When a man finds a suitcase of bones in his backyard, his wife documents the entire saga from the initial discovery to the police investigation.
Imagine you just bought a house and had your first child. You’re leveling up in the world and you decide to do your first home renovation: a line of hedges between you and the neighbors. But as you begin to dig, the unexpected occurs. You dig into a suitcase that’s full of bones. And no, this is not the plot of a horror film, this is TikToker Rebecca-Lynne Echols’s real life!
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Before sharing the now-viral video on TikTok, Rebecca-Lynne was just a stay-at-home mom with no intentions of becoming an influencer. And while her intentions haven’t changed, her circumstances have changed after her husband dug into a pile of bones. He immediately called the police, but the oddities didn’t stop there.
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TikToker Rebecca-Lynne Echols shared details about her husband’s discovery of a suitcase of bones in their yard.
In her first video on the topic, shared on Sept. 16, 2023, Rebecca-Lynne wrote, “When there’s a full-blown investigation happening in your backyard because your husband dug up a suitcase full of bones while trying to plant trees.” The 12-second video quickly went viral when commenters became invested in the boney saga. Hello, this is 2023! True crime is basically the most popular genre.
Someone shared their own bone-filled story. “My husband’s uncle’s neighbor buried her husband in the backyard and his uncle sat on the roof to watch the excavation for hours.” Creepy! Another wrote, “If you don’t go over there with a tray of lemonade and come back with the tea!!!!!” Luckily, Rebecca-Lynne did exactly that.
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On Sept, 18, she gave us an update. Throughout the day, 12 police officers went to their house to investigate the bones. She gives more detail as to what exactly happened: “My husband was trying to plant trees and he hit metal and kept digging. And then hit fabric and kept trying to pull it up to see what it was. And then he hit what he thought was a tree root and went to pop it out. And it was not a tree root, it was a bone!”
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We would be scarred for life, but Rebecca-Lynne shares at the end of the video that her husband is totally fine. She said, “That was the first sign to call the police,” which hubby did immediately. “After the first half of the day, there were six police officers,” she added. We hate to break it to you, but you don’t need six police officers for animal bones, so they definitely suspect that the Echols found human remains.
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Rebecca-Lynne and her husband only moved in about seven months ago after leaving Florida because of a hurricane. “The previous owners lived here for a year. They were going through some family stuff, and so they moved out,” Rebecca-Lynne shared. “And the owners before them basically were hoarders and had a ton of animals and the police had actually had multiple calls out to this area because of them.”
Rebecca-Lynne’s neighborhood is infamous for various crimes.
Although our main suspects right now are the ex-ex-owners aka the hoarders, who are giving us major The Watcher vibes, police don’t want to rule anyone out. They actually thought the previous owners could have some connection to a Bristol, Tenn., serial killer, Oadis White, who’s currently in jail.
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Sidebar: White was first convicted in 2011 for first-degree murder of his “on-again, off-again” girlfriend, 22-year-old Angela Statzer. But seven years earlier, White had reported finding the dead body of a 19-year-old woman, Ashli Shea Ayers, in his basement. In 2005, 20-year-old Leah Feltner disappeared, and in 2006, 25-year-old Meranda Faith Hayden went missing.
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In 2007, 21-year-old Jill Cunningham Pope also went missing nearby. All of their remains were found not long after, but it was Hayden’s remains that connected them to White. Her body was found near Abingdon, Va., on a property owned by White’s late stepfather. And while police suspect that White is the culprit of all four homicides (which would make him a serial killer by definition), there’s not enough evidence to connect him to the cases.
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Luckily for the Echols, White was sentenced to life in prison, so there’s no way of him getting in contact with them. Regardless, the way this story is unfolding is sheer entertainment for the true crime girlies! Rebecca-Lynne continues, “There was another murder that happened right down the road from us about 20 years ago, and someone unalived their wife, and she was found in a retention pond that’s by our house.”
The police officers said they still weren’t sure if it was human or animal remains, but because there was no skull found and because of the suitcase, everyone now seems to suspect it was the former. If that’s the case, we’re hoping for a happy ending that ends a family’s search for a loved one. But for now, we just have to wait for an update from Rebecca-Lynne on the DNA testing.
Source: https://www.distractify.com/p/suitcase-of-bones-in-yard