Shapeshifters, Stageny and SkinCrawlers

Almost every culture around the world has some type of transformation myth, and almost every commonly found animal (and some not-so-common ones) probably has a shape shifting myth attached to them. Usually, the animal involved in the transformation is indigenous to or prevalent in the area from which the story derives. It is worthy to note that while the popular idea of a shape shifter is of a human being who turns into something else, there are numerous stories about animals that can transform themselves as well.

Notable shape shifters in European lore would include the werewolf, Beauty and the Beast, Kissing a frog who then turns into a prince. More recently we have Franz Kafka's book "The Metamorphosis" where the protagonist is unwillingly changed into a cockroach. Finally, don't forget many of our comic book and movie super heroes like Clark Kent, darting into a phone booth to go from being the meek reporter to being Superman.

Many Native Americans tribes believe in the "skin walker" which is a "shape shifter" in their culture. A "skin walker" is not something you can find out about by talking to a Native American because they will not talk to anyone they don't trust when it comes to this topic. They fear that you may possibly be a skin walker in their eyes.

There are Native Americans who believe they are skin walkers and they hold secret ceremonies in locations that won't be stumbled upon by others on accident.

The skin crawler or shape shifter that was discussed in this case though was referred to as "Stageny" by OSBI Agent Dick Wilkerson, (It is likely that Harvey Pratt told this information to Dick Wilkerson) and then later Wilkerson attempts to discuss this with the Medicine Man who in the documentary is named "Crying Wolf."

In this uncomfortable exchange Agent Wilkerson pushes this issue with the reluctant Crying Wolf. Crying Wolf first tells Wilkerson that he does not know what a Stageny is... Read in the next column how this dialogue continues.

Wilkerson:
"By the way, Crying Wolf, do you know what a Stageny is?"

Crying Wolf:
"No."

Wilkerson:
"Well let me tell you what I know about the Stageny. I have heard that it is a great medicine owl which sleeps under the cedar tree. I have also heard that Gene Hart has the ability to change himself into the Stageny. Personally I believe this is ridiculous, but I would like to get your thoughts on it."

Crying Wolf:
"First of all, I will not discuss the Stageny with you because that is something of which you should not know.

The belief in this transformation is quite prevalent. A great number of Cherokee people believe that a person can transform himself into another being, whether they want to hide under a leaf, go into a rock, or whether they literally want to become an owl or any other animal."

Wilkerson:
"Do you believe Gene Hart could do this?"

Crying Wolf:
"No, I don't believe he could. He may, however, use these legends to his own benefit. He is not the quality of person who could perform these deeds. But he could enhance his image by using the terms and knowledge of the old Cherokee ways so that he may give the appearance that he is performing these deeds. Opportunities to use these tricks would simply enhance his image."

Wilkerson:
"You're not going to talk to me about the Stageny, are you Crying Wolf?"

Crying Wolf:
"No, I am not. Again, these are things you should not know about.

(Taken from: Someone Cry for the Children by Michael and Dick Wilkerson, The Dial Press, New York; 1981. pgs. 194-195)

Is Agent Dick Wilkerson asking a question of Crying Wolf here or is he just playing a game with the Medicine Man?

Is he just letting Crying Wolf know that he knows more than the normal cop knows about Cherokee Medicine?

Was Wilkerson at a point of desperation in the case where he is starting to believe that perhaps Hart is capable of shape shifting? This would explain the tracking dogs behavior when chasing after a scent out into an open field
and then simply losing that scent as if what they were tracking just flew away or disappeared into the air. It would perhaps explain the experience that Agent Pratt and his brother had out in the darkness of the Cookson Hills when a cat suddenly and without explanation pounced onto Agent Pratt's chest and then darted off back into the nighttime . More simply, it would explain why the OSBI, the FBI, 400 volunteers, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and local law enforcement could never seem to even get close to Hart during the manhunt?

There was tremendous pressure, personally and politically, to catch and convict someone. The agents involved had placed all their eggs in this one basket named Gene Leroy Hart.

Was Hart a man capable of becoming a Stageny or perhaps becoming any number of animals? Was Hart a shape shifter? A skin crawler, able to change form in order to evade capture? Had Hart come employed the help of a Medicine Man who was able to help him bring about this physical metamorphosis?

Apply the logical axiom of Ockham's Razor to this situation and suddenly the Medicine Man comes off as the rational, logical one and the OSBI agents seem illogical, irrational and desperate.

The more logical and simple explanation is that Hart was simply using the lore that had grown up around him. Was he manipulating those who supported him the most by making them believe that he was capable of doing these magical transformations? Certainly he knew that if his fellow Cherokees believed he was capable of shape shifting, then this would elevate his status among them to a very high level.

This "fake" status would also mean that he couldn't possibly have been capable of doing these horrendous, brutal murders.

The Inside Story of the Girl Scout Murders

Camp Scott had hosted Girl Scouts from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri for nearly 50 years when they opened the gates for another summer season in 1977.  Expectations were that the camp would run just as smoothly as it had each year before.  Before June of 1977 the worst kind of accident that had occurred at Camp Scott was a snake bite, a relatively common event in the Cookson Hills of northeastern Oklahoma. 
Camp Scott is located in Oklahoma but more important to most of the residents of the area, it is the Cherokee Nation. The Cookson Hills are the foothills of the Ozark Mountains and Camp Scott was located just a couple of miles south of the small town of Locust Grove; some forty-five minutes east of Tulsa.
At dinner the first night of summer camp a heavy thunderstorm and the young campers waited for the storm to let up before they left the porch of the mess hall.  They sang some Girl Scout songs and the storm subsided.  Individual counselors made the call for their own unit of girls about when it was ok to make the run from the dining hall back to their camp areas.  The counselors in the Kiowa Unit eventually made that call for their girls and they headed across the camp down the hill towards the staff house and then back to the west, towards the back side of the camp and then on to the Kiowa Unit.  This would be the last time that three of the Kiowa girls would make this walk across the camp.  By morning Doris Milner, Lori Farmer and Michelle Guse would all be dead.

During the night the counselors across the camp, including the counselors in the Kiowa Unit, heard strange noises in the woods, saw dim amber colored lights in the woods, and some counselors even heard the sounds of screams coming from the direction of the Kiowa Unit.

It would be difficult to differentiate the sounds of girls screaming, girls shrieking, girls giggling, the sounds of practical jokes being played and the first night jitters in a camp full of young girls.  It was difficult enough that the trained counselors who heard these sounds did not investigate what they heard.
Animal type sounds being made in the woods?  Nothing unusual about that when night falls in a fairly remote and densely wooded area.  An amber colored light dimly shining through the trees could just as easily be another camper or counselor walking to the latrine.  The light could simply appear dim because of distance?  Or perhaps it appears so dim because the light has to shine through the deep underbrush and the thick foliage of Camp Scott.

During the night someone went through the 8 tents in the Kiowa Unit, reaching inside by guiding their hand between the wooden platforms on which the tents stood, and the canvas.  No valuables were taken but apparently this person took only eye glasses from inside the tents.  The person in question appeared to have then just discarded most all of the glasses by tossing them into the underbrush just outside of the Kiowa perimeter.

At 6 AM on the morning of June 13th one of the Kiowa counselors woke up to her alarm clock.  Her purpose for setting the clock so early was to head back up the same trail they had used coming back from dinner the night before. Her route would take her up the larger trail to the staff house in hopes of getting a hot shower.  The counselor did not get even one hundred yards from her own tent when she came upon a gruesome scene that would change her life and all of Oklahoma forever. 

At the intersection of two trails, seemingly a purposeful placement of the bodies for increased shock value, she found the beaten, molested and dead bodies of three of her campers.  Two of the girls were pushed back deep within their sleeping bags, one of the girls was perhaps posed there. Her legs were open and her underpants pulled down.  The exposed girl's eyes were wide open and she had tremendous swelling and bruises around her neck.  There was no doubt in the counselor's mind that she and the other two girls were dead. 

Law enforcement arrived soon after this discovery.  A couple of days later not only local and state law enforcement were involved but the arrival of the FBI was a sign to the people of Oklahoma that this was a case and a story that had shocked the entire nation.  Print and television reporters from around the country descended upon the city of Locust Grove.  The small town in rural Mayes county Oklahoma received more attention than it ever had; in fact more than it ever wanted.

Law enforcement eliminated three men in the immediate vicinity as suspects.  All three men willingly and voluntarily submitted themselves to lie detector tests in hopes that the investigation might be turned towards whoever the real killer may be.  One of the men was the husband of the camp director.  He lived on the premises with his wife.  The only other male on the grounds of Camp Scott was the groundskeeper and he lived there year round.  Just outside the camp a rancher was given a lie detector case.  He had repeatedly reported robberies from his home in the weeks leading up to the murders. A couple of the things he had reported stolen were things that could have possibly been used as murder weapons.  The local sheriff remembered these previously bothersome calls and the rancher was given and then subsequently passed a polygraph exam.

Gene Leroy Hart was suspect number one, almost from day one. Law enforcement, including the Mayes County sheriff's office, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers, Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) and the FBI, would aggressively search for Gene Hart for ten months before they arrested him living in an extremely remote area, about one hour from the Girl Scout camp.  They arrested Hart in the primitive home of a Cherokee Medicine Man. 

Hart had raped two women from Tulsa in 1966.  He abducted them in Tulsa near a popular night club.  He put them in the trunk of the car and drove them about 30 minutes east of Tulsa.  In fact the actual rapes took place just over the border into Mayes county.  He took them out of the trunk, forced them to walk to a wooded area where he sadistically raped them, then stuffed rags in their mouths, he covered their mouths with duct tape and then placed a final piece of the strong tape over the women’s noses.  This left no doubt what his intent was.  He intended for them to die.  He intended for them to die in the woods, tied up, half naked, covered in a disgusting mix of his bodily fluids, leaves, dirt and mud.

Hart spent only a few years in prison for these crimes and was released in 1969.  Within a few months Hart was arrested in Tulsa after burglarizing three apartments.  All three apartments were robbed while the residents were at home asleep.  Hart made the mistake of burglarizing the home of one of Tulsa's few women police officers at the time.  As the officer was just falling asleep she saw a hand reaching into her bedroom from behind the door. She had her service revolver next to her and she drew the pistol and told the intruder to leave.  He didn't respond until she cocked the gun. The sound sent Hart out of the apartment.  Police arrived probably a bit more quickly than normal since it was one of their own who was being robbed.  The police caught Hart less than 10 minutes later trying to break into another apartment in the same building.
Because of the circumstances and the legal arrangements of his parole Hart was ultimately sentenced to over 300 hundred years at the conclusion of three separate burglary trials.

A few years before the murders of the Girl Scouts Hart had escaped for the second time from the Mayes County jail. He was back in Mayes County for a relief hearing at the local court house and he had been relocated to the small jail from the state penitentiary in McAlister, Oklahoma pending this hearing. 
After his second escape he remained on the loose and seemed to avoid capture even though residents in Locust Grove and surrounding communities regularly claimed to see and even visit with Gene Hart.
Knowing Hart's criminal history and knowing that Hart had never left the general area, the sheriff of Mayes County suspected him from the very beginning.

After some delays and some political issues involving the district attorney in Mayes county were rectified the case went to trial.  The trial was over relatively quickly and the jury returned a verdict keeping up the pace of the trial.

Not guilty.

The Unsolved Murders of Three Young Oklahoma Girl Scouts

In 1977, Camp Scott was in its 49th year as a keystone of the Tulsa-based Magic Empire Girl Scout Council. Situated along the confluence of Snake Creek and Spring Creek near State Highway 82, the 410-acre  compound was located just south of Locust Grove, Oklahoma.

 The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders is a still-unsolved crime in rural Mayes County, Oklahoma.   This is in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in Eastern Oklahoma. On a rainy, late-spring night in 1977, three girls—ages 8, 9, and 10—were raped and murdered and their bodies left in the woods near their tent at summer camp.
Gene Leroy Hart had been at large since escaping four years earlier from the Mayes County Jail. He had been convicted of raping two pregnant women. Hart was born about a mile from Camp Scott.


Camp opened on June 12, 1977. Around 6pm a thunderstorm hit, and the girls huddled in their tents. Among them were Tulsans Lori Lee Farmer, 8, and Doris Denise Milner, 10, along with Michele Guse, 9, of Broken Arrow, a suburb of Tulsa. The trio were sharing tent #8 in the camp's "Kiowa" unit, named for a Native American tribe.

The following morning, a counselor made the discovery of a girl's body in the forest. Soon, it was discovered that all three girls in tent #8 had been killed. Subsequent testing showed that they had been raped, bludgeoned, and strangled.

 The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders is a still-unsolved crime in rural Mayes County, Oklahoma This is in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in Eastern Oklaahoma. On a rainy, late-spring night in 1977, three girls—ages 8, 9, and 10—were raped and murdered and their bodies left in the woods near their tent at summer camp.

Camp Scott was evacuated that morning and after nearly 50 years of being a Girl Scout camp, it would never reopen.

Gene Leroy Hart, a Cherokee, was arrested within a year at the home of a Cherokee, medicine man and tried in March, 1979. Although the local sheriff pronounced himself "one thousand percent" certain the man on trial committed the crimes, a local jury acquitted Hart.

Although Gene Leroy Hart, a local jail escapee with a history of violence stood trial for the crime, he was acquitted.
Two of the families later sued the Magic Empire Council and its insurer in a $5 million alleged negligence action. The civil trial included discussion of the threatening note as well as the fact that tent #8 lay 86-yard (79 m) from the counselors' tent. The defense suggested that the future of summer camping in general hung in the balance. In 1985, by a 9–3 vote, jurors sided with the camp.

By this time, Hart was already dead. As a convicted rapist and jail escapee, he still had 305 of his 308 years left to serve in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. In June 1979, during a jog inside the jail, he collapsed and died of an apparent heart attack.

Thirty years later authorities conducted new DNA testing, but the results of these proved inconclusive, as the samples were too old.

The murders are still a great source of controversy among Oklahomans and even among law enforcement.  The investigators involved in the case were convinced that they had the right man.  Many residents in the area around the former camp grounds feel that Gene Hart, although he was an escaped convict at the time, was railroaded by the "white man's" courts.

The case remains open, cold and almost completely inactive.