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In the summer of 1977, over 140 young girls were ecstatic about spending two weeks away at a stay-away camp in the remote woods of Oklahoma. For many of the girls, this would be the very first time they've ever spent this long without their parents. The girls would spend two weeks swimming, hiking, and making new lifelong friends.
They would get to stay in cabin-like tents with four girls of their own age. On the morning of June 13, 1977, only the second day of the two-week-long camp, the bodies of three young girls were discovered, brutally murdered, sexually assaulted, and stuffed inside of their sleeping bags.
The murders left everyone wondering, what kind of person could do something so terrible to girls who were not even over the age of 10? Could forensic science put a child killer behind bars? Or could science be what sets a killer free? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 36, The Girl Scout Murders.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell. Today, we're going to be talking about the
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.
If you're interested in supporting the show and getting access to exclusive content and bonus material, consider visiting our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. I want to give a shout out and a huge thank you to this week's newest patron of the show, Gems. Thank you so much for supporting the show and becoming a patron.
Every contribution, big or small, helps me to continue to produce the true crime content you love. Please consider supporting the show on Patreon. Now, let's talk about the Oklahoma Girl Scout murders.
Hi, Forensic Tales listeners. The case we're covering on the show this week is hands down one of the hardest and saddest cases that we've covered on the show so far. It's a case and a story that when I first heard about it, chilled me to the core. I will never be able to forget this story. Anytime there's a case involving children, it's absolutely terrible.
But this one in particular is what nightmares are truly made of. The Oklahoma Girl Scout murders involved the murders of three young girls all under the age of 11 years old while away at Girl Scout camp. It's a case that reminds us that even the worst monsters are real.
The story began in June 1977 at Camp Scott in Mays County, Oklahoma. Camp Scott is a pretty large camp. It sits on over 400 acres and has been operated by the Girl Scouts since 1928. The camp is named after H.J. and Florence Scott, who were both big supporters of both the Boy and Girl Scout organizations.
Camp Scott was a place that young girls flocked to year after year. Girls were sent to Camp Scott for two weeks at a time, away from their parents, usually for the very first time, to have the time of their life. Girls stayed in cabin-like tents, spending their days hiking, swimming, and just hanging out with other girls their age.
In 1977, the camp was held in the middle of June. Girls arrived at the Girl Scout headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 12th, and then the girls were bussed over to Camp Scott. The road that took the campers to Camp Scott was called Cookie Trail Road. This year, the camp expected over 140 girls plus a number of camp counselors and staff.
As the girls arrived, they were placed in different camps throughout the property, which were all named after Native American tribes. The girls were then assigned tents by their birth dates, and each tent held four girls that sat on wooden platforms. All the girls were so excited to start the two-week-long camp.
After being assigned a camp and a tent, the girls ate dinner together in the mess hall and returned to their tents where they would spend their first night together as a group of four inside the tents. Three of the girls who showed up to Camp Scott that summer were 10-year-old Doris Denise Milner, who went by Denise, 9-year-old Michelle Heather Goose, and 8-year-old Lori Lee Farmer.
These three girls were assigned to tent 8 in Camp Kiowa. Camp Kiowa was situated on the far end of camp in a pretty remote area. Camp Kiowa had 8 tents. Tent number 1 was for the camp counselors and tents 2 through 8 housed the girls.
Now, if you've read anything about this case online, there's some confusion on whether the girls were in tent 7 or tent 8. But we're going to say the girls were in tent number 8. Because tent number 1 housed the counselors. So there were technically 8 tents in Camp Kiowa. Now, I mentioned that there were usually 4 girls assigned to tent.
But with tent number eight, camp staff and counselors accidentally assigned a girl to the wrong tent that first night. Staff had gotten her birth date incorrect at check-in, and they assigned the girl to another tent with older girls.
Now, once the camp staff was made aware of this mistake, they told this girl that the following morning they would move her into tent 8 with Denise, Michelle, and Lori. So for this first night of camp, tent number 8 had just three girls.
What we now know about this very first night of camp, this fourth young girl was extremely lucky. She was not in tent eight that stormy June night. Tent number eight in Camp Kiowa, if you look at the map of this camp, which I will post to the website, is the furthest away from tent one with the counselors.
It's completely out of the line of sight from the counselor's tent, and it's the only one in Kiowa that's like that. In fact, in between the counselor's tent and tent number 8, there's an entire building that completely blocks the view from the counselors. To be completely honest with you, when I saw where this tent was located...
I don't think I would even want to spend the night inside of it. That's how remote it really was. So let's talk about the three girls who were assigned to tent number eight. Nine-year-old Michelle was really into plants. Before camp, she asked her mother if she would look after her plant collection, make sure they were doing okay, that they got watered every day while she was away.
And Michelle had actually attended Camp Scott the year before, and she was described as a girl who loved playing soccer. Eight-year-old Lori was one of the youngest girls at camp that year, whose birthday at the time was just one week away. And she was really smart and had already skipped a grade in school.
Lori was super adventurous, even at eight years old. She wanted to do and try everything she could. Before the summer, Lori mentioned to her mom that she either wanted to go to stay away camp at the Y or to Girl Scout camp. She was completely torn between the two.
Now, it was Lori's mom, not Lori, who decided on Girl Scout camp that summer, a decision that she would later regret for the rest of her life. 10-year-old Denise was the mama's girl of the group and one of only a few African-American girls who attended camp that year. She never liked to stay over at friends' houses for sleepovers. She always got super homesick.
She just wanted to stay home with her mom and dad. That's why her mom was surprised when Denise asked her that year if she could go to a sleepover camp that summer. Her mom's like, you don't even like to spend the night at friends' houses. What makes you think you're going to like sleeping in a tent for two weeks? But Denise was like, no, mom, I'm ready for this. I want to go to summer camp like all of my other friends.
So her mom finally agreed and signed her up for Girl Scout camp at Camp Scott. But the day before they were supposed to leave for camp, Denise started to have second thoughts. She told her mom that she didn't want to go, that she was afraid. But Denise's mom is like, look, honey, you begged me to go to camp. I've already paid for you to go. Let's just go.
Still scared, crying that she doesn't want to go, Denise's mom is like, look, let's take you to camp, spend one night, and if you don't like it, call me in the morning and your dad and I will come pick you up. Her mom had no idea that her daughter would only get to spend one night at Camp Scott.
Camp Scott is located in a very densely wooded area. There's no cameras out there. So what exactly happened on the night of June 12th isn't exactly known. But here's what we do know. We know that earlier in the night, some girls reported that they saw flashlights coming from deep inside the woods.
Early in the night, the weather took a turn and it started to rain and storm over the camp. So all the girls were forced to go inside and stay inside their tents for most of the night. Once inside tent eight, we know that the girls wrote letters home to their parents. And that's because police discovered these letters inside the tent the following morning.
What's even more heartbreaking was that inside Denise's letter to her parents, she begged for them to come get her, that she was scared and that she wanted to go home. Later that night, a counselor in a nearby camp to Kiowa said that she spotted a dim light coming from somewhere in the woods around the camp.
So the counselor decided to grab her own flashlight, head out of tent number one, the counselor's tent, and see if she could figure out where this dim light was coming from. But as she got a little closer, she noticed that the light seemed to be headed in the direction of Camp Kiowa. She had no idea where the light could have been coming from. She said that she thought maybe it was just one of the other counselors.
So she didn't think too much about it and went back inside of her tent. A counselor in tent number one at Camp Kiowa said that she woke up in the middle of the night after hearing strange noises from a tent farther away from hers. She described later on that the noises didn't sound like an animal. They didn't sound human. They were sounds that she has never heard before.
She said the sounds were terrifying, like someone or something was grunting. The counselor decided to grab her flashlight and see if she could find out where this strange sound was coming from. But once she got out of her tent, she looked around, she looked left, she looked right, went down to a couple of the girls' tents…
But she didn't see anyone, and the strange noises had suddenly stopped. So she turned around and went back inside the counselor's tent and fell back asleep for the rest of the night. The following morning on June 13th,
That same camp counselor who heard the strange noises got up early, as she usually did, and wanted to hit the showers before anyone else in the camp woke up. As she headed towards the camp showers around 6 a.m. in the morning, she saw something that caught her eye. It was a sleeping bag bunched up underneath a tree.
She got closer to the sleeping bag, and that's when she discovered the lifeless body of a small girl, completely wrapped up inside of her sleeping bag. About 100 yards away from tent 8, two more sleeping bags were found containing the bodies of Lori and Michelle. All three girls were pronounced dead at the scene.
Lori and Michelle had been found dead inside their sleeping bags. Whoever killed the girls killed them, then rolled their bodies up inside the bags. Denise, however, was found lying on top of her sleeping bag. Local and state police responded to the call as quickly as they possibly could. This was a huge case.
Three young girls had just been found brutally murdered while at Girl Scout camp. The state of Oklahoma had never seen anything like this before. The rest of the campers were immediately bussed back to the Girl Scout headquarters in Tulsa. The girls were told that there was a problem with the water supply at camp, so they had to end the two-week camp early, just after the first night.
The rest of the campers had no idea that Lori, Michelle, and Denise had been brutally murdered right there at Camp Scott. And it would be some time before any of the young girls knew what happened to their friends. Before the staff at Camp Scott called the parents of Lori, Michelle, and Denise to inform them about what happened to their daughters, they made two other phone calls first.
one to the camp's attorneys and the other to the camp's insurance company. The officers who first arrived at camp quickly started their investigation into the case. Evidence at the scene suggested that whoever killed the girls entered through the back of tent number eight.
It appeared to them that Lori and Michelle had been murdered inside the tent, and Denise had been dragged out of the tent and murdered out in the woods. Police believed that Denise was the last girl killed, because when first responders arrived, Lori and Michelle had already had rigor mortis set in on their bodies.
Denise had no signs of rigor mortis, and her body was still warm to the touch. Police suspected that the girls must have been killed sometime between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. in the morning. And that's because the girls' sleeping bags were dry, and the rain that night had stopped a little before 11 p.m.
And 6 a.m. is when the camp counselor left her tent and discovered the girls in the morning. Evidence suggested that the killer tried to clean up inside the tent after the murders. Blankets that the girls owned were used to try and clean up some of the blood and were left behind in the tent.
This was a possible clue that the killer didn't want to leave behind any valuable forensic evidence that could tie him to the murders. Now, this is the part that makes this case even harder for me to talk about on the show. And that's because evidence suggested that all three of the girls had been sexually assaulted.
They were strangled and they were severely beaten. Their bodies were completely mutilated by their killer. Autopsies of the girls revealed that Lori and Michelle had been killed by blunt force trauma to the head and Denise had been beaten and strangled to death with some sort of ligature.
almost impossible to imagine inflicting this kind of pain to young girls, small girls, all under the age of 11 years old. Investigators on the case learned that just two months before Camp Scott began, during a training session, one of the counselor's tents had been ransacked.
And inside the tent, counselors found a really creepy handwritten note. The note rambled on about a bunch of stuff, including talking about aliens and some other weird things. But the note also said, quote, we are on a mission to kill three girls in one tent, end quote.
Now, we have no idea for sure if this note has anything to do with the murders of Lori, Michelle, and Denise at Camp Scott, but it's extremely alarming when just two months later, three girls end up dead inside of a tent, which begs the question, did Lori, Michelle, and Denise's killer visit the camp sometime before the murders?
maybe to scope the place out and prepare for what he wanted to do? The news about the three murdered girls dominated headline news for days following the murders. Right after the murders, investigators had searched the camp and the surrounding woods for any evidence or clues that would lead them to a possible suspect.
But very little evidence was left behind at the scene. And what evidence they found was just all around strange. Near the girls' bodies, police found duct tape, nylon rope, a crowbar, and a red flashlight. Police knew that all of these items belonged to whoever the killer was.
But what was even more odd was that eyeglasses had been stolen from several of the tents and were found at different locations around the camp. So not only did the killer go inside of tent number eight, they also went inside other tents, stealing eyeglasses and placing them all over the camp.
Which, of course, made absolutely no sense to the investigators, at least in the beginning. Was this some sort of sick and twisted game? Did the killer somehow find this funny? Or maybe it's some sick and weird fetish. What's his obsession with female eyeglasses?
Police also discovered an unknown fingerprint on the lens of the red flashlight that didn't match anyone in the database. They also found a footprint from a size 9.5 shoe in blood inside of the girl's tent. Both pieces of evidence police believed belonged to their killer.
The evidence recovered near the girls' bodies, the tape, the duct tape, the crowbar, were actually linked to a nearby farmhouse located not too far away from Camp Scott. When police went to go interview the farm owner, he denied having any involvement in the murders, and he even offered to take a polygraph test, which he passed.
He told police that these items, including many others, had been stolen from his property a few weeks prior. Now, unfortunately for this poor, poor guy, the media had already caught wind that items found near the bodies had been linked to a nearby farmhouse.
The media published stories about the farm owner. They even put his name and his face right there on the front page of the local newspaper. And they named this man as a suspect in the Girl Scout murders. So, naturally, this farm owner started to receive hate mail. He was getting threatening phone calls. People were calling him a child killer.
Even though police had already cleared him as a possible suspect, the police believed that these items did in fact were stolen from his property. The harassment of this man during these few first days got so bad that it sent him to the hospital.
People were just so desperate to find the person responsible for killing three innocent young girls. But unfortunately, for this innocent man, he wasn't the person they were looking for. Days go by without identifying a potential suspect until June 23rd.
Police identify and name a potential suspect in the case by the name of Jean Leroy Hart. 33-year-old Hart was a convicted burglar and rapist who had recently escaped from prison. Hart had been convicted of kidnapping two pregnant women, tying them up with nylon rope and raping them.
After the rapes, Harp took duct tape and placed it around the two women's entire faces and left them for dead in the woods. One of the women was able to get the duct tape off of her mouth and was able to break free and survived the attack. When the woman reported it to police, she described one very important detail about the suspect.
And that was that during the rape, he made these really strange noises. She couldn't even describe what these noises sounded like. She said that she's never heard anything like that before come out of a person. When police in the Girl Scout murders learn this particular detail about Hart's first attack,
They remembered what one of the counselors said that night. The counselor who remembered hearing a strange noise in the night, a noise that didn't sound human and didn't sound like an animal. Could the noise heard by the counselor at Camp Scott be the same noise the woman heard Jean Hart make during her attack?
After Hart was convicted of rape with the two pregnant women, he escaped prison years later and had been on the run for over four years. Police learned that Hart grew up only one mile away from Camp Scott, and he was a Cherokee Indian. During the investigation, police also found a cave in the nearby area of Camp Scott that
The cave obviously appeared to have someone living in it, and when police searched the cave, they found several items that were possibly stolen from the camp. They found women's underwear, a crumpled picture of a woman, eyeglasses, and several newspaper clippings.
Police knew that the underwear and eyeglasses had been missing from Camp Scott after the murders. They now knew that whoever was living inside the cave was in fact the Girl Scout killer. But police needed more if they wanted to be able to link the cave to their only possible suspect in the murders, Jean Hart. So investigators were
published the photo of the woman from the crumpled photo found inside the cave in hopes that identifying this woman, they could somehow tie this cave to heart. The photo of the woman was placed in local newspapers all over Oklahoma.
It turned out the photo was taken by a wedding photographer, and when police spoke to the photographer, she told them she got help developing the photo by a man in prison, a man by the name of Gene Hart. Once authorities could link the crumpled photograph found inside the cave to Gene Hart, the largest manhunt in Oklahoma history got underway.
Authorities searched for months for Gene Hart, who had already been on the run for over four years by this point. And now, the man was wanted for murdering Lori, Michelle, and Denise at Camp Scott. The manhunt finally came to an end nearly a year after the murders, on April 6, 1978, when
When police apprehended Gene Hart, they found him wearing women's eyeglasses. Gene Hart was charged with capital murder for killing 8-year-old Lori, 9-year-old Michelle, and 10-year-old Denise. Because the murders happened in Oklahoma, that's where his trial took place.
Hart was represented by attorney Garvin Isaacs, who was once an Oklahoma public defender himself. Now, to my surprise, Hart had a lot of local supporters who believed he was innocent, that the police had the wrong guy for the murders. His defense attorney was paid for with money that was raised by members of his very own community.
I read an article that the community held a hog fry dinner where Hart supporters wore t-shirts that read, quote, stop the Mays County Railroad, end quote, which to them signified their belief that Jean Hart was being railroaded by Oklahoma police.
Well, it turns out that this hog fry dinner raised over $12,000 for Hart's defense fund. The state's case against Hart relied on two big pieces of evidence. The evidence found inside the cave located just three miles away from Camp Scott is
and some pictures found inside the cave that were linked to Hart because they were developed in the photo lab where he worked while in prison. He also had forensic evidence. They had recovered semen and hair samples from the girls' bodies, and they also had the size 9 1⁄2 footprint left behind in the girls' tent. But...
His trial happened in the late 1970s. We weren't really using DNA evidence to solve criminal cases until well into the 1980s. And using hair samples as evidence to link a defendant to a crime had been discredited as a valid forensic technique.
So, the little forensic evidence they had against Hart really didn't do the prosecution any good. And to be completely honest, the forensic evidence kind of hurt them in the end. The little forensic evidence that the state had against Hart actually hurt their case. When the hair sample was tested, it came back inconclusive.
The footprint didn't match the size of Hart's foot, and the evidence they found inside the cave, well, it really wasn't enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jean Hart is the Girl Scout murderer. So, on March 20th, 1979, a jury found Jean Hart not guilty of killing Lori, Michelle, and Denise at Camp Scott.
The acquittal of Hart was absolutely devastating for the families of the murdered girls. Not only do they have to deal with this incredible amount of grief of losing a daughter, the man that most people think did it was just found not guilty.
And in a pretty lousy move by the prosecutors on the case, they tried to console the girls' families by saying, look, we know we didn't get a conviction in this case, but don't worry. Hart is going to go to prison for 300 years for the previous rapes, the burglaries, and his escape from prison.
Which, I say this is lousy, because in no way, shape, or form is that justice for the families or even the girls themselves. Now, here's where the story takes another shocking turn. Or, depending on which side you're on, may just be karma at its finest.
And that's because just a few weeks after Jean Hart was acquitted of the Girl Scout murders, on June 4th, 1979, Hart collapsed and died after an hour of jogging and lifting weights in the prison exercise yard. This is literally just weeks after being found not guilty.
So, in case you're wondering, is this finally the end of the story? Not even close. After Hart's death, Oklahoma police had no intention of pursuing the case in search of any other suspects. In their minds, and in the minds of many people, Gene Hart was their guy.
The police in this case really did put all of their eggs in one basket. But people, not just throughout Oklahoma, but across the entire country, people who followed this case kept wondering, was there a killer still out there on the loose? The killer responsible for brutally murdering three young girls?
Well, in 1989, when advances in DNA testing made huge leaps forward, DNA testing was done on a semen sample recovered from one of the girl's bodies. The sample that wasn't able to be tested back when the trial first started in the late 1970s. The DNA testing proved that three of the five prongs matched Jean Hart's DNA.
So essentially, this made it possible that Hart was the Girl Scout murderer by 1 in 7,700. So by no stretch of the imagination does this test mean that Gene Hart is in fact the murderer. It means that there is a 1 in over 7,000 chance that he is.
But the semen sample was retested again years later in 2008. The results came back inconclusive. And that's because the sample was far too degraded to get a proper DNA profile that they really needed to identify a suspect. So here's where the case is at now.
The FBI maintains the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. So matches made among profiles stored in CODIS can link possible suspects to crimes. And this CODIS system is updated by forensic labs from all across the country.
The problem is, is that the case of the Oklahoma Girl Scout murders, police need a DNA profile, a DNA sample, which they don't have.
Oklahoma police and the families of Lori, Michelle, and Denise are hopeful that continued advancements in DNA testing will someday be able to retest that degraded semen sample to finally reveal that DNA profile they really need in order to finally solve this one.
By 2017, over $30,000 in donations has been raised to conduct this new DNA testing on the semen sample to finally prove whether or not Jean Hart is in fact the Girl Scout murderer, or if there is still a killer out there on the run. Until this DNA testing can be done, the murders of Lori, Michelle, and Denise remain unsolved.
Their families have had to live with that for the last four decades. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to be the mother or the sister or even the friend of one of these girls and not have an answer as to who killed them.
And the one person who by all accounts is the most likely suspect was found not guilty and is now dead themselves. We may never know who is responsible for killing those three innocent young girls who left their homes that summer, believing they are going to have the time of their lives.
They believed they were going to make new friends, swim, hike, make s'mores, do all the things you're supposed to do on a two-week stay-away camp at their ages. But because of one monster, that was all taken away from them.
After the murders of Lori, Michelle, and Denise in 1977, Camp Scott shut down and never hosted another stay-away camp. Two of the girls' families sued the company that owned Camp Scott and its insurance company for $5 million, alleging that the camp was neglectful.
The lawsuit included the threatening note that was found at the camp just two months before the murders and that tent number eight, the tent that the murder girls were in, was 86 yards away from the counselor's tent, which they alleged was way too far for proper supervision of the girls.
But in 1985, the jury sided with the camp by a 9-3 vote, awarding zero money to the families. Years after the murders, Richard Goose, the father of 9-year-old Michelle, went on to help the state pass the Oklahoma Victims Bill of Rights.
Sherry Farmer, the mother of eight-year-old Lori, founded the Oklahoma chapter for the support group Parents of Murdered Children. The parents of these young girls have done their very best to help the spirit of their daughters live on for years past their murders. If you'd like to hear who I think the Girl Scout murderer is,
Be sure to sign up and become a patron of the show at patreon.com slash forensic tales. I have my very own opinions and thoughts on this case, and I think I know who the killer is. If you want to hear who I think is responsible, check out our Patreon page.
I also want to hear from you. I want to hear if you think Gene Hart is the killer. And if not, who else do you think could have been responsible? And do you think we will ever be able to test the semen sample all these years later?
Connect with the show on Instagram, Facebook, our website, ForensicTales.com, or you can send me an email at Courtney at ForensicTales.com. Let me know who you think is the Girl Scout murderer. ♪
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