In 1977, three little girls went to girl scout camp. They never came home.

Lori Lee Farmer, Michele Heather Guse and Doris Denise Milner didn’t know each other when they were put into the same tent on the first day of Girl Scout camp in Oklahoma in the summer of 1977. But their names will be forever linked, victims of one of the most horrific killings in Oklahoma’s history. 

At eight, Lori was the youngest girl at Camp Scott in Locust Grove, but she was unusually mature, the oldest of five girls in her family. Shy Michele was nine years old, and had asked her mum to look after her plants while she was away. Denise - as she preferred to be called - was a 10-year-old straight-A student, who was planning to attend camp with her friends. When they pulled out at the last minute, Denise wanted to pull out too, but her mum persuaded her to go on her own. 

On the first day of camp, it poured with rain, and the girls were sent to their tents to write letters home. Lori talked about how much fun she was having. 

"I've met two new friends, Michele Guse and Denise Milner," she wrote to her parents. 

Denise was less enthusiastic.

"I don’t like camp," she wrote to her mum. "It’s awful. I don’t want to stay in camp for two weeks. I want to come home." 

The three girls were in Tent 8, the furthest away from the counsellors' tent. Being the first night at camp, there was a lot of excitement, and counsellors Carla Wilhite and Dee Elder had to get up a couple of times during the night to ask giggling girls to quieten down and go to sleep. But it wasn't just the sound of giggling that the counsellors heard. They heard a low, guttural sound, something in between a growl or a moan, coming from the woods. Carla – who was 18 years old and on her first night as a counsellor – thought it must be an animal. As she walked towards the sound, it stopped. When she walked away, it started again. She was too frightened to investigate further. 

"I didn't want anything to pounce out of the woods at me," she says in Disney+ docuseries Keeper Of The Ashes. "Whatever it was, I didn't want to tangle with it."

Carla may have been hearing the final moments of one of the girls as she walked back to her tent.

"You know, when I look back at it now, though... I regret. I have guilt that I didn't... didn't go there."

Watch the trailer for Keeper Of The Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders. Story continues below.

At 6am, Carla got up to have an early shower. She saw three sleeping bags on the ground outside. The bodies of Lori, Michele and Denise were underneath them. The girls had been sexually molested, bound with duct tape and murdered. Lori and Michele had been beaten to death and Denise strangled. 

All the other Girl Scouts were quickly put on a bus and sent back to their parents. 

Police began their investigation. The girls’ tent was damaged, and there was blood on the floor and mattresses, with one obvious shoe print. Near the bodies, police found rope, a pair of women's glasses and a torch with newspaper shoved inside. In a nearby cave, there was some of the same duct tape found on the girls' bodies, pages from the same newspaper found inside the torch, black-and-white photos of three women at a formal event and writing on the wall: "The killer was here. Bye bye fools."

The black-and-white photos were soon identified as having been taken at the wedding of the daughter of an employee of the Granite Reformatory, a jail in Oklahoma. The photographer's assistant at the wedding, who had printed those photos, was a Granite Reformatory inmate called Gene Leroy Hart.

Hart quickly became the prime suspect in the Girl Scout killings. He was a former high school sports star who had turned to crime in his early twenties. In 1966, he was charged with kidnapping two pregnant teenagers. He pleaded guilty and was sent to jail, but paroled after just a few months. After committing a string of burglaries – he was known for stealing glasses, because he had bad eyesight – he ended up back in court. Because he'd committed the burglaries while on parole, he was sentenced to more than 300 years' jail. He escaped in 1973. 

Ten months after the Girl Scout murders, following the biggest manhunt in Oklahoma history, Hart was finally captured and charged. 

A member of the Cherokee Nation, Hart had a huge number of supporters in the local community who were convinced of his innocence. They held a fundraiser to help with legal fees. 

The police case was not as strong as they had hoped it would be. The shoe print found inside the girls' tent wasn't the same size as Hart's foot – and, although the police claimed a fingerprint had been found on one of the girls' bodies, it turned out to belong to a police officer. 

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A jury found Hart not guilty. But he still had his 300 year-plus sentence to serve, so he was sent back to jail. He died two months later, after having a heart attack while exercising. 

So if Hart didn’t kill Lori, Michele and Denise, who did?

Two months before the murders, a note was left inside an empty donut box at the campsite. 

"We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one," the note read. 

But it also contained statements about Martians. It wasn't taken seriously at the time, or even after the murders. 

District Attorney Sid Wise told the New York Times in 1978 the note was "probably a prank".

Over the years, police have investigated – and eliminated – numerous other suspects. DNA testing carried out in the 1980s allowed police to rule out several men as being the killer, but not Hart. The results of further DNA testing, released in May this year, pointed even more strongly to Hart’s guilt. 

"Our belief is that Gene Leroy Hart committed the murders," Andrea Fielding, the director of forensic science services at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation told KOCO 5 News in May.

Denise's mother Bettye has been convinced of Hart's guilt ever since sitting through his trial. She's only visited her daughter's grave once, preferring not to think of her in the ground. She sees Denise in one of her granddaughters, Morgan. 

"She has the same personality," Bettye told Tulsa World in 2022. "She wants to be a part of everything; she tries to join everything like Denise did."

Meanwhile, Lori’s mother, Sheri, told Tulsa World that she was at peace, but that didn’t mean closure.

"When I sit down for my birthday with my daughters, you'll see me laughing – and yet, I am aware we're not all there. And that's still real."

As for Carla, the camp counsellor who discovered the girls' bodies, she felt the need to "help somebody" afterwards, and became a police officer, then an occupational therapist. She has never met any of the parents of the three girls. She says she can't face them, because she's always felt guilty about that night.

"I didn't discover what was happening," she explained in June 2022.

"I haven't had a good night's sleep – the sleep of the innocent – you know, the deep, restful sleep – since 1977."

Feature Image: Disney+.

This article was originally published in 2022 and has since been updated.

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