OK so I am new to this case but I did a lot of reading tonight, including a dedicated forum and an excellent 40th anniversary expose that was just published in the Tulsa World last week or two. If any of this is incorrect, please let me know.
1. There was a training week or something before the season in April 1977. A 15 year old long time girl scout who was too old to camp but training as an aide to the adult counselors, had brought a box of donuts. When her and several others returned to a tent or cabin, they found it ransacked. Inside the empty doughnut box was a letter: "kill (repeated again and again). we are going to kill 4 girls". I think many of the media articles mistakenly refer to the mention of three girls in the letter, because that's the number who were eventually killed. But the tents all had four beds and were usually occupied by four girls. Another source I found did say the letter referred to four girls, which makes more sense to me.
2. The letter was dismissed as a prank or hoax and thrown away. The 15 year old aide referred it to the adults, and was told that some other girls had confessed to writing it as a prank. That would be a pretty dark prank but even so it's unlikely because of the ransacking, and so I suspect she was just told that to put her at ease. The adults probably either really thought it was a prank and couldn't prove it, or didn't want to think about the possibility that something more sinister was going on.
3. Over 100 girl scouts arrived at the camp on June 12, 1977. They may have participated in communal events but their individual lots were divided into various sub-groups which consisted of a counselor's tent with three adult women inside, and seven tents with occupancy of up to four girls inside. These were large semi-permanent structures that were stripped down during the off-season, but not moved around or pitched from night to night or troupe to troupe. There was a campfire and latrine area for each of these groups, and perhaps some other small structures.
4. The troupe where the murders took place was not in the back but it was on the edge and most remote part of the camp. The victim's were sleeping in the last tent, furthest away from the counselor's, and literally right up against the dense woods and edge of the property. Due to the poor design of the layout, their tent was not visible to the counselors.
5. The campers and counselors at the site went to bed sometime around 10:30 p.m. but it seems there was still a lot of activity until approx. 1:30 a.m. Possibly some "boy who cried wolf" stuff going on with girls screaming and then giggling shortly after. Others had flashlights on. A few times the counselors had to get out of their tent and go check on the girls to make sure they were alright or tell them to stop messing around and go to sleep. I'm not sure which, but you get the idea.
6. Around 2 a.m. a group of girls in another troupe went to the latrine. As they walked, they crossed path with another group of girls who were returning from the latrine. Those girls said they had seen a man with a red flashlight (emanating red light) in the woods. This second group of girls did not ever see this man or the flashlight, but indeed a red flashlight (emanating red light) was found at the crime scene. The girls are believed to have been murdered sometime between 2-4 a.m.
7. Back at the troupe where the murders took place, one of the counselors was kept up and startled by guttural noises that kept coming from the woods. She woke the other two women sleeping with her and asked if they had heard anything. They had not. She went outside the tent to investigate, and claims that every time she shone her flashlight into the woods, the noises stopped. Eventually, she returned to her tent.
8. I could not confirm but I saw a rumor that one of the counselors in the tent was getting tired of the false alarms and annoyed by the situation in general. Someone claimed she had a boyfriend, and I am very interested to hear about that. Because it comes back to possible theory, that I will got into more detail in a bit.
9. At approx. 3 a.m., at least two girls in two of the other tents heard noises outside and eventually screams. In the tent next to the victims' tent, a flap was opened and a man flashed a flashlight into the tent. A couple of the girls heard screams, including "momma! momma!" While they are afraid, the girls felt like they could do nothing but bury their heads in their pillows and try to go to sleep. Whether the adult counselors heard these screams and ignored them because of the earlier false alarms, or did not hear them because they had fallen asleep, I don't know.
10. At approximately 6 a.m., the counselor who had been constantly checking on the girls got up to walk to the showers. She passed the crime scene, but further down the trail came upon the girls bodies who had been dumped there. Two were bludgeoned and wrapped in their sleeping bags having been the victims of SA. The third was laying out in the open, having been strangled and also the victim of SA.
11. When LE arrived on the scene (approx. 7 a.m.?) the victims were found, their bodies had been dumped just off the path. The main crime scene however was the girls' tent, the inside of which was covered in lots and lots of blood. The evidence that was found is sketchy and differs from account to account, but I saw reports of the red flashlight, rope, tape, gags, hammer and crowbar (the murder weapons used on two of the girls), DNA samples from the SAs, fingerprints, and footsteps and boot markings, some of them in blood.
12. The prime suspect was a local Cherokee man who had escaped from prison after he had previously been convicted of kidnapping and SA. He was a local folk hero among the poor Cherokee community, unjustly so in my opinion, as a man who had already done terrible terrible things regardless of his guilt or innocence in this case. But he was also probably the target of prejudice from the mostly white local LE and the more affluent white Tulsa community who were sending their girls to this camp.
13. It seems as though the state did not have much evidence against the suspect, and there are questions that some of the evidence they did have was planted. Apparently, the Sheriff was arch-enemies with the suspect, having had many encounters with him over the years and even having him escape from his jail twice. The incriminating photos found at his hideout were supposedly seen by a jailer in the Sheriff's office many years earlier--just one example. Meanwhile, there were two different types of shoe-prints found, discounting the one murderer theory. They apparently did not match the defendant's shoe size. The fingerprints did not match or were then deemed to be smudged. Hair analysis used at trial was later deemed to be forensically worthless by the FBI.
14. Eventually, the defendant was acquitted, and the case has never been retried. Later DNA tests have been inconclusive, although they did yield one surprising result--female DNA one one of the victims. It couldn't be ruled out that the DNA was from one of the victims, but it could have also been from a female perpetrator.
Again, if any of these are wrong, please correct me. I will now post some thoughts.
