Nebraska Executes 20 Yrs Old Killer Charles Starkweather-He Murdered 11 People in 8 Days With Girl..

On June 25th, 1959, just after midnight, the state of Nebraska put Charles Starkweather to death in the electric chair at the state penitentiary in Lincoln. He was 20 years old. He died for the murder of a 17-year-old boy named Robert Jensen, one of 11 people he had killed across two states in 8 weeks that winter. 11 dead.

 a gas station attendant, a whole family in their own home, an old farmer on his land, two high school students who stopped to help, a wealthy family and the woman who kept their house, a traveling salesman asleep by the road, some he had known his whole life. Most he had never met before the moment he killed them. Charles Starkweather was a 19-year-old garbage collector from the poor side of Lincoln.

 short, red-haired, bow-legged, halfblind, laughed at his whole life and carrying a lifetime of that inside him. Beside him for those eight days was his girlfriend, Carrill Anne Fugate. She was 14. And what she was to the killings, a willing partner or a terrified prisoner, is a question the courts answered, the books argued, and no one has ever fully put to rest.

The murders that winter did something to Nebraska that had never been done before. A state capital of 120,000 people shut itself down. Businesses closed. Gun shops sold out. 1,200 National Guard soldiers stood on the corners of Lincoln with rifles. Fathers walked their children to school and stood outside with guns waiting for the bell because two teenagers were somewhere in the city killing without a pattern and no one could say who was next.

 This is the complete story of Charles Starkweather and Carol Anne Fugate. From a mocked half-blind boy on the poor side of Lincoln to a filling station on the Corn Husker Highway, a house in Belmont, a farm at the end of a dirt lane, a storm seller by an old schoolhouse, a mansion on the hill, and a roadside in Wyoming, all the way to the execution chair at the end of it.

 If this is the kind of documentary you come to this channel for, subscribe right now and turn on your notifications. You won’t want to miss any part of this one. Charles Raymond Starkweather was born on November 24th, 1938 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was one of seven children born to Guy and Helen Starkweather.

 The family lived on the poorer edge of the city in a rented house on a plain street back when Lincoln was still a place of wide flat lots, rail yards, and small churches. Guy worked as a carpenter and handyman, but his hands had started to stiffen and swell with arthritis, and the work came and went with his health and the weather.

 Helen waited tables to keep money coming in. The family was poor the way many Nebraska families were poor then. They counted every grocery bill and made one roast last several days. Still, the home held together. People who knew Guy and Helen called them decent parents who cared for their children and asked for nothing more than steady work.

 Charles was born with a small problem in his legs. His knees bowed outward, and it gave his walk an odd rolling off-center look from the time he first stood up. To a doctor, it was minor. To a boy, it was permanent. He was a quiet baby and he grew into a quiet little boy. He watched more than he talked.

 He stayed close to his brothers and felt at home in the yard, the alley, and the open ground at the end of the block. There was one strange thing in the family name. Generations back, an ancestor had held a seat in the United States House of Representatives. That old bit of importance did nothing for the grocery money.

 It sat oddly against a rented house and a father whose hands hurt. Lincoln in those years was a city a boy could read just by walking it. To the southeast were the wide shaded streets where the money lived with deep lawns, brick homes, and iron fences. Then there were the flat plain neighborhoods where the stark weathers lived closer to the tracks, the plants, and the smell of the stockyards when the wind came from the south.

Charles moved through both parts of the city as he grew, running errands and making deliveries. He learned the map of Lincoln the way poor children learn it. Standing outside the good houses and looking in. He was close to his father in the early years. Guy taught him what a handyman knows, how to hold a tool, set a nail, and fix a small thing.

 But Guy’s temper could turn. The pain and the short money wore him down, and the house had its rough nights. Charles took those nights in quietly. He was not a boy who cried easily or complained. He held things inside and carried them. By the time he was old enough for school, two things set Charles apart from the other boys on the block.

 And both were the kind of thing other boys noticed and used. The first was the bow of his legs, which made him look smaller and younger and a little funny when he ran. The second was his speech. When he got nervous or excited or when someone told him to read out loud, his words caught and stuck.

 It was a stammer that grabbed certain sounds and would not let them out. At home among his brothers, it barely showed. In a room full of strangers, it showed right away. The family moved more than once in those years, following the work and the rent, but always within the same part of the city. They never moved up the hill to the shaded streets.

 Charles knew where he stood on the map of Lincoln, and he knew it early. He was a boy of normal size with an odd walk and a catch in his voice. Born into a house that worked hard and stayed poor in a town that made its rankings plain for anyone to see. By every account from the people who knew the family then, he was a well- behaved boy. He obeyed at home.

 He was gentle with the younger ones. He loved the outdoors and anything mechanical. Then he turned five and Helen walked him up the steps of Saratoga Elementary and left him in a room with 30 other children. The classroom took the two things that set Charles apart and put them on display in front of everyone at once. In his first days at Saratoga Elementary, the bow of his legs and the catch in his speech became public property.

 And the other students did what students that age do with a difference they can see and hear. They made fun of the walk. They copied the stammer, stretching out the stuck sounds and laughing when the real word finally came. Charles sat there and took it and something in him closed. He put it in hard, flat words. He said his heart turned black with hate and rage on that schoolyard, and he made himself a private promise about the people who left.

 He was small, and he could not answer them with size, so he answered with silence and with a cold pile of resentment that he fed and kept. There was a second cruelty in his early schooling, and the other students had nothing to do with it. Charles could not see. His eyes were badly nearsighted, weak enough that the front of the room was a blur.

 To him, that blur was simply what the world looked like. Nobody tested him. The teachers watched a boy who could not follow the board and marked him down as slow. His parents did not buy him glasses. Money was part of it, and a certain hardness was part of it, too. So, he sat in rooms he could not read, judged dull by the adults and funny by the children, and he learned to expect nothing from either.

 Everyone called him a poor student. He was not a poor student. He was a half-blind one. But nobody drew that line for him. And he did not draw it for himself. He simply understood that the classroom was the place where he was small and stupid and laughable. And he came to hate the classroom and everyone in it.

 The hate was not loud. He did not act out. He went quiet and watchful and stubborn. And he waited for the parts of the day that belonged to him. The part that came to belong to him was physical. As he moved up through the grades and into Irving Junior High, his body caught up with his anger. He grew strong through the shoulders and arms.

 In games, in gym class, in anything that came down to strength and nerve, he was not the small funny figure from the reading circle. He was hard and quick and willing to hurt. He began to fight. The boys who had mocked his legs and his stammer found out that the odd little kid came at them without fear and did not stop when a normal fight stopped.

 He built a reputation with his fists. And that reputation was the first thing about him that other children respected. So he leaned into it. The boy who had been bullied learned to bully and the trade suited him. By the time he reached Lincoln High, he had the whole arrangement turned around. The rage that had gathered in silence had somewhere to go.

 He picked at anyone he decided he did not like, and the list of people he did not like grew until it covered almost everyone he met. He sized up other boys against himself and resented any who came out ahead. Anyone taller, better looking, or better dressed, and he made it his daily business to cut them back down. Then a movie came to Lincoln and changed how he saw himself.

It was called Rebel Without a Cause, and the young star in it was James Dean. Charles sat and watched Dean move through the picture with a slouch, a squint, and a hurt kind of defiance, and it matched something already sitting inside him. Dean was small. Dean was angry. And on that screen, being small and angry looked good.

 To a boy who had been laughed at his whole life, the picture said something simple. Your anger is not a flaw. It is a style. He took it as instruction. He combed his red hair into Dean’s shape. He put on the jeans, the boots, and the leather jacket. He learned the walk, the cigarette, and the set of the jaw. He took up the idea the young star seemed to carry, that a life should be fast and short and unbothered by whatever came after it.

 So, he was a school boy in a poor part of Lincoln, playing at being a rebel from the pictures, carrying a real load of hate under a borrowed pose. The classroom had never given him one thing he wanted. He had stopped asking it to. He was 16 when he walked out of Lincoln High for the last time and did not go back.

 What waited for a 16-year-old with no diploma and a short temper was labor. And Charles took it where he found it. There was no trade for him, no shop, no craft handed down. His father’s hands were too far gone to teach much of anything now. And the jobs a boy like him could get were the jobs a boy like him could also lose. For a while he unloaded trucks at a Western Union newspaper warehouse, hauling bundles of papers in the early dark.

 It paid little and led nowhere, but it put money in his pocket for the first time in his life. He was strong enough for it, and the work was simple, and simple suited a young man who had spent his school years being told he was dull. on the loading dock. Nobody asked him to read out loud. Nobody measured his mind.

 He lifted what needed lifting. That and at that he was as good as anyone, but he was restless and proud and easy to insult. And jobs built on showing up and taking orders did not hold him. He drifted into hauling garbage, riding the truck through Lincoln’s neighborhoods for about $7 a day. One of the men who came at dawn to take away what the city threw out.

 The route ran through every part of town, and that was the part of the job that marked him. Day after day, the truck carried him up into the shaded southeast streets, the good streets. He stood at the back of the houses where the money lived and lifted their cans, and he looked at their gardens, their cars, and their wide, clean windows. He had known since he was small that Lincoln was divided.

 Now the division was his wage. He handled the leings of people who had everything he did not. People who never spoke to him and did not know his name. He came home each night smelling of the work to a rented room and a plate of whatever there was. The gap he had felt as a watchful boy was now something he tasted every morning.

 His own writing from these days carried that bitterness under everything. a settled belief that the people in the good houses had been handed a world that was closed to him behind a door he had done nothing to deserve. He put it bluntly. The more he looked at people, the more he hated them because he could see there was no place for him among the people he knew and no place among the people he served.

 He felt pushed to the outside of every room. Instead of fighting his way in, he started treating the outside as his own country. a place where the rules of the good houses could not reach him. The job wore at him, and he wore at the job. He was slow to obey and quick to bristle, and he collected warnings and hard looks from the men who ran the cruise.

 Money ran through his hands. Rent came due and went unpaid. He fell behind on the small room he rented, and that pressure sat on him along with everything else. His nights were not clean, either. He described sleep broken by dreams that frightened him and waking pictures that were not the ordinary tiredness of a working man, strange vivid things that came and would not be argued with.

 He did not take this to anyone. He was not a young man who took anything to anyone. He kept the nights to himself the way he had kept the schoolyard to himself. So this was what he had at 19. A body that worked, a mind everyone had misjudged and nobody had corrected. a wardrobe copied off a movie star, a wage that barely covered a room, and a hard settled belief that the world had cheated him, owed him, and would never pay.

 He had the James Dean pose and none of the glamour. He had the anger and none of the outlet his fists had given him back in school. He was a strong, sullen, half-blind young man from the Lincoln Flats, riding a garbage truck past mansions, certain he deserved more, and just as certain nobody would ever hand it to him.

 He wanted one thing that was his, something the good houses could not take, the foreman could not dock, and the classroom had never offered. Then his friend Bob von Bush mentioned there was a girl he ought to meet. A dark-haired girl from the Belmont neighborhood named Carol Anne Fugate. Carol Anne Fugate was born on July 30th, 1943.

 And she grew up in Belmont, one of the plain neighborhoods on the north and west side of Lincoln, where the houses were small and close and the yards were bare and the families counted their money the way the Stark weathers counted theirs. She lived in a one-story frame house with her mother, her stepfather, and the youngest of the household in the ordinary crowding of a working family’s home.

 Her mother was Bartlett, 36, a woman who had known hard use and kept going, holding the household together across the daily wear of low wages and close quarters. Her stepfather was Marian Bartlett, 57, a laborer who had come into life and taken on her family, a watchman and worker who did the unglamorous jobs that kept a poor house fed.

 The youngest of the family was Betty Jean, Belda and Marian’s daughter, the small, bright center of the little house, still in the earliest part of life, cared for by everyone under that roof. Carol was not the only daughter. She had an older sister, Barbara, already grown and out of the house and married, which left Carol as the girl at home, half looking after the youngest, half straining against the walls of a household that had little room and less money for a teenager’s wants.

 She was in junior high, a small girl, dark-haired, quick, given to the ordinary hungers of her age, for attention, for a life larger than Belmont, for someone to belong to who belonged to her back. The Bartlett House ran on Marian and work and on the routines every tight household keeps. There were meals to cook and wash to do.

 There was the youngest of the family to look after. There were bills to hold off for another week. Carol did her share of it, and she complained about it the way any 14-year-old complains about chores. She went to school, came home, helped out, and wished she were somewhere else. on her street. She was nothing unusual. Her family was not rich and not desperate.

 She was one of a thousand Lincoln teenagers going back and forth between a crowded house and a crowded classroom, waiting for her real life to start. What set her slightly apart was how young she looked and how much older she wished to seem. She was small and slight, and strangers took her for younger than she was, and she pushed against that, doing what she could to look and act beyond her years.

 She wanted to be taken seriously, to be treated as grown, to be chosen. The gap between how the world saw her and how she wished to be seen was the kind of gap that made a girl her age reachable by the wrong sort of attention. Her family watched her the way families watch a girl at that age with a mix of love and worry and control.

 Marian and set the limits that parents set. They said where she could go and whom she could see and when she had to be home. And Carl met the limits the way teenagers meet them with argument and evasion and the certainty that her elders understood nothing. It was the ordinary friction of a household with a teenage daughter no worse than a hundred other houses on the block.

 Barbara, the older sister, had married a young man named Bob von Bush. And through that marriage, the Bartlett family touched a wider circle of Lincoln young people. The loose web of friends and friends of friends through which everyone in that world met everyone else. Von Bush had a friend, a young man from the flats who hauled garbage and dressed like a picture show rebel and carried himself with a sullen intensity that some found frightening and some found thrilling.

The web being what it was, an introduction was only a matter of time. Carol at this point in her life, had done nothing and seen nothing beyond the ordinary round of a poor Lincoln girlhood. She had a family that worked and worried, a small sister she helped tend, a crowded house she wanted out of, and a young girl’s raw wish to be somebody’s whole world.

 She was reachable and she was reached. The introduction came through Bob von Bush and it took almost no time. Charles was 18, Carol was 13. 5 years is not much on paper, but it was a lot here. He was a working man with a truck route and a rented room. She was a junior high girl who still had to ask permission to leave the house.

 The gap that should have kept them apart was the thing that pulled them together. He was older, hard, and defiant. Nothing like the ordinary boys she knew. She was young and admiring and hungry to be somebody’s chosen one. Each one found in the other exactly what they had been missing. For Charles, it was the first time in his life that someone looked at him and did not see the bowed legs, the stammer, or the garbage truck.

 Carol took his pose seriously. She believed in the rebel he was playing at being. She listened to his complaints. She shared his scorn for the people and the rules that boxed them in. She stepped into his private world as if she had always belonged there. He had spent his whole life standing outside every room. She built him a room for two and let him run it.

 He arranged his working life around her. He took the job unloading papers at the Western Union Warehouse, partly because the building sat near her junior high. It was close enough to match his hours to her school day. Close enough to walk her, wait for her, and keep her near him. He was possessive from the start, and she took that as proof of love.

 They became inseparable the way only the young and the lonely do. folding their two lonely lives into one and calling it enough. He taught her to drive in his car, a beat up 1949 Ford. It was his pride, the one good thing he owned and took care of. During one of the lessons, she lost control and wrecked it. The car was legally his father’s.

 Guy was already worn out by his son’s temper, his failures, and his refusal to live by the rules of the house. He paid for the damage, and that was the end of his patience. He put Charles out. The break with his father cut the last cord tying Charles to the family home. He was on his own now. A young man with a truck route, a rented room he could barely pay for, and a girl who was the only thing in his life he counted as his.

 Then the truck route slipped away, too. He was let go from the garbage work. The foremen were finally finished with his slowness and his sulking, and the small wage that had covered the room stopped coming. He fell behind on his rent. One day, he came back and found himself locked out of his own room until the back money was paid.

 Money he did not have. The frame of his adult life, thin as it was, came down piece by piece. The father, the job, the room. The only beam still standing was Carol. And then the Bartletts moved to take even that. Marion and did not want the red-haired young man from the flats anywhere near their daughter.

 They saw an unemployed older boy with a hard reputation circling a 14-year-old and they said no. They told him to stay away from the house and stay away from the girl. They put themselves between Charles and the one thing he had left. He was a young man who had already lost everything else. A young man who had spent his whole life certain the world was working to keep from him what everybody else got for free.

 To him, the Bartlett’s refusal was the last theft. By the last weeks of 1957, Charles Starkweather was 19 with no job, no room of his own, no father, and no girl. He carried the same hatred he had started collecting on a schoolyard, and by now it filled him. He had told Carol and told himself that the two of them were against the world.

 As he read it, the world had just told him he could not even have her. He needed money and had none. On the last night of November, with every grievance sitting on him at full weight, he drove toward the north edge of the city toward a filling station on Corn Husker Highway called the Crest. The young man working the night shift at the Crest was Robert Culver, 21, back in Lincoln with his Navy discharge in hand, and building the ordinary good life a steady young veteran built in those years. He had married.

 His wife was expecting their first, and that coming arrival gave a shape and a reason to everything he did. He took nights because nights paid, and because a man about to be a father took whatever hours he could get. The station sat on the Corn Husker Highway at the north edge of the city, a lit island in the dark.

 Truckers and travelers and late drivers pulled in for gas, for cigarettes for a few minutes out of the wind. Culvert pumped fuel, made change, and watched the road alone for most of the shift, the way night attendants always were, trusted with the cash drawer and the pumps and the empty lot until morning.

 He knew the regulars and the rhythm of the place, and he knew how to be pleasant to a stranger at 2:00 in the morning. Everyone who knew him described the same young man, decent and unremarkable in the best sense. One of thousands across the plain states doing honest work at an odd hour to get a family started. Nobody in Lincoln would have picked him out of a crowd.

 Off the clock there was the small business of setting up a household on a young man’s wages, the shifts that filled his nights, and the sleep that filled his days. He had done what a young man was supposed to do. He served, came home, married, found work, and started the patient business of building. On the last night of November 1957, Culvert took up his post as he had on the nights before.

 The pumps stood under their lights. The small building held its heat against the glass. The lot was quiet, and the highway ran black on either side. He watched the road and waited for the shift to pass. One more night of honest work between him and the life he was building. Then a car turned in off the highway toward the lights.

Culvert had seen the driver before. He had been in earlier that night wanting a small purchase on credit and he had been refused and he had left. Now he was back in the small hours of the 1st of December, 19 years old, red-haired in a leather jacket with a shotgun in the car. He came inside and bought something minor.

 A few coins across the counter, cigarettes and gum. He went out, then he came back and bought something else, small again. While Culvert made his change, he was measuring the place, the lot, the road, the man behind the till. The station was doing what it always did at that hour. There was nobody else on the lot.

 On one of those trips back inside, Charles brought out the gun. He made Culvert hand over the money in the till, the cash drawer under the counter where a station kept the night’s takings, and it came to something near $100. The robbery was finished. He had the money in his hand and a clear road out. He did not take it and go.

 He forced Culvert out of the lit building and into a car and made him drive off the highway and onto a dark stretch of Lancaster County Road where there were no lights, no traffic, and nothing to see them. Out there, the two of them fought. Colbert understood by then what was happening and went for the gun.

 They struggled over it in the dark, the older man fighting for his life against the younger one who had brought it. And in the middle of that struggle, the gun went off. Robert Colulbert died there on the county road, a long way from the pumps and the till and the wife waiting at home for a husband whose shift was over. Charles left him and drove away with the money.

Sometime after that night, he saw Carol the way he always found a way to see her, and he told her what he had done at the station. He told her he had gone in with a gun. He told her he had made the attendant hand over the cash drawer. He told her about the money, close to $100, and how bold he had been to walk in and take it.

 That was the whole story as he gave it to her. A robbery, a gun, a drawer, $100. He did not tell her the rest. He did not tell her he had forced the young man out of the station and into a car. He did not tell her he had made him drive out into the country in the dark. He did not tell her about the struggle on that county road or that Robert Culvert was dead in a field while the two of them talked.

 So Carol heard about a robbery and she believed there had been a robbery. She did not know a man had died. Charles kept that part to himself the way he had kept everything to himself since he was a boy. Only now what he was keeping was a killing. The body was found on Superior Street and the Lincoln police took up the case of the murdered station attendant and it went nowhere.

 A young veteran, newly married, robbed and killed on a county road. There was little to tie it to anyone. Nobody had seen the car. Nobody had seen the man. The detectives worked it the way they worked such cases, and the leads thinned and stopped. Days went by, then weeks. Robert Culvert was buried.

 His widow was left with the coming arrival and no husband. The man who had done it walked around Lincoln in his leather jacket free. The money did not last. It bought a few days and then it was gone. And when it was gone, nothing had changed. He was still out of work, still locked out over rent, still cut off from his father.

The Bartletts still had their line drawn, and their daughter was still on the other side of it. Everything that had been pressing on him at the end of November pressed harder through December and into the new year. And now he had one new thing sitting alongside all of it. He had learned that a gun in his hands could move an obstacle out of his way and that the world did not necessarily make him pay for it.

The largest obstacle in his life was not a stranger behind a counter on the Corn Husker Highway. It was a small frame house on a plain street in Belmont, and the two people inside it who had told him to stay away from their daughter and meant it. On the afternoon of the 21st of January, he drove there with a gun.

Charles came up to the small frame house in Belmont on the afternoon of the 21st of January with a .22 rifle. He had a story ready for why he was carrying it, that he had come to hunt, that he was going out for rabbits, and he came inside. Marion was not home yet. Za was. And what passed between the two of them was the old argument at its sharpest, the argument about Carol and about him.

Charles was an unemployed 19-year-old with a hard reputation who had been told to keep away from a 14-year-old girl. And he had not kept away, and knew it. She held the line her family had drawn. He refused to accept it. The voices came up. It went further than words. Struck him. It had worked before.

 The parents pushing him off, the young man going. This time it did not send him off. Marian came home into the middle of it. And the argument doubled. The stepfather now standing where the mother had stood, telling him to get out of the house and stay away from their daughter. Then Charles used the rifle.

 Marian Bartlett, 57, was shot and killed. Bartlett, 36, was shot and killed. And Betty Jean, the youngest of the household, Marian and daughter, was killed as well. It took a few minutes. When it was over, the house was quiet, and the family that had stood between Charles and Carol was gone. All but the one daughter, and the young man who had done it was standing in their front room with the gun.

 Then he said about hiding it, and he took his time over it. He wrapped them, paper, rugs, blankets, each one covered over, bundled, made into something that would not read as a person to a passing eye. Then he carried them out the back of the house into the yard. A house like that one had outbuildings behind it, the small structures that stood in the yards of poor houses in that part of Lincoln.

There was a chicken house. There was an outhouse. Charles put Marion in the chicken house. He put Vlda in the outhouse. And he put Betty Jean in a cardboard box and put the box in there with her mother. Then he closed the doors on them and went back inside. What Carol did that afternoon became the most disputed question in the whole affair, and the only two people who knew told it two different ways.

 By Charles’s account, she was there in the house while it happened and in the house after. By Carol’s account, she came home from school to find the place wrong and Charles waiting for her with the gun. He told her that her family was being held somewhere, that other people had them, and that they would be safe only if she did exactly as he said.

 She believed him. She did not know that afternoon that Marian and Betty Jean were already in the outbuildings behind the house. One of them said she was part of it. The other said she was a captive who thought her family’s lives hung on her obedience. Both accounts came from inside that house. Outside it, nobody could say which was true.

 What was not in dispute was the plain fact. Three people who had gotten up that morning to an ordinary crowded day were dead by evening. The stepfather who worked, the mother who held the household together, the youngest of the home, they were in the yard a few steps from the back door. and the young man who had been forbidden their daughter had the run of their house and the daughter in it.

 The people who had said no could say nothing now. Outside the January afternoon faded on the plain street. The neighbors came and went. The ordinary life of the block carried on within a few yards of the outbuildings. Inside Charles and Carol were alone in the rooms where the family had lived, with the doors shut and the yard quiet behind them.

 They held the world off with a lie, and the lie was a scrap of paper. On the door, they put a note saying the family was down with illness and asking callers to stay away, that everybody inside was sick with the flu, signed in the family’s name. It was a small thing, and for the better part of a week, it did the work of a locked gate.

Callers came because a family does not vanish from a closed street without somebody noticing. Relatives came to the door, uneasy at how still the place had gone, and Carol met them. She stood in the doorway and told them what the note told them, that the family was ill, that they could not come in, that everything behind her was as it should be, to people who loved the Bartletts and had every right to worry.

 She gave the account that kept them on the step and sent them home. and they went, unsatisfied, but not yet willing to push past a girl telling them her mother was sick. They did not let it go entirely. The quiet around the house nagged at them, and they came back more than once, and each time the story held them at the threshold.

 The sister and her husband, others in the family circle, came and asked and were met with the same closed door and the same explanation. And each time they left with their unease a little larger and their certainty a little smaller, because the girl in the doorway was family, and family telling you the house is sick is not at first a thing you break a door down over.

 Even the police came. The worry reached far enough that officers were sent to look in on the Bartlett house. They came and they found the note and nobody answered in a way that raised an alarm and they saw a house in apparent order behind a plausible message. They went away again. A family reported ill, a note explaining it, nothing a passing check would catch.

The officers moved on to the next call. Inside, the days passed in a strange domestic suspension. The two of them lived in the emptied house as though it were theirs, eating what there was, keeping to the rooms, waiting out the callers. The house that had held a crowded working family now held two teenagers in a lie.

 And the lie held longer than it had any right to because the people it fooled were the very people who most wanted to believe that the silence had an innocent cause. But a story like that cannot hold forever. Every returning relative left a little less convinced. The unease thickened with each closed door visit. Each day the illness was supposed to explain, each glimpse of a house too still.

 What had turned them away the first time turned them away less surely the second, and hardly at all the third. Carl’s grandmother, in particular, could not be settled by any of it. Her worry sharpened past the point where a note on a door could soothe it, and she pressed. The same web of family that had introduced Charles and Carol in the first place was now tightening around the silent house.

 On the 27th of January, they gathered what they needed. Guns, ammunition, what money there was, went out to the battered 1949 Ford, and drove away from the house in Belmont, south and east, out of the city toward the open country. They stopped at a service station on Highway 77 and laid in more gas and a box of shotgun shells and boxes of rifle rounds, stocking the car for the road.

 Then Charles pointed the forward toward Bennett, 16 mi southeast, out past the last of the city, and into the flat frozen fields. He was making for a place he knew. Two miles out from Bennett, at the end of a dirt road, stood August Meers’s white farmhouse. Meyer was 70, a bachelor farmer who had worked that same ground most of his life and lived on it alone with his animals and his fields around him.

People in the district knew him as a kind old man, settled and gentle, the sort of aging bachelor who had made his peace with being alone, and filled his days with the steady work of the farm. The house stood trim, the outbuildings sound, the fences up, the whole small place showing the care of a man who had tended it for decades with nobody to tend it for but himself.

 He had known the Starkweather family for a long time. He was one of those country friends that city families keep. A man whose farm was somewhere the Lincoln relatives could come out to. He had been generous to the boys and to Charles most of all. Since Charles was young, Meyer had let him come out to hunt, opening his fields and his timber to a boy who loved guns and the outdoors more than anything indoors.

For a boy who was mocked in the classroom and small in the schoolyard, that land had been one of the few clean pleasures of his early years. A gun in his hands and open country all around him. Meyer knew him as the boy who came to hunt. The Ford never reached the house. The January road was soft with mud and snow, and before they got there, the car went off into it and bogged down, the wheels spinning, stuck fast on the lane.

 They came the rest of the way on foot and August Meyer answered his door the way he had always answered it for the Starkweather boys, an old friend to a familiar face. Whatever passed between them in the yard was brief. Charles killed him there on his own farm with a blast from the shotgun. The old man who had shown him one of the few kindnesses of his boyhood lay dead on his own ground.

 Charles moved him into one of the outbuildings. out of sight the way he had put the Bartletts out of sight. Then he took what he wanted from the place, including a rifle, adding the old farmer’s gun to the arsenal in the car. Now, there were two problems. Meer was dead in his wash house, and the Ford was still mired in the mud on the lane, and they could not free it.

 They worked at it, and it would not come. Charles tried to mend the worst of the car’s failing tires, and the repair would not hold. The vehicle that had carried them out of Lincoln was finished, stuck on a farm road in the cold, with a dead man behind them and nowhere to walk to. So they stood out on the frozen lane with their guns, needing a car, exposed in a way they had not been inside the closed house in Belmont.

Behind them, the neat white farmhouse stood empty at the end of its lane, exactly as it had stood for 40 years, except for the old man who was no longer in it. The country road ran quiet in the cold. The farms shut against the weather, almost nothing moving on the gravel. Then down the road, a set of headlights appeared.

 The car slowed as it came up on the stuck Ford and the two figure standing in the cold and it pulled over. That was the way of the farm country. One driver stopped for another in trouble. The car belonged to Robert Jensen. He was 17, a junior at Bennett High, and the president of his class. Not a small thing in a school that size.

 It meant the others trusted him and liked him and picked him to stand a little out in front. He worked at his studies, kept his commitments, drove the roads around Bennett the way farmtown boys did. He was polite and dependable, the kind of young man parents were glad to see with their daughters. Beside him was Carol King, 16, his classmate and his girl.

 She was a Bennett High student, too. Tied into the same web of school and church and town, known and liked in a place where everybody’s business was everybody’s. The two of them had paired off the way couples do at that age. They went together. They were known to be together. They were folded into each other’s families and routines.

They were out on an ordinary school night date, a couple of hours in a car on the country roads, the kind of evening they had spent many times, expected home at a decent hour with school in the morning. And when Jensen came up on two young people stranded beside a mired car on a January night, he slowed and pulled over to help.

Whatever help he meant to offer ended the moment Charles brought a gun up on them both. The stop closed like a trap. Charles took their car and he took them with it, ordering the two of them to do exactly as they were told, the guns making the orders absolute. He had Jensen drive, directing him back through the dark grid of country roads to a place he had settled on, an abandoned storm cellar near an old schoolhouse, a belowground refuge sunk into the frozen earth, empty and out of sight of the road. It was the kind of place where a

person could be taken and not be seen. At the cellar, he robbed Jensen of what money he had, the small cash of a high school boy on a date. And then in that place in the dark, he killed them both. Robert Jensen, 17, class president who had stopped to help two strangers on a cold road, was shot and killed.

 Carol King, 16, was killed as well. Charles and Carol got into Jensen’s car and drove away into the night. As they went, Charles cleared out anything that showed whose car it was. Jensen’s school books were still in it, the books he had carried to class that day. Charles threw them out the window onto the side of the road and kept driving.

 In the space of a single evening in the country around Bennett, three people were dead who had been alive that afternoon. August Meyer lay in his outbuilding at the end of his lane. Robert Jensen and Carol King lay in the storm cellar near the old schoolhouse. The two from Lincoln were rolling away in a dead couple’s car with the arsenal in the seats.

 One thing was left in the wrong place. The Ford sat mired on Meyers Lane where anyone who came looking would find it. A Lincoln car abandoned in the mud 2 mi from Bennett with a family’s name behind it. But that was back on the dark roads now, and Charles was already turning toward the next thing. He drove into Lincoln in the small hours and pointed the car up the hill toward the shaded southeast streets he knew from the garbage truck.

He knew exactly which house he wanted. It stood on South 24th Street, one of the finest homes in Lincoln, a big house set back behind a wide front lawn. He knew it from the back. That was how a garbage man learned a street. From the alley, from the service door, from the cans at the rear of the house.

 He had hauled that family’s trash. He had shoveled their snow for a few dollars. It was the kind of small job the rich hired out and never thought about again. And the people inside that house had no reason at all to remember the young man who had done it. The house belonged to Seau Ward, 48. He was president of Capital Steel and Capital Bridge, and that put him in the small circle of men who ran the business of Nebraska.

 He was a Lincoln man in a city where the men at the top all knew each other. He had a wife, a daughter away at school, and one of the finest houses in the capital. His wife was Clara Ward, 46, who kept the house and the family’s place in the city’s settled society. And working there with her was Lillian Fenkel, 51, their housekeeper, who had given her working years to that household and knew its rooms and its routines as well as the family did.

There were two dogs in the house. It was the morning of the 28th of January when Charles pulled the car into the ward garage out of sight from the street and went to the door. Lower Ward had already left for his business that left the two women inside. Lillianfle opened the door. She knew his face.

 The young man who had shoveled the walk and taken the trash. Nothing to think twice about. The door that opened for a known young man opened for him now. He came in with the guns and he took the house and then he did something he had not done anywhere else. He stayed. He did not rob the place and run.

 He settled into it for the day. He put Clara Ward to work in her own kitchen and had her cook for them, and the two of them ate breakfast in the house they had just taken. Hours passed that way. The two women were held in their own home through the morning and into the afternoon while Charles moved around it, going through the rooms, eating their food, waiting for the day to pass.

 Lillian Fenkel was taken upstairs and tied to a bed. At some point that afternoon, Clara Ward went up the stairs and Charles went up after her. By his account, she came at him with a gun and he was defending himself. That was the story he told afterward. And it was the story he told about nearly every death he caused, that the other person had started it.

 What is certain is that Clara Ward, 46, was killed upstairs in her own house and that she was killed with a knife. Lillian Fenkel, 51, was killed in the room where she had been tied. Neither of them was shot. The rifle stayed quiet. Then he waited. The two women were dead upstairs, and Charles and Carol sat in the house through the rest of the afternoon because the man who owned it was still at work and he was going to come home. Around 6:00 that evening, C.

Ward drove up to his own house and came through his own door. He had eaten lunch that day at the same table as the governor of Nebraska. He walked in out of the cold, expecting his wife and his supper. Charles shot him there in his own entryway. Low Ward, 48, was killed by the young man who had once cleared his walk of snow.

The whole household was dead now, and Charles had been inside for something close to 10 hours. He went through the rooms taking what he wanted. He found black shoe polish and worked it through his red hair to darken it, changing the one thing about him that every description mentioned. He and Carol gathered what they could use.

 Food, clothing, money, jewelry, a fur coat of Clara Wards, and in the garage stood the ward’s car, a black 1956 Packard, a far better machine than the Ford stuck in the mud or the couple’s car he had driven earlier. He loaded it and took it. The boy who had looked up at the good houses from the back of a garbage truck drove out of that garage in the family’s own Packard, his hair dyed black, the car full of their things.

Behind him, the house on South 24th Street sat closed and quiet and lit, and the neighbors on the good street went about their evening. He pointed the Packard west and out of Lincoln. His brother lived away toward Washington State, and the running had a direction now. In Belmont, the note on the door finally failed.

 Carol’s grandmother would not let it go. For days, she had been told the family was sick. She did not believe it anymore, and she kept pushing. Bob von Bush had already gone to the police once. He told them something was wrong at that house. They did not act on it, and he went away, and the family stayed dead in the yard. So, on the 27th of January, two men went out to the house to settle it themselves.

One was Rodney Starkweather, Charles’s own brother. The other was Von Bush. He was married to Carol’s older sister, Barbara, which made him Carol’s brother-in-law. He was also Charles Charles’s closest friend. He had a foot in both families. They were done being sent away at the door. This time, they did not knock and wait for an answer.

They walked around the house into the backyard to the small sheds nobody had let them near. They opened the chicken house and found Marian Bartlett wrapped in paper and rags. They opened the outhouse and found wrapped the same way. Betty Jean was in a cardboard box beside her.

 The family had been called sick for almost a week. They had been dead the whole time a few steps from their own back door while their relatives stood at the front and were told to go home. The two men went for the police and this time the police came. Officers filled the yard on the plain street in Belmont. Two days earlier, this had been a house nobody answered.

 Now it was a murder scene and Sheriff Merl Carnop had it. Three of the household dead in the yard. The fourth, the daughter, gone and gone with her, the young man her parents had feared and forbidden. Nobody had to work out the connection. The neighbors knew Marian and had barred Charles Starkweather from the house and from the girl. The relatives knew it.

 Von Bush knew it better than anyone. The picture came together in an hour. A forbidden older boy. A family that said no. The family dead in the yard. The girl gone. The boy gone. A bulletin went out on both of them to every officer in the region. Charles Starkweather about 5′ 5, roughly 140 lb, red hair, black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a note that he was a good shot.

 Carol F feet 14 but looking older 5’1 about 105 lbs dark jeans blue parka they were believed to be in a souped-up 1949 Ford wanted in connection with three deaths in Belmont three that was the number the police had and it was wrong and nothing they held could tell them so what they thought they had was a family killed by the boy they had thrown out and the boy gone off with the daughter terrible but over a hunt for two runaways in a beat up Ford.

The bulletin was 4 hours late. The Ford was already gone from Belmont, and it was not the car they were driving anymore. The rest of it was still out there in the dark, unopened. 16 mi southeast, that same Ford sat stuck in the mud on a farm lane with a Lincoln family’s name on the registration, and August Meer lay in his wash house at the end of it.

Not far from there, the storm cellar by the old schoolhouse was closed and quiet with Robert Jensen and Carol King inside it. And back in the city, on the good side of the hill, the big house on South 24th Street stood lit and locked with three people in it. Nobody had walked up that lane.

 Nobody had lifted that cellar door. Nobody had knocked on South 24th Street. Then it all opened at once. Two teenagers did not come home to Bennett on a school night and by morning half the district was out on the country roads looking for them. A neighbor saw a car stuck in the mud on August Meers Lane and went up to ask whose it was and why the old man had not moved it.

 And in Lincoln, Charles Lowour Ward did not turn up where he was supposed to be. The man he did business with noticed and officers were sent to his house to find out why. Three questions asked by three sets of people who did not know each other in three parts of the county. The searchers around Bennett found the Ford on Meyer’s Lane.

 And then they found Meyer. They kept looking and near the old schoolhouse, someone lifted the door of an abandoned storm cellar and found Robert Jensen and Carol King. And on the evening of the 28th, the door of the big house on South 24th Street was opened and L. Ward and Clara Ward and Lillian Fenkel were found inside.

 In a day and a half, the count went from 3 to 10. The city broke. A businessman, his wife, and their housekeeper killed in one of the finest homes in Lincoln on the good side of the hill in the middle of a working day. If it could happen in that house, it could happen in any house. That was what set the panic loose.

 Look at who had died. A laborer, his wife, and the youngest of their household. An old farmer alone on his land. Two high school students on a date. A steel executive, his wife, and the woman who kept their house. Rich and poor, old and young, in the city and out in the fields. Some of them he knew. Most of them he had never met.

 There was no kind of person being killed. So there was no way to look at your own life and decide you were safe. There was only whoever happened to be in front of him. Governor Victor Anderson answered with force. He called out the National Guard, about 1,200 soldiers, and put them on the streets to patrol the city and back up the police.

 An army in a state capital, sent out after two teenagers. Guardsmen stood on the downtown corners with rifles. The state police joined the hunt. The FBI came in. Every sheriff’s department in the surrounding counties was working it. The city armed itself and shut its doors. Fathers carried guns and walked their sons and daughters to school, then stood outside and waited for the bell to ring them out again.

Businesses closed in the middle of the day. Gun shops sold out. People stayed home and watched the street through the front curtains. The ones who had to go out went armed. Officers searched block by block, house by house, checking basement and garages and sheds because the two of them could have been hiding in any of them.

 $1,000 was offered for information that led to their capture. Lincoln had 120,000 people in it and it stopped. Not for a war, not for a storm. Two teenagers were somewhere in the city with guns and nobody could say why. The descriptions were on every corner, every front page, every radio bulletin in Nebraska.

 The red-haired young man in the leather jacket, the small, dark-haired girl in the blue parka. People looked hard at every young couple in every passing car, but the city was hunting two people who were not in it. They were already gone, running west in the wards black Packard. They were past the roadblocks before the roadblocks went up, crossing the planes toward the state line while Lincoln locked its doors against them.

 Twice along the way, somebody looked at them twice and called it in. A young pair in a fine car a long way from anywhere. Both calls came to nothing and the Packard was a problem now. It was a known car tied to the dead in the house on the hill. Every mile it carried them west. It carried a description that could be radioed ahead and be waiting at the next town.

Somewhere out on the western highways, Charles started thinking about trading it for a car nobody was looking for. They drove hard through the night and into the next day. And on the 29th of January, they crossed into Wyoming and came down the High Plains highways toward the town of Douglas. Out on the highway near Douglas, a Buick sat pulled over on the shoulder with a man asleep behind the wheel.

 His name was Merl Collison. He was 37, a shoe salesman out of Great Falls, Montana. He was one of the traveling men who covered enormous distances by car in those years, carrying their sample cases from town to town across the empty country, living out of the automobile and the roadside motel. It was a hard way to make a living.

 The towns out there were an hour apart. The road ran straight to the horizon. You ate where you could, and you slept where you stopped. And when the driving ran long and the next town was still ahead, you pulled over and slept in the car. That was what Collison was doing on the shoulder outside Douglas. His samples were in the back.

 His family was a hard day’s drive to the north and west. It was exactly what Charles was looking for, an ordinary car with an ordinary man in it on an empty road with nobody around. He pulled off behind the Buick and walked up to the sleeping man. He woke him and told him they were trading cars. The Buick was his now.

Collison came awake on a cold roadside to find a stranger standing over him with a gun, and he did not move fast enough to satisfy him. Charles shot him. Merl Collison, 37, a shoe salesman and a father of five, died in the car he had pulled over to rest in, but the car would not give itself up.

 The Buick had a parking brake of a kind Charles had never seen, a brake he did not know how to release, and when he tried to drive away, the car would not move. He worked at it and could not free it. So there he was on an open highway with a dead man beside him and a car he could not drive. It was the same trap in a different shape.

 A killing done and the getaway stopped by a piece of machinery, exactly as the Ford had bogged down in the mud on Meyer’s Lane. Down the highway, another car came on and began to slow. The driver was Joe Sprinkle, a geologist out of Casper, and he pulled over the way one driver pulls over for another. He walked up to the stranded Buick to help a stranger get moving again.

 Charles seized on it and asked him to help with the stubborn break. Sprinkle bent down to the problem the way a helpful man would. Then his eye fell on the passenger seat and he saw Merl Collison’s body and he understood in that instant that he had walked into something that could cost him his life. Charles brought the gun up on him.

 Sprinkle was a big man close to 6 ft with reach and weight the smaller Charles did not have. He made the only choice that gave him a chance. Instead of standing there and being shot, he rushed him and grabbed for the gun. The two of them wrestled on the roadside, the weapons swinging between them. R Sprinkle holding on because he knew that letting go meant dying.

 He was bigger and he was fighting for his life and by main strength he kept hold of it and wrenched it away. While the two men fought, another car came along the highway and this one belonged to the law. Deputy Sheriff William Romer was working the county. He drove up on two cars, pulled over, and two men struggling beside them, and he stopped to see what was wrong.

 The moment the deputy’s car halted, everything broke open, Carol bolted. She ran from the Buick straight to Ror, shouting that Charles was going to kill her, that he was crazy, that he had just killed a man. She reached the deputy, pouring it all out, putting herself under his protection, and naming the man standing beside the road.

 For Charles, the deputy’s arrival and the loss of the gun ended it. He broke away from Sprinkle, ran for the Packard, the marked car he had been trying to get rid of, turned it around, and drove hard back toward Douglas, leaving the stalled Buick and the dead salesman and Carol all at once. Ror stayed with the girl who had run to him, radioed for help, and put the alarm out on the fleeing Packard.

 The chase came together fast. ROR’s call reached the law men near Douglas. Among them the town’s police chief, Robert Aninsley, and the county sheriff, Earl Heflin. They took up the pursuit as the Packard came racing toward town. Charles drove flat out past 100 m an hour, tearing through Douglas with the officers behind him and blowing past the roadblock set up to stop him.

 Sheriff Heftlin fired at the speeding car and a bullet found the glass. It shattered and sent fragments through the car and a piece of it cut Charles and he began to bleed. The sight of his own blood did what the whole chase had not. Charles had killed 11 people across two states without hesitating. Now he believed he was badly hurt.

He thought he was bleeding to death and that belief stopped him cold. He pulled the Packard over and gave himself up. It ended on the highway outside Douglas on the 29th of January, 8 days after it began in Belmont. They took the two of them into Douglas and lodged them in the small Converse County Jail.

 And the news ran ahead of them and drew a crowd. Word that the pair wanted for the Nebraska killings had been taken outside town brought curious people to the jail and reporters from across the region. The Little Wyoming courthouse became the center of a story that had held two states. The sheriff’s office jammed the phone lines overwhelmed.

Charles, brought in, cut, and caught, gave his first account of Carol to the officers who had him, and it took the whole weight onto himself. He told them not to be hard on the girl. She had had nothing to do with any of it. He was the one responsible, and she was clear of it.

 That was the version he offered in the first hours of custody, the young man shielding the girl he had built his life around. Carol in the sheriff’s office looked like what she said she was. She swung between hard sobbing and stretches of blank quiet. She told the officers that he had made her sit in the car with the dead man.

 She cried for her mother, calling for until she was given something to calm her, and she cried herself down into sleep. To the man watching her, she looked like a terrorized girl at the end of an ordeal. The county attorney of Converse County, William Dixon, took charge, and Charles gave him a confession, laying out the killings across the eight days.

The scale of it, told out in that little jail, confirmed what the discoveries in Nebraska had been assembling. the string of the dead from the December station killing through the house in Belmont, the farm at the end of the lane, the storm seller, the house on the hill, and now the salesman on the Wyoming road.

Then came the question of where he would answer for it, and it turned on the position of Wyoming’s governor. Milward Simpson opposed the death penalty and had made it known he would not see a man go to the chair in his state. that left the Wyoming officials in an awkward place with a case the public wanted answered with a life.

 Simpson made it plain he would sign the papers to send Charles back to Nebraska without delay, handing the prosecution to the state where most of the killing had been done and where the death penalty was in force. Charles was willing to go. He believed either state would put him to death for what he had done.

 So the destination made no difference to him. What he did not weigh was that Wyoming’s governor would have spared him. By accepting the return, he was choosing the ground where death was the likely sentence. He waved the fight and agreed to be taken back. On the 31st of January, they returned him to Nebraska in the custody of Lawman Carol taken back as well to answer in the same courts.

The 8 days on the road were finished, and the long process of the law began. And with the return, the account Charles had given in those first hours at Douglas began to change. Word reached him of how the girl was casting herself as a hostage, a captive, a victim who had never willingly taken part, and the protectiveness of his first statement curdled.

 The young man who had told the Wyoming officers to go easy on her started telling a very different story about what Caroline Fugate had done. He began to name specific killings as hers. He said Carol had killed Carol King, the 16-year-old girl who had been on the date with Robert Jensen. The two of them forced together to the storm cellar near the schoolhouse.

 He said she was the one who had killed Clara Ward, the wife in the big house on the hill. And he said that at the Wyoming roadside when his own gun failed, it was Carol who fired the last shots into Merl Collison, the traveling salesman asleep in his car. He called her the most trigger-happy person he had ever seen.

 Not a frightened girl dragged along, but an eager hand in it, as deep in the killing as he was. And he pressed one point hard. She had never been held against her will, he said, because she had always had the chance to leave. She was armed. She sat in the car with the guns while he went off on his own. He described going into a place for hamburgers and leaving her outside by herself.

 A girl with a car, an arsenal, an open road in every direction who stayed put, waited, and was still there when he came back. If she was a hostage, he asked, why had she never once run out of all the chances she had? Carol’s account was the opposite, and she never moved off it. She said she had come home from school on the 21st of January to find Charles in the house with a gun and her family nowhere in sight.

He told her that her mother, her stepfather, and the youngest of the family were being held somewhere safe and that they would stay safe only as long as she did what he said. She believed him. And so she said through the days in the Belmont house and the eight days on the road that followed, she did not know that Marian, and Betty Jean were already dead in the outbuildings behind her own home.

 She had been a prisoner the whole way, doing what she was told to protect a family she thought was still alive. She had killed no one. The trouble was that some of the evidence did not fit her account. When the two of them were captured, they were carrying newspaper clippings and photographs about the killing of her own family. Kept, folded up, held on to.

That was hard to square with a girl who did not know her family was dead. Sheriff Earl Heftlin, who took her in Wyoming, said she had those clippings in her own coat pocket. And in the first hours after the capture, before the two accounts hardened, she was reported to have spoken about watching the killings happen.

which fit badly with a claim of knowing nothing. So the two who had been against the whole world together were now against each other and each one’s story tore at the others. He put her at the center of it. A willing killer who could have walked away at any time and never did. She put herself outside it completely.

 A girl lied to about her own family and held at gunpoint from the first afternoon to the last. The state charged them both. 11 people had died, but the prosecutors did not try to prove all of it. They chose the single death they were most sure they could win in front of a jury. Robert Jensen, the Bennett class president, shot at the storm cellar.

 They charged Charles Starkweather and Carol Anne Fugate, each with first-degree murder for that one killing. They had ridden the eight days together. They would be tried separately for the same death. Charles went first. His trial opened in Lincoln on the 5th of May before Judge Harry Spencer for the murder of Robert Jensen. Lancaster County Attorney Elmer Shiel led the prosecution.

 Charles was defended by courtappointed lawyers T. Clement Gohan and William Matchelott. The charge came in two counts for the single killing. One was premeditated murder that he had thought about it and meant to do it. The other was murder committed in the course of a robbery, which under Nebraska law carried the same weight whether he had planned the death or not, because the death had come out of the robbery.

 To both, Charles entered p of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. The insanity plea was his lawyer’s one real hope of saving his life, and their own client set himself against it. He wanted no part of being called mad. He said that nobody remembers a crazy man. He would rather be remembered as a killer than dismissed as a lunatic.

His lawyers were trying to keep him out of the electric chair by persuading 12 people that he could not be held fully responsible for what he had done. And he kept cutting the ground out from under them, unwilling to be presented as anything less than a young man who had known exactly what he was doing.

 The clash came to a head over his mind. Gogggin Charles’s lawyer told the jury that Charles’s measured intelligence put him only a point or two above the level of an idiot, arguing that a boy that limited could not truly have planned anything. Charles gripped the defense table until his knuckles went white. It was the old wound opened in open court by his own lawyer.

 He had spent his school years being marked down as slow by teachers who never thought to test his eyes. He had built his whole hard reputation on top of that. Now the man trying to save his life stood up in front of the city and called him stupid. The defense put on psychiatrists, three of them testifying for him.

 Among them, a doctor named Nathan Greenbomb. Their evidence was was that Charles suffered a disturbance of the mind that left him unable to form the deliberate premeditated intent, the gravest charge required. that whatever he had done, he had not been capable of the cold planning the state was describing. The state answered with its own experts.

They granted that the young man had a disordered personality, but disordered was not the same as insane. He knew what he was doing. He had the capacity to plan and to intend his acts, and a man with that capacity was responsible before the law for the death of Robert Jensen. Between those two positions stood the 12 people in the box.

 And the question in front of them was not whether Charles Starkweather had killed the young man at the storm cellar. Nobody was arguing that. The question was what was in his head when he did it. Charles took the stand himself and it did his defense no good at all. He told grudgingly about the childhood that had shaped him, the family that had felt cold to him, the bowed legs, the stammer, the years of being laughed at, the small boy at the back of rooms he could not read.

 For a moment, it might have earned him some sympathy from the people watching. A hard start in life, plainly told. He could not hold on to it. What showed underneath was flat and untroubled. He explained the killings as if they had been reasonable, walking through them with a coldness that killed off whatever pity his childhood had raised.

 The jury sat and watched a young man account for 11 deaths without any of it seeming to weigh on him. That was the problem with the whole defense in one image. To spare his life, his lawyers needed a young man who was not in control of himself. The young man in the witness chair was calm, clear about what he had done and plainly in full control.

Elmer Sheiel for the state used his closing argument to pull the jury back from the insanity plea. He told them to get their feet on the ground and see the plea for what it was, a trick dressed up to pull them away from the plain facts, something to grab at. And he finished by putting the safety of the town in their hands.

 This verdict, he said, was how they would protect their own families. Goan, for the defense, made an emotional plea. Charles was a product of the society that was now hunting for someone to blame. The town that had laughed at the boy was now asking for the man’s life. He argued it under the shadow of the death sentence hanging over the case, and he asked the jury to look at where the young man in front of them had come from.

The jury took the case and went out and they stayed out a long time. They deliberated about 22 hours weighing what had been in the head of a 19-year-old on a dark road near an old schoolhouse. They came back guilty on both counts and they set the penalty at death. On the 23rd of May, Judge Spencer sentenced Charles Starkweather to die in the electric chair for the murder of Robert Jensen.

The young man, who had said he would rather be executed than called crazy, had gotten the first half of his wish. The jury had refused to call him crazy. They had found him a man in full control of himself, who had known exactly what he was doing at every step, and who was answerable for all of it.

 He was taken from the courtroom to the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln, to a room on the ground floor where the state held the men it meant to put to death. and the law turned to the second trial. Carol Annefugates trial opened in Lincoln on the 27th of October and it drew its own hard attention because of who she was and how young she was.

 At 14, she was the youngest girl ever tried for first-degree murder in the country. And under Nebraska law, young as she was, a guilty verdict could still send her to the electric chair alongside Charles. She was defended by a lawyer named John MacArthur who took up her case and argued that she was innocent. In most ways, it was the first trial run over again.

 The same judge, much of the same evidence, many of the same witnesses telling much the same story. But all of it came down to one question. Now, what had Carol been? A partner or a prisoner? The prosecution ran the case Charles had built for them. She had been in it with him. They pointed to the chances she’d had to get away and never took.

 They pointed to the newspaper clippings about her own family’s deaths found folded up among the pair’s things. They pointed to what she was reported to have said in the first hours about watching the killings. And Charles’s account hung over the whole trial, that she was armed, free, eager, and could have walked away on any one of those eight days.

 Her defense held to her account. She had been tricked and forced, a girl who believed her family’s lives depended on her obedience and did not know they were already dead. MacArthur argued it hard and he did it in a city that had been terrorized, standing up for a girl half the state wanted to see punished. It cost him. People in Lincoln let him know exactly what they thought of a man who would defend her.

 The prosecution called Charles Starkweather to the stand against her. He came over from the penitentiary under sentence of death to testify about the killing at the storm cellar. But his word was already in pieces before he opened his mouth. He had told the story of these deaths several different ways, and the defense had every version to read back to him.

Even so, the weight of the evidence went against her. And so did the girl the jury saw in front of them. She did not look to them like a hostage. She looked like someone who had been there. The jury convicted Carol Anne Fugate of first-degree murder in the death of Robert Jensen on the count of murder committed during the robbery.

 They did not set the penalty at death. On the 21st of November, she was sentenced to life in prison and sent to the state reformatory for women at York to serve it. The younger of the two had been spared the punishment handed to Charles in the same courtroom 6 months before. Then the appeals began and they ran for a year and a half.

 For Charles, they were the only thing standing between him and the chair, and he made an uneasy prisoner of the process. The Nebraska Supreme Court reviewed his conviction, considered whether the evidence supported a finding that he had deliberated and premeditated the killing of Robert Jensen, and held that it did. The court found that from the moment Jensen was ordered to turn back toward the cellar, the jury could properly find that the young man driving him had made up his mind. The conviction stood.

 The death sentence stood. The court declined to reduce it. He fired Gauin and Matt Shelot, the lawyers who had tried to save him with the insanity plea he had hated. He went before the state pardon board in April and asked to have his sentence commuted and the board heard him and refused.

 His case moved into the federal courts on petitions for stays and for relief. Judge Robert Vanpelt denied habius relief. Judge Richard Robinson granted a stay. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals took the case and dismissed it. Justice Charles Whitaker of the United States Supreme Court granted a brief stay and then the Supreme Court declined to hear the case at all. Five execution dates were set.

Four of them fell. One stay came 98 minutes before the appointed hour with his father Guy spending the night on the telephone to federal judges trying to reach anyone who would hold it off. The man whose patience had run out over a wrecked Ford was working the phones through the dark to keep his son alive. On death row, Charles was largely indifferent to it.

 The man around him described a young man settled in resignation, not fighting, not frightened. He gave interviews, he wrote. He turned his life over on paper, working through the hatreds he had been collecting since the schoolyard, still convinced the world had cheated him. He was offered the chance to donate his eyes after death. He refused.

 “Nobody had done anything for him while he was alive,” he said. So he saw no reason to help anyone once he was dead. The eyes that no one would buy glasses for were his to withhold now, and he withheld them. In a letter to his parents, he wrote that he was not truly sorry for what he had done.

 With Carol, he said he had known something he counted as happiness for the first time in his life. Meanwhile, Carol’s own case went up. Her lawyers found something after her trial. One of the men who had sat in judgment on her, a juror named Valenta, had made a bet before he was seated that the girl would get the electric chair. The court took it seriously enough to examine it closely and then refused her a new trial.

 Went disclosed on questioning that he held an opinion from the newspapers as nearly everyone in Nebraska did and he had not been challenged over it. He said he had forgotten the bet entirely. And there was the fact that answered it. When the jury fixed the penalty, Wenta voted for life. Whatever he had wagered on, he had voted against his own bet.

 And at such the bet really didn’t even matter. Her lawyers raised more. Two penitentiary inmates housed next to Charles swore that around the time of her trial, he had suddenly received special favors and that unidentified men had attended his door for days telling him what he must and must not say. The courts examined that, too, took counter affidavit from Charles, the warden, the deputy warden, the county attorney, a guard, a reporter, and rejected it.

 The aience could not identify the men. Her conviction stood. Her sentence stood, and the fifth date on Charles’s calendar came up, and this time nothing stopped it. The last day was the 24th of June, and he spent it calm. The appeals were exhausted. The stays were used up. The date was fixed and holding. He passed the hours without visible fear, resigned as he had been for months, and took a plain last meal.

 The men who watched him through the afternoon and evening saw the same flat indifference to his own death that he had shown to everyone else’s. As midnight approached, something happened that nobody had planned for. The prison physician assigned to pronounce him dead after the current was passed. Dr. Ba Finkele suffered a heart attack and died.

Another doctor had to be found in the middle of the night and brought in through the gates in a hurry so the execution could go forward on schedule. When deputy warden John Greenholtz came to the cell to bring him out, Charles met it with a last dry remark, asking the man what his hurry was. Earlier in the evening, he had told a guard that he had a feeling this was the night.

He walked to the chamber just after midnight. It was a small, brightly lit room, and some 40 witnesses were waiting in it. He crossed to the heavy oaken chair without needing the guards on either side of him to hold him up. His head had been shaved for the electrode. He was pale. He gave the assembled witnesses a single quick glance and nothing more.

He was asked whether he had any last words. Charles Starkweather shook his head. He had nothing to say at the end. No statement, no apology, no plea, nothing for the family sitting in that room. He was strapped into the chair and the mask was fitted and the current was passed through him. And at 4 minutes past midnight on the 25th of June, 1959, he was pronounced dead in the Nebraska State Penitentiary at Lincoln.

 He was buried at Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln in the same ground that held some of the people he had killed. Carol Anne Fugate stayed at York serving the life sentence for the murder of Robert Jensen and she held to the account she had given from the first hour. She had been a captive. She had been deceived about her family.

She had been forced along. She was guilty of no one’s death. She was a model prisoner. She worked. She took her schooling. She caused no trouble across the years. and the reformatory that had received a 14-year-old convicted of first-degree murder found itself holding a quiet woman getting older behind the walls. In time, the state softened it.

Her life sentence was commuted in 1973 to a term of years, which opened the door that a life sentence had closed. In June of 1976, after 17 years, Carol Anne Fugate was parrolled. She left Nebraska. She went to Michigan, took work as a hospital ordererly, married, and built a quiet life a long way from Lincoln and out of the public eye.

 She never stopped saying she had been innocent, that she had been a 14-year-old swept up and held by a man who killed her family and then lied to her about it for 8 days. She asked the state to say so. She petitioned for a pardon in 1996 and was refused. She petitioned again and in February 2020, the Nebraska Board of Pardons refused her again, three votes to nothing.

 The board framing it narrowly that a pardon restores a person’s rights. And what she was asking for was to have her name cleared, which was more than the board could give her. If you want more cases like this one, subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss the next episode.

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