UPDATE: On February 14, 2025, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office announced that the remains of Danette Tenas had been found.
According to a release, the remains found on February 4 were located at Buffalo Bridge in Polson, Montana, and were determined by the Montana State Medical Examiner’s Office to belong to Danette.
Buffalo Bridge, according to her sister, Dana Hewankorn, is where Danette was last seen with friends on her birthday.
The release goes on to say that Danette’s cause and manner of death are still under investigation.
Following the news of her sister’s death, in a Facebook post, Dana Hewankorn wrote, “My new fight is for justice. Justice for my sister. She didn’t deserve this.”
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“We love her, and we need her to come home,” Dana Hewankorn told Dateline.
Dana’s younger sister, Danette Tenas, has been missing for two months. She was last seen on October 8, in Lake County, Montana. It was her 54th birthday.
Dana told Dateline their family is from the Flathead Reservation in Lake County. She said they moved away early on but returned when they were young adults.
“I pretty much raised her when my mom went to work,” Dana said of her relationship with her sister. “She really loved and cared about her family, her kids and her grandkids.”
Danette has three children and one grandchild. “She really cared about people and would give her last dollar if they needed it,” Dana said.
At the time of her disappearance, Danette was living alone on the Flathead Reservation, just a few towns away from Dana.
Dana says she last spoke to her sister a few weeks before her disappearance. Everything was normal. “She doesn’t carry a phone so it’s, like, she’s not the easiest to get ahold of,” Dana said.
Dana says she stopped by Danette’s house on her sister’s birthday. “I dropped off a box of food that I do for my work, and she wasn’t home,” Dana recalled. “But I didn’t know she was in any kind of trouble.” A few days later, Dana went out of town. Then, on October 13, she got a concerning call from their brother. “He said, ‘Hey, I’m starting to get worried. Sister hasn’t checked in or anything,’” Dana said.
Dana says Danette has a plethora of friends on the reservation and since it was her birthday week, it would be typical for her to be out celebrating. But Dana’s brother told her Danette hadn’t even been seen since her birthday, which wasn’t typical. “He went to Lake County and filed a missing person’s report,” she said.
When Dana returned to town a few days later she learned Danette and a friend went to a Casino earlier in the day of October 8, and then the pair went to the river near Buffalo Bridge in Lake County.
On October 22, NBC Montana shared a release sent out by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office. According to the release, Danette’s last confirmed location was in a recreation area near Buffalo Bridge on October 8. It goes on to say that “Danette had been with friends in that area and became separated from them after a breakdown had occurred on a vehicle they were operating. The friends she was with attempted to locate her, but eventually assumed she got a ride from other friends or people who were present in the area as this would not be out of the ordinary for Danette to do.”
Dateline reached out to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office for additional information but has yet to receive a response.
After returning to town, Dana immediately began searching for her sister. She says she took her trailer to the river near Buffalo Bridge on October 17 and stayed there until November 4, hoping her sister would return.
“They had search and rescue and volunteer searches out there,” she said. “I was just making a presence.”
Dana told Dateline massive searches of the area were conducted by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and tribal police. “They had an intensive search at the river area. Hundreds of man hours and volunteers,” she said. “Drones, water sonars, boats, tracking dogs, horses, ATVs.”
But they found no sign of Danette, which Dana finds odd. “She has these [flip-flop] shoes on — we scoured the entire area. We would’ve found some piece of her articles [of clothing],” she said. “Her shoes weren’t tied to her feet.”
Dana says her sister knows how to survive in wildlife and believes she would have made her way safely out of the area. “She was homeless for a couple of years. She was a survivor and a walker,” she said. “She could have walked out of there.”
Dana also believes her sister wouldn’t have gone in the water because she has arthritis. “It would have hurt her bones. The water is cold,” she said. But if she had, Dana says her sister is a strong swimmer. “We had respect for water and knew how to be in water.”
“I believe something happened. Somebody did something to her on accident or on purpose,” Dana said.
Dana says when Danette was younger, she got into a bad car accident, so she gets a disability check every Monday. They haven’t been picked up since her disappearance. “She would never not go get it,” Dana said.
Although she suspects the worst, Dana says she’ll never stop looking for her baby sister -- the sister she helped raise and will always look out for. “The hope is that she’s still alive,” she said.
Danette was last known to be wearing a denim jacket over a white shirt, denim shorts, and slide-sandals with white soles and a sparkly sequin top. According to the family, she is approximately 5’9” and 180 lbs. with dark brown hair and hazel eyes.
Anyone with information about Danette’s disappearance is asked to call the Lake County Sheriff’s Office at 406-883-7301.