SORORICIDE

Tampa Woman Accused of Murdering Her Sister, Burying Her in the Backyard

“Karen would say, if you find me dead, it was Debra,” a friend said.

A Florida woman has been accused of murdering her sister and burying her in her own backyard. Debra Patton faces charges of second-degree murder with a firearm and abusing a dead human body after the disappearance of her sister, Karen Pais, led police to a messy, makeshift grave in the backyard of the Carrollwood home where the two sisters lived. Pais, 66, went missing in late May. Patton had moved in with Pais 10 years ago, and the two had reportedly never gotten on well but were, at first, able to cohabitate. They fell out about five years in, with Patton accusing Pais of failing to give adequate care to their parents before they died. Tensions ran so high that friends of Pais said they had repeatedly urged her to ask Patton to leave. Each sister owned a gun.

Friends of Pais grew concerned after she stopped answering phone calls in late May, and police soon arrived at the home to do a welfare check, at which point they noticed a patch of upturned earth in the yard. Cathy Wynkoop, a friend of Karen’s, told the Tampa Bay Times, “We were telling them, you need to dig up that back yard because Karen would not have left it looking like that.” Deputies discovered Karen's body with a gunshot wound in the chest that indicated a homicide. “Karen would say, if you find me dead, it was Debra,” Wynkoop said.