New DNA Tests Planned In 1977 Girl Scout Killings
Officials: Novel Test May Bring Closure To The Families


OKLAHOMA CITY -- A DNA sample taken from one of three Girl Scouts who were sexually assaulted and killed nearly three decades ago will be tested in an attempt to bring closure to the case.

Samples from victims are generally a combination of both male and female DNA, with the greater amount being female, said Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Jessica Brown. A new test allows the male part to be isolated from the female, Brown said.

"It's very specific to the male," Brown said.


When the private laboratory returns the results -- later this week at the earliest -- OSBI biologists would then prepare a report to be given to Mayes County District Attorney Gene Haynes, Brown said. Haynes is the only person allowed to release the findings, Brown said.

Haynes did not immediately return a telephone message left at his office Wednesday.

Brown said the OSBI received a federal grant to conduct additional tests on cold cases, and chose to use part of it to test DNA related to the unsolved killings of three Girl Scouts -- Lori Lee Farmer, 8, of Tulsa; Michele Guse, 9, of Broken Arrow; and Doris Denise Milner, 10, of Tulsa -- who were found dead June 13, 1977, at Camp Scott near Locust Grove.

Ideally, Brown said the testing would provide a profile that could be matched to a person by using a computer-based database. A certain amount of DNA is needed to create a profile.

"We had very little left, but we think enough for this testing," Brown said.

Gene Leroy Hart, who was escaped from prison at the time of the killings, was acquitted on murder charges in the slayings in 1979 and died later that year of a heart attack after being returned to prison.

An FBI test on DNA samples from a semen-stained pillowcase in 1989 were inconclusive, and an attempt to test the pillowcase again in 2002 determined there was no evidence left on it.

This story always freaked me out. Can't believe no one's turned it into a movie.

There was a book published.


Someone Cry for the Children: The Unsolved Girl Scout Murders of Oklahoma and the Case of Gene Leroy Hart by Michael & Dick Wilkerson. Dial: New York (1981)

I am in disbelief that the evidence was going to be trashed and Lori Farmer's mother took her daughter's murder evidence so it could be saved! Hopefully, DNA will help to set her soul free.....God Bless these families, who, after 30 years, still do not have any answers to who murdered their daughters.



====================Sheri Farmer waits for the answer.

"As Lori's mother, I felt like, up until the time she left to go to camp, I knew everything about her life. I washed her hair. I took her to school. And now, in death, I don't know what happened to her," Farmer says.

In a closet, seldom opened, Sheri Farmer has much of the evidence collected from the crime scene. Investigators were going to throw it away. Her daughter's suitcase is still stained with the dustings of the fingerprint powder.

"Here's her shirt," Farmer says. "So tiny; so tiny."

Time has turned the blood brown.

Sheri believes the killer left part of him self somewhere in this evidence, and if the current DNA being tested isn't conclusive, someday somehow the murders will be solved.

"I think there's something in there that has the answer. I think there's a reason I kept it. I think there's an answer," Sheri Farmer says.

But there is no answer that will compensate for the loss of a daughter.

"It's when I'm watching my other children with their children and my heart aches to know that Lori didn't get to experience that," Sheri says.

The results of the DNA testing should be back by the end of this week. OSBI criminologists will analyze the report before forwarding them to Mayes County DA, Gene Haynes.