Memories of a Mass Murderer in the Midwest
My encounter with Charles Starkweather
Lincoln, Nebraska, was like many mid-size cities in America in the 1950s. It had good schools, low unemployment, a solid middle-class, a lot of churches, and relatively little crime. As the home of the state university and the state capital, it had grown steadily and comfortably and would continue to do so.
Poverty certainly existed, but not in large numbers. Moreover, for children trapped in poverty, it was still possible for them – at least once in a while – to work their way out and up. Horatio Alger stories were not uncommon.
But for Charlie Starkweather, born into what would become a large, struggling family in 1938 and impaired by learning disabilities, the odds against escaping his circumstances were astronomical.
His father was a self-employed carpenter but was unable to work beginning in his middle years because of rheumatoid arthritis in his hands. Unfortunately, however, that did not stop him from becoming abusive with his wife and seven children. Charlie (as he was known by classmates, including me), was the third-born. He was short at 5 feet, 5 inches, and was dramatically bowlegged. He struggled academically in school and may have had a speech impediment for a time. At some point in his schooling, he was “held back” a year, as they called it then – forced to repeat a grade in the hope he could catch up. He never did. Classmates often made fun of him; bullying before it became known as that.
He dropped out of high school in his senior year and went to work in a warehouse. The job did not work out, and his next job was one of the most lowly in society at that time – a garbage collector. Garbage cans full of trash that had not been bagged had to be carried to the truck, lifted into the truck bed, dumped by hand, and stomped down to make room for more. It was hard, physical, dirty, and low-paid work.
His was not a pretty lot in life. He began to fall into fits of rage and violence growing from his extreme dislike of those who enjoyed better life circumstances, which was the great majority of the 100,000 residents of the city. He excelled in two qualities – athleticism and strength – and found these qualities useful in playing out the rage he felt for others. He also became an expert marksman.
To say that he became one of the nation’s earliest mass murderers of the post-World War II era is an oversimplification. His murders were horrifyingly heinous. He committed them one to three at a time, in the company of his 14-year-old girlfriend, , mostly during the last ten days of January in 1958. Exactly 66 years ago this week; two-thirds of a century. It might have been called a kill-and-run-and-kill-again murder spree. The City of Lincoln, understandably, freaked out. Some residents sat on their house roofs with shotguns through the night to protect their homes and families.
It was like no other murder spree in American history up to that time. Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, were a top news story from New York to Los Angeles.
A bit about Starkweather’s childhood – and mine
Some who knew Charlie Starkweather were not terribly surprised at his murderous turn. I was among them. I knew him and had witnessed his rage.
I grew up in Lincoln in a small, five-room home in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood. For a time, Charlie Starkweather lived about three blocks away. We attended mostly the same schools. I was 2 ½ years younger than he but would end up only one year behind him in school.
We were both at Irving Junior High School in 1955; I was in eighth grade, Charlie in ninth. We knew each other by name and sight but had no connection beyond that; we were acquaintances, but not friends. Then, in physical education class one day, instructors arranged an outdoor flag football game for a combined group of eighth and ninth graders whose gym classes happened to meet at the same hour. The classes were mixed and divided into teams. Charlie was on one team, I was on the other.
I was playing on the defensive line early in the game – either guard or tackle, I don’t remember which. The ball was snapped and I began to run at – or hopefully through – the offensive line. I tried to find an angle to the player directly across from me – Charlie Starkweather. He stepped aside, stuck his leg out suddenly, and tripped me as I was running through. I fell hard to the dirt field. A streak of pain shot through my right foot.
Being a 14-year-old, I tried to tough it out. I limped to the sideline, finished my afternoon classes, and began to walk home – five blocks. The pain grew so intense that I had to crawl on my hands and knees a good part of the way, cutting through a city park. I called my parents, both at work in the downtown retail shoe store my father managed.
My lower leg was in a cast for the next five weeks.
I thought the whole thing to be a simple playground accident and described it that way to all who asked, saying simply that I had tripped, without mentioning an opposing player.
A few years later, however, as the story of Charlie’s murderous spree across Nebraska and into Wyoming began to unwind, I began to rethink that day on the playground. A player in the situation I have described does not quickly step aside and stick out his foot by accident. That’s not in the football playbook. It is an intentional, planned action with the expectation of causing physical harm.
No, I was not surprised to learn that he had become violent. I had seen that he had it in him.
Moreover, years later, as I continued to look back, I began to wonder, “Why me?” It could have been simply random, but maybe he targeted me, and the only reason I could think of was because I was one of the few Jewish kids at Irving.
The Starkweather murder spree: Like no other
Robert Colvert was a 21-year-old gas station attendant in Lincoln. He was just out of the Navy and his wife was pregnant. On Saturday evening, November 30, 1957, shortly before midnight, a teenage couple pulled into the station where Colvert worked on the north outskirts of Lincoln. The man walked inside to make a small purchase, possibly cigarettes. He saw a toy stuffed dog on display and decided he wanted it for his girlfriend. He did not have enough money, however, and Colvert refused to let him have it for less than the marked price. Charlie proceeded to rob the store at gunpoint. He took about $100 plus the stuffed toy. He forced Colvert into his car, drove a short distance, pulled over, forced him out, shot him in the head, and left his body on the roadside. The body was found around 5 a.m. the next morning.
Charles Starkweather, 19, apparently in a rage over not being able to purchase the toy for his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, 14, had committed his first murder. Law enforcement officers had no leads. It was only the third murder of the year in Lincoln; the first two both involved family violence.
Starkweather’s rage struck again about seven weeks later, after Fugate’s mother tried to discourage her daughter from continuing to see him. On January 19, 1958, Starkweather murdered Fugate’s family — her mother, stepfather, and stepsister — at their home, hiding the bodies in dilapidated outbuildings on the semi-rural property. A note was left on the front door: “Stay away. Everybody is sick with the flue.”
It was several days before the bodies were discovered. Starkweather, accompanied by Fugate, already had committed several more still-undiscovered murders.
The two left Lincoln, heading for the August Meyer farm near Bennet, Nebraska. Starkweather knew Meyer, a friend of the Starkweather family, and had gone hunting on the Meyer farm. Starkweather got his car stuck on a muddy road approaching the farm. Meyer, 70, probably jokingly, described it as a dumb move, or some such. Starkweather took it as insulting his intelligence. He shot Meyer in the back and left him lying dead. He and Fugate fled on foot, hitching a ride with a young couple driving by – Robert Jensen, Jr. and Carol King, both juniors at Bennet High School, out for an evening together. The young couple was forced into a storm cellar, where they were horrifyingly and unspeakably assaulted, tortured, and murdered. Starkweather and Fugate then took their car.
The next day, he and Fugate circled back to Lincoln. They drove to an upscale residence in a country club neighborhood that Starkweather knew well from his garbage truck route. They murdered Clara Ward, the wife of Lincoln industrialist, C. Lauer Ward. They then forced the Wards’ maid, Lillian Fencl, to fix them lunch, after which, she was tied to a bed and stabbed to death. When C. Lauer Ward came home that evening, he was shot in the head. Starkweather and Fugate fled in the Ward family car.
Heading west Starkweather began to worry that their luxury Packard automobile would be identified. They came across a car parked on the roadside near Douglas, Wyoming, its driver-occupant, a traveling salesman, napping inside. Merle Collison was shot and killed.
Starkweather and Fugate took Collison’s car, but it stalled due to Starkweather’s unfamiliarity with it. They finally managed to get the car going as a local deputy sheriff happened by, slowly. Fugate ran to him, seeking safety. Starkweather drove off and a 100-mile-an-hour chase involving three law enforcement vehicles ensued. Starkweather surrendered after being cut by flying glass when his windshield was shattered by a bullet.
The 11 victims of Starkweather’s murder spree seemed unusually random and happenstance. The spree carried on for so long, was so frightening, so violent, and so unparalleled in the mid-twentieth century that it attracted enormous national attention. The story of the arrests was on Page 1 everywhere.
The publicity paralleled some of the most notorious murders of the century to that time, such crimes as the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932, and the Leopold and Loeb thrill murders in Chicago in 1924.
The Aftermath: Two convictions, one of them probably wrongful
Starkweather initially contended that Fugate committed all the murders. But he was convicted of the Robert Jensen murder and sentenced to death. He died in the electric chair at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln at age 20 on June 25, 1959, one of the youngest persons to be executed in the twentieth century, and the last time the electric chair was used in Nebraska. The prison doctor, on hand to declare Starkweather dead, fell dead himself of a heart attack awaiting the outcome.
Fugate was convicted of the same murder and sentenced to prison for life. She became a model prisoner, and her sentence was commuted to 30-to-50 years in 1973. She was paroled at age 32 in 1976 after 18 years in the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women.
The murders have not faded from the landscape. Books, movies, documentaries, and even songs have been and still are being written and made about them.
Though Fugate was convicted, her involvement in the crimes always was in question among some who studied the case. Her lawyer said she was forced to accompany Starkweather and did not know that her family had been murdered. She said Starkweather threatened to kill her family if she fled. The jury did not buy it, though it spared her life because of her age.
For many, however, it seemed a stretch too far that a 14-year-old girl, known to be nice and intelligent, could or would actively kill people in the manner of the Starkweather murder spree. Her conviction seemed yet another Starkweather tragedy. Recent books and films have described Fugate as Starkweather’s 12th victim. A descendant of two of the victims supported a failed pardon request for her a few years ago.
After her release, she relocated to Lansing, Michigan, where she found work as a janitor. She married in 2007, although tragedy was not yet through with her. Her husband died in a 2013 automobile accident in which she was seriously injured. Now 80, Fugate still maintains her innocence.
For those in Lincoln who lived through it or came after, Starkweather is an indelible part of the city’s history. For America, an ever-growing and endless wave of mass murders soon began sweeping the country.
Thanks, Chuck. Yes, Lamberto was the first reporter on the scene in WY; I had forgotten that.
A gripping story well told! Thanks, Arnold!