Charles Starkweather

Charles Raymond Starkweather, born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1938, was the fourth of seven children in a working-class family. His father, a carpenter often unemployed due to arthritis, admitted at trial to pushing his son into a window; his mother worked as a waitress. Starkweather had a mild birth defect causing misshapen legs and claimed he was teased for a speech impediment, though his elementary teacher did not recall this. He excelled only in physical education, where he bullied those who had previously bullied him.

Relationship with Caril Ann Fugate

He dropped out of high school in his senior year. In 1956, he met thirteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate, and he took a job near her school to see her daily. After Fugate crashed his father’s car, Starkweather was banished from home and became a garbage collector. He developed a nihilistic philosophy, believing dead people were all on the same level.

His first murder occurred in late November 1957, when he killed service station attendant Robert Colvert after a dispute over a stuffed animal. In January 1958, Starkweather went to Fugate’s home and fatally shot her mother and stepfather, then clubbed their two-year-old daughter to death. He hid the bodies in an outhouse and chicken coop.

1958 murder spree

Fugate later said Starkweather claimed her family were hostages. A note reading “Everybody is sick with the flu” was placed in the window. The pair remained there until police, alerted by Fugate’s grandmother, arrived on January 27.

After the bodies were discovered by Starkweather’s brother and a friend, an alert was issued. Starkweather then killed seventy-year-old August Meyer, a family friend, with a shotgun. Over nine days, he killed ten people. He was arrested on January 29.

Trial and execution

Starkweather was convicted and executed by electric chair in 1959, the last execution in Nebraska until 1994. Fugate served seventeen years in prison. The case became a national scandal, inspiring the film Badlands, the song “Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen, and a mention in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”