Lori, Michele, and Denise’s case is still open. The most promising suspect, then-33-year-old Gene Leroy Hart, was acquitted due to insubstantial evidence, as People explains. At the time of his arrest, he’d been a convicted rapist who’d escaped from jail four years prior. He was tracked down after a 10-month manhunt, and after being acquitted, he had a heart attack in 1979 and died. All other suspects have since been eliminated.
The Farmers have had to deal with not only the grief of Lori’s loss but also the lack of closure regarding her death. As Sheri Farmer told Tulsa World in 2022 when she turned 77, “I’m at peace, but that does not mean closure. When I sit down for my birthday with my daughters, you’ll see me laughing — and yet, I am aware we’re not all there. And that’s still real. There’s no closure that will change that.”
Bo, convinced of Hart’s guilt, said, “It’s been one day after another for whatever 365 times 45 years is. You take it day by day. And you can either cowboy up and face the next day, or you can fall apart.” Sherri continued, “And we have fallen apart at times … No question about it.” In another Tulsa World article, Sherri said, “It changed us as a family. We’re totally different. Every single person is different. We’ve all been shaped by this. And we’ve been this way for so long.”
