Lori Lee Farmer was 8 years old. Michele Heather Guse, 9. Doris Denise Milner, 10. All three arrived at Camp Scott, in Mayes County, Oklahoma, on June 12, 1977, and that same night they took shelter from a storm in Tent 8.
They did not live to see dawn. A counselor found their bodies stuffed into sleeping bags, scattered through the woods. Two months earlier someone had left a handwritten note inside an empty box: “We have a mission to kill three girls in tent one”. No one took it seriously.
Gene Leroy Hart, a former local American football prospect and prison fugitive, was the main suspect. There was semen, there were clues, there was a trial. In 1979 the jury acquitted him. Months later he died of a heart attack behind bars, serving a sentence for other crimes. Decades later, at Lori’s mother’s request, the sheriff reopened the case. The DNA left no doubt: it was him.