Arson suspect tripped up by her own video amid neighbors’ feud
After a house caught fire in an Oklahoma City suburb, the next-door neighbor gave investigators permission to check video from her home surveillance camera. That was probably a tactical error.
The video apparently showed that same neighbor flinging a burning towel through the home’s open door.
“She caught herself on camera setting the fire,” Del City Fire Chief Brandon Pursell told TV station KFOR.
Annie Durham, 59, has now been arrested on suspicion of second-degree arson.
The fire ignited on the afternoon of June 10 in a single-family home in Del City. As firefighters mopped up, Durham stood in front of the smoldering house and gave an interview to KFOR.
“All I know was I was in the house and I saw smoke, but I was like, OK, maybe everything’s OK, they’ll put it out or whatever,” she said.
She was wearing the same turquoise top and dark ballcap as the arsonist in the surveillance video.
Pursell said that as soon as investigators began looking into the fire, they started hearing reports of a long feud between the neighbors. Durham believed that the house had been used for the illegal sale of drugs — and she said as much to the TV reporter.
She let investigators see the video from the surveillance camera she had pointed at the neighboring house. The images from the afternoon of June 10 showed a woman dousing a towel in lighter fluid, setting it on fire and using a stick to fling it through the neighbor’s side door.
Shown the video of the on-camera interview, Pursell compared it to the surveillance images. “It does appear that is the same person,” he told a KFOR reporter.
Shortly afterward, on June 17, Durham was arrested.
If the culprit is indeed Durham, he said, he could understood her frustration about living next door to criminal activity, but he added, “You definitely don’t resort to fire as a means of conflict resolution.”