Misfits, Lovers, and Murderers
Two midwestern teens go on a killing spree, inspiring films and songs decades later
Lincoln, Neb.—Charles Starkweather's eyes never worked right. He took grief for wearing glasses, but without them, the world was a permanent blur. At the age of 19, standing trial for murder and asked to identify the guns he had allegedly used in the crimes, the detached-looking defendant refused to put on his specs.
"Charles, would you rather not see what's going on here?" a lawyer asked him.
"There ain't nobody in here that I want to see," he replied.
For most of his short life, few people had taken much notice of Charles Starkweather, either. Slow-witted by most accounts, he was also unreliable and at times combative. "Of all the employees in the warehouse," one of his bosses recalled, "he was the dumbest man we had." Later, when Starkweather worked as a garbage collector, he was known to randomly curse at pedestrians along his route. The only person, it seemed, who took a liking to the short, bow-legged Lincolnite with the speech impediment was 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate, whose parents were becoming increasingly unhappy with their daughter's older beau.
Fugate and Starkweather were an unlikely pair to have masterminded one of the most notorious killing sprees in American history. By the time the police caught them near the town of Douglas, Wyo., 11 people were dead, several towns had been terrorized, and the National Guard had been called out. "They were perfectly matched misfits; dull, cruel, cold killers," says Del Harding, a former reporter who covered the case for the Lincoln Star. To many people they've become folk heroes, which is just disgusting." Indeed, over the years, Starkweather and Fugate have been immortalized in song, with Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska," and in movies, with Terrence Malick's Badlands and inspiring Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.
Hold-up. The rampage began with a robbery. Covering his face with a bandana, Starkweather held up a Lincoln gas station on Dec. 1, 1957, hoping to clean out the register. He kidnapped the 21-year-old attendant, then killed him with a shotgun a few miles down the road. He made off with about $100—much of it in change—spending it on clothes, movies, and presents for his girlfriend.
A month and a half after the killing, with the case still unsolved, Starkweather got into an argument with Fugate's parents, who lived in a small house near the service station. The quarrel escalated until Starkweather ended it with several rounds from his .22-caliber rifle, killing both the parents, then fatally stabbing Fugate's 2-year-old sister with a hunting knife.
Accounts of the killings are plagued with inconsistencies. Starkweather later testified that Fugate had watched him clean up the mess and hide the bodies in a pair of outbuildings. Fugate maintains that she didn't know her parents were dead. Whatever the case, the pair hid in the house for almost a week, watching westerns and having sex. They pinned a note to the door that said, "Stay a Way Every Body is sick with the Flue [sic]."
The ploy worked until there were more visitors than plausible excuses to rebuff them. Starkweather and Fugate gathered up some guns and cash and made a run for a farm in nearby Bennet. One resident of the town, the elderly August Meyer, had always been kind to Starkweather, allowing him to hunt on his land. But when Meyer came out to his farmhouse porch, Starkweather shot him dead.
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