The Oklahoma Girl Scout murders took place 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 were then left on a trail leading to the campsite's showers, about from their tent. The case was classified as solved when Gene Leroy Hart, a local jail escapee with a history of violence and rape, was arrested. However, Hart was acquitted in March 1979 after a jury unanimously returned a verdict of not guilty.
Less than two months before the murders, during an on-site training session, a counselor at Camp Scott discovered that her belongings had been ransacked and her doughnuts had been stolen. Inside the empty doughnut box was a hand-written note, stating in capital letters, "We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one." The director of that camp session treated the note as a prank, and it was discarded.
DNA testing performed in 1989 was officially inconclusive, as it did reconfirm Harta member of the Cherokee nationas a suspect, but did not narrow the pool of possible suspects enough, showing that it applied to 1 in 7,700 Native Americans. DNA testing performed in 2017, taking advantage of a further 28 years of advances in testing, strongly suggests Hart’s involvement in the crime, though the case remains officially unsolved.
Discovery of the bodies
At around 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 12, 1977, the night before camp started, 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 all residents of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. They were sharing tent #7 in the camp's "Kiowa" unit, which was located the farthest from the camp counselors' tent and partially obscured by the camp’s showers.
At around 6 a.m. on June 13, a camp counselor on her way to the shower saw a girl's body in her sleeping bag in a wooded area just outside the tent area. It was discovered that all three girls from tent #7 were missing. As counselors began searching, they discovered the girls from tent #7 had been murdered. Two bodies were inside a sleeping bag, crumpled towards the bottom of the bag, and one body was visible on the outside. They had been left on a trail leading to the showers, about 150 yards from their tent. Subsequent testing showed that they had been bludgeoned and strangled. All three girls had been raped.
A large, red flashlight was found on top of the girls' bodies; a smudged fingerprint was found on the lens, but it has never been identified as it was too smudged for a positive identification. A footprint from a 9.5 size shoe was also found in the blood in the tent. Between 2:30 and 3 a.m. on June 13, a landowner reported hearing "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) 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. Raised about a mile from Camp Scott, Hart, a member of the Cherokee nation, 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, Hart still had 305 years of his 308-year sentence left to serve in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
On June 4, 1979, two years after the murders, Hart collapsed and died of a heart attack at the age of 35 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 #7 was from the counselors' tent. In 1985, by a 9–3 vote, jurors decided in favor of Magic Empire.