AMERICAN HORROR STORY
How Nebraska’s raw material – the Charles Starkweather murders – shocked a nation.
CHRISTMAS 1957 WAS coming, and Charles Starkweather just wanted to buy his girlfriend a toy dog. For more than a year, Starkweather – a diminutive 19-year-old trash collector with bad vision, bowed legs, and big dreams of James Dean-style intrigue – had been dating Caril Ann Fugate, a 14-year-old whose affection was the first thing that ever gave him a sense of self-worth. Still, Starkweather’s father warned, the underage dalliance could only mean trouble: “She’s jailbait,” he reportedly told his son.
But it was Starkweather himself who paved their way to prison. When the new night clerk at a Crest petrol station in their hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, refused to sell him that toy dog on credit, Starkweather returned after 3am on December 1 with a 12-gauge shotgun. He forced the clerk to fill up a canvas satchel he’d salvaged on his garbage route, then drive his hotrod down an isolated country road. There was a scuffle, then several shots. It was Starkweather’s first kill; by the end of January 1958, when Starkweather finally surrendered amid the flatlands of eastern Wyoming, there would be 10 more.
Starkweather’s rampage proper began seven weeks later. After evading suspicion for killing the clerk, he arrived at Fugate’s home on January 21, where he quarrelled with her parents about whether or not he could carry on seeing her. He murdered the mother and the father, then bludgeoned their two-year-old daughter, Betty Jean, to death with a shotgun, disposing of their bodies in an outhouse. Fugate always insisted she returned home only after the deed was done, but the pair played house for several days, like husband and wife, mere feet away from the dead family. “They lived like kings… had never had a more wonderful time,” William Allen wrote in his exhaustive 1976 account of the case. “At last, there was nobody to order them around.”
AFTER NEARLY a week hiding out in the scene of the crime, rebuffing visitors by claiming everyone at home had flu, the couple fled. The first stop was the farm of a friend, unceremoniously murdered when he became suspicious. After a pair of teenagers in an old Ford offered them a ride, Starkweather killed them too, stuffing them in a storm cellar and telling Fugate to get in their car. They returned to Lincoln, taking the wife and maid of a steel magnate hostage. Starkweather stabbed them and subsequently shot the husband, just before bands of armed citizens and a unit of the Nebraska National Guard launched a statewide search for the young fugitives.
With the body count now in double digits, the couple stole a fashionable 1956 Packard and aimed west toward Washington state – across Nebraska, through its western badlands, and toward the foot of Wyoming’s massive mountain ranges. Starkweather stopped to steal a Buick from a shoe salesman sleeping alongside the highway and shot him. Just before the couple
could continue, however, a Wyoming geologist and a deputy sheriff wrested Starkweather’s gun away, then gave successful chase at high speed.
A little more than a year later, Starkweather was executed in a Nebraska State Pen electric chair. “She should be sitting on my lap,” he famously said of his girlfriend – a detail Springsteen was careful to include in his song. In a note to his parents, however, he was more charitable to Fugate: “For the first time me and Caril have more fun,” he wrote. “Don’t hate her she had not a thing to do with the Killing.” After serving 17 years, marrying, changing her name, and working as a hospital orderly in Michigan, Fugate applied for a full pardon in 2020. It was denied.
The Starkweather-Fugate case remains one of the United States’ most notorious killing sprees, catapulted to attention by contemporaneous television coverage and since perpetuated by movies like Natural Born Killers and, most obviously, Terrence Malick’s 1973 Badlands. Played by Martin Sheen, the trash collector Kit Carruthers first finds the freckled Holly Sargis – played by Sissy Spacek – standing in her front yard, twirling her cheerleader’s baton. After a secret tryst, they take a ride together into Montana with visions of a Canadian escape, killing everything in their path.
“HE MURDERED THE MOTHER AND THE FATHER, THEN BLUDGEONED THEIR TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, BETTY JEAN, TO DEATH.”