Misfits, Lovers, and Murderers
Two midwestern teens go on a killing spree, inspiring films and songs decades later
Fugate and Starkweather were fleeing along a road from the farm when another teenage couple, Carol King and Robert Jensen, offered them a lift. Starkweather assured Jensen that the guns he and Fugate were toting were unloaded. They weren't. He marched Jensen to his death in a storm cellar back at the Meyer farm. King was shot and killed, too (it is not clear by whom) but only after a brutal sexual mutilation that some suspect was carried out by Fugate.
Meanwhile, the police had discovered the bodies at the Belmont Street house and were en route to the Meyer farm. Thinking that Starkweather was holed up inside the house, they shot in canisters of tear gas and waited. The house was empty, but police did find Meyer's body and the gruesome remains of Jensen and King.
With news of the latest murders spreading quickly, Starkweather and Fugate headed back to town, driving to Lincoln's country club district and the home of prominent businessman C. Lauer Ward. They shot and killed Ward and fatally stabbed his wife and the maid before stealing the family's Packard and heading out of town. Starkweather took the wheel, and Fugate sipped Pepsi through a straw. There were long periods of silence, Fugate recalled later, interrupted by Starkweather's odd monologues, which bore no relevance to events and seemed to ignore Fugate's presence.
When the bodies in the Ward house were found on January 29, panic hit Lincoln. Citizens called authorities with hundreds of Starkweather sightings, parents pulled their children out of school, and a mob of drunk, gun-toting men formed outside the county court house eager to join the search.
Capture. With the police on their trail and the National Guard mobilized, Starkweather and Fugate decided to make their escape across the Plains, heading for Montana. But they needed a different car. Near Douglas, Wyo., they came upon Merle Collison, a middle-aged shoe salesman sleeping in his Buick along the highway. Starkweather tapped on the window, then began shooting. When a second car stopped, Starkweather fought with its driver. A police car pulled up, and Fugate fled toward the officer. "He's killed a man!" she cried. Starkweather jumped into the Packard and sped off, surrendering not long afterward when the police shot out his rear window and a slice of glass slashed his ear. "He thought he was bleeding to death," Sheriff Earl Heflin was reported as saying. "That's why he stopped. That's the kind of yellow sonofabitch he is."
Fugate and Starkweather were flown back to Nebraska, a state that, unlike Wyoming, allowed capital punishment. Starkweather posed for the cameras like his idol James Dean, in leather jacket and T-shirt, with a cigarette in his mouth. Fugate wore a head scarf and white cowboy boots. In custody, Starkweather made a series of contradictory confessions to the slayings, while Fugate maintained her innocence.
In court, Starkweather claimed that he killed in self-defense and grew angry when his lawyers suggested he was insane. Jensen, Starkweather argued, had started back up the steps of the cellar toward him when he was shot. But the grisly autopsy photographs of the bullet holes behind Jensen's ear told a different story.
Starkweather was sentenced to death in the electric chair at the Nebraska State Penitentiary on June 25, 1959. Fugate was sentenced to life in prison. (Paroled in 1976, she now lives in Michigan.)
Reporter Del Harding was sitting about 15 feet away when Starkweather's sentence was carried out. "As I watched Charlie being jolted up and down like a puppet by the current," he says, "I wondered if such a quick, clean, relatively painless death was adequate punishment for a person who had caused so much pain, misery, and suffering."
William Allen, author of Starkweather: Inside the Mind of a Teenage Killer, writes that before the executioner flipped the switch, Starkweather was asked whether he would like to donate his corneas to an eye bank. "Why should I?" replied the myopic murderer. "Nobody ever gave me anything."
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