It was a scene no child — or person — should ever have to witness.
“We got out of the car, and we were excited because we were home,” Kira Lowe told Dateline. “We were going to see our mom.”
It was the morning of June 4, 1988. Kira, then 7, and her younger sister, Amber, were getting dropped off at their home after spending the night with their grandmother.
The girls raced to the door and knocked, but got no answer. “But yet, her car was there,” Kira remembered.
So the girls decided to climb up to their mother’s bedroom window.
“I helped Amber climb up,” Kira told Dateline. “My mom was pretty much on full display in three big pane windows -- with blood everywhere.”
Mary Morgan Pewitt had been murdered. She was only 25 years old.
Kira told Dateline that she and her sister spent their early years in Comanche, Oklahoma. “It’s small-town America. Everybody knew everybody,” she recalled. “Very community-based.”
Growing up in Comanche, Kira said, was fun. “Our house backed up into the playground, so we had our own playground essentially in our backyard,” she said. “It was a lot of playing over the swings and the merry-go-rounds and then just riding bikes throughout the neighborhood.”
Kira’s younger sister, Amber Benson, recalled Comanche life, as well. “It’s a one-stoplight town,” she said. “We were out playing in the dirt all of the time.”
Kira said that they only saw their father every other weekend, so the girls shared a particularly special bond with their mother. “I remember she was going to beauty school,” she said. “So we kind of were her Barbies to practice on at home.”
The girls were not only Mary’s Barbies, they were also her favorite sous chefs. “She would cook with us,” Kira recalled. “She liked making snow ice cream.”
Amber told Dateline that their mother was her best friend. “If I didn’t want to go to school, I didn’t have to,” she said. “I was her tag-along buddy to whatever she was doing that day.”
On June 3, 1988, Mary was working at Harold’s Club, a bar in Comanche. “My mom was supposed to be at the bar, I believe at six that night,” Kira said. “So my grandma took us home with her.”
Kira told Dateline that their maternal grandparents lived near them in Comanche, so they saw them all the time. “My grandmother worked at a nursing home that was catty-corner from our house,” she said. “It was, if not every day, but every other day that she would come over and see us.”
The girls stayed over at their grandmother’s house that night and returned home the next morning, June 4.
“It was a typical morning, except my grandmother had to be up early for a WeightWatchers meeting at six in the morning,” Kira said. “So we were there early.”
The girls pulled into the driveway of their home. “It’s almost like slow motion walking through it,” Kira recalled.
What happened after that, Kira said, was something that she repressed for years. “For the longest time, I couldn’t remember. And then I started going to counseling,” she told Dateline. “A lot of it became more clear than maybe I thought I wanted it to be.”
It’s now something Kira remembers vividly, she said, of the moment she saw her mother’s lifeless body in the three-pane window in the front of their house. “She was just displayed in her bed where we could see her.”
Amber told Dateline it’s an image she also can’t erase. “We looked in there and we saw that she was covered in blood,” she recalled.
Kira picked up the story. “My grandma went in, and I remember her coming out being very distraught,” she said. “And she ushered us across the street to call the police and my grandpa.”
Across the street, the girls waited. “Amber had said ‘Well, where do you think they’re taking Mom?’ I told her, ‘to the hospital,’” Kira said. “I had already come to the conclusion that it was bad.”
And it was bad. Their mother was dead.
Amber told Dateline it was difficult to grapple with their mother’s death. “I still remember seeing her and what she was wearing and stuff like that in the coffin,” she recalled. “The next thing I know, I was running out of the funeral home.”
Meanwhile, investigators were trying to figure out who killed Mary.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation is investigating her death. Their website confirmed that on June 4, 1988, Mary was found stabbed to death in her home in Comanche. The OSBI has put Mary’s case in their Cold Case Playing Cards program — an initiative in which unsolved cases are featured on playing cards provided to prison inmates. Mary’s case is featured as the three of diamonds.
Dateline has reached out to the OSBI for the latest on the investigation, but was told that at the time they had no investigators who could speak about Mary’s case.
According to NBC affiliate KFOR, Mary had worked at Harold’s Club until midnight and after she closed the bar, she delivered the day’s receipts to the owner.
Then she went home. Mary was last seen alive just before 1 a.m. on June 4, the article states.
Kira told Dateline that a passerby saw her mother at their home that night. “My mom was on the porch and my mom was telling him to get out of there,” she said.
Kira said that she believes the person her mother told to leave that night was a man named Randy Benson. “They had been dating for about three months,” she recalled.
Kira told Dateline she isn’t sure exactly what happened but thinks a confrontation could have possibly ensued. “My mom was feisty,” she said. “When she told you to leave it probably wasn’t, ‘Please, leave.’”
Randy Benson is now deceased. It is unclear if Benson was ever an official suspect, but according to local news station KWTV News 9, he was considered a person of interest.
Following their mother’s murder, Kira and Amber moved to Texas with Mary’s second husband, Tim Allen. Tim is Amber’s biological father.
Both Kira and Amber said that after moving to Texas, they were forced to keep the memory of their mother on the backburner. “We were told to tell people that our mother had died of cancer. We were not to have any pictures of my mom. We were not to discuss my mom,” Kira told Dateline. “It was just pretty much like it didn’t exist.”
Amber said that even when their mother was spoken of, it was in a negative light. “We weren’t really allowed to talk about her. Or, like, if my dad and stepmom -- if they talked about her, it was never in a good light,” she recalled. “You can say those things, but at the same time, share as many good things about her and keep it real.”
Growing up, the girls did hear rumors, though. According to Kira, one rumor was that her mother’s death may have been drug related, something she said she doesn’t believe. “We were always told it was this horrible drug deal,” she said. “I’ve had somebody look at toxicology reports and everything else, and there’s nothing to believe that that was the scenario,” because, according to Kira, there were no drugs found in Mary’s system.
Kira also said there were no drugs found in their home, either. “The police told me that there was no drug paraphernalia found in the house,” she added.
Kira told Dateline that several people were looked into for their mother’s murder. But to this day, no one has been charged in her case. “I know technology is progressing,” she said, so she is hopeful that there may one day be justice for her mother.
“I feel like we’re closer than we’ve ever been to getting it solved,” Amber told Dateline. “I feel like there’s going to be a resolution in my lifetime.”
Despite the possibility of a resolution, Amber said it will never replace the mother-daughter moments she’s missed out on. “My oldest daughter looks just like her, and it would be funny just to see them together,” she said. “Seeing her with my kids, I would just love to see that and have somebody to call when I’m going through something, you know, to have that person to talk it out with.”
The girls’ grandparents missed out on moments like that with their daughter Mary, as well. Both have since died, but never gave up fighting for justice. Kira told Dateline their grandfather took an extraordinary step. “He went and put himself through Cameron University to get a criminal justice degree,” she said. “He was determined to figure this out.”
And now, so is Kira. “Everybody says, ‘Well, what is justice for you?’” she said. “I don’t need somebody to go to trial, I just need to know what happened.”
Kira runs the ‘Mary Morgan Pewitt’ Facebook page dedicated to finding answers about her mother’s murder.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation is offering a $5,000 reward for information in the case.
Anyone with information about Mary Morgan Pewitt’s murder is asked to call the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation at 800-522-8017 or email [email protected].