Article 32: March 2023
Woman who died in house fire predicted her own death
This is the burned house on Womack Road where a 42-year-old woman and her dogs died, allegedly after the house was set afire last week and the woman ran inside to save the dogs. (Staff photo)
The 42-year-old woman who died in an alleged arson homicide predicted her own death less than two weeks before it happened, according to her Feb. 20 Facebook posts.
The woman, Danette Stowe, wrote on Facebook in February that the 89-year-old homeowner, who has since been arrested for second-degree murder, sent a man to her home with a backhoe and drove it through her porch.
Stowe said she called the sheriff’s department and made a statement, but deputies told her there wasn’t much they could do because the house belonged to the 89-year-old.
Stowe went on to say after the deputies left Feb. 20 that a “man with white hair showed up here threatening me, saying if I wasn’t out by next week…he’s burning this house to the ground whether I’m inside or not.”
“And that the McCurtain County deputies said it was OK for him to do so. So did the sheriff’s department just give these men the OK to kill me?”
Stowe said she had been trying to find another rent house to move into, but could not. She said that house was her only option besides living in a tent with her dogs.
“Someone please help me understand, what good did it do for me to call (the sheriff’s department)? They took their side and I’m the one being threatened.”
“I’m afraid they’re gonna come and do something bad to me,” she said on Feb. 20, less than two weeks before she was killed on March 2.
In a Saturday Facebook post sheriff Kevin Clardy said neither party (the victim or two suspects) did what deputies had advised them to do on Feb. 20. Clardy said the two suspects will face “several felony charges and the investigation continues.”
Neither of the two suspects arrested for second-degree murder has been formally charged yet, according to court records Monday afternoon, but charges were expected Monday or Tuesday.
A 68-year-old man admitted to pouring approximately a half-gallon of diesel inside the home after breaking a window and then lighting the fuel, according to an OSBI affidavit.
