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.