Search efforts for a 17-year-old girl who vanished after leaving her Indiana home in early June came to a grim end this week when authorities learned she’d been right next door all along: Her body was found buried on the property of a neighbor.
“This is not the outcome we had hoped for,” Rush County Sheriff Allan Rice said Wednesday in announcing the shocking twist in Valerie Tindall’s disappearance. The teen was last seen leaving her house in Arlington on June 7, and just over a week later, police appealed to the public for help finding her, warning that she was thought to be “in extreme danger.”
The same neighbor who reassured Tindall’s parents that she’d probably just run away is now charged with her murder. Patrick Scott, 59, was arrested on a preliminary charge of murder, police said Wednesday.
