The Truth Behind Kristin Chenoweth's Terrifying Link To The Girl Scout Murders Of 1977

In 1977 three young girls were sexually assaulted and murdered at an Oklahoma Girl Scout Camp, as the four-part Hulu true-crime documentary series "Keeper of the Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders" explains. The case was never solved, and the investigation is still ongoing. As the show also reveals, a well-known singer and actress from both stage and screen, Kristin Chenoweth, narrowly escaped a similar fate when she was just a young girl growing up in Oklahoma (via IMDb).

Because of this, Chenoweth leads the true-crime series on Hulu in which she returns to her Oklahoma hometown to try and shed new light on the infamous unsolved murder mystery. In the show, Chenoweth also shares recent updates in the case, as Entertainment Weekly explains. In the trailer for "Keeper of the Ashes," Chenoweth said that the story of what happened to those young girls (via New York Post) "[H]aunts me every day ... this story, it needs to be told."

The three young Girl Scouts who were sexually assaulted and killed in 1977 were named Lori Lee Farmer, 8, Michelle Guse, 9, and Denise Milner, 10, per The Oklahoman. At the time that the murders happened, Gene Leroy Hart, who had recently escaped from jail and who was a known serial rapist, was charged for the crimes but he was acquitted. Grant later died from a heart attack while he was behind bars for another offense. Given this uncertainty, stories have sprung up over the years about what might have happened. Many of those theories are explored in Chenoweth's series.

To this day, no one knows for sure who killed the young girls, per the New York Post. But as is outlined by Chenoweth on Hulu, modern DNA evidence, as well as clues gathered at the time of the murder, may finally help find some answers. The field of possible suspects may now be narrowed down. For this reason, investigators could be closer than ever to finding the real killer. They may also now be able to conclude if Hart was in fact involved, according to Newsweek.

Also covered in the ABC News/Hulu series is the story of how $30,000 was raised from the nearby community as well as the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to retest the DNA evidence several decades later. In addition to Chenoweth, the show features interviews with local law enforcement who worked on the case in the '70s and who continue to do so, the parents of the murdered daughters who never gave up hope of finding the real killer, and a Girl Scout camp counselor who remembers the tragic murders.

Adding urgency to the story for Chenoweth, though, is that she was supposed to be at that same Girl Scout camp in 1977. But she got sick and her mother made her stay home. As Chenoweth also said in the series trailer, available to watch now on Youtube, "My mom said, 'You can't go,' ... It has stuck with me my whole life. I could have been one of them." The Hulu series "Keeper of the Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders" was produced in collaboration with ABC News (via Hulu).