The Oklahoma Girl
Scout murders are an unsolved murder case that occurred on the morning of
June 13, 1977, at Camp Scott in Mayes County, Oklahoma, United States. The
victims were three girl scouts, between the ages of 8 and 10, who were raped
and murdered. Their bodies had been left on a trail leading to the showers,
about 150 yards (140 meters) from their tent at summer camp. The case was
classified as solved when Gene Leroy Hart, a local jail escapee with a history
of violence, was arrested. However, he was acquitted when he stood trial for
the crime.
History
Less than two months before the murders, during an on-site
training session, a camp counselor discovered that her belongings had been
ransacked and her doughnuts had been stolen. Inside the empty doughnut box was
a disturbing hand-written note. The writer of the note vowed to murder three
campers. The director of that camp session treated the note as a prank, and it
was discarded.
Discovery of the
bodies
At around 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 12, 1977, the night before
camp started, a thunderstorm hit the area, and the girls huddled in their
tents. Among them were Lori Lee Farmer, 8, Doris Denise Milner, 10, and
Michelle Heather Guse, 9. The girls were
residents of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. They were sharing tent
#8 in the camp's "Kiowa" unit which was located the farthest from the
Camp Counselor's tent, and partially obscured by the showers for the camp. At
around 6 a.m. on June 13, a camp counselor on her way to the shower found a
girl's body in her sleeping bag in the forest. It was soon discovered that all
three girls in tent #8 had been killed. Their bodies had been left on a trail
leading to the showers, about 150 yards from their tent at summer camp. Subsequent testing showed that they had been
raped, bludgeoned, and strangled.
A large, red flashlight was found on top of the girls'
bodies; a fingerprint was found on the lens, but it has never been identified. A footprint from a 9.5 shoe size was also found
in the blood in the tent. Between 2:30
and 3 a.m. on June 13, a landowner heard "quite a bit" of traffic on
a remote road near the camp.
Aftermath
Camp Scott was evacuated and was later shut down.
Suspect
Gene Leroy Hart (November 27, 1943 - June 4, 1979), the only
suspect in the case, had been at large since 1973 after escaping from the Mayes
County Jail. He had been convicted of kidnapping and raping two pregnant women
as well as four counts of first-degree burglary. Hart was raised about a mile
from Camp Scott. Hart, a Cherokee, was arrested within a year at the home of a
Cherokee medicine man. He was represented by Garvin A. Isaacs, a local Oklahoma
attorney. He was tried in March 1979. Although the local sheriff pronounced
himself "one thousand percent" certain that Hart was guilty, a local
jury acquitted him. On June 4, 1979,
Hart collapsed from a heart attack and died after about an hour of lifting
weights and jogging in the prison exercise yard.
Two of the families later sued the Magic Empire Council and
its insurer for $5 million, alleging negligence. The civil trial included
discussion of the threatening note and the fact that tent #8 was 86 yards (79
m) from the counselors' tent. In 1985, by a 9–3 vote, jurors decided in favor
of Magic Empire. By that time, Hart was already dead. As a
convicted rapist and jail escapee, he still had 305 years of his 308-year
sentence left to serve in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
DNA testing
In 1989, DNA testing was done and proved that in DNA testing
at the time three of the five probes matched Hart's DNA making the chance Hart
was the killer 1 in 7,700. In 2008,
authorities conducted new DNA testing on stains found on a pillowcase, the
results of which proved inconclusive because the samples were "too
deteriorated to obtain a DNA profile".
In 2017, $30,000 in donations were raised by the sheriff in order to do
new DNA tests using the latest advances in testing.
Legacy
Richard Guse, the father of one of the three victims, went
on to help the state legislature pass the Oklahoma Victims' Bill of Rights. He
also helped found the Oklahoma Crime Victims Compensation Board.
Another parent, Sheri Farmer, founded the Oklahoma chapter
of Parents of Murdered Children, a support group.
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