland than we have, Poppa,
And like I said, it's a proud community that everybody
knows everybody. When something happens, everybody's willing to help out
and assist.
Speaker 1: For seventeen year old Valerie Tyndall, this quiet life was
all she ever knew. She lived in a modest home
with her parents and her siblings. Valerie always showed a
sense of responsibility. She looked out for her family, often
working odd jobs during the summer months, mowing lawns, babysitting,
and running errands for neighbors just to earn a little
extra money. Because she liked contributing and being independent. She
was practical and hard working, traits that her mother admired
and treits that we all should admire to be quite honest,
twenty twenty three was a pivotal year for her. In
the past, she was an underachiever and didn't take school seriously,
but once she decided she wanted to be a veterinarian
at the end of her junior year, it was full
steam ahead, straight a's and b's. Valerie was about to
start her senior year in high school and the future
was heavy on her mind. She dreamed of leaving Rush County,
going to college, and making something of herself. The thought
of staying in this quiet, unchanging place felt suffocating at times,
and she knew she wanted more, but she hadn't quite
figured out how to get it yet. On the morning
of June seventh, things were normal as ever. Valerie had
breakfast with her mom, talking briefly about her plans for
the day, and mentioned heading out to work later. There
was no reason to think that this day would be
any different from any other. Valerie grabbed her keys, climbed
into her green Honda Cord, and drove off. Hours passed
and evening crept in. She noa waited for her daughter
to return, as she always did, expecting to hear the
familiar sound of her Honda pulling up into the driveway.
But that sound never came. That's how easy it is.
That's how quick it happens your life suddenly turned upside down.
Valerie had not come home. At first, it seemed like
a minor inconvenience. Maybe she was just running late, caught
up in some errands, or spending time with friends. But
as night wore on and calls to her phone went unanswered,
Gina's worry grew. By morning, both of Valerie's parents were
in a state of panic. I unfortunately was at work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was here.
Speaker 4: I was working in the bathroom and then I come
down for a break and she was in her room
and going down a tray to wash the clothes and
come back. And she then said she was going to
go to work for a couple of hours and she'd
be back. She smiled at me right now when she
said it.
Speaker 3: If you don't anything about anybody she can be talking to,
where'd she go with, what she might be in?
Speaker 4: Anything to let.
Speaker 2: Things know so they can investigate it.
Speaker 4: Don't wait, don't hesitate. If you think of something, come forward.
Speaker 1: Valerie's mom added a personal message for her daughter, saying.
Speaker 5: If you ran away, please please come home. There is
nothing we can't work on and fix as a family.
We all miss you so much, from your mom and
dad to your bullies. I have had people all over
Messenger ask if we found you and tell us they
will pray. That is all I can ask of everyone
else to please just pray. Pray for her safer turn,
Pray that she realizes how much God, family and friends
love her. Her best friend is so torn up. She
misses her so much. We all just miss her so much.
Life just isn't the same. Our home is broken.
Speaker 1: On June tenth, the silver alert was issued for Valerie.
Speaker 6: Rush County Sheriff's Department is asking for your help finding
a missing seventeen year old. This is Valerie Tindall. She
is missing from Arlington, Indiana. She was last seen around
noon on Wednesday. The Sheriff's Department says she is believed
to be in extreme danger. She is five feet six
inches tall, weighs about one hundred and sixty pounds, with
brown hair and hazel eyes. Valerie was last seen driving
a green two thousand Honda Accord with an Indiana license plate.
It's on your screen zyk eight thirty three. Anyone with
information is asked to call the Sheriff's Department at the
number on your screen or just called nine one one.
Speaker 1: In a press release, they asked for property owners between
Shelbyville and Arlington with deep creek beds, low level fields, ravines,
and properties off a roadway to help find her vehicle.
They added that the car could be hidden in barns,
other outbuildings, or along lesser traveled roads. She was last
seen wearing a light blue shirt, jean shorts, sandals, and glasses.
Speaker 3: On June eighth, the SHARE's department received a call. Deputies
took a report that morning of Valerie being a reported
runaway or missing person. The road guys took the initial
report and she was entered as a runaway missing person
into the computer system at that time.
Speaker 1: Since you're a true crime fan, you know about a
lot of these cases where the victim was reported as
a missing person or as a runaway, but turned out
it was something worse, like a kidnapping or a murder.
But in reality, most missing people get that status because
of their own actions or maybe their families. In twenty
twenty three, eighty to eighty five percent of missing children
ran away or were pushed out of the house by parents.
Of the remaining cases, abduction by an acquaintance counted for
three to four percent, and abductions by strangers totaled less
than one percent of cases. It's really rare to just
get kidnapped out of the blue by a stranger, no
matter what lifetime.
Speaker 2: Is telling you.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, it's that one percent, though, of cases where acting
fast is most crucial.
Speaker 3: So we received the case. It got into the detective's
office on in June eleventh or June twelfth, and the
one of the things we had talked about was we
have seen investigations done in past, and not any specific agency,
but just done in the past that they wished they
would have done things from the get go that they
needed later because circumstances were different than what they maybe
initially thought. And Sean and I had the conversation that
we were not that was not going to happen. We
were we were from the get go going to do
everything we possibly could have and if we don't need
it later, we don't need it, but we're going to
do everything we can to get all the facts at
the beginning, which later created that environment of a whole
bunch of analysis that had to be done that that
took a long time.
Speaker 1: In other words, Detective Randy and his partner Sean didn't
just file a missing person's report and wait.
Speaker 3: No matter what on this case here, we from the
get go took it seriously and then the necessary steps
in those initial days to give us later evidence that
built the foundation for this case. And it was important
that we did it in those initial days because that evidence.
A lot of it was digital, so we didn't have
we didn't have any witnesses, which is is kind of
unique in this situation, is you don't we didn't. We
didn't have any witnesses in this case. So we ultimately
had to depend so heavily on data from social media,
cell phones and stuff like that to pieces case together,
to lead us in the direction that we needed her
that it led us in. So the initial days of
it being reported, how it was reported didn't change what
we did. We took it from the beginning days we
were whether she ran away or was abducted, we did
the things exactly the same either way.
Speaker 1: The last thing Valerie told her parents before she walked
out the door was that she was going to work.
Valerie worked as a landscape laborer for a company owned
by a guy named Patrick Scott. Patrick and Valerie were
friendly and they sometimes hung out together. In addition to
hiring her, he typically hired one or two other seasonal
workers for the summer. His business was successful, and he
usually paid his workers at the end of every day
anywhere between one hundred to two hundred dollars, But Valerie
never showed up to work that Wednesday, after she went missing,
detectives focused on gathering any clues to her last known movements.
They talked to family and friends, and went through her
social media, bank records and phone activity to trace her steps.
Within just a few days, they issued search warrants for
her phone and Snapchat account, hoping to find a lead
without Valerie or her car. Hope was fading, that is
until Valerie's grandfather was questioned and remembered a sighting that
shed new light. He reported seeing a young woman who
looked a lot like Valerie driving a black Nissan eastbound
on US Highway fifty two towards Rushville, just a few
days after she disappeared. An hour later, the same car
passed by again, but this time with a Hispanic mail
behind the wheel and the girl as a passenger. This
report begged the question was Valerie still out there and
had she run away to be with an new boyfriend,
or had she been kidnapped and maybe even pulled into
one of those human traffic rings we keep hearing about
on Lifetime. I got a step picking on Lifetime they
do have some marvelous Christmas specials. It was the start
of summer in twenty twenty three, and Valerie Tyndall of Arlington, Indiana,
had the rest of her life ahead of her, or
so she thought. Seventeen year old Valerie was a hard
worker and had been earning good grades towards her goal
of becoming a veterinarian. She worked for a landscaping company
and was saving money for car and other things. Young
people save up money to buy on their own, whatever
the hell it is they buy, I don't know anyway.
Valerie was a responsible girl and always told her parents
where she was, but when she announced she was going
to work on Wednesday, June seventh, her parents were curious
since she didn't usually work on a Wednesday. The police
scoured her phone records in social media, and after a
few days, also had an idea of where her vehicle
was last seen, but they still hadn't located it or Valerie.
After a few more days passed, her grandfather remembered seeing
a girl who looked like Valerie in a black Nissan
driving up the highway past his house. When it came
back the other way, he thought he saw a young
Hispanic mail in the driver's seat. At the same time,
investigators were following all leads, including information from her cell phone.
Initial placed her phone in Shelbyville, Indiana, around noon on
June seventh, before her phone eventually went dead. After talking
with her parents more, they discovered she had an old
boyfriend in that area. They checked out the location, all
the woods in that area, and footage from nearby cameras.
They called on their Shelbyville police to help locate her car,
but it wasn't found. All the leads so far were
accounting to a dead end. Just like the information about
the black Nissan and Hispanic mail, nothing really panned out.
The case was getting cold. That's when they decided to
retrace their footsteps and go to the last place that
Valerie was supposed to be at her job. Here's her employer,
Patrick Scott Hight, who's.
Speaker 7: Been missing sis June seventh, which was a Wednesday of
this right graphic.
Speaker 3: Now you know.
Speaker 4: Valerie because a couple of different ways here. Once she's your.
Speaker 2: Neighbor, right right, she lives.
Speaker 7: There kind of like in front of you, yeah, okay,
And she also works for you right in the summer,
help mowgrass and things like that, and right now part
time okay.
Speaker 4: And when she does that grass, when she does mowgrass,
for you and works with you?
Speaker 5: Is she usually with you?
Speaker 4: Did you drive her from job to job?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 4: So you guys rollway together.
Speaker 7: Yes, okay, So there's never a time where you have
her meets you at a job.
Speaker 4: You just once, just once, just once?
Speaker 7: How long goes at before June before?
Speaker 5: She wrote?
Speaker 4: Right away?
Speaker 2: Yeah, before she left? Yeah? Right after short dash cool
let out all right.
Speaker 4: Okay, Wednesday, Wednesday afterne there? Where did you meet up
with her at South High Gardens? South High Gardens and
show though?
Speaker 2: Yes? Okay?
Speaker 8: And what were you driving at that point?
Speaker 9: My truck car both the truck in the car both
had hands out hot right, So the what did you drive.
Speaker 4: There that day with your trailer?
Speaker 5: Two?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 4: Okay? How did the car get there?
Speaker 2: I looked at like day before or two days before?
Speaker 4: Why did you do that?
Speaker 2: Because she was about to take.
Speaker 4: Off, So you're gonna give her a car to use?
Speaker 2: No? No, I was just gonna give her a ride.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: So she so she calls you on Tuesday, on Tuesday, No,
she's telling me to come the day before she was
gonna leave.
Speaker 2: Okay, so she I didn't think she'd go through with it,
but she did.
Speaker 1: Valerie reportedly didn't get along with her father. He didn't
like some of her past boyfriends, allegedly, and recently she'd
been meeting up with boys without telling her dad again allegedly.
But there was someone she regularly confided in. That's how
we know all this information. That person was her employer,
Patrick Scott. It was like her real father, or maybe
a surrogate father, according to him.
Speaker 4: So she planned this.
Speaker 2: With you, Well, she planned that. I just you went along.
You just went along.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay. So her plan or the plan was, was
for you who had to have the tourists there prior
to Wednesday?
Speaker 9: Well, she wanted to ride back, but I didn't want.
Speaker 2: To drive that truck. I drove the car on what day? Wednesday?
Speaker 4: Okay? But you took the car there the night before, right, Yes?
And you did that because you knew that she was
going to need a ride. Yeah, because she had already
told you that she wanted to meet because you on
Wednesday at those.
Speaker 7: Apartments, correct, Right, So you already knew prior to Wednesday that.
Speaker 4: You were going to go to those apartments and showed
the god Hi Hi, what was it South hide Guards?
Speaker 8: South Hide Guards to meet her, right, right, you knew
that prior to Wednesday right here day?
Speaker 4: Did she know that too?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 4: Okay, so you're ready there moment? Were you there moment
when she showed up home Wednesday? Yes? Okay. So you're
at South Eye Gardens mowing grass. Yes, and she shows
up in her car or bring on the cord right?
Speaker 5: Okay?
Speaker 2: You met up with her right right?
Speaker 4: And what she got in? Four tourists with you right?
And you guys left South Bye Gardens right left her
car there, yes, along with your truck and trailer. Yes, okay.
From there you came back to Rush County? Is that right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: Okay?
Speaker 4: And on your window Rush County? Was she on her phone?
Speaker 2: Using her phone? She texts a lot. She don't talk
on in Russia, but she was using in the phone.
Speaker 4: Yes, she's she.
Speaker 2: Danks all the time.
Speaker 4: She really suns it. Yes, okay. And did you know
where you was taking her before that day?
Speaker 2: I thought we was going back to Rushfield, but we
stopped at Homers where we went to.
Speaker 4: Okay, So she had to stop at Homer, yes, okay.
And what happened at.
Speaker 2: Homer She got out of the car, got in with
the other guy.
Speaker 4: Okay, what kind of card she get in.
Speaker 2: They's just a kind of a pale blue cars all
I am.
Speaker 4: That was the last time you seen her?
Speaker 2: Well then when I dropped her off, Yes, that is.
Speaker 4: Something you talked to her. That was the last time
I talked to her.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yes, she got in another car with some dude.
How many times have we heard that one before? Are
your alarms going off yet? I remind you that this man,
Patrick Scott, the owner of the landscaping company and employer
of Valerie the Missing Girl, wants you to believe that
he and Valerie were so close that she told him
about all her boyfriends from the past and present. This
included a recent breakup that Patrick, for some reason, found suspicious.
Speaker 2: Give me his name, you give me I probably know
the one boy I know, you know, I just know
the name. She got into truck runs more in the
company Scotland, and she was pissed. I knew she was
when shot in the track because of the way that
she was taking I mean, she she would final, Will.
Speaker 5: You take you?
Speaker 2: She then said? I asked her, I said, are you mad?
And she was pitched As the boy dumped her, she
talked to a man to take her back, just so
she could dump him. A week later that he showed
up at their house.
Speaker 9: I wanted to say Monday before she disappeared and got
a stub and he was pisched.
Speaker 4: She told me the next day. And this is a
kid that tries to tell a.
Speaker 2: Blue car, right, No, he had an orange car.
Speaker 4: So this is a different kid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's five or six of them all the time.
I didn't even know what he looks like. I don't
want none.
Speaker 4: Look like you just he was an orange car.
Speaker 2: I'm an orange ee ugly thing.
Speaker 7: But you talked her off to somebody in a blue car, right, Okay.
Speaker 9: There was another boy she was talking to on Tuesday
that was giving her ship because he thought they were
going to have a relationship.
Speaker 2: And she said no, but I can't tell you who
the name is.
Speaker 4: And then there's the.
Speaker 2: Boy in Arlington.
Speaker 4: So she discussed this with you by her wanting to leave.
Speaker 2: Yes, she's been discussing it for a long time.
Speaker 7: And then she discussed it prior to Wednesday, within a
couple of days before Wednesday, about this idea of what
she wanted to do.
Speaker 2: I thought she was leading on Saturday nine because she
said she was leading.
Speaker 1: On Saturday Meanwhile, about two weeks after her disappearance, Valerie's
Facebook profile suddenly becomes active. Out of nowhere, is she alive?
Valerie's mom, Shea, was contacted by an acquaintance of Valeries,
who had taken it upon herself to start messaging Valerie,
or at least who she thought was Valerie on Facebook.
This friend asked Valerie's account if she could come see
her to make sure she was okay. The account responded,
I'm okay. The friend retorted with I need to hear
your voice to know you're okay, or I can come
check on you. I just need to know where you
are so I can check on you. The response was no,
I'm fine. I was just stressing a little and took off.
I'm okay. The friend then says, send me a voice
message saying you're fine. The account doesn't, but instead responds, bro,
I'm fine, please, I just need time to myself, And
then the account says this, why did you text me
to see if I was with him? I thought you
would have been, says the friend. Why would I be
with him, says the account. We thought anything could have
happened At this point, you have everyone worried sick. There's
an Amber alert out for you and everything. The response
to that was his girlfriend is pregnant. Why would I
be with him and tell them I'm okay. There's a
question mark at the end of that sentence. Also, what
a weird thing to say, right his girlfriend is why
would I be with them? The police were doing the
best they could, but leads seemed to be coming from everywhere.
Speaker 3: We were thrown in all kinds of different directions. First, again,
number one thing, where was her car? A car is
easy to find, and we obviously didn't find that for
I believe going off my memory nineteen days. Also, there
was some communication on our social media that was unusual
with one of the people she was talking to had
made reference to the last conversation said I'm sorry that
I heard you. So this obviously was somebody that we
had to vet out and make sure that they didn't
have a part in it.
Speaker 4: And so our.
Speaker 3: First move was there we went and spoke to that person.
Speaker 1: Another lead involved a friend of Valeries who lived in
another state. She'd been in contact with this person too,
and detectives discovered that this person belonged to an organization
that had an important meeting on the day that Valerie
went missing. He ever showed up for that meeting, which
was highly unusual.
Speaker 3: For him, and talk to Patrick Scott. Patrick Scott said
she didn't work. He didn't see her on Wednesday. She
didn't work that day, which matched her schedule. She normally
didn't work on Wednesdays. So we had a few things
at the very beginning that did look like there was
possibility that she had decided to run away. Keep in mind,
we're getting we're getting tips, We're getting tips from psychics,
we're getting tips from I mean, we were getting mass
quantities of tips that led us. I mean, I remember
we had a tip in Fort Worth, Texas. We had
a tip at the Chicago Subway that we had to
follow up on. And we have all these tips coming
in at the same time that were following up on
and not counting just the tips in our in our
our county and surrounding counties that weren't that had some
validity to him that we could have been, you know,
that could have been her, the people seeing her or
possibly knowing she's at a location or whatever, and we
had to follow up on those. So we were we
were obviously we were stretched thin and we were going
all over the place on it.
Speaker 1: They even received a call from a psychic claiming to
know where Valerie's car was, but they were wrong. Hippies
are always wrong. All of these leads led exactly nowhere,
and the Facebook account was a hoax. All they knew
at this point was that Valerie may not have had
an ideal relationship with her father. Then again, who does
oh you.
Speaker 5: Do, Susan?
Speaker 1: Oh, that's great, thanks for piping up in the comments.
I mean, they all knew she was seeing more than
one boy. She was, after all seventeen. She said she
was going to work on Wednesday, but didn't work on Wednesdays.
They knew she disappeared without a trace, that she had
talked about running away to her employer, who was also
her friend and surrogate dad, and finally that no one
could find her car until they did. It's hard to
hide a two ton machine, you know.
Speaker 3: So we found her car hidden in an apartment complex,
and it was not your typical apartment complex. And this
was June twenty six, I believe is when we found
in her car. So she went missing on the seventh.
We located her car roughly June twenty sixth, and we
found it because we were checking in the area and
we had been doing surveillance on Patrick Scott at that
point and we had seen him drive in that area,
and so we were doing checking that area and we
came across this apartment complex in Shelbyville that was remote
hidden in this housing addition. You wouldn't expect there to
be an apartment complex in this area, and it's like
a little alley that leads to it. And when a
couple of our detectives went back there, they discovered Valerie's
car backed in with a whole bunch of cars getting
worked on or cars that were broke down. It was
back in there with a license plate off, and were
we were able to determine that that was Valerie's car.
At that time, it was still possible that Valerie had
and away based on the information we were getting, so we
decided to leave the car at the time and not
tow it out of there, and we also kept it.
We also did not reveal for roughly two weeks that
we had the car at that point, just as an
investigative strategy to be able to want eliminate tips, and
then if the car moved, we would have known it.
Speaker 9: She never really killed lately. She never talked to me
about boys. We talked about everything else in the world.
Speaker 2: But boys.
Speaker 7: So you're telling me that you haven't seen her, talk
to her or know anything about hersus JUICEA.
Speaker 4: You just went back on Thursday and food your car, right,
she asked you do right? Why specifically you wanted.
Speaker 2: Me to move it somewhere else so that way it
would be after seeing.
Speaker 4: It was sitting right out on white open.
Speaker 8: Did she tell you to move it to Burway, Yes,
so she specifically said moved.
Speaker 2: To Burber You had see there was a definitely living
out there. So I don't know why she would want.
Speaker 4: And you haven't seen her out and out with your
mown grass or we know you've been over there. She's
been missing because it sounds of the grass.
Speaker 2: Is rely rights. I've been over twice and.
Speaker 7: You never seen her.
Speaker 1: Before they found her car, they were using cell phone
pings and messages to figure out where she was and
where she was headed. Then they used traffic cameras to
look at that car. In other words, they knew her
phone was at a certain location at a certain time
based on the ping, and they were trying to match
that with the car on the surveillance camera at the
exact time to figure out what kind of car it
would be that she might be in, see how that works.
They were surprised at what they found.
Speaker 3: So that's when we went to the next thing of
all right, so we've got her coming through here at
this time, So then we start using surveillance cameras well. Again,
this is a farming community. There's not a ton of
businesses along there, but we were able to find some
business in traffic cameras and utilize them to our advantage.
And we don't see her car coming through at that time,
so she goes to show well, she comes back, but
we're not seeing her car on cameras, so that doesn't
make sense. So what we did was we were able
to narrow the time down to that this is the
time within you know, a minute, that she should be
crossing this camera, what car is crossing that camera at
that time, because she is more likely in that car.
And what we got was we got a maroon Ford
Taurus at that time. And so we went back to
her last photo that she had sent, which was a
picture that showed an over the shoulder shot, and that
picture showed a street sign in Chobyville, and we could
see a tan interior, and we could see her fingernails,
and we could see the corner of her shirt was
with the color of VIP And using that surveillance camera,
we were able to say, there's definitely it looks like
a female in the pasture's seat. We were able to
determine that the terior car looks tan and all that. Well,
what we found was that Patrick Scott had a gas
saving car so he didn't have to drive his drug
all the time. He had a little Maroon four Tours
that he would operate and so we then that was
when we first came into realization that Patrick Scott had
driven her back that day to Rush County.
Speaker 1: But why were Valerie and her boss aka Superdad even
together on a day that Valerie wasn't supposed to be working. Well,
that's a story within a story. You like stories, right,
Patrick had taken such a fatherly interest in Valerie that
he was using a locator or tracker if you will,
on Valerie's phone. That's normal. There are a few different
versions of these Microsoft three sixty five places that allows
users to share their work location and even schedule GPS
three sixty five to locate vehicles, routes, speeds, and operation
time life three sixty, which is mostly for families with
lots of kids you want to keep track of all
your kids. And there's another one called family through sixty.
They're all pretty similar, They all pretty much do the
same thing. In fact, their names are almost identical. With
the three sixty three sixty five thing going, you know,
it would seem reasonable. I guess that the two might
share one of these apps since he was working for her,
Maybe he was tracking her for work purpose. I don't
really I don't really know. But she didn't seem to
mind her real dad though. Did. Patrick had been calling
Valerie's dad and getting kind of pissed at him when
Valerie wasn't where she said she was going to be.
You know, like, what kind of parent are you if
you don't even know where your daughter is? That kind
of thing. Why would an employer care about how good
the parents of their employees are? Just a little weird,
you know, it's quite the overstepping of bounds. To add
to this, buses are surrogate family dynamic. Patrick's own wife
was jealous of the attention and money that he was
giving to Valerie. Whether she thought it was a sexual
thing or just a fatherly concern over a young neighbor
and employee, who knows. But she knew something was up,
that's for sure. Women always know. Let's just say she
didn't like it one bit, and she didn't like Valerie either.
But Patrick continued playing this role, and the reason they
were together on that day was that he was going
to go buy her a car. Her employer was going
to go buy her a car. Messages between Valerie and
Patrick sent to each other just days before she went
missing confirm a friendly exchange about looking for one. Here's
Patrick's version of events.
Speaker 2: When her car wrote down, I had told her if
he could, if Dad couldn't get it running, I would
help her get another.
Speaker 9: Car, but a g car, something that she could make
work and make payments on. You know, I got three
down dollar that wasn't sitting her. She wanted a new car,
brand new car.
Speaker 5: She wasn't.
Speaker 2: Putting up with those three talent dollar car.
Speaker 1: It seemed clear that Patrick was meeting up with the
Valerie on that Wednesday afternoon to look at a specific
car that she may have liked, maybe even to help
her run away, since she'd verbalized that to Patrick and others.
It also seemed like the deal didn't go down that well,
since the vehicle was sold to someone else before she
could test drive it.
Speaker 4: You're kind of like a father figure to her. Probably
she find those up to you a little bit. Maybe
I don't know, Maybe she does. You shine out of her. Okay.
Speaker 1: That's so.
Speaker 4: The best way can help her right now is if
you know where's at?
Speaker 7: Is a town?
Speaker 2: Where's at?
Speaker 5: I do not know.
Speaker 4: I swear to about any idea at all.
Speaker 2: No, I batted you with Tollinoian I really did. I
thought you should off that Wood, Illinois.
Speaker 1: By this time, the investigation had been ongoing for weeks.
Aside from the idea that Valerie was planning to run
away or not, detectives had enough data to place Patrick
as the last person to see Valerie alive. He claimed
he was helping her by employing her, being her confidante,
looking for a used car for her, and by helping
her disappear, but detectives had latched onto the distinct possibility
that she really had disappeared forever.
Speaker 4: Patrick, over the last five months, you and I have
got to know each other, correct good, Craig, you see
me a lot right again?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 2: And every time every time we saw is.
Speaker 5: We along?
Speaker 4: Good?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: I reckon.
Speaker 1: Although Patrick didn't have a criminal history, it sounds like
he listened to a lot of true crime podcasts because
judging by the tone of his voice, he knew what
was coming. Don't think that just because he's from rural
Indiana that he's some kind of dummy. I know that
accent really gets under some people's skin and they love
to lash out, call people stupid and all that political divisiveness,
you know. But this guy was a business owner. He
was able to keep investigators guessing for months, so at
this point he knew the jig was almost tough.
Speaker 7: Now, I normally don't do this, okay, but here's why
I'm going to do this, Because here's why.
Speaker 4: Here's why. You know, I can play it all like
eighty million things right here.
Speaker 7: As you come and sit in this room, your mind
plays tricks on you as an officer, all right, and
it tells you to go all these different directions and
trial this different stuff. But the fact of the matter
is is that I think you're overall probably a pretty
good person. Okay, If I didn't, I would have treated
you probably different over the.
Speaker 2: Time, all right.
Speaker 4: So the day as we drove in here just for
forty minutes and we just drove in together, in my head,
I'm like, how am I going to talk to Patrick?
And you know what I decided when I walked to
the door.
Speaker 7: And then there's times like you sitting this interview room,
and maybe that didn't happen in the past, all right,
But the fact of the matter is that the natural
human thing is when you do something wrong, is you
want to tell.
Speaker 4: Us that you did something wrong.
Speaker 3: Okay. The other thing is is that.
Speaker 4: There's family involved, there's mistakes that's been made.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: I would like to talk to you today, and I
would like you to tell me what happened to Valerie.
That's the end result of what I want to know, okay.
But here's what's weird about today.
Speaker 8: I'm gonna tell you about everything I know, okay, because
here's the deal. In the end, I believe you've done
something to Valerie. I believe you've done something to Valerie, and.
Speaker 4: We're going to prove it, all right.
Speaker 7: But what I want to know is the why, And
what you want to tell me is I'm sitting here
watching you tear up right now, you want to tell
me the why?
Speaker 4: Okay, So does that make sense?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm not trying to be insured to you.
Speaker 4: Okay, that's what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to
be a person to you that you understand I set
from I set across a lot of people, Okay, in the.
Speaker 7: Day one I set across or the times I've set
across from you, you remind me of a common man
that goes to work, that works his butt off.
Speaker 4: It is a family man loves his family. That's what
I get from you, Okay. And I may be completely wrong,
but that's what I got from you in the five
months that I had known you.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: Patrick was for sure a family man. He was in
charge of his own family, and he thought he was
in charge of the neighbors family too. But the detective
was about to uncover this family man's secrets.
Speaker 3: And and one of the times when talking to Patrick,
Patrick Scott made a comment that everybody's saying that he
put her in the pond, or that she's in the
ponds up to that form, and that we're going that
the police are going to drain the pond, He tells
us us, Well, we the pond had never came up,
and so when we when the investigators walked away that day,
we said, did Patrick just tell us where she's at.
Speaker 1: They had already pulled search warrants for his property based
on the revelation that he had her car on his
property the day she disappeared. Patrick had several properties, including
one next to his house and another separated by a
neighbor's hayfield. In the middle of that hayfield was a pond.
The owner of the property was one hundred percent cooperative,
so detectives sent out four cadaver dogs, one at a
time and independent from each other, to see if they
could sniff out anything. Each dog caught the scent of
something on the north side of the pond, so next
divers checked out the fairly shallow pond but found nothing.
They called on a topographist, who theorized that the water
runoff from Patrick's property into the pond could possibly place
the scent there. Feeling like they were literally looking for
a needle in a haystack, they took aerial photos. What
they found on Patrick's property were areas of debris that
could be hiding something and also areas of disturbed ground.
Finally they hit something.
Speaker 3: So we hit the first box fairly early as we're digging,
and what we noticed was this box had osme plywood
on it, and which is what we had seen at
the hardware store purchased. And we said, you know, it's
that moment where it's okay, you know we're going to
have some closure, and it's not good. It's not what
we wanted, but there is. You know, your mind tells
you what it's probably going to be in that box.
So we start the slow, tedious process of hand digging
this box out. And this box is the size of
a skinnier version of a coffin, you know, roughly five
to six feet long, twenty some inches tall. So it's
as soon as you pulled out and you see it,
you pretty well have an idea of what's going to
be in it. We start taking the box apart, and
as soon as we start taking apart, we see VHS
tapes and just trash.
Speaker 1: Now, detectives were worried that this was a false alarm.
They had seen Patrick go to a hardware store a
day after Valerie's disappearance and purchased the very materials used
on this box, but this wasn't the box. Patrick was
an extremely routine oriented kind of guy, but they noticed
that he strayed from his usual schedule and headed to
a remote cemetery that very day. Now they would need
permission to excavate the cemetery. They sent deputies to have
a conversation with the presiding priest, but at the same time,
the excavator on Patrick's property wasn't giving up.
Speaker 3: The guy running the excavator is a local guy here
and again I revert back to proud community. Anybody bend
over backwards to help us. And he owns a local
record business. His name is Bruce Davis, and he is
one of the greatest people in every community should have
a Bruce Davis. And he was running the excavator for
us that day. And so Bruce says to us, Hey,
this ground has been disturbed. This ground is My excavator
is not bogging down. I am going to I this
has been somebody has excavated here before. My excavators have
no issue moving this dirt. So we decide, hey, keep digging,
keep digging until you tell us you've hit dirt.
Speaker 1: That hasn't been moved, and that's what he did. He
kept digging, just knowing in his gut that he was
going to find Valerie. The excavator was practically fully extended,
meaning he wouldn't be able to dig one more inch,
But in that last attempt, he snagged the teeth of
the bucket on another wooden box.
Speaker 3: You can start smelling the decomposition. Then it's a smell
anybody's ever smelled it. It's a smell that will never
exit their brain, and you could start smelling it.
Speaker 1: When they pulled the box out, they realized it required
a special drill bit to open it. Guess where they
found it? In a nearby shed belonging to Patrick. They
opened the box, and even though they weren't able to
identify Valerie's body, they recognized the orange fingernail polish she
was wearing in the last photo of her, the snapchat
photo of her in Patrick's carn't use you.
Speaker 7: Drove Valerie, alt went back to your residence, okay, And
you arrived at your residence at twelve fifty nine PM, okay.
And then between twelve fifty nine and roughly four o'clock
something happened, and our.
Speaker 4: Job was to fill the gap and to try to figure.
Speaker 2: Out what happened.
Speaker 4: As an investigation unfolded.
Speaker 7: That led us to a day in which we found
the box with Valerie's body in it behind your shed.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 7: Now, I couldn't come in here and say, pasture gino,
what I'm about to talk to you, because that's a
common thing.
Speaker 4: And that was the first thought in my head that
I was gonna do to you.
Speaker 7: And then I said no, because I did indeed down
you love Valerie and I know you love your family. Okay,
so I decided that when I come in that door
just now, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to explain
the why.
Speaker 4: Okay, because we have her in the box.
Speaker 1: You would think that Patrick Scott would be shitting his
pants right about now, but not once did he act
like he was nervous. This man has nerves of steel.
Detectives had finally found Valerie in a homemade wooden box
crafted by Patrick himself. This discovery did not come easily,
though Patrick owned several properties next to his house, and
he also mowed dozens of large areas of ground, including
a remote cemetery where his phone pinged the afternoon. Valerie disappeared,
but it was something Patrick mistakenly said in a previous
interview that eventually led them to her body. The only
question that was left unanswered was why why would a
seemingly normal father, grandfather, business owner, neighbor and friend take
the life of someone he supposedly cared about. Police had
a final task ahead in rural Indiana, a search for
a missing teen Valerie Tyndall, had stretched on for months,
filled with dead ends and false leads. After Valerie disappeared
on June seventh, twenty twenty three, the initial investigation focused
on tracking her last known movements, including her trip to
a nearby town, where her car was eventually discovered at
aartment complex. Detectives worked tirelessly, following up on phone pings,
surveillance footage, and interviews with those closest to her. Patrick Scott,
her employer, was questioned early on, but insisted that he
dropped Valerie off in Homer that day, a detail that
initially seemed believable, But as the investigation progressed, new pieces
of evidence started coming out, text messages, surveillance data, and
discrepancies in Patrick Scott's account. The breakthrough came in late
November when detectives, aided by FBI agents, uncovered a disturbing
scene on Scott's property. During excavation, a wooden box was
unearthed containing human remains. Investigators had feared the worst, and
this gruesome discovery confirmed their suspicions. Valerie had been murdered,
and now it was up to detective Randy Meek to
excavate the remaining information from killer Patrick Scott.
Speaker 4: What happened to Valerie?
Speaker 2: Got carried away? Want do what.
Speaker 5: Lay out to it?
Speaker 2: Laid out to me? What happens her? She tried to
buy me, o me into buying in her car?
Speaker 7: Good?
Speaker 4: What happened?
Speaker 2: She thought she was going to sedition and it wasn't
going to happen.
Speaker 1: Don't forget this is a minor compared to a seasoned
grown man, Dan.
Speaker 2: She just got carried away.
Speaker 4: It's gonna explain act to me. What's that meaning? Does
Linda know about it? Okay, nobody knows? Yours still WI.
Speaker 2: She tried to sedition and I wasn't gonna happen.
Speaker 4: But what happened to Valerie? That's where you're saw?
Speaker 2: What I mean?
Speaker 4: What did you do to her?
Speaker 2: What did I do to what you do? So tell
us what you do is strangled her.
Speaker 1: A cold blooded sociopath who claimed to devote himself to work,
his family and friends, including Valerie, lied for weeks in
two months, while knowing the whole time that she lay
in a cold box underground, just yards away from the
comfort of her bed and her home and the love
of her family. And why because he wasn't having it.
He wasn't having his wife, who was already suspicious, discover
how carried away things had gotten with this girl. Even
if his claims were true, Valerie was a child of seventeen. Besides,
there was not one shred of evidence that she intended
to blackmail him. That was all bullshit, a bell, Okay,
Then what to do with it?
Speaker 2: I moved her into the office?
Speaker 4: Okay? How long was she learned?
Speaker 2: Till next day?
Speaker 4: Where's the belt? It's okay? You left her in the
office till next day? And then what happened?
Speaker 5: Then?
Speaker 2: When I got home the next day, I just made
that box.
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 4: What about the hole?
Speaker 2: The holes already done. But he wasn't for that. It
was because I was telling comm about to concrete in it.
Speaker 4: What about the other box?
Speaker 2: Just put shit in it?
Speaker 4: We did did you build to that day? No, it
was just about one. So you strangle her? What room
were you when you strangle her?
Speaker 2: Backed here by my bedroom, like in that little pintryway.
Speaker 4: Had you and Valor been in a sexual relationship ever? Okay?
So you said she tried to seduce you for the car,
We'll explain to me what happened.
Speaker 2: She was fun to come on to me.
Speaker 4: Did she say she was going to get you in
trouble or yeah, she.
Speaker 2: Was going to tell everybody that I was making moves
on her. I wasn't going I was go have.
Speaker 3: It, okay.
Speaker 2: It's just things got out of hand.
Speaker 4: Where did the bell come from?
Speaker 5: It was mine?
Speaker 2: I had it on, you got it on? Okay.
Speaker 4: So explained to me what happened there in that room,
Like how did you get the belt on her?
Speaker 2: I was fighting her off, and I took it and
threw it around her.
Speaker 4: Why were you guys fighting because she was.
Speaker 2: Trying to get she tried to take her clothes off, okay,
And it wasn't gonna do it, okay.
Speaker 4: And then you guys got in a fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I kind of a pushing a shoving thing right there, okay.
Speaker 4: And then you said your belt off, and then what happened?
Speaker 2: I put it around her neck and I held on
to it till she quit.
Speaker 4: Okay, and what did you do afterwards?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 4: What did you? What was going through your head at
that time?
Speaker 2: I didn't know what to do with her.
Speaker 1: Well, here's an idea. Since they were supposedly engaged into
a pushing match, you could have pushed her towards the
door and sent her across the street back home instead
of maybe, I don't know, ending her life.
Speaker 4: Was she struggling when you were stroking r when you
were strained on her?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Okay, what were you saying, sir?
Speaker 2: They say nothing and lived on Blackmaily?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So because of the blackmail?
Speaker 5: Did you?
Speaker 4: Was that your intention to kill her? To avoid the BLACKMAILINGNA.
Speaker 2: Tell everybody that I had my way with her and
that never happened.
Speaker 4: Okay, you see you you seem like a good guy.
Explain to me how you have functioned like you have.
Did you hate Valerie?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you just heard a real sociopath's response, A real
life monster disguised as a human. There's lots of them.
When asked if he hated Valerie, his answer was so nonchalant,
that it's terrifying, so indifferent that it's like he's talking
about a TV show. The hallmark of sociopathy is not
rage or hatred, but a disturbing emotional vacancy, a disconnection
to empathy. Sociopaths commit acts of violence or betrayal without
feeling the gravity of their actions whatsoever. It's like life's
a board game and you're playing it, but the instructions
are in Chinese and you don't really care. You're just
gonna do whatever you're gonna do, regardless of the rules.
In fact, there's nothing behind the rules other than just
a bunch of gibberish.
Speaker 5: To you.
Speaker 1: Scott's flat no wasn't just a dismissal of the question.
It was a glimpse into his inability to connect with
what he had done to him. The act of murder
wasn't fueled by passion or hatred. It was simply another
moment in time, another problem to be solved, another task
to complete.
Speaker 2: So we did all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 4: I see clothes as well. I'm asking you know.
Speaker 9: We took she'd go out to eat with us, her
and her little sister Boba go It's at different places.
Speaker 2: They took her to the movies. They've taken her shopping.
Speaker 7: You see a good guy like I don't understand, Like
that's got to bother you ride that you killed the vallerye.
Speaker 2: I looked crazy about it.
Speaker 1: Wasn't too crazy about it. Taking a child's life.
Speaker 3: That is, it was obviously not the outcome we we wanted,
not the outcome the family wanted or anybody in our
community wanted. But we at least had everybody working together
collectively doing our job, and we never lost focus.
Speaker 4: I mean we worked hours. I mean, it's our lives.
Speaker 3: Ultimately, all the investigators' lives we stopped, you know, in
June that year, and all way up till November twenty eighth,
our lives stopped.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: We all had families at home, and we dedicated ourselves
to this. We worked terrible hours to try to find her.
We had notebooks, We had guys. Some of the guys
had notebooks beside their ben I know, I sent emails
at like two three in the morning. I think of
something when I'm trying to go to sleep, and we
send emails. But we lived this for you know, those
five months, and we did it together, and we never
you know, we never stopped on it. It was it
was Valerie became our kid.
Speaker 1: The detective didn't say all that for sympathy. He said
it to remind us about the concept of community and
working together to flush out evil even when we can't
see it. Being a homicide detective must sometimes feel like
being a shadow chaser and priest at the same time.
Every lead feels like looking at something evil moving just
out of sight, looking on the edges of reality. The
average Joe or Joan never truly delves into the fact
that evil is all around us every single day.
Speaker 3: And I think sometimes people wonder, like, how did the
parents not see this? How did the parents not understand that? Well,
the thing is is, the parents didn't know any of
this stuff. This is a guy who ran a successful business.
He was a neighbor. We live in an area that
a lot of people go and mow for people, a
lot of people, there's a lot of mowing services, and
people go and mo for them, and that you trust
them to take care of your kids. And here's a
neighbor that they were friends with, Their families were friends,
and they trusted this guy. And so obviously the parents
didn't know all this stuff at the time, and so
I think sometimes we forget that that information isn't given
to you like that, it's trickled in. And so the
family trusted this guy, just like a lot of us
would trust our neighbors, and just like a lot of
us trust our kids to go off and work for someone.
And unfortunately, in this situation here, Patrick Scott was a
monster and he was in disguise.
Speaker 1: Fifty nine year old Patrick Scott pled guilty and was
sentenced to basically a whole other lifetime fifty seven years
in prison for the murder of seventeen year old Valerie Tyndall.
Believe it or not, we are all constantly chasing flickers
of movement just outside of our field of vision. The
real monsters, the people capable of these acts, aren't lurking
off in some shed somewhere in the woods. They're right
in the corners of your world, hiding in plain sight.
That's the worst part about it. They don't wear the
darkness on their sleeve. They move among us. They're your gardener,
your door dasher, your grocery store clerk, your gas station attendant.
They cook your meals, haul out your trash, They connect
your calls, they drive your ambulances, they guard you while
you sleep. Well, that's gonna do it for another one.
We'll be here next week if you want to join us,
unless you're a socialist, of course, in which case you
can just fuck off. We don't need you here whining.
That's all you know how to do anyway, all right, patriots.
So oh, if you don't like America and want communism,
get the fuck out.