Gene Leroy Hart
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Gene Leroy Hart (November 27, 1943 – June 4, 1979) was an American murderer and convicted rapist and burglar. A Cherokee Native American, Hart was charged with the murders of three girl scouts at Camp Scott in Mayes County, Oklahoma on June 13, 1977, but was later acquitted due to lack of evidence. Before any more evidence could be collected against him, he died from a heart attack in 1979. Advances in DNA testing would confirm him as the killer in 2022.
Biography edit
Before the murders edit
Hart had been at large since 1973 after escaping from the Mayes County Jail. He had been convicted of kidnapping and raping two pregnant women as well as four counts of first-degree burglary.
The murders edit
Less than two months before the murders, during an on-site training session, a counselor at Camp Scott discovered that her belongings had been ransacked and her doughnuts had been stolen. Inside the empty doughnut box was a hand-written note, stating in capital letters, "We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one." The director of that camp session treated the note as a prank, and it was discarded.
At around 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 12, 1977, the night before camp started, a thunderstorm hit the area and the girls huddled in their tents. Among them were Lori Lee Farmer (8), Doris Denise Milner (10), and Michele Heather Guse (9). The girls were all residents of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. They were sharing tent #8 in the camp's "Kiowa" unit which was located the farthest from the camp counselor's tent, and partially obscured by the showers for the camp.
At around 6 a.m. on June 13, a camp counselor on her way to the shower found a girl's body in her sleeping bag in the forest. It was soon discovered that all three girls in tent #8 had been murdered. Their bodies had been left on a trail leading to the showers, about 150 yards from their tent. Subsequent testing showed that they had been raped, bludgeoned, and strangled. A large, red flashlight was found on top of the girls' bodies; a fingerprint was found on the lens, but it has never been identified. A footprint from a 9.5 shoe size was also found in the blood in the tent.
Legal proceedings edit
Hart was arrested within a year at the home of a Cherokee medicine man. He was represented by Garvin A. Isaacs, a local Oklahoma attorney. He was tried in March 1979. Although the local sheriff pronounced himself "one thousand percent" certain that Hart was guilty, a local jury acquitted him.
As a convicted rapist and jail escapee, Hart still had 305 years of his 308-year sentence left to serve in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
Death and DNA testing edit
On June 4, 1979, Hart collapsed and died of a heart attack at the age of 35, after about an hour of lifting weights and jogging in the prison exercise yard.
In 1989, DNA testing was conducted that showed three of the five probes matched Hart's DNA. Statistically, DNA from 1 in 7,700 Native Americans would obtain these results. In 2008, authorities conducted new DNA testing on stains found on a pillowcase, the results of which proved inconclusive because the samples were "too deteriorated to obtain a DNA profile". In 2017, $30,000 in donations were raised by the sheriff in order to do new DNA tests using the latest advances in testing. In 2022, authorities determined that DNA evidence shows the killer was Hart.