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The Darkest Night at Camp Scott · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine finding the defining piece of evidence in a forty
0:04
five year old like world famous triple homicide.
0:07
Speaker 2: Right, And you don't find it in some sterile, temperature
0:10
controlled police evidence locker.
0:13
Speaker 1: No, not at all. You don't find it in a
0:15
heavily guarded courthouse vault either. You find it, of all places,
0:19
in a faded plastic ice chest.
0:22
Speaker 2: Yes, shoved into the corner of a retired sheriff's dusty
0:25
residential garage, literally right next to the lawnmower.
0:28
Speaker 1: It's just it's mind blowing. How does a criminal justice
0:31
system break down so profoundly that the absolute truth of
0:34
a massacre has to be treated like contraband.
0:37
Speaker 2: Well, it's a complete inversion of everything we're taught about
0:40
the law. Right, We're taught to view the justice system
0:42
as this self correcting machine.
0:44
Speaker 1: Exactly like if an error is made, the appellate process
0:48
or new evidence a modern science, Yeah, modern science will
0:51
eventually calibrate it back to the truth. But what happens
0:54
when the machine itself is the entity hiding the evidence.
0:57
Speaker 2: That is the exact nightmare we are exploring in today's
0:59
DA Dies. Yeah, we're examining an incredibly dense stack of
1:03
primary sources for you all. Today.
1:05
Speaker 1: We've got declassified investigative files, transcripts from preliminary hearings, private
1:10
informant notes.
1:11
Speaker 2: Notes that were literally hidden for decades, plus the profound
1:15
legal earthquake of our recent Supreme Court ruling.
1:18
Speaker 1: Right, and we know that a lot of you listening
1:20
already know the broad strokes of the infamous nineteen seventy
1:23
seven Girl Scout murders at Campscott in Oklahoma.
1:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a legendary American cold case. So our mission
1:29
today isn't to just you know, read you a Wikipedia
1:32
timeline of the trategyue.
1:33
Speaker 1: We really want to unpack the mechanics of a multi
1:36
generational cover up. We want to understand the psychological concept
1:40
of institutional inertia, how a.
1:42
Speaker 2: State's highest investigative bodies will spend millions of dollars and
1:46
literally decades of time protecting their own pride rather than
1:50
catching the actual killers.
1:51
Speaker 1: And we want to dissect exactly how a completely unrelated
1:55
modern legal ruling accidentally handed the keys to this mystery
1:59
back to the very peace people who were marginalized by
2:01
the original investigation.
2:02
Speaker 2: Because I mean to truly grasp the scale of the
2:05
failure here We have to look past the boogeyman narrative
2:08
that the state of Oklahoma sold to the public back
2:11
in the late nineteen seventies.
2:12
Speaker 1: We have to look at the undeniable forensic contradictions, the
2:15
suppressed confessions.
2:16
Speaker 2: And that terrifying reality that the people responsible didn't just
2:20
vanish into the night. They stayed right there, completely insulated
2:24
by the very badges sworn to catch them.
2:26
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because to understand the absurdity of
2:30
the state's official narrative, you really have to first understand
2:34
the physical geography and like the atmospheric pressure of the
2:37
crime scene itself.
2:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, the setting is crucial. We are in June nineteen
2:41
seventy seven Locus Grove, Oklahoma.
2:43
Speaker 1: Camp Scott. It's this four hundred and ten acre wooded
2:47
retreat sitting directly on the Cherokee Reservation, about fifty miles
2:51
east of Tulsa.
2:52
Speaker 2: And the isolation of this place it's critical to the
2:55
mechanics of the crime. One of the counselors actually described
2:58
the drive into the camp as a cathedral.
3:01
Speaker 1: A cathedral.
3:01
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, Because you take this winding country road, you
3:04
pass the front gates and the ancient trees literally arch
3:07
over the road. It creates this impenetrable green canopy that
3:11
just blocks out the rest of the world.
3:12
Speaker 1: It was designed to be a fortress of innocence for
3:15
the two hundred and thirty young girls who arrived that summer.
3:18
I mean this was pure magic.
3:19
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. And remember this was an era where the
3:22
concept of stranger danger hadn't yet fully permeated the American consciousness.
3:26
Speaker 1: Right, kids rode bikes without helmets, they stayed out until
3:29
the street lights came on. But even by nineteen seventy
3:32
seven standards, Camp Scott was exceptionally insulated.
3:35
Speaker 2: Very structured. You had the Cookie Trail inspiration point. There
3:39
was literally only one paved road in and one paved road.
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Speaker 1: Out, and the perimeter was just dense, unforgiving Oklahoma wilderness,
3:47
crawling with ticks and chiggers. It was not the kind
3:50
of place a casual drifter just you know, stumbles into.
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Speaker 2: Oh not at all, And into this cathedral arrive our
3:56
three victims. They were assigned to Tent seven in the
3:58
Kioi unit.
3:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have eight year old Lorie Farmer, who was
4:01
this fierce protector of her four younger siblings, and she
4:04
was currently obsessed with the book Where the Red Fern Grows.
4:07
Speaker 2: We have nine year old Michelle Does, a competitive soccer player.
4:11
She actually made her mom promise to water her African
4:14
violets before she left oh Man.
4:16
Speaker 1: And then ten year old Denise Milner, a gymnast who
4:19
was actually terrified to go to camp. She was crying
4:22
as she got on the bus.
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Speaker 2: These are young, small, innocent children.
4:25
Speaker 1: So walk us through the logistics of the night of
4:28
June twelfth, because the weather plays a massive role in
4:31
how the state later tried to explain the infiltration.
4:34
Speaker 2: Right it does. It wasn't just a rainstorm. It was
4:37
a quintessential violent Midwestern thunderstorm, the kind where the sky
4:43
turns a bruised purple and the thunder just shakes the ground.
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Speaker 1: Because the storm was so severe, the camp leadership huddled
4:51
the girls in the great hall for hours.
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Speaker 2: Right having them sing songs on the porch, desperately hoping
4:56
the weather system would pass.
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Speaker 1: But it didn't. Eventually, long after dark, they had to
5:00
march these girls back to their canvas tents and.
5:03
Speaker 2: The girls are soaked, The paths are pure mud, and
5:05
the woods are deafeningly loud.
5:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, the sound of the wind thrashing the canopy and
5:10
the torrential rain hitting the canvas tents.
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Speaker 2: It creates a massive auditory smoke screen.
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Speaker 1: Which makes the experience of counselor Michelle Hoffman that night
5:17
incredibly chilling.
5:18
Speaker 2: Oh, it's terrifying. She's out making the rounds in the dark,
5:22
just trying to get the girls to quiet down and
5:24
go to sleep, and.
5:25
Speaker 1: Through all that chaotic noise of the storm, she hears
5:27
something out by the tree line.
5:29
Speaker 2: And it isn't a raccoon, It isn't a branch snapping.
5:33
She later testifies, it sounded distinctly unnatural.
5:36
Speaker 1: She has a flashlight with a red lens on it, right,
5:39
and she points it into the dense trees.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, and here is where the psychological terror really sets in.
5:45
Every single time she sweeps that red beam into the woods,
5:49
the noise instantly stops.
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Speaker 1: Just absolute silence from that specific area exactly.
5:54
Speaker 2: And the moment she turns the beam away, the noise resumes.
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She is experiencing the primal instinct of being hunted.
6:00
Speaker 1: She knows something sentient is reacting to.
6:02
Speaker 2: Her light, but the failure of imagination kicks in. She
6:05
just cannot fathom that human predators are out there in
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the freezing rain.
6:09
Speaker 1: So she eventually retreats to her tent, assuming her mind
6:11
is playing tricks on her, which is a completely normal
6:15
human reaction.
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Speaker 2: Totally normal. So we fast forward to six am the
6:19
next morning. A different counselor is walking up the muddy
6:22
dirt trail, just trying to beat the rush for a
6:25
hot shower before the campers wake up, and she.
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Speaker 1: Looks down the path and sees sleeping bags lying directly
6:30
in the middle of the trail.
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Speaker 2: The cognitive dissonance here is staggering. Her first thought is literally, oh,
6:36
some sleeping bags must have bounced off the luggage truck.
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Speaker 1: Right She cannot process what she's actually looking at until
6:43
she is standing right over them.
6:44
Speaker 2: It's a protective mechanism of the brain. You are in
6:47
a girl Scout camp. Your brain refuses to instantly register
6:51
a massacre.
6:51
Speaker 1: But the reality is that the bodies of Laurie, Michelle,
6:54
and Denice had been carried out of ten seven and
6:56
left on the trail.
6:58
Speaker 2: They had been brutally beaten with blunt instruments, sexually assaulted,
7:01
and strangled. Two of the girls were still zipped inside
7:05
their sleeping bags.
7:06
Speaker 1: But the ten year old Denise was found outside of hers,
7:09
and there was clear evidence of a struggle.
7:12
Speaker 2: I want to stop right here and talk about the
7:13
physical logistics of this because it feels almost like the
7:17
opening sequence of a horror movie, except it is devastatingly real.
7:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, but looking at the mechanics of the crime scene,
7:24
I am immediately struck by the sheer impossibility of a
7:27
loan attacker.
7:28
Speaker 2: Yes, we are talking about an environment with two hundred
7:31
and thirty people, The tents are clustered together.
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Speaker 1: The rain is loud, sure, but how does one human
7:37
being enter a tent, subdue three girls, beat two of them,
7:41
chase down a third who we know put up a fight, bind.
7:43
Speaker 2: Them using multiple different types of complex knots right.
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Speaker 1: And then drag their dead weight in soaked sleeping bags
7:50
nearly fifty yards through thick mud to the trail, all
7:54
without a single counselor waking up.
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Speaker 2: That is the exact analytical pivot that the local law
7:58
enforcement completely fail to make.
8:00
Speaker 1: You're looking at the mechanics and realizing that controlling that
8:03
much chaos in the dark requires coordination, It requires multiple
8:07
sets of hands.
8:08
Speaker 2: But when May's County Sheriff Pete Weaver arrives on the scene.
8:11
He isn't looking at biomechanics or logic. He is looking
8:14
at the sheer panic of an entire state, and he
8:17
needs a villain immediately.
8:18
Speaker 1: While the staff is frantically evacuating the surviving two hundred
8:22
and thirty girls under this fabricated excuse of a water shortage,
8:27
Weaver points his finger directly at a man who wasn't
8:30
even on the radar for this crime.
8:31
Speaker 2: Right, he names Jean le Roy Hart as the prime
8:34
and only suspect.
8:35
Speaker 1: Now I have to play devil's advocate for a second.
8:37
Let's look at this through the lens of Aukham's razor.
8:40
Is it possible that Weaver wasn't acting out of deep
8:43
systemic corruption at this exact moment, but simply tunnel vision.
8:48
Speaker 2: That's a fair question, because if you look at Geen
8:50
Hart's resume, he is a terrifying guy.
8:53
Speaker 1: He was a terrifying guy, which made him the perfect scapegoat.
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Jean Hart was a local Cherokee man who grew up
8:59
about a mile from Camp Scott.
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Speaker 2: He was a former high school football star, which meant
9:03
everyone in town knew his face. But more importantly, he
9:06
was a violent convicted felon.
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Speaker 1: Years prior, he had kidnapped, tied up, and raped two
9:11
pregnant women, abandoning them in the woods.
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Speaker 2: Were sent to the state penitentiary. But in nineteen seventy three,
9:17
four years before the Camp murders, he escaped from the
9:19
county jail.
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Speaker 1: He had been living as a fugitive, utilizing these survivalist
9:23
skills to hide in the dense, cavernous wilderness of eastern Oklahoma.
9:28
Speaker 2: So from Sheriff Weaver's perspective, you have a known convicted
9:32
rapist who specifically targets.
9:34
Speaker 1: Women, who operates in the woods, and who is currently
9:37
hiding in the exact woods surrounding the camp.
9:40
Speaker 2: Right, I can see how a small town sheriff completely
9:42
out of his depth with a triple homicide would immediately
9:46
lock on to Heart.
9:47
Speaker 1: Absolutely. The initial suspicion of Heart is entirely understandable.
9:50
Speaker 2: It's the subsequent weaponization of the justice system to force
9:54
the evidence to fit Heart that exposes the corruption.
9:57
Speaker 1: Weaver kicks off a ten month manhunt that becomes an
10:00
absolute media circus.
10:02
Speaker 2: You have hundreds of volunteers, state troopers, bloodhounds scouring these
10:07
thick chigar infested woods in the miserable heat of an
10:09
Oklahoma summer.
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Speaker 1: It costs the state millions of dollars, and jeene Hart
10:14
completely embarrasses them. He ghosts them.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, he is supposedly attending local high school football games,
10:20
showing up at funerals, just hiding in plain sight while
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the entire apparatus of the state trips over itself in.
10:25
Speaker 1: The brush, and while the state is burning millions of
10:28
dollars hunting a ghost in the woods. The preliminary hearings
10:32
for the case begin to unearth details about what happened
10:35
inside Camp Scott before the girls were killed.
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Speaker 2: And this is where the story shifts from tragic to
10:41
honestly infuriating. The camp director had completely dismissed a series
10:47
of escalating, terrifying warnings.
10:49
Speaker 1: The failure of imagination we discussed earlier wasn't just On
10:52
the night of the storm. Weeks before the camp officially opened,
10:56
counselors arrived to set up and found a massive, disturbing
10:59
effigy hanging in the trees.
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Speaker 2: It was an assemblage of sticks lashed together to perfectly
11:04
resemble a man hanging by his neck.
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Speaker 1: Shortly after, they found a massive three foot slash in
11:09
the back of one of the canvas tents, a cut
11:12
large enough for a grown man to crawl through.
11:14
Speaker 2: Hatchets began going missing from the union kitchens.
11:16
Speaker 1: And then comes the absolute blaring siren that was ignored.
11:20
Someone entered a counselor's tent, stole a box of hostess doonnuts,
11:23
and left a handwritten note in its place.
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Speaker 2: The note was scribbled on a reporter's notepad. It looked weathered,
11:29
like it had been carried around in a damp pocket for.
11:31
Speaker 1: Days, and on the final page it explicitly stated, We're
11:36
on a mission to kill three girls.
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Speaker 2: And the camp director threw it in the trash unbelievable.
11:41
Speaker 1: She chalked it up to a teenage prank.
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Speaker 2: She literally threw away a written manifesto of a triple homicide. Now,
11:48
the sources do note that in the context of nineteen
11:51
seventy seven, teenagers driving out to the country to honk
11:55
their horns and try to scare the girl scouts was
11:57
a known nuisance.
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Speaker 1: Right. The director to this terrifying note onto her pre
12:02
existing mental model of annoring local boys, but.
12:05
Speaker 2: She missed the specific targeted malice of the wording and
12:09
more Importantly, she failed to realize that the person who
12:11
left the note had physically breached the inner sanctum of
12:14
the camp.
12:15
Speaker 1: And unfortunately that exact same confirmation bias. You know, mapping
12:19
new evidence onto a pre existing theory is exactly what
12:22
the prosecution did when they finally caught gene Hart and
12:25
brought him to trial in March nineteen seventy nine.
12:28
Speaker 2: The trial is basically a masterclass in forensic manipulation. The
12:31
prosecution knew their case was highly circumstantial. No one actually
12:34
saw Heart at the camp.
12:36
Speaker 1: So they relied on the cutting edge science of the
12:38
late seventies, which by today's standards is basically pseudoscience.
12:42
Speaker 2: They brought in experts to testify that hares found on
12:45
the duct tape used to bind the girls microscopically matched
12:49
a Native American.
12:50
Speaker 1: They tried to match heavily degraded sperm samples taken from
12:53
Hart's prison underwear for months prior to the crime scene.
12:56
Speaker 2: It was all smoke and mirrors to dazzle a jury, but.
12:59
Speaker 1: The defense doesn't fall for it. Gene Hart is represented
13:02
by a young, brilliant Native American attorney named Garvin Isaacs.
13:06
Speaker 2: And Isaac's bypasses all the pseudoscience and focuses on one
13:10
piece of absolute, undeniable physical evidence. Left at the center
13:14
of the trime scene.
13:15
Speaker 1: Right in the middle of ten seven, pressed into the
13:17
canvas floor in the victim's blood, was a perfectly clear bootprint.
13:21
Speaker 2: The OSBI had cast it and measured it. It was
13:23
a size nine point five.
13:25
Speaker 1: When Garvin Isaacs gets Geneart to stand up in front
13:28
of the jury, he has him take off his shoes.
13:31
Gene Heart wears a size eleven point five.
13:33
Speaker 2: Is Isaac famously thundered at the prosecution. You can't change
13:36
your fingerprints or shrink your feet.
13:38
Speaker 1: Wow, it is a biological impossibility for a man with
13:41
a size eleven point five foot to leave a size
13:44
nine point five bloody footprint.
13:46
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate mic drop. But it wasn't just the
13:49
shoe size that lost the state their case. It was
13:52
the undeniable proof that law enforcement was actively framing Heart.
13:56
Speaker 1: This is where we talk about the sunk cost fallacy
13:59
in law enforcement. Sheriff Weaver had spent ten months and
14:02
vast resources chasing this man.
14:05
Speaker 2: His political career was entirely dependent on Heart being the killer.
14:09
So when the physical evidence didn't fit, Weaver's department decided
14:12
to create evidence that did.
14:14
Speaker 1: The state claimed that a couple of local squirrel hunters
14:16
miraculously stumbled upon three different caves and the sprawling wilderness
14:20
that contained evidence directly linking Heart to the.
14:22
Speaker 2: Murders, evidence including a pair of glasses and some prison
14:25
photographs of women.
14:26
Speaker 1: But during the cross examination at trial, Isaac's gets a
14:29
deputy sheriff on the stand under oath, and the deputy cracks.
14:33
Speaker 2: He admits to the jury that he had actually seen
14:35
those exact prison photographs sitting on Sheriff Weaver's desk before
14:39
the murders even happened.
14:41
Speaker 1: The Sheriff's department had literally taken items they confiscated from
14:44
Heart years earlier, walked out into the woods and planted
14:47
them in caves to secure a conviction.
14:50
Speaker 2: And if we connect this to the bigger picture, this
14:52
trial was never really about the forensic timeline. The sources
14:56
illustrate that it was a powder keg reflecting the deeply
14:59
fractured racecial reality of eastern Oklahoma.
15:02
Speaker 1: To Sheriff Pete Weaver, who was a small time politician,
15:05
a cattle rancher, a guy who ran a local drive
15:07
in restaurant before getting a badge. Jean Hart was a
15:11
personal insult.
15:12
Speaker 2: Weaver was profoundly unqualified to handle a complex triple homicide,
15:17
and Heart's ability to evade him for years made a
15:20
mockery of his authority.
15:22
Speaker 1: Weaver was so infuriated that he publicly stated he would
15:24
shoot Jeene Hart on site, and he threatened to fire
15:27
any deputy who brought the man in alive who.
15:29
Speaker 2: Wasn't acting as a law enforcement officer. He was acting
15:32
as a.
15:32
Speaker 1: Vigilante exactly, and to the Cherokee traditionalists in the area,
15:36
this was a terrifying echo of history.
15:39
Speaker 2: The Native community had a long agonizing history of the
15:42
state of Oklahoma acting as judge, jury, and executioner. They
15:47
were used to the state manufacturing evidence and framing Native
15:50
people to solve inconvenient crimes.
15:53
Speaker 1: So when the prosecution presented a case built on planted
15:56
photos and a physically impossible shoe size, the Cherokee community
16:00
and ultimately the jury saw right through it.
16:02
Speaker 2: The jury takes a mere five hours to acquit Gene
16:05
Heart of all charges, five hours for the most high
16:08
profile murder in state history.
16:10
Speaker 1: Hart goes back to prison to serve out his previous
16:12
sentences for the rapes, and three months later he dies
16:14
of a massive heart attack while lifting weights.
16:17
Speaker 2: He takes whatever he knew to the grave. But the
16:19
critical takeaway from that jury isn't just that they believe
16:21
the cops lied.
16:22
Speaker 1: Jurors gave interviews afterwards stating they were absolutely unanimous in
16:26
their belief that one person could not have physically committed
16:29
this crime alone. The logistics demanded a group.
16:31
Speaker 2: Which is the perfect entry point into the most mind
16:34
bending noir thriller aspect of this entire deep dive, because
16:38
while Sheriff Weaver was busy planting photos and caves and
16:41
hunting his white whale.
16:42
Speaker 1: There was a completely separate, deeply guarded shadow investigation happening
16:47
right under his nose.
16:48
Speaker 2: Enter Paul Smith.
16:50
Speaker 1: I want to talk about this guy because his life
16:52
is basically a Greek tragedy. Paul Smith was not some
16:56
rookie small town cop back in the day. He was
16:59
a hot shot vice squad detective for the Tulsa Police Department.
17:02
Speaker 2: He was brilliant, he was connected, and he was dangerously honest.
17:06
Speaker 1: In the early seventies, Smith blew the whistle on massive
17:09
systemic corruption in Tulsa he testified before a grand jury
17:13
against nineteen corrupt police officers, including the police commissioner, proving
17:18
they were taking payoffs from gambling rings and prostitutes, and.
17:21
Speaker 2: What was his reward for breaking the blue wall of silence?
17:25
The department retaliated. They transferred this elite vice detective to
17:28
the city dog Pound, making his life so miserable that
17:31
he was forced to resign.
17:33
Speaker 1: So by the summer of nineteen seventy seven. Paul Smith
17:35
is a humbled, middle aged local city cop working in
17:38
the tiny town of Locust Grove. He technically has zero
17:41
jurisdiction over Camp Scott, which sits two miles outside the
17:44
city limits.
17:45
Speaker 2: But he is a trained observer. He knows how to
17:48
watch people, and.
17:49
Speaker 1: The day before the murders, Smith is sitting on a
17:52
bench in town watching the buses full of excited girl
17:55
scouts roll through Locust Grove on their way to the camp.
17:58
Speaker 2: But his vice detective instincts kick in when he sees
18:01
what is trailing the buses. It's a dark Dodge super
18:05
Bee muscle car.
18:06
Speaker 1: And Smith instantly recognizes the men inside. They are local criminals,
18:10
guys in their late teens and early twenties, whom Smith
18:13
has personally arrested multiple times for burglary and drug offenses.
18:18
Speaker 2: Now, Smith knows that in a town like Locust Grow,
18:21
you don't solve crimes with microscopes and fiber analysis. You
18:24
solve them by knowing the ecosystem of the streets. You
18:27
solve them with informants.
18:29
Speaker 1: So, within three days of the murders, while the state
18:31
is gearing up to hunt gen Hart, Smith's local teenage
18:35
informants come to him with a highly specific, terrifying narrative.
18:38
Speaker 2: They tell them that two of the men from that
18:40
Dodge super Bee were seen walking north on the local
18:43
highway just after daylight on the very morning the girl's
18:46
bodies were found.
18:47
Speaker 1: The men were barefoot, they were shirtless, and they were
18:49
walking directly away from the geographical direction of the camp.
18:52
Speaker 2: And the intelligence gets much darker. The informant tells Smith
18:57
that one of those specific suspects showed up at his
19:00
house just before dawn.
19:01
Speaker 1: He was completely covered in blood and out of his
19:04
mind on a combination of acid and alcohol.
19:07
Speaker 2: When his terrified sister asked him what happened, he gave
19:10
the classic panicked excuse, I killed a.
19:13
Speaker 1: Deer, But then he sat down in the middle of
19:16
her living room floor with a spoon and two metal
19:19
pie pans.
19:20
Speaker 2: And he went into a dissociative, obsessive loop. He just
19:23
sat there, compulsively transferring water from one pan to the other,
19:27
muttering over and over again. Those little girl scouts, those
19:31
little girl scouts.
19:32
Speaker 1: Oh my god. When his sister tried to intervene, he
19:34
threatened to kill her if she ever spoke about it.
19:36
Speaker 2: This isn't a vague rumor. This is a highly specific
19:39
psychological trauma response observed by a direct family member.
19:43
Speaker 1: Paul Smith takes this incredibly actionable intelligence and he hands
19:46
it directly over to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation,
19:49
the OSBI, the highest law enforcement authority in the state.
19:52
Speaker 2: And what does the OSBI do with a lead about
19:55
a bloody, confessing suspect. Absolutely nothing.
19:58
Speaker 1: They are already finance vally and politically committed to hunting
20:01
Gene Heart, so they ignore Smith completely.
20:04
Speaker 2: But Paul Smith doesn't let it go. He waits, he
20:08
watches the trial, he watches Heart get acquitted, and he
20:11
watches the state declare the case essentially unsolvable.
20:14
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen eighty Paul Smith makes a massive
20:17
play he runs for May's County Sheriff on one specific platform.
20:22
Elect me and I will solve the girl Scout murders.
20:25
Speaker 2: The town elects him, He wins.
20:27
Speaker 1: Imagine the anticipation he is finally the top law enforcement
20:31
officer in the county. He walks into the Sheriff's office
20:34
on his first day. He walks straight over to the
20:36
filing cabinets to pull the massive, multi volume investigative file
20:41
on the biggest crime in state history.
20:43
Speaker 2: He opens the drawer. He finds a Manella folder labeled
20:45
gene Heart.
20:46
Speaker 1: And he opens it and the folder's empty. The drawer
20:48
is empty.
20:49
Speaker 2: Every single piece of evidence, every forensic report, every crime
20:52
scene photograph has been completely removed from the building.
20:55
Speaker 1: The outgoing administration literally looted their own archives to prevents
21:00
from seeing the truth.
21:01
Speaker 2: But Smith is a former vice cop. He doesn't need
21:04
their files. He just rebuild the investigation from the street up.
21:07
Speaker 1: He tracks down the passenger of that Dodge super Bee.
21:11
It's a nineteen year old local guy named Buddy Bristol.
21:14
Speaker 2: And Bristol is currently sitting in a state prison for
21:16
exposing himself to children near the camp just months after
21:20
the murders.
21:21
Speaker 1: Sheriff Smith visits Bristol in prison. Repeatedly, he leans on
21:25
him and eventually he breaks him. Bristol gives a full
21:29
detailed verbal confession.
21:31
Speaker 2: Bristol's confession is a masterclass in answering the how and
21:35
the why of the crime scene anomalies.
21:37
Speaker 1: He claims that he and three other men had been
21:39
awake for three straight days on a massive bender of
21:42
drugs and beer.
21:43
Speaker 2: They are broke. They knew the camp was open, and
21:46
they hatched a chaotic plan to sneak in and rob
21:48
the adult chaperones in the tents, assuming they'd have purses.
21:52
Speaker 1: Full of cash, but the plan instantly spiraled out of control.
21:55
Bristol says they hit Tent seven.
21:57
Speaker 2: He claims two of the men came through the back
21:59
of the tent, where now a massive slash had been cut,
22:01
wielding a crowbar and a roofing hammer.
22:04
Speaker 1: They immediately struck Laurie and Michelle with blunt force to
22:07
keep them quiet, but Denise, the ten year old, managed
22:11
to bolt out the front flap of the tent.
22:13
Speaker 2: Bristol says one of the men chased her out into
22:15
the muddy woods, tied a nylon cord around her neck.
22:18
And kept her alive as a hostage.
22:20
Speaker 1: The confession maps perfectly onto the physical evidence. It explains
22:24
why Denise was found outside her sleeping bag with ligature
22:27
marks while the other two suffered blunt force trauma.
22:30
Speaker 2: It explains the logistical ability to control three victims. Bristol
22:35
claimed that something spooked them, an alarm clock went off,
22:37
where someone made a noise and they panicked.
22:39
Speaker 1: They dropped the girls in the muddy road, strangled Denise
22:42
to finish it, and fled into the storm.
22:44
Speaker 2: Bristol supposedly claimed they drove the Dodge super Bee to
22:48
a nearby river and dumped the vehicle along with the
22:51
weapons and their bloody clothes.
22:53
Speaker 1: This narrative perfectly bridges the gap between the physical evidence
22:56
and the juries. Believe in multiple killers, So.
22:59
Speaker 2: Sheriff Smith takes this verbal confession directly to his local
23:03
district attorney. He wants to offer Bristol a plea deal
23:07
to get the confession officially in writing so he can
23:09
bring murder charges against the other three men.
23:12
Speaker 1: And the DA's reaction is stunning. Wait explain the legal
23:16
mechanism here. How can a district attorney just refuse a
23:19
sitting sheriff's primary suspect in a triple homicide.
23:22
Speaker 2: It comes down to the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion. In
23:26
the American legal system. Police investigate and arrest, but the
23:29
district attorney holds the unilateral power to actually file charges.
23:33
Speaker 1: If a DA refuses to file, the police are completely paralyzed.
23:37
Speaker 2: And in this case, when Smith presents the confession, the
23:40
DA literally jumps out of his chair, shases his finger
23:43
at the sheriff, and says, hell no, as far as
23:46
I'm concerned, the man who killed those girls is in
23:48
his grave and that's where he belongs.
23:50
Speaker 1: Why is it just stubbornness or is there a deeper
23:52
illegal fear here?
23:54
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate expression of institutional self preservation. Think
23:57
about what would happen if the DA approve those tries charges.
24:00
Speaker 1: The state would have to publicly admit that Sheriff Weaver,
24:03
the DA's office, and the OSBI were entirely wrong.
24:07
Speaker 2: They would have to admit they spent millions framing an
24:10
innocent man while a group of local white teenagers butchered
24:15
three children and walked free for years.
24:17
Speaker 1: The resulting civil lawsuits, the perjury charges against the deputies
24:22
who planted the photos, the utter destruction of political careers.
24:26
It would have decimated the county government.
24:29
Speaker 2: The DA used his absolute immunity to shut the door
24:32
on the truth to protect the.
24:33
Speaker 1: Institution, but Smith, to his immense credit, still doesn't stop.
24:37
He goes back to the sister, the one who watched
24:39
her brother compulsively play with the pie pans.
24:42
Speaker 2: He finally convinces her to come forward. She agrees to testify.
24:45
Speaker 1: Smith puts her and her husband in the back of
24:47
a deputy's cruiser to drive them to the courthouse to
24:50
make a sworn on the record statement.
24:52
Speaker 2: And this next part sounds like a mob movie, but
24:55
it is documented history. As the deputy's car is pulling
24:58
up to a toll booth on the highway, a parked
25:00
car suddenly blocks them.
25:02
Speaker 1: Two men in sharp suits step out, flash their badges,
25:05
and physically drag the witness and her husband out of
25:08
the deputy's car.
25:09
Speaker 2: And those men weren't mobsters. They were agents of the
25:12
Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.
25:14
Speaker 1: They take this terrified woman into a roadside room, separate
25:18
her from her husband, and brutally interrogate her. They threaten
25:21
her until she is physically shaking and white as a sheet.
25:25
Speaker 2: Whatever they said to her worked. She and her husband
25:28
immediately pack their bags, flee to Arizona, and refuse to
25:32
ever speak to law enforcement again.
25:33
Speaker 1: I have to pause here. How does a state agency
25:37
legally operate completely out of bounds to intercept a local
25:41
shriff's witness. The jurisdictional mechanics of that are terrifying.
25:45
Speaker 2: Legally they can't, but sunctionally, when the highest investigative body
25:49
in the state decides to act as a rogue entity,
25:52
there is no one left to police them.
25:54
Speaker 1: The OSBI recognize that Paul Smith was hours away from
25:57
putting a sworn affidavit into the public record that would
26:00
destroy their carefully constructed narrative.
26:02
Speaker 2: They weaponize the authority of the badge to intimidate a
26:05
citizen into silence.
26:06
Speaker 1: And it breaks Paul Smith. The Greek tragedy concludes. He
26:11
lost his first career fighting dirty cops in Tulsa, and
26:14
he spends his final years in law enforcement fighting an
26:17
impenetrable wall of badges in Mays County.
26:20
Speaker 2: He leaves office in nineteen eighty four, exhausted, defeated, and
26:25
fully aware that the men who murdered three little girls
26:28
are walking the streets of his town, he becomes a farmer.
26:31
Speaker 1: The case goes dormant for for over thirty years. The
26:34
Girl Scout Murders become a ghost story a tragic Wikipedia page,
26:38
until a completely new generation picks up his hidden torch.
26:42
Speaker 2: We have to jump all the way to the year
26:43
twenty twenty one. Enter Faith Phillips. Her background is fascinating.
26:47
Speaker 1: She was a high powered corporate attorney who became completely
26:50
disillusioned with the transactional nature of the law.
26:53
Speaker 2: She leaves her practice, moves back to the Cherokee Nation,
26:56
and becomes a creative writing teacher at Stigler High School.
26:58
Speaker 1: She starts a podcasting with her students to teach them
27:01
about narrative structure and local history, and they decide to
27:04
investigate the rumors surrounding the Girl Scout murders.
27:07
Speaker 2: Faith posts about the class project on social media, just
27:10
looking for local anecdotes, and she gets a cryptic message
27:13
from a stranger saying, you need to talk to someone
27:16
right now.
27:17
Speaker 1: That's someone is Paul Smith. He is now ninety seven
27:20
years old. He is living in an assisted care facility
27:23
during the absolute height of the COVID nineteen pandemic lockdowns.
27:27
Speaker 2: He knows his time is short, and he is terrified
27:30
of taking the truth to his grave. Faith manages to
27:33
get clearance to see.
27:34
Speaker 1: Him, and this frail, elderly veteran literally hands her his
27:38
entire life's work. The hidden informant notes the names the
27:42
confession he had kept boxed up for forty years. He
27:45
passes away shortly after.
27:46
Speaker 2: It is a profound, almost cinematic passing of the baton,
27:50
and as soon as Faith takes possession of these files,
27:52
it's as if it damn breaks.
27:54
Speaker 1: She is contacted by an independent cold case investigator named
27:57
Jennifer Morrison.
27:58
Speaker 2: Morrison had been digging into the case years earlier, but
28:01
had slammed into the exact same OSBI brickwall that Smith had.
28:05
But Morrison brings a vital, terrifying new piece of evidence
28:08
to Faith.
28:08
Speaker 1: A literal deathbed letter.
28:10
Speaker 2: This letter is the Lynchpin. It was written by a
28:13
turokey man named David Sack. Sack had given the letter
28:17
to a friend with strict instructions to mail it to
28:19
Morrison only after he died.
28:21
Speaker 1: Because he was terrified of retaliation from local law enforcement.
28:25
In this letter, Sack details exactly what his nephew witnessed
28:29
the night of the murders.
28:31
Speaker 2: The letter independently corroborates the exact same names of the
28:34
local men that Paul Smith had in his hidden files, But.
28:38
Speaker 1: The letter adds a horrifying new layer of context. It
28:41
identifies a fourth man, a known local pedophile, and it.
28:45
Speaker 2: Reveals that these men had been sitting in a local
28:47
bar a day before the murders, openly brogging that they
28:50
had found a secret hidden spot in the dense woods
28:52
where they could spy on the young girls taking cold
28:55
showers at the camp.
28:56
Speaker 1: It establishes premeditation, motive, and opportunity entirely so from gene Hart.
29:01
Speaker 2: Armed with this insane corroboration, Faith does what any good
29:04
citizen is taught to do. She calls the OSBI.
29:07
Speaker 1: She reaches out to the special agent currently in chart
29:09
of the cold case, assuming they will be thrilled to
29:11
receive a deathbed letter containing specific suspect names.
29:15
Speaker 2: But the response she gets is instantly hostile. The agent
29:18
gets on the phone incredibly defensive in barks, who told
29:21
you to call me?
29:22
Speaker 1: He dismisses her completely, arrogantly, claiming they've run most of
29:26
this down, which Faith knows is a mathematical impossibility because
29:30
no one outside of David Sex's friend had ever seen
29:32
the letter.
29:33
Speaker 2: The institutional inertia is still alive and well. Forty years later,
29:37
the modern o SBI agents are still protecting the narrative
29:41
constructed by their predecessors.
29:42
Speaker 1: So Faith pivots. She connects with the Tulsa County Cold
29:46
Case Unit. This is a group of seasoned, retired FBI agents,
29:50
veteran homicide detectives, guys who don't care about Mays County politics.
29:53
Speaker 2: They come to Faith's dining room table, they look at
29:56
her massive, interconnected murder board, and they realize she has
29:59
cra the foundation of the case.
30:01
Speaker 1: They work with her for six solid months. They utilize
30:04
modern national databases and confirm that Buddy Bristol's nineteen eighty
30:08
one confession about dumping the Dodge super B in the
30:10
river was highly credible.
30:12
Speaker 2: Why because the VIN number for that specific muscle car
30:16
was never registered, tagged, or insured anywhere in the United
30:20
States after the night of June twelfth, nineteen seventy seven.
30:23
Speaker 1: The car literally vanished from the face of the earth
30:26
on the night of the murders.
30:28
Speaker 2: The Tulsa Cold Case Unit builds a massive, comprehensive presentation.
30:32
They take it to the current Mayze County Sheriff, expecting
30:35
to finally get subpoenas issued and grand jury's convened.
30:38
Speaker 1: But history is a flat circle. After one closed door
30:42
meeting with the Maze County Sheriff, the entire Tulsa cold
30:45
case unit goes completely silent.
30:47
Speaker 2: They stop returning Faith's calls. They dropped the investigation. The
30:51
invisible wall comes crashing down again.
30:53
Speaker 1: Faith is devastated. She feels like she is living Paul
30:56
Smith's nightmare all over again. But then comes the break
31:00
through that changes everything.
31:01
Speaker 2: She gets a phone call from the son of Pete Weaver,
31:04
the original sheriff who planted the photos in the caves
31:06
the Sun.
31:07
Speaker 1: Invites Faith over to his house, walks into his garage,
31:10
and hands her an old plastic ice chest that his
31:13
dad had hidden away for four decades.
31:15
Speaker 2: Faith opens this cooler, probably expecting some old newspaper cliffings
31:19
or trial transcripts. Instead, she finds the holy grail of
31:23
the nineteen seventy seven cover up.
31:25
Speaker 1: Inside this cooler are highly classified original OSBI documents, internal
31:30
departmental letters, and most importantly, the original high definition crime
31:34
scene photographs.
31:36
Speaker 2: These are the exact files that were looted from the
31:38
sheriff's office that Dave Paul Smith took over in nineteen.
31:41
Speaker 1: Eighty and the photos. Faith looks at these original eight
31:45
x ten glossy crime scene photos of the floor of
31:48
ten seven, and she is stunned.
31:50
Speaker 2: Right there, perfectly preserved in the blood on the canvas
31:53
floor are two completely distinct, incredibly clear footprint side by side.
31:58
Speaker 1: One is the size nine point five Vietnam era jungle
32:01
boot with a heavy lug soul that Garvin Isaac's yelled
32:04
about in court.
32:05
Speaker 2: But right next to it, completely ignored by the state
32:08
for forty five years, is the clear print of a
32:10
smooth tennis shoe.
32:11
Speaker 1: It is tangible, undeniable visual proof that legally dismantles the
32:16
state's lone wolf narrative. It proves the jury was right
32:19
there were at least two men standing inside that tent.
32:21
Speaker 2: The physical evidence of the multiple weapons, the blunt force
32:24
trauma from a hammer and a crowbar, combined with the
32:27
ligature strangulation of Denise, aligns flawlessly with the photographic proof
32:31
of multiple attackers.
32:32
Speaker 1: Which in turn aligns perfectly with Buddy Bristol's suppressed confession.
32:37
Speaker 2: But wait, why on Earth. Would a sheriff keep classified
32:40
horrific crime scene photos in an ice chest in his
32:43
garage for forty years?
32:45
Speaker 1: Is this guilt? Is it treating them as morbid trophies?
32:49
Speaker 2: Or is it the paranoid hoarding of a corrupt official
32:52
who knew that if he destroyed them, he'd have no leverage.
32:55
But if they stayed in the official record, his entire
32:58
fabricated narrative would collapse.
33:00
Speaker 1: I lean toward the latter. It is the ultimate insurance
33:04
policy of a corrupt official. He couldn't burn them, perhaps
33:08
out of a twisted sense of historical preservation, but he
33:10
couldn't let another investigator see them.
33:13
Speaker 2: And perhaps the most damning thing in the cooler is
33:15
an internal letter written by Sheriff Weaver himself. In the letter,
33:19
he explicitly acknowledges the contradictory footprint evidence he had, states
33:22
He's going to push this single killer theory to nail
33:25
gene heart anyway.
33:26
Speaker 1: It is written proof of malice.
33:28
Speaker 2: And once Faith has this photographic proof of multiple killers,
33:31
she gets another massive shock. And this one comes from
33:34
the very family that the state tried.
33:35
Speaker 1: To execute for forty five years, the family of Jean
33:38
Leroy Hart has maintained absolute silence. The cultural narrative in
33:43
the true crime world was that Heart was a martyr,
33:46
a framed Native American hero who was tragically victimized by
33:50
a racist sheriff.
33:52
Speaker 2: But then Jean Heart's own nieces, Kim and Megan Baker,
33:56
reach out to Faith. They want to go on the
33:58
record for the very.
33:58
Speaker 1: First time, and they comple depletely dismantle the myth of
34:01
their uncle. They sit down with Faith and tell her
34:04
that growing up they were absolutely terrified of Geene Hart.
34:07
Speaker 2: They confirmed the behind closed doors. He was a violent, controlling,
34:11
abusive predator. The family knew he was not an innocent angel.
34:15
Speaker 1: But here is the revelation that shifts the entire paradigm
34:18
of the case. Kim Baker tells Faith that growing up,
34:21
she overheard the adults in her family whispering the exact
34:24
same names of the local accomplices that Paul Smith had identified.
34:28
Speaker 2: The nieces presented theory that perfectly bridges the gap between
34:31
the state's obsession with Heart and Paul Smith's hidden suspects.
34:35
They believe Jean Hart was involved.
34:36
Speaker 1: They believe he orchestrated the entire crime. Remember, he was
34:39
a survivalist hiding in the woods.
34:41
Speaker 2: He was likely the ones stalking the camp, slashing the
34:44
tent and leaving the terrifying donut note because his psychological
34:48
profile fed on terror and control.
34:51
Speaker 1: But he utilized these local young white men who were
34:54
out of their minds on acid and alcohol to carry
34:56
out the physical massacre with him. He was the ringleader
34:59
of a nightmare.
35:01
Speaker 2: This hypothesis perfectly explains the synthesis of the evidence. It
35:04
explains the multiple weapons, the multiple footprints, and Heart's proximity.
35:09
Speaker 1: To the camp, But it also raises an incredibly important
35:12
question about how modern forensic science is actively manipulated to
35:16
serve institutional narratives.
35:17
Speaker 2: Because in twenty twenty two, a Hulu documentary on the
35:20
case revealed a major update. The current Mays County Sheriff,
35:24
Mike Reid, had the OSBI run modern PCR DNA testing
35:28
on a heavily degraded seamen stain and a single hair
35:31
found at the crime scene.
35:33
Speaker 1: The result was a partial match that pointed towards gene
35:35
Hart's family lineage.
35:37
Speaker 2: And Sheriff Reid immediately goes on television, takes a victory lap,
35:40
and essentially declares the case closed.
35:42
Speaker 1: He tells the public that this partial DNA match proves
35:45
Heart did it and therefore excludes all other suspects, which,
35:49
if we look at the math, is logically absurd.
35:51
Speaker 2: It is entirely mathematically flawed. A partial DNA match placing
35:56
Heart inside the tent does not mean.
35:58
Speaker 1: He was alone, means he was present, which perfectly aligns
36:02
with the niece's theory of him being the ring leader.
36:04
Speaker 2: But a DNA match for Heart does absolutely nothing to
36:08
explain the tennis shoe footprint right next to his boot.
36:11
It does nothing to explain the crowbar and the hammer.
36:14
Speaker 1: It does nothing to exclude Buddy Bristol or the pedophiles
36:17
named in the deathbed letter.
36:18
Speaker 2: It's exactly like finding a single fingerprint of a known
36:21
bank robber on a vault door and then ignoring the
36:24
high definition security camera footage showing three other guys carrying
36:28
bags of cash out the back.
36:29
Speaker 1: The state is using the veneer of modern unquestionable science
36:33
to retroactively validate a nineteen seventy seven prejudice. They're using
36:37
a sliver of truth to slam the door on investigating
36:40
the accomplices.
36:41
Speaker 2: And Sheriff Reed eventually had to publicly backtrack on his
36:44
claim that the case was definitively closed, but the pr
36:47
damage was already done. The state had once again protected
36:50
its legacy.
36:52
Speaker 1: Faith realized a deeply depressing truth. As long as the
36:56
State of Oklahoma held legal jurisdiction over this case, they
36:59
would never ever opened the books to implicate local citizens
37:03
and admit to a forty five year cover up.
37:05
Speaker 2: But the earth under the Oklahoma legal system was about
37:08
to literally shift thanks to a massive, completely unrelated legal earthquake.
37:13
Faith realizes she doesn't need the State of Oklahoma's permission anymore.
37:17
Speaker 1: There is a new sheriff in town. Let's dig into
37:20
the mechanics of this, because it is fascinating.
37:22
Speaker 2: We have to look at the monumental twenty twenty Supreme
37:25
Court decision McGirt to the Oklahoma This is one of
37:27
the most consequential rulings in Native American legal history.
37:30
Speaker 1: The case actually stemmed from a completely unrelated criminal, Jimsey mcgert,
37:34
who argued that the State of Oklahoma lacked jurisdiction to
37:37
prosecute him because his crimes occurred on the Muscogee Creek Reservation,
37:41
which he argued Congress had never officially disestablished and.
37:45
Speaker 2: The Supreme Court, in a five to four decision authored
37:48
by Justice Gorsic, looked at the history and said, you
37:52
know what, He's right, A promise is a promise.
37:55
Speaker 1: They ruled that the United States government had never actually
37:58
disestablished the historic Native American reservations in eastern Oklahoma.
38:02
Speaker 2: The implications were staggering. The ruling declared that roughly forty
38:06
three percent of the entire state of Oklahoma, including major
38:10
cities like Tulsa and small towns like Locust Grove, technically
38:14
remains sovereign Native American reservation land.
38:17
Speaker 1: So think about the implications of that for a second.
38:19
It means the law isn't a static, unmoving thing. Because
38:23
of McGirt, the state of Oklahoma literally overnight lost legal
38:27
jurisdiction over crimes involving Native Americans that occurred on that land.
38:31
Speaker 2: Jurisdiction instantly transferred from the state to the federal government
38:35
and tribal law enforcement. And guess exactly where Camp Scott
38:38
is located.
38:39
Speaker 1: It sits squarely within the historic boundaries of the sovereign
38:42
Cherokee Nation exactly.
38:43
Speaker 2: So Faith Philips realizes she has a legal loophole the
38:46
size of the Grand Canyon She doesn't need to beg
38:48
the OSBI to reopen the case.
38:50
Speaker 1: She doesn't need to fight the Mays County sheriff or
38:53
the local DA. She takes her massive box of files,
38:57
Paul Smith's hidden informant notes, the death letter, and the
39:01
ice Chess photos showing the two footprints, and she drives
39:04
straight to the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation Marshals.
39:07
Speaker 2: The historical poetry at this moment is just breathtaking. Think
39:10
back to nineteen seventy seven. Sheriff Pete Weaver terrorized the
39:15
Cherokee community.
39:16
Speaker 1: He threatened to execute their citizens in the woods without
39:18
a trial. He manipulated evidence, planted photos, and weaponized the
39:22
entire justice system against them to fuel a racial divide.
39:26
Speaker 2: Now, forty five years later, a Supreme Court ruling has
39:30
stripped that very county of its power and handed the
39:33
keys to the cold case vault directly to the sovereign
39:36
Cherokee Nation's own justice system.
39:39
Speaker 1: The very people who were marginalized and framed by the
39:41
original investigation now legally hold the sole power to correct it.
39:45
Speaker 2: And what do the Cherokee Marshals do when Faith brings
39:48
them the files? They actually listen. They don't try to
39:51
protect Weaver's legacy.
39:52
Speaker 1: They sit down with faith, They go through the ice
39:54
chess photos, they read the deathbed letter, and they agreed
39:58
to form a dedicated, act ative task force to review
40:01
the entire forty five year old case. They respect the
40:05
evidence instead of burying it.
40:06
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the core truth of this entire
40:09
deep dive. This story forces us to reevaluate what justice
40:13
actually means in a cold case.
40:15
Speaker 1: Many of the suspects Paul Smith identified are now dead.
40:19
Buddy Bristol is dead. You cannot put handcuffs on a ghost.
40:22
Speaker 2: But justice isn't always about a prison sentence. Justice is
40:25
about acknowledging the empirical truth on the public record.
40:28
Speaker 1: It's about setting history straight.
40:30
Speaker 2: Precisely, as Jeane Hart's niece Kim Baker so profoundly stated
40:35
when she broke her family's silence, I am first human.
40:38
Speaker 1: She chose the agonizing truth over protecting her own family's mythology.
40:42
Because the families of Laurie, Michelle, and Denise deserve the
40:45
whole story.
40:45
Speaker 2: They don't deserve a politically convenient half truth manufactured by
40:49
a corrupt sheriff and propped up by a defensive state agency.
40:52
Speaker 1: Think about the incredible trajectory we've just traveled. Three innocent
40:56
girls murdered in a sanctuary, a botched, biased investigation that
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panicked and focused on a lone wolf.
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Speaker 2: A brilliant whistleblowing cop who knew the exact truth but
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was silenced, threatened, and run out of town by his
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own peers.
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Speaker 1: A literal ice chest full of classified exonerating evidence hidden
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next to a lawnmower for decades.
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Speaker 2: And a Supreme Court ruling that shifted the very borders
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of a state to finally allow that truth to see
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the light of day.
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Speaker 1: It forces us to deeply examine the institutions we inherently
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trust to protect us. The OSBI and local law enforcement
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in the late seventies and eighties expended vastly more energy
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protecting their own reputations than they did hunting the men
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who butchered children.
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Speaker 2: They allowed dangerous, violent men to walk free in their
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own community simply because admitting a catastrophic mistake was too
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damaging to their bureaucratic egos.
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Speaker 1: And I want to leave you with haunting final thought
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to mullover as we end this deep dive, think about
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those accomplices.
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Speaker 2: If Paul Smith's informants, Buddy Bristol's confession and that deathbed
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letter are right, and the physical evidence heavily sekks jest
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they are. These young men didn't flee to a remote.
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Speaker 1: Island, they didn't vanish into thin air. They stayed right
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there in eastern Oklahoma for forty five years. They have
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bought groceries at the local market. They've pumped gas at
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the corner station.
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Speaker 2: They've walked the exact same small town streets, perhaps even
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passing the families whose lives they completely destroyed.
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Speaker 1: They have lived full, long lives, entirely shielded by a
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law enforcement system that was too proud to admit it
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made a mistake.
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Speaker 2: What does it do to the very soul of a
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town when the monsters are hiding in plain sight, protected
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by the very badges sworn to catch them.
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Speaker 1: And it makes you wonder if the investigative machine was
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this deeply broken in Locust Grove, how many other towns
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out there are looking at a clean record, completely blind
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to the killers hiding just beneath the surface.
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Speaker 2: It's a chilling reminder that sometimes the darkest secrets aren't
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buried in the woods. They are buried in the filing cabinets.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. Keep
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questioning the narratives you are handed. We'll see you next time.