Cold Case Files: Thirty -seven years ago, a heinous murder in Muskogee left three children without a murder
On a quiet Labor Day weekend in Muskogee, the morning of September 3, 1989, began with the sound of a baby crying. The cries went on for more than an hour. A neighbor at 720 Georgetown finally went to check. What the neighbor found inside the bedroom was the body of 25-year-old Danice Lovell Crowder Cope. Her throat had been slashed with a large knife.
The wound was so deep that she had been nearly decapitated. Her eight-month-old child lay nearby, unharmed. The other two children were not in the home.
Danice had been born Danice Lovell Crowder on December 24, 1963, in Muskogee. She attended Muskogee High School and later became a mother of three. The night before her death she was last seen at a friend’s house around 11 p.m. By roughly 10:30 the next morning she was dead in her own bedroom.
No one has ever been charged. Contemporary news accounts noted the killing alongside other violence that weekend in Muskogee, yet the case of the young mother left alone with her infant has remained open for more than thirty-seven years.
The extreme violence of the attack has long shaped the questions investigators and those who study such cases must consider. A throat wound of that severity, inflicted with a large knife inside her bedroom, points to a killer who was close enough to reach her without an apparent struggle that left other reported signs, and angry enough to continue until the neck was nearly severed.
In cases with this pattern, detectives often look first at people who already had access to the home: a current or former partner, the father of one or more of the children, or someone she trusted enough to let inside late at night or early in the morning.
The fact that the infant was left alive and unharmed suggests the killer either knew the child, had no interest in harming the baby, or simply left once the attack on Danice was finished.
The other two children being absent that night raises the further question of where they were and whether their absence was planned or simply ordinary.
Random strangers are not ruled out, but the personal nature of the killing and the lack of any public mention of forced entry or theft make a pure stranger attack less straightforward.
Someone she had argued with earlier that evening, someone who followed her home from the friend’s house, or someone who knew she would be alone with the baby are among the possibilities that remain open because so little has ever been released about leads or persons of interest.
No named suspect has ever appeared in public reporting. No arrest has been made.
The Muskogee Police Department has kept the file open, which means the evidence that does exist, whatever its strength, has not yet been enough to charge anyone.
The eight-month-old child present that morning is now an adult in their late thirties. The two older siblings are older still. All three have grown up without answers about who killed their mother.
Public records and news coverage have never named them or described their lives in connection with the case, which is common in cold cases where families seek privacy. What is known is that they were left without her.
One of them spent the first hours after the murder alone with her body until a neighbor responded to the crying.
The others learned later that their mother had been taken in the most brutal way inside the house where they lived. Decades later they, along with the rest of her family, still wait for any name to be attached to the person who walked into that bedroom on Georgetown Street.
Investigators with the Muskogee Police Department have never released a public description of a suspect or a detailed timeline beyond the basic facts of discovery. The brutality of the attack and the fact that an infant was left alive in the same room raise obvious questions about who had access to the home, whether the killer knew Danice, and why the child was spared.
Those questions have never been answered in open court.
Danice is buried in Booker T. Washington Cemetery in Muskogee. Anyone with information is asked to call 918-683-8000. After nearly four decades the case of Danice Lovell Crowder Cope is still cold, and the person responsible has never been identified.
