Not even 2 months before the murders, April 1977-
During a training session, a counselor at Oklahoma’s Camp Scott returned to her find her bunk in disarray. Someone had thrown her things around, and strangely replaced all the doughnuts in a box with a handwritten note. The author stated that he intended to soon murder 3 campers. The note was handed over to the head counselor, who considered it a prank and ultimately threw that very important note away. And that’s not all- people had seen a strange man at the camp- and several of the tents were slashed with a knife. The head counselor was so rattled that, hoping to catch this man, he stayed awake all night in a tent with a gun.
But, you know. Not rattled enough to do something crazy like call the police, or stop the camp from opening until all had calmed down. The camp opened just as planned.
On June 12, 1977, a group of Girl Scouts arrived at Camp Scott. There was a thunder storm that night, and the girls were huddled in their tents. In tent #8 were 8 yr old Lori Lee Farmer, 9 y/o Michelle Heather Guse, and 10 y/o Doris Denise Milner.
6 a.m. the next morning, a counselor named Carla Emery was walking to the showers when she found the dead body of little Denise at a fork in a trail. A rope and a towel were wrapped around the child’s neck. Soon Lori and Michele’s tiny bodies were discovered dead inside their sleeping bags. Their mouths were still sealed with black electrical tape.
Doris had been strangled, Lori and Michele were bludgeoned to death. Their little bodies had been carried more than 100 yards from the tent. All three girl’s bodies had been abused.
One of the girls tennis shoes were missing, taken by the killer, likely as a trophy. Police, now searching for a killer, were spending a ton of time at the camp. So much so that they even set up a makeshift police center there. One morning, the girl’s missing shoes simply showed up on the doorstep of the main Scout building. Somehow, while police were combing the camp searching for clues, the killer still managed to sneak back to the site of the killings and leave his taunting trophy for the police.
The bloody wooden floor of the tent in which the murdered children had slept was airlifted to a crime laboratory. It appeared that someone had unsuccessfully tried to mop up the blood with towels and mattresses. A tennis shoe print was found outside the tent and another print was found inside the tent.
A red flashlight with a piece of newspaper inside it, a roll of duct tape, and a nylon rope were found close to the bodies, along with someone’s Prescription eyeglasses. There was an unidentified fingerprint on the lens of the flashlight.
A cave close to Camp Scott was found to contain a newspaper that was the same as that in the flashlight, along with Pictures of 2 women. Police discovered that a prison guard who moonlighted as a wedding photographer had taken the pictures. They had been developed by inmate Gene Leroy Hart. Gene was a man of Cherokee descent who had escaped 4 prison years prior to the murders for robbing and raping a couple of pregnant women. He was still at large.
Gene Leroy Hart was now found and charged with the 3 murders.
During Gene’s trial, the defense showed that there was a thumbprint on the flashlight that was not his, and that a footprint found in the tent of a 9 size shoe while Gene wore a 11.
Gene was acquitted in April 1979. He didn’t stay out of prison, but he did always deny hurting those little campers. And he could be innocent- there was a Boyscout camp just over a mile away from the camp. Some believe that’s where the culprit came from. Or that it was a man working at the girl’s camp, or a police officer. Though Mostly people still believe Gene to be the killer. In ‘08 they tried to do DNA, but the sample was too deteriorated. As of last year money was being raised to try again with the latest technology.
As of right now, The case remains officially unsolved.
