On the first night of summer camp in June 1977, three young Girl Scouts were killed in their tent at Camp Scott in rural Oklahoma, just yards from a counselor’s tent. A massive manhunt followed, and a local man was tried for the murders — and acquitted. In the decades since, DNA testing has been done and redone, pointing back toward that same man without ever quite closing the case. For the families and for the state of Oklahoma, the wound has never healed: everyone has a theory, and no one has justice.

The First Night of Camp

Hundreds of girls arrived at Camp Scott on June 12, 1977, many of them away from home for the first time. That night, storms rolled through. In a tent pitched near the edge of the camp, three girls — 8-year-old Lori Lee Farmer, 9-year-old Michele Guse, and 10-year-old Doris Denise Milner — slept apart from most of the others. Sometime in the early hours, they were attacked and killed. Around dawn, a counselor walking the path discovered their bodies, left in their sleeping bags not far from her own tent.

The Manhunt

The killings triggered one of the largest manhunts in Oklahoma history. Investigators found a nearby cave containing items — newspaper, tape, and other materials — that seemed to connect to the crime. Suspicion centered on Gene Leroy Hart, a local man and convicted rapist who had escaped from custody in 1973 and was believed to be hiding in the surrounding countryside, which he knew well. The search for him stretched across many months and inflamed deep tensions in the community before he was finally captured in 1978.

The Trial and Acquittal

Hart’s 1979 trial divided the region. The forensic evidence of the era — hair comparisons and the like — was hotly contested, and many in the local community did not believe he was guilty. In March 1979, the jury acquitted him. Hart was returned to prison to serve time for unrelated crimes and died there of a heart attack only months later, never having been convicted of the murders.

The DNA Question

As DNA science advanced, the old evidence was tested again and again over the decades. In recent years, officials have said the results point toward Gene Leroy Hart as the most likely killer — but the samples are old and degraded, and the testing has not produced the kind of definitive, courtroom-proof match needed to formally declare the case solved. So it sits in an agonizing limbo: a prime suspect long dead, science that strongly implicates him, and no conviction.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Oklahoma Girl Scout murders have split the state for nearly fifty years — between those certain Hart was guilty and those who believe an innocent man was hounded. The case is tangled up with the racial and community tensions of the time and place, and it has never resolved into a story everyone can accept.

Beneath all of it are three little girls, killed on the first night they ever spent away from home, a stone’s throw from the adults meant to keep them safe. A man was hunted, tried, and set free, and the science that might finally name the killer has so far only whispered when everyone needs it to speak. So Oklahoma is left with the cruelest kind of answer: a name almost everyone believes, and a case the law still calls unsolved.