Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders (Lori Farmer, Michele Guse, Doris Milner)

Case background and investigation

On June 12, 1977, girls arrived at Camp Scott, a Girl Scout camp near Locust Grove in Mayes County, Oklahoma, for the first session of the summer. Lori Lee Farmer, 8, Michele Heather Guse, 9, and Doris Denise Milner, 10, all from the Broken Arrow area, shared a tent in the camp's Kiowa unit, the unit farthest from the counselors' tent and partially screened from view by the shower building. Sometime during the night of June 12-13, an intruder entered the tent. Around 6 a.m. on June 13, a counselor walking to the showers discovered the girls' bodies on a trail about 150 yards from their tent. All three had been sexually assaulted; two died of blunt-force trauma and one was strangled. Physical evidence included a red flashlight bearing a smudged fingerprint and a bloody size 9.5 shoe print. During the later civil trial, it emerged that roughly two months before the murders a counselor had found her belongings ransacked and a handwritten note declaring, 'We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one'; camp staff had reportedly dismissed it as a prank.

The killings prompted one of the largest manhunts in Oklahoma history. Investigators quickly focused on Gene Leroy Hart, a Cherokee Nation citizen and convicted rapist who had escaped from the Mayes County Jail in 1973 and was believed to be hiding in the rugged terrain around the camp. Hart was captured on April 6, 1978, at a cabin in Cherokee County after nearly ten months on the run. He stood trial in March 1979 in Pryor, where the prosecution's case rested largely on circumstantial and hair evidence. The jury unanimously found Hart not guilty. Returned to prison to serve time on his earlier convictions, Hart died of a heart attack at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on June 4, 1979, at age 35.

Camp Scott closed after the murders and never reopened. Two of the victims' families sued the Magic Empire Council of Girl Scouts and its insurer for $5 million, alleging negligence, citing the threatening note and the isolated placement of the girls' tent. In 1985, jurors voted 9-3 in favor of the Girl Scout council.

Forensic re-examination continued for decades. Testing reported in 1989 found that three of five DNA probes were consistent with Hart's profile, a result prosecutors said applied to roughly 1 in 7,700 Native American men. Testing of a pillowcase in 2008 was inconclusive because the samples were too deteriorated. In 2017, Mayes County Sheriff Mike Reed raised about $30,000 in donations for new testing by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. In 2022, at the families' request, Reed announced that the results, known since 2019, strongly suggested Hart's involvement, saying he was personally convinced of Hart's guilt; because of degradation, the evidence still fell short of a complete, definitive DNA profile.

Because Hart was acquitted and no one else has ever been charged, the case officially remains without a conviction. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's McGirt decision on tribal jurisdiction, the Cherokee Nation has also reviewed the case. Victims' relatives, including Lori Farmer's mother Sheri Farmer, said the 2022 announcement brought a measure of peace after 45 years.