Man dies while burying woman he strangled, South Carolina officials say

A man from South Carolina died because he had a heart attack while he was digging a hole to bury his girlfriend, whom he had killed. He had told one of his neighbors that he was digging the hole to make a nice water feature for his garden. However, another neighbor later saw him lying still and face-down next to the hole on Saturday morning. They called the police after seeing this.

"We get there and determine that he apparently has had a heart attack," Rowland says. "No trauma to his body."

With no one else at the home, deputies set out to locate and alert McKinnon's next of kin.

"However," he says, "we had a hard time finding his significant other."

The police were looking for McKinnon's girlfriend, Patricia Ruth Dent, who lived with him. They tried to contact her at her job, but her co-workers had been sending her messages since 7:30 in the morning and she hadn't replied. This was unusual for her, so everyone was already worried even before the police arrived.

Deputies returned their focus to the couple's residence.

"We continued to investigate the yard and this huge garden," Rowland says. "The house had been freshly cleaned, but we were able to identify blood in the house that tested as hers."

"That took us back to the pit he was digging."

"We got down in the pit and started digging around," he says. "We uncovered it enough that we found black garbage bags."

When the bags were opened, they found a body inside that was tied up with tape. A team of experts in investigating evidence was called to the scene. This led to a more detailed investigation," the sheriff explains.

Deputies talked to people who saw what happened to put together a timeline of the couple's last moments. On Monday, they received the results of examinations done on the bodies.

"We were quite sure about what we thought had occurred," Rowland says, and the autopsy results helped to complete the story.

"She had been hit in the face, but that wasn't what caused her death," he mentions about Dent. "The autopsy showed that she was strangled. His autopsy proved that he died from a very serious heart attack."

The sheriff thought that McKinnon killed Dent, taped her up, and put her body into two large trash bags. After that, he dragged the bags through the house to his truck and then drove to his garden where he had dug a hole. When the deputies arrived, they found the truck still parked in the garden.

"Apparently he had been covering the hole, which didn't make sense to a witness," Rowland says. "He was feverishly covering the pit, and so we just kind of put things together."

"He attacked her, killed her, put her in the pit, and he died covering her up."

Rowland mentioned that the situation was "really unusual and very surprising." There were no known past issues of domestic violence between the couple, and his department had not received any calls for help from the Tanglewood Drive location before.

"In simple terms," he stated, "this case is closed."

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