A South Carolina man has died after authorities says that he collapsed from a heart attack. Joseph McKinnon told one of his neighbors in that the hole was for something totally different. He said that he was creating the whole for water to decorate his garden. Later on the neighbor saw that McKinnon, who was 60, was laying face-down and completely without any motion beside the hole. After seeing this, he decided to call the authorities. “We get there and determine that he apparently has had a heart attack," Authorities says. "No trauma to his body." No one else was at the home, so deputies had ti locate and alert McKinnon's next of kin. "However," he says, "we had a hard time finding his significant other." Authorities started searching for McKinnon's live-in girlfriend, Patricia Ruth Dent, who was 65. They tried to reach her at her workplace. They discovered that her co-workers had been trying to contact Dent through text. They had been attempting to contact her since 7 a.m. She had not answered any of their attempts, which was extremely “not like her," Authorities says. "Everybody was already concerned before we even got there." Deputies returned their focus to the couple's home. "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 opened, the bags revealed a body bound with tape, and a forensics team was called in. "It really took off then," says the sheriff. Authorities tracked down eyewitnesses to get the order of events that happened. The authorities said that the autopsies filled in the questions that needed to be answered. “She had been hit in the face, but that was certainly not a death blow," he says of Dent. "The autopsy proved she had died of strangulation. His autopsy proved that he died of a massive heart attack." The sheriff came to the conclusion that after fatally injuring Dent, McKinnon bound her up with tape. He wrapped up her body in two large trash bags. He dragged it through the house to his truck. He took the body to his garden. He then proceeded to place the body in the hole. The truck just happened to be still parked in the garden when deputies showed up. Watch Video Below "Apparently he had been concealing the hole, which didn't make much sense to a witness," Rowland says. "He was feverishly covering the pit, and so we just kind of put things together." "He attacked her, fatally injured her, put her in the pit, and he died covering her up." Authorities says that the incident registers as "very out of the ordinary, very unexpected." He knew of no history of criminal treatment between the couple, and said that his department had no records of any incident calls. He said “Case Closed”