Oklahoma Girl Scout murders

On the morning of June 13, 1977, three Girl Scouts — Lori Lee Farmer (8), Doris Denise Milner (10), and Michele Heather Guse (9) — were found dead at Camp Scott in Mayes County, Oklahoma. The girls, all from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, were sharing tent #7 in the camp's "Kiowa" unit, an area located farthest from the counselors' tent and partially obscured by the camp's showers. At around 6 a.m., a camp counselor discovered a girl's body in a sleeping bag in a wooded area outside the tent. Searchers then found that all three girls were missing from tent #7 and subsequently discovered their bodies left on a trail leading to the showers, about 150 yards from their tent. The girls had been bludgeoned, strangled, and raped. A large red flashlight with a smudged, unidentifiable fingerprint was found near the bodies, and a footprint from a size 9.5 shoe was found in blood inside the tent. A landowner near the camp reported hearing significant traffic on a remote road in the early hours of the morning.

Less than two months before the murders, a counselor at Camp Scott had discovered a handwritten note during a training session, stating "We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one," after her belongings were ransacked. The camp session director dismissed it as a prank, and the note was discarded.

The case was classified as solved when Gene Leroy Hart, a Cherokee Nation member and jail escapee who had previously been convicted of kidnapping and raping two pregnant women along with four counts of first-degree burglary, was arrested in April 1978 at the home of a Cherokee medicine man. Hart had grown up about a mile from Camp Scott and had been at large since escaping the Mayes County Jail in 1973. He was tried in March 1979; despite the local sheriff stating he was "one thousand percent" certain of Hart's guilt, a jury unanimously acquitted him. Hart remained imprisoned to serve out his prior 308-year sentence and died of a heart attack in the prison exercise yard on June 4, 1979.

Two of the victims' families later sued the Magic Empire Council and its insurer for $5 million, alleging negligence; in 1985, jurors voted 9–3 in favor of the council.

DNA testing in 1989 showed three of five probes matched Hart's DNA, a result statistically applicable to 1 in 7,700 Native Americans, and testing in 2008 on a pillowcase stain was inconclusive due to sample deterioration. In 2017, further DNA testing was funded through $30,000 raised by the local sheriff. In 2022, authorities publicly stated that this newer DNA evidence strongly suggested Hart's involvement, with Mayes County Sheriff Mike Reed saying he was convinced of Hart's guilt absent new information. Reed said the results had been known since 2019 but were not released until requested by the victims' families. The case remains officially unsolved, and following the 2021 Supreme Court decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation has been investigating new details related to the killings.