The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders

 

Warning the contents of this blog might be graphic and disturbing to some readers.

The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders is an unsolved murder that occurred sometime between June 12th and June 13th, 1977. The murder happened at Camp Scott which was located in Mayes County, Oklahoma in the United States of America. The victims were between the ages of 8 and 10-years-old.

Scott Camp was located two miles from the town of Locust Grove in Mayes County about 50 miles from Tulsa and had been operated by the Girl Scouts since 1928. With a creek on site and occupying 410 acres of the area's densely wooden hill country. This made the camp an ideal spot for the Girl Scouts to use year-round. The units consisted of several campers' tents and a counselor's tent. These units were named after Native-American tribes.

The tents were about 12-by-14 feet with canvas sides that could be rolled up, they sat on wooden platforms and had four cots in each of them. For those first two weeks in June, 130 campers were attending the camp. The woods were very dark around the camp, but to the Girl Scouts of the Tulsa-based Magic Empire Council, these dark nights were part of the camping experience. However, in the summer of 1977, something was lurking in the darkness that did not belong there.

Less than two months before the murders, the camp had received a warning. It was during an onsite training session that a camp counselor discovered that her belongings had been ransacked. On top of that, her doughnuts had been stolen, and there in the empty box was a sinister note. The handwritten note had said: “We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent #1,” This, however, was treated as a prank by the camp director and they threw the note away.

When the campers had arrived that Sunday things went according to plan. When the girls arrived they found out what unit and what tent they were assigned to and dropped off their sleeping bags and backpacks. These tents were arranged in a horseshoe, and Tent #8 was located at the end of the row close to the bathroom and kitchen units.

The three girls, Lori Lee Farmer (8-years-old), Michelle Heather Guse (9-years-old), and Doris Denise Milner (10-years-old) did not know each other before going to camp. However, they were bonding quickly. They might have been the three quietest girls at camp, but their tent was one of the loudest. They were the residents of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. They were sharing tent #8 in the camp's “Kiowa” unit. It was located the farthest from the counselors' tent, and partly obscured by the showers for camp.

 

On Sunday evening the camp had songs around the campfire, but this was cut short by an early evening thunderstorm, and the girls all took shelter in their tents. A counselor checked on the girls as they were getting ready for bed that night. Before turning in for the night a lot of the campers were playing with their flashlights, but soon one by one the lights went out. Now not only could the campers not see, but not much could be heard either. The tents themselves were sturdy, and the trees and undergrowth helped to absorb the sounds. However, some people did hear some strange and disturbing sounds that night.

Multiple people heard disturbing noises on the night of the murder. On that night several campers and counselors at Camp Scott had heard strange noises such as a moaning sound at about 1:30am, which were coming from the direction of tent #8. A counselor had even investigated these sounds but was unable to locate the source of the sounds, so she went back to bed. It would only be 30 minutes later when a camper from tent #7 woke up to see someone with a flashlight opening the flap on the tent. But, it wasn't until around 3 in the morning when a Girl Scout heard a scream coming from the area that tent #8 was located. It was around the same time that another camper heard the same scream and someone crying, “Momma, Momma.” Unsure what she should do, the camper went back to sleep. Sometime between 2:30 and 3am on June 13th a landowner heard a lot of traffic on a remote road near the camp.

It was at 6am on June 13th when camp counselor Carla Wilhite was on her way to the showers and found a girl's body in her sleeping bag, in the forest. Soon after it was discovered that all the girls from tent #8 were dead. Their bodies were left on the trail leading to the showers, about 150 yards from their tent.

Doris had been strangled to death, Lori and Michelle had been bludgeoned. Two of the girls had been raped, the other sodomized. Their lifeless corpses had been shoved into their sleeping bags and left on the trail. The camp was quickly evacuated and shut down.

A large red flashlight was found at the scene, on top of the girls' bodies. There was a fingerprint on the lens, but it has never been identified. There was also a footprint of a 9.5 size shoe found in the blood that was inside the tent. There were also two sets of DNA found on a pillowcase. It has been determined that female DNA has been found on this pillowcase. As well as semen. Now, while two of the victims' DNA has been ruled out one has not. This could mean that the female DNA found at the scene could belong to one of the victims. Or there was a woman present during the murder. The other DNA matched to Native-American, pointing towards one key suspect.

Gene Leroy Hart had been at large since 1973. Ever since he escaped from the Mayes County Jail. Gene had previously been convicted for kidnapping and raping two pregnant women as well as several first-degree burglaries. He was raised about a mile from Camp Scott, and he was Cherokee. Gene was arrested within the year at the home of a Cherokee Medicine Man. The reason that police suspected Gene was the evidence they found in a nearby cave, ten days after the bodies were found. They found several items that connected the murders to Gene. This included photographs that Gene had developed, a roll of tape, sunglasses in a vinyl case taken from a Camp Scott counselor, and pages from a Tulsa Newspaper, a section of which was stuffed into a flashlight found near the girls' bodies.

He was represented by Garvin A. Isaacs a local Oklahoma attorney. Gene was tried in March of 1979. The local sheriff had been convinced that Gene was guilty of the murders, but apparently, the jury didn't think so. He was acquitted of the charges. Because he was a convicted rapist and jail escapee, he was required to finish 305 years of his 308-year sentence. Which he would serve at Oklahoma State Penitentiary. However, on June 4th, 1979 he collapsed from a heart attack and passed away. The DNA sample was unable to rule out Gene as the murderer, the test came up as inconclusive. By 2008 the sample was too degraded to create a profile of the person who left it.

There is a second possibility that four men had something to do with the murders. In 1989, Reverend Gerald Manley had contacted the police to tell them that he thought these men were involved in the murders. Manley claims he went to Camp Scott in the company of these four men who needed his Christian influence. He says he saw the body of one girl and two sleeping bags that held the other two campers. He passed a lie detector test and gave the same story under hypnosis. The police looked into the claims but couldn't find anything that connected the men to the murders.

Two families later sued the Magic Empire Council and its insurer for about five million dollars alleging negligence. This civil trial included the threatening note that was ignored and the fact that the tent was 86 yards away from the counselors' tent. But in 1983 jurors decided in favor of Magic Empire.
No one has ever been convicted of this crime. It remains a mystery to both law enforcement and true crime fans.