The Unsolved Mystery of The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders

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Oklahoma Girl Scout murders

In the summer of 1977, three young Girl Scouts — Lori Farmer, 8, Michelle Guse, 9, and Doris Milner, 10, — were brutally assaulted and murdered on their very first night at Camp Scott in Mayes County, OK. Just hours after they were killed, a counselor discovered the girls’ battered bodies, stuffed in their sleeping bags and dumped not far from Cookie Trail, the main road into the Girl Scout camp.

Decades later, Oklahomans and people all around the world are fascinated by details about the Oklahoma Girl Scout murders. Many people — including ministers and convicted criminals — have contacted law enforcement and the media to provide the names of the people they believe killed the girls. While some people think they know exactly who killed the Oklahoma Girl Scouts, no one has ever been convicted of the crimes. The unsolved Girl Scout murders remain some of the state’s most disturbing unsolved cases.

Victim

• Date of Murder: 13 June 1977
• Location: Mayes County, Oklahoma, U.S.
• Cause: Homicide by strangulation
• Name and Age of Victims: Lori Lee Farmer, age 8; Michele Heather Guse, age 9; Doris Denise Milner, age 10

On June 13, 1977, Lori Lee Farmer, age 8, Michelle Heather Guse, age 9, and Doris Denise Milner, age 10 arrived for Girl Scout camp at Camp Scott in Mayes County, OK. That evening around 6 p.m., The three girls — who had met for the first time earlier that day — sought shelter from a thunderstorm in tent number 8.

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 Michele 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.

On June 13, the counselor had walked in the morning and that is when they noticed two other girls still in their sleeping bags. All of them were dead. The three girls were all from tent no. 8, about 150 feet from where they had been found.

Lori and Michelle were the ones found lying side by side in their sleeping bags. Denise was found lying on top of hers. At 6:00 am that morning one of the counselors had been walking to the bathhouse when she came upon the sleeping bags in a fork along the path. Thinking at first that some of the luggage hadn’t arrived the previous day, she started walking toward the bags to collect them. That is when she noticed the body of a little girl lying on the ground with her eyes open. She was naked from the waist down with her legs spread wide. Her hands were bound behind her back with duct tape.

This was Denise Milner. She looked to have been hit on the head as she had dried blood on her forehead. The other two bodies were covered by sleeping bags. They had been found a short distance away but were not initially discovered with Denise. They were thought to only be missing at this point but soon discovered to be in their sleeping bags. The counselor only thought there was one body at first. She quickly ran back to camp to wake the other counselors to do a headcount thinking that there had been an accident.

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.

Investigation

By 7:30 am law enforcement would be on the scene. All three girls would be transferred to the county coroner’s office for autopsies. Lori and Michelle’s autopsies would show that they had been beaten to death while Denise had been beaten, but her cause of death would be due to strangulation by ligature. The time of death was between 2:00 am and 5:00 am. There are conflicting reports about whether the girls were victims of sexual assault

Denise and Michelle had cords tied around their bodies in what looked to be double half hitch knots. The cords were wrapped around their bodies and tied to their wrists.

Back at the crime scene investigators had begun to arrive. What they determined at the time was that the attack seemed to have taken place inside the girl’s tent where one or more assailants entered through the back of the tent, striking Lori and Michelle on their heads. Blood was everywhere — pooled on the pillows, cots, and floor

On June 14th, the wooden floor of tent number 7 would be airlifted to the crime lab. Evidence showed that there was blood all over the floor that looked to have been wiped up using towels and mattress covers. Prints would also be found in the blood indicating a tennis shoe with another different print found outside the tent. Investigators were possibly looking for more than one killer. Other evidence found at the scene were fingerprints found on the bodies, a flashlight, duct tape, and a piece of cord.

Later the coroner would say what they thought were fingerprints were not. Investigators questioned the three counselors assigned to Camp Kiowa.

A Counselor Was Warned About the Killings Before They Happened

In April — two months before Farmer, Guse, and Milner were murdered — a training session was held at Camp Scott. However, the weekend ended prematurely when a counselor’s cabin was ransacked, and a disturbing note was discovered in an empty box of doughnuts. The handwritten note warned, “We are on a mission to kill three girls.” Someone had also created an effigy of a man, which they hung from a tree by its neck.

While both the effigy and the note were strange and upsetting, the letter also mentioned Martians. The camp administrators dismissed the entire series of events as a tasteless prank.

Suspect

Gene Leroy Hart (November 27, 1943 — June 4, 1979) 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. 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. On June 4, 1979, he collapsed and died of a heart attack, 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 a discussion of the threatening note and the fact that tent #7 was 86 yards (79 m) from the counselors’ tent. In 1985, by a 9–3 vote, jurors decided in favor of the Magic Empire.

Further Investigation

In 1989, Reverend Gerald Manley contacted the authorities to say he thought four men were responsible for ending the lives of Farmer, Guse, and Milner. Manley provided law enforcement with the names of two of the people he said killed the girls, and while officials investigated the tip provided by the reverend, they were unable to link the men to the murders.

Manley said he went camping Scott with four men — whom he claimed needed his Christian influence — and he saw the dead body of one of the girls and two sleeping bags that appeared to contain the corpses of the two other Girl Scouts. While police have been unable to corroborate the reverend’s story, Manley reportedly passed a lie detector test when questioned about his claims, and provided the same account while under hypnosis.

In addition to biological evidence recovered from the crime scene, the authorities also found semen on a pillowcase discovered near the victims’ bodies. The FBI tested the sample in 1989, and while they were unable to rule Gene Leroy Hart out as the person who left the bodily fluids at the scene, the test was inconclusive. They were unable to definitively match the convicted kidnapper and rapist to the Girl Scout murders.

In 2008, the authorities decided to test the semen again in hopes of getting more conclusive results. Unfortunately, after several decades, the DNA sample was simply too degraded for technicians to create a profile of the person who left it. That also meant that Hart still wasn’t ruled out, and despite being found not guilty, many people remain convinced he committed the killings.

Witness

On the night Farmer, Guse, and Milner were viciously raped and murdered, several campers and counselors at Camp Scott heard disturbing noises. At around 1:30 a.m., multiple people heard moaning sounds coming from the direction of the murdered girls’ sleeping quarters, tent number 8. A counselor investigated the noises, but couldn’t find the source, so she went back to sleep.

Approximately 30 minutes later, a camper in tent number 7 was awoken when someone with a flashlight opened the flap to the tent. At around 3:00 a.m. Girl Scout heard a scream come from the section of the camp where tent number 8 was located. At approximately the same time, another camper heard a scream, followed by someone crying, “Momma, Momma.” Unsure of what to do, the Girl Scout went back to sleep.

Evidence

Why did the police suspect Gene Leroy Hart, besides his record? Ten days after the bodies of Farmer, Guse, and Milner were discovered, several items connected to the killings and the convicted criminal were found in a cave approximately three miles from Camp Scott. In the cave, law enforcement recovered photographs Hart had developed.

Investigators also found a roll of tape and a pair of sunglasses in a vinyl case that had been taken from a counselor at Camp Scott. Plus, law enforcement recovered pages from a Tulsa newspaper, a section of which was discovered stuffed inside a flashlight that was found near the lifeless bodies of the three young girls.

Movie on Murders

In 2011, John Russell — who was convicted of embezzlement and check fraud — announced that he was making Candles, a film about the murders at Camp Scott. Russell decided to make a film about the case because he said that, while he was in the Ottawa County Jail in 1979, one of his fellow inmates, Karl Lee Myers, confessed to the killings.

Myers, a convicted murderer, died in prison in 2012 while on death row for the 1996 killing of Cindy Marzano. Before his death, police linked him to the rape and murder of another woman, Shawn Williams, but officials never connected him to the Girl Scout murders. As of 2017, Candles still hasn’t been released.