When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back The abyss looks back with the eyes of the missing.

It echoes the names of the murdered Lori Lee Farmer, Doris Denise Milner, and Michelle Heather Guse a crime that remains unsolved haunts families, investigators.

And in two Oklahoma, cases, prosecutors who tried to convict and lost asked the question, are now are you going to go out, try to find the real person?

And, of course, they you know, you try to explain.

Well, based on what I know about the case, based on the evidence, they had the real person.

On this edition of Stateline, a pair of puzzles that will likely never be solved, puzzles with too many missing pieces This is State Line, the documentary series Inside Oklahoma, They called me from headquarters early that morning.

And I mean, it just gets up here and found it in a name girl.

And when I got here, to my surprise, I was still the one that was three and it was a homicide.

Two of the girls were from Tulsa and one of the girls was from Broken Arrow.

And I think it I think it sort of shocked the entire area.

You know, that three Girl Scouts could come out here for a peaceful encampment and be sexually murdered.

And two found in zippered up in their sleeping bags and another one nude from the waist down, you know, strangled.

These three were sharing a tent.

One young lady named Farmer, one named Milner, and one named you say, I can't remember their exact ages right now, but it seems to me like we're talking 89, ten, some something like that.

On June 13th, 1977, counselors at a Girl Scout camp in Locust Grove, Oklahoma, woke up to an unspeakable horror.

Eight year old Lori Farmer, nine year old Michelle, you say, and ten year old Denise Miller had been brutally murdered.

It was a crime that sparked a blaze of anger, mistrust, and mystery.

Who would do such a thing?

Authorities would charge a local man, a Cherokee Indian, who'd broken out of the county jail four years earlier.

His name was Jean Le Roy Hart.

He had a history of several felonies he had involving rape and kidnaping He was out on is in Mays County on post-conviction relief, sentencing relief.

And that's why he was in Mayes County.

And and he escaped from the jail there, not once, but twice.

And then at the time of the Girl Scout murders, he had been at large for more than four years.

It was probably the largest manhunt in the history of the state of Oklahoma.

And that went on forever.

There were all sorts of news reports about him being cited at different places Hard to new his hometown terrain.

And he had hundreds of relatives and friends who protected him because of this hard was able to evade authorities for ten months.

Well, I think people that knew him and had been around him as a young man and boy knew that he was incapable of doing something like that.

I think they thought that the authorities had dealt him a bad hand, and it's about as simple as I can make it.

I think they believed the authorities had dealt him a bad hand.

And that he wasn't guilty of any or all of this.

James Maskell You Want Me was just one of those guys that that was 99% put up.

Dale, for one thing, the last day was damn sure put up Dale.

Do you think Gina Rinehart killed those girls?

No, I do not.

Why not?

He wasn't that kind of a guy.

You just had to know him to understand.

Hart may have been well liked, but it was his racial heritage that was a major asset in winning allies.

The Native American is huge.

That that factors bigger, much bigger than any football factor.

The fact that he was a Cherokee and and the fact that there's this area and I don't mean this in a bad way, but it's very clannish Oh, great.

Thanks to the Cherokee Tribe and the Ross swimmer, the chief of the Cherokees.

We're all swimmers said we want to be sure that Gene Leroy hard gets a fair trial.

Garvin Isaacs, a Native American himself, will not say who asked him to represent Hart, but he took the case.

It would be Isaac's first murder trial, and he'd be up against a seasoned prosecutor from Tulsa County.

Betty Fallows was appointed special prosecutor for the case against a gene Leroy Hart.

He was welcomed to Meigs County with bumper stickers that read Welcome to the Heart of Gene Country.

You knew where people stood as you walked in the courthouse in the morning on one side.

Out on the lawn, you'd see the people who were very upset with law enforcement, with the prosecution, the family the the the sage or the farmers or Mrs. Milner and her mother coming in there.

I mean, you know, there you were.

You walked the gantlet to go in there a while.

These kids, it was a big crowd, no question about it.

The but, you know, it was not it was not a very comfortable field.

His mother's property was very, very close to the Girl Scout camp location, the Camp Scott location.

And in this massive effort to uncover evidence, part of it would have involved items that were taken from the Girl Scout camp the same night as the homicides occurred.

Some of these were found in a location called the Cellar Cave.

And the cellar cave was attached to Jean Le Roy Hart during that period of time as a hiding place.

While he had escaped through a there was a witness who had put him there.

But there was also physical evidence in the cave that that not only tied him to the cave, the cellar cave, as it was referred to, but also, in that sense, tied him to the items that had been taken during the same evening or night of these crimes.

Additionally, there was a testimony concerning the hair, as I recall, the and the little Milner girl.

Her hands were taped with tape or duct tape, as I recall, and that a hair found embedded in the tape between the hands of the little girl matched in all characteristics.

Jean Roy Hart's hair.

Now, here is not an absolute means of identification or accept it as an absolute means identification, but when you take that along with other evidence, certainly it has probative value.

And it did in this case, in my opinion, they came with a lot of scientific evidence and a lot of claims and all that was just you know, the evidence that they presented at the trial was based upon science, a lot of it.

And we were able to show that it was not reliable.

How so?

Blood, hair, saliva.

How are you able to prove it?

Well, just to two quick examples.

One, there's thumbprint on the flashlight and it's not Heart's thumbprint.

And then another piece of evidence was that there was a footprint in the blood in the tent, and the footprint was I think a nine and a half.

And Hart's Feet were 11 and a half.

So you can't change your fingerprints or shrink your feet.

So, you know, those are scientific pieces of evidence that fly in the face of the allegation.

The prosecution's case was jeopardized because the evidence was complex and sometimes difficult to understand.

And and you had to absolutely believe that the authorities were telling you the truth about the evidence.

And we felt like there was a lot of manufactured evidence, a lot of sloppiness in the in the pursuit procedure.

Leila Ramsey was one of six women who sat on the jury that heard Hart's case.

She remembers testimony from an Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent that created grave doubts.

Larry Bowles is on the on the stand being interviewed.

I mean, with on that he was talking to the jury and the governor's defense team said we're in a picture taken the day of their when they arrested Jean Hart.

And he said, no, not really.

He said, you didn't take any pictures.

And they said, no, we're sitting here looking at eight, ten glasses of that very man posed like you bagged a big game.

He lied to us.

Jurors returned a verdict of not guilty.

It was vindication for Hart and his supporters.

But Ramsey says the jury's verdict actually had little to do with clearing Hart.

I'm not saying he's not guilty, but I am saying that the evidence showed he was not one person done by themselves.

We all 12 agreed on that, that there was enough evidence to show that it had been more than one person.

We spoke with one of the investigators who helped gather evidence in the Hart case about the allegations that evidence was planted.

He the humanly told state line he never saw anyone planned evidence nor did he hear of a conspiracy among the six investigating agencies to frame Jean Lee Roy Hart.

He said it is accusations like these that keep many involved in this investigation.

Who speaking out publicly, including himself, the SBI, the lead agency in this investigation, refuses to comment on this case because it is still considered open however, the agency has never made another arrest.

And I was asked the question, are now are you going to go out, try to find the real person?

And of course, they you know, you try to explain, well, based on what I know about the case, based on the evidence they had, the real person, you know, I don't believe any DNA testing was used for court purposes prior to 1987 a decade after the trial, investigators still wanted answers about Hart.

They hoped a new technique called DNA testing might help three of the five tests run on material found at the scene matched Hart's DNA.

But still it was not enough to be conclusive.

If three came back and were a match, then so far you would have a match.

But if one or two of those other locations did not match, then that would turn that match into an exclusion, because all you need is one location or one probe.

To differ for it to be an exclusion.

If there was insufficient information on the other two that it was inconclusive or results can be obtained for the other two, then you would still have a match.

But you may not have as highly discriminating of a match as you would if you had five locations DNA testing skills continue to evolve and as recently as 2002 analysts tried again.

So I think there's been about 13 years between the first DNA effort and this one.

And with 13 more years, apparently all the slides and exemplars are so degraded that they could not work with them and could not reach a conclusion or any findings one way or the other.

Whatever Gene Le Roy Hart knew about the murders he took to his grave, Hart died of a heart attack in a prison exercise yard just two months after his acquittal.

Michel Gus says Father called Hart Steph Divine Justice.

Hart's family and friends suspected foul play, so that even in death, Hart remains surrounded by controversy.

The Girl Scout murders shrouded in mystery.

It will never probably never be brought to an end because of people and their opinions and the way they think.

I'm afraid personally that that type of person is still living in our community.

I would just hope we remember Lori Lee, Farmer, Doris niece, Milner, and Michelle had their say.

I hope you remember those names you'll see young girls went to the state fair that afternoon together.

And they were friends.

They often did things together.

They went to the fair during their state fair.

An individual who we believe and who we felt like you show was rolling us along, approached them, asked them if they wanted some part time employment in assisting him in unloading some stuffed animals.

Which obviously he said had to do with the fair.

The girls, as they should have done, called their parents, asked their parents if it was OK, if they accepted the employment they were supposed to be over.

But before dark, the parents both allow them to do that.

He also the male individual, the adult recruited two young boys about the same age as the girls to assist.

All four of the children left the fair grounds in a in a car with four, we believe.

Roll us along.

They went to a truck stop with with a thought being the information being that the truck with the stuffed animals were there that they needed to help unload.

There was no truck there to no one's surprise.

Roll us along indicated to the boys they should get out of the car remain at the truck stop in case the truck showed up and he and the two girls would go to a secondary truck stop and see if by chance there had been some mistake about the agreed upon location as of us along drove off, leaving the two boys behind.

Our evidence show that the two girls looked out the back window of the car, waved goodbye to the boys, and that was the last time they were ever seen alive when 13 year old Charlotte Kinsey and send a pallet went missing from the Oklahoma State Fair, authorities suspected foul play.

They quickly came up with a suspect, a roving carnival worker named Donald Corey.

The disappearances and Cory's picture made the National News.

Police say the man dropped the boys off of the western Oklahoma City truck stop, but Corey had a solid alibi.

It was a setback that would cause this case to languish for four years.

Then, January 1985, Oklahoma City police come up with a new suspect.

Another social worker named Voyle Russell Long, Strong, was serving a life sentence in Wyoming for kidnaping a young girl.

Their funeral home and county D.A.

Bob Macy charged him with Kinsey and Pallets murder.

Ray Elliott would be lead prosecutor in that case.

The bodies weren't found.

They still haven't been found to this day.

So the initial challenge was to was trying to to prepare and present a case to a judge and ultimately a jury to prove that the girls were dead, absent bodies.

Oklahoma City Attorney Mike Galloway represented long.

He was pure garbage, trash.

He was a convicted child abductor.

But simply because he was a piece of trash didn't mean he was guilty.

Of this crime.

The composite drawing, as I say, was given by one of the boys.

And then there was a second composite drawing.

It was compiled by an adult.

When you when you compare the two it was almost like an overlay.

Neither neither individual had talked to the other when prior to giving the the composite drawings, we obtained a photograph later of roll, Russell Long in a cowboy hat almost identical to the composite drawings and almost identical to the one that was described by the witnesses Galloway's first order of business was to destroy the credibility of those composites.

So I went out and hired a bunch of guys with scruffy beards and hats just like that set them all over the courthouse.

So at any one time there's probably 20, 30 guys in that courthouse that look just like Royall Russell Long.

Any one of them fitting the composite Galloway's plans weren't the only people who resembled the composites.

So did Donald Corey, the first suspect in this case.

And in a news report filed by Channel Nine in Oklahoma City, you can see a man in the background of the reporters stand up.

The man is also wearing one of those distinctive hats.

But prosecutors had more evidence against long than composite drawings and headwear.

The car that rolled us along left the fairgrounds and with the girls was a rental car.

Years later, when when we when the case was brought to the DA's office and we filed charges, we found the rental car in the trunk.

The trunk mat had been repainted.

It had been spray painted black.

The people at the rental car facility said it was not painted when Ronald Russell Long rented it.

Embedded in this new black paint in the mat in the trunk of that car were blond hairs that were stuck after roll rust along was was charged with the case.

A search warrant was executed on a trailer that he had lived in prior to his incarceration in Wyoming.

The trailer was also in Wyoming, contained in that trailer a mobile home was a baggie sandwich baggie containing two locks of blond hair.

Again, our chemist compared those and determined that in her opinion, they were microscopically consistent with the hair that was in the trunk of the car, embedded in the paint and scalp hairs from Charlotte Kinsey, our blond headed victim at best.

Ethically, at the time, forensic examiners could simply say it was consistent with as opposed to matched.

And when it found out that, it was also consistent with many, many other hair samples from total strangers their case kind of faded away a little bit right there.

We also at that time used a system of what was called luminol, which was certainly one, if not the first.

It was searched and one of the first times it was used in Oklahoma County, outlines of two small bodies on that mat luminescence.

Once the substance was placed on the mat, as it turns out, produce will also cause the luminol to react positively, same as blood got the forensic expert to admit that he found out that there had been produce and whatnot hauled in that truck.

They had had a photograph taken of the blood splotches in the car, and a forensic artist had drawn a picture of how two bodies could have been placed in the trunk of the car.

They were given the bodies pressure points on the carpet, and if they had been bleeding, the how that would have looked but that was sort of sort of far fetched.

I mean, I was sort of like looking at a row sharking blood and saying, what do you think this represents even giving strength to the fact that it was police who were experienced in this saying this.

It was it was a little bit beyond it got to that reasonable doubt, juror Stephens state and paid close attention to the evidence submitted by prosecutors back in 1985.

But he'd never get to make a decision after hearing all the state's evidence, Judge Charles Owens dismissed the case against Royle Russell Long.

I simply felt that there was no proof that the girls were were dead and further no proof that if they were that he the defendant had long caused their death.

And if we had gone in further that there was malice aforethought shown proving and those things it was was nothing there.

After the case against him was dismissed, Long went back to Wyoming to serve out his life sentence for kidnaping.

He died eight years later, but he isn't gone.

Ray Elliott is still haunted by Long's memory.

But what more could you have done I don't know.

I asked myself that question many times since then and probably will forever I don't know.

I think we've turned over every stone.

Obviously we didn't.

The judge disagreed.

That was his job.

He did his job.

We disagreed.

But we accepted it.

And I thought, well, I felt and still feel that perhaps a little further investigation might have uncovered more evidence and this this might have been avoided.

Perhaps more time was needed or perhaps too much time was taken.

Consider this.

The Oklahoma County DA's office did not get its hands on this case until four years after Senator A and Charlotte Kenzi disappeared.

That's how long it took the Oklahoma City Police Department to gather its evidence.

Now, this is still considered an open case, so the department will not discuss it.

But we learn something new from Mr. Elliott, something we'd never heard before.

It turns out Donald Corey was not the first suspect in this investigation.

Instead, it was Royal Russell Long within the first day or two of the girl's disappearance, Royal Russell Long's name surfaced.

There were some what we now know was some erroneous information given that discounted him as a suspect.

Initially, Elliott says he doesn't know what erroneous information made police discount long as a suspect early on in their investigation.

Then.

But by the time he got the case, the lead prosecutor felt it was time to move.

Any time a case sits inactive over a period of time, particularly when you get into years, is this one dead?

That's a that's a problem from prosecution standpoint.

I would have loved to have gotten in the case the day after the girls disappeared or the day the girls disappeared.

I've always said that to me.

The missing child cases and the kidnaping cases are the worst cases that there are for parents, because the parents never know.

Dan Vogel is a former FBI agent and profiler.

He's faced his share of heartbreaking crimes and worked to find those responsible for committing them.

It's much easier because we have a tremendous array of new technology that we can utilize for these cases, primarily the one of the biggest breakthrough breakthroughs that we've seen in criminology is the use of DNA, being able to identify people through DNA.

It's just a tremendous it's probably one of the greatest breakthroughs in criminology since fingerprinting.

But would it have helped solve Oklahoma's two most notorious unsolved crimes?

Remember the blond hair found in Royal Russell Long's trailer?

Investigators believed it belonged to one of the girls who disappeared from the state fair, but they couldn't prove it.

Since that predated DNA testing.

That would have all been microscopic hair comparisons, which is, you know, basically two or more examiners evaluating a known and a questioned sample and comparing them and seeing what characteristics they had in common, and then determining whether or not there was enough information there to consider that a match or an exclusion.

How reliable was that?

Well, it's led to DNA testing has contradicted hair comparisons and several cases nationwide Ray Elliott asked investigators to use the new DNA test to check those strands of hair.

But because no roots were attached to the strands tests could not be conducted.

As for the gene, the Roy hard case, any DNA material that might have yielded answers has deteriorated.

The gathering of evidence is absolutely critical, because if you don't gather the evidence properly and you don't maintain the chain of custody, it doesn't matter how good or how sure you are that you've got the right person.

If you can't convict that person, then you've wasted all that time and effort.

It was it was like there had been a slap in the face of all those people that came forward and and tried to make the right thing happen.

I was very saddened, very sad.

And I think most Oklahomans see that trial is a case that the jury system worked.

It protected a guy who was wrongfully accused of something he didn't do.

And, of course, that's what the jury system's all about.

I wish I could turn back the clock and maybe do the case differently.

I'm sure all of us wish we could.

But the fact of the matter, it came out like it did.

That doesn't change the fact that two families have been torn apart.

It doesn't change the fact that two mothers and two dads don't have a kids anymore.

That changed it at all.

I'm convinced that he killed them I would like to this day to perhaps make up for what I didn't give the family and form of a conviction.

I'd like to be able someday to find the bodies and be able to let the families put them to rest in a proper manner, even though attorneys on each side of these cases consider them closed.

The murders of Lori Farmer, Michelle Gusty endorsed Milner and the disappearance of Charlotte.

Kenzie and Cindy Pallett are still considered open cases men and women are still searching for the missing pieces for their home to me, the missing child cases and the kidnaping cases are the worst cases.

If you would like a VHS copy of this state line program, send a check or money order for 2295 to the PTA Foundation Post Office Box 14190 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73113 or two order with a credit card call one 800 8796382 during regular business hours.