Kristin Chenoweth reveals that if she was not at home sick one weekend as a small child, she may not have lived the life she has today. Chenoweth shared in an upcoming trailer how she was supposed to go on a camping trip to Camp Scott with her fellow Girl Scouts in June 1977.
Kristin Chenoweth Shares the Personal Connection She Has to the 1977 Unsolved Girl Scout Murders
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Three young girls, Lori Lee Farmer, 8, Doris Denise Milner, 10, and Michele Heather Guse, 9, were sexually assaulted and murdered on the trip while other campers slept nearby.
Fast forward 45 years later, Chenoweth is returning to her home state of Oklahoma in the ABC documentary Keeper of the Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders, where she and investigators look deeper into the unsolved case.
“I should have been on that trip, but I had gotten sick,” Chenoweth explains in a trailer released May 16. “It has stuck with me my whole life. I could have been one of them.”
The actress adds, “It haunts me every day, but this story needs to be told.”
Authorities arrested and charged local Gene Leroy Hart, who escaped prison in 1973, with the girls’ murders. However, a jury acquitted him of all crimes in 1979, according to the St. Petersburg Times.
And because he had previously escaped prison, Hart was returned to the state’s custody to finish out sentences for other crimes and died two years later.
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And in May of 2022, Mayes County Sheriff Mike Reed said that investigators conducted new DNA exams, which indicated that Hart was likely responsible for the girls’ murders.
“I pray that there’s something that we’ve done that gives the family a second of something that even resembles closure or acceptance or something,” said Reed, according to CBS local station KOTV-DT. “But as far as peace, there is absolutely nothing about this case that has given me one second of peace. Period.”
Chenoweth has added herself how her near-death encounter will forever rattle her. “There’s no closure,” she said. “There’s no pretty red bow at the end. “
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