Lori Farmer was murdered at Girl Scout camp in 1977. Her parents are still looking for answers.

It’s been 46 years since Sheri Farmer hugged her eight-year-old daughter Lori, told her she loved her, and waved goodbye to her as she got on the bus for Girl Scout camp in Locust Grove, Oklahoma. On her first night at camp, Lori was brutally murdered, along with the two girls who shared her tent, Michele Guse and Denise Milner. 

Sheri is now 78, but she and her husband Bo haven’t given up on finding out who killed their daughter.

“I promised Lori we would continue searching for justice – and we would do something positive in her memory,” Sheri says in a new interview with People Magazine Investigates, airing July 10 in the US. 

Watch the video showcasing the identification of the killer in the 1977 Girl Scout Murders. The post continues once the video concludes.

Lori was the youngest of the Girl Scouts who arrived at Camp Scott on June 12, 1977 for a two-week summer camp. But as the oldest of five children in her family, she was mature for her age, and, her mother remembers, “just a really good oldest sister”. 

“I wish I had not let her go,” Sheri told People in 2018. “It was her first time to ever go to camp anywhere.”

Lori, nine-year-old Michele and 10-year-old Denise were assigned to the tent furthest away from the camp counsellors. 

Their bodies were found outside their tent the next morning by a teenage camp counsellor. All three had been sexually assaulted. Lori and Michele had been beaten to death, and Denise strangled. There was blood inside their tent, as well as a man’s shoeprint. 

A few kilometres from the camp, police discovered a cave that the killer appeared to have been living in. As well as tape and newspapers that were linked to those found at the crime scene, and a taunting message painted on the wall (“The killer was here. Bye bye fools.”) the cave contained some photos taken at a wedding. The wedding had taken place inside an Oklahoma jail and the photos had been printed by an inmate called Gene Leroy Hart.

Image: Supplied

Hart had gone to jail in 1966 after pleading guilty to kidnapping and raping two pregnant teenagers and abandoning them, bound and gagged, on a rocky hillside. Incredibly, he was released on parole just over two years later. After committing several burglaries he was arrested again and this time sentenced to more than 300 years’ jail. He escaped from jail twice, the second time in 1973, and went on the run. 

Within days of the Girl Scout murders, Hart, a member of the Cherokee Nation, was the police’s prime suspect. Following the biggest manhunt in Oklahoma’s history, he was finally arrested nearly a year later. Many locals believed he was innocent, and felt the police were out to get him because he’d embarrassed them with his jailbreaks. Some suggested the police had planted evidence.

When Hart went on trial, things didn’t go the prosecution’s way. The shoeprint found in the tent was too small to belong to Hart. Hair and semen samples found on the girls’ bodies were consistent with Hart’s, but the evidence wasn’t conclusive enough to convict him. 

The defence introduced another possible suspect: Bill Stevens, who was serving time for kidnapping and raping a woman and leaving her in her car boot to die. A woman claimed Stevens had turned up to her house the morning after the Girl Scout murders, with scratches on his arms and red stains on his boots, and she also said a torch found at the murder scene was one she had lent to Stevens. However, the woman – whose boyfriend was Stevens’ cellmate – was later charged with perjury. Stevens was stabbed to death in jail in 1984.

When a jury unanimously found Hart not guilty of the Girl Scout murders, there was “thunderous applause” in the courtroom. Sheri burst into tears and buried her head in her husband Bo’s shoulder.  

Hart died in jail from a heart attack two months after being acquitted. 

Dick Wilkerson, who led the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation in Hart's capture and arrest, said the evidence against Hart was “overwhelming”. 

"It was O.J. before O.J.," Wilkerson told ABC News more than three decades later. "It was the first time I ever saw the system fail."

Years went by and Sheri and Bo struggled on with their lives. Sheri suffered from panic attacks and struggled to make parenting decisions. 

“Someone would ask me if one of the children could go swim,” she told KFOR in 2017. “And I would say to myself, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can decide that because I let Lori go to camp and she didn’t come back.’”

Bo, a doctor, found his own way of dealing with the overwhelming grief.

“I became a workaholic,” he said. “I worked all the time.”

He is still working now, at the age of 77, but plans to retire this year.

The couple started up the Oklahoma branch of Parents Of Murdered Children, to support other people going through the same trauma as them. Sheri has spent decades as a victims’ right advocate, giving talks to law enforcement and community groups.

DNA testing of evidence was done in 1989, and again in 2008. Both times, the results showed Hart could be the killer, but they weren’t conclusive enough to prove that he was. 

The testing in 2008 also produced a partial female DNA profile, which could have belonged to one of the girls or a female attacker.   

“I’ve always felt in my gut that there was a girl present,” Sheri told The Oklahoman at the time. 

There were other suspects put forward over the years. In 2011, convicted fraudster John Russell Penn claimed that when he was in jail, a fellow inmate, Karl Myers, had confessed to the Girl Scout murders. Myers was sentenced to death in 1998 after murdering two young women in Oklahoma, and was suspected of killing several other women. Penn, calling himself John Russell, said he was planning to make a movie about the Girl Scout murders, called Candles, because that was the only way to get the police to pay attention to his claim. 

Image: Supplied

"No one would listen to me because of my criminal record," Penn said. 

Sheri spoke to Penn about his movie-making plans. 

"I told him that a movie would be a hard thing for our family to go through, and I wish he would find another avenue to get his information across,” she told Tulsa World. “But I'm willing to see whether there is some validity to his information."

Myers died in jail of natural causes in 2012. Penn died in 2021, still hoping that his movie would get made. 

Sheriff Mike Reed, who was eight years old – the same age as Lori – when the Girl Scout murders took place, spent almost a decade working on the case, after Sheri and Bo asked him to take a fresh look at it. In 2017, he helped raise $US30,000 in donations to take one more shot at DNA testing. The results were made public last year. The DNA testing ruled out every suspect except one: Hart. 

"I pray that there's something that we've done that gives the family a second of something that even resembles closure or acceptance or something,” Reed told News On 6. 

There is no doubt in Reed’s mind that Hart killed the three girls. 

Image: Supplied

Camp Scott has long been abandoned as a Girl Scout camp, but Sheri and Bo still visit to place flowers where Lori’s body was found. They’re still willing to talk about her murder, still hoping that one day the case can be officially closed.

“Bo and I have been open to listening to people, and we still are,” Sheri says. “It’s been 46 years, and I feel the same today as I did then – that we care about the truth.”

 Feature Image: Supplied