Few American criminals have captured the imagination of Hollywood like Charles Starkweather, a red-haired James Dean wannabe who murdered eleven people in 1957 and 58. With him during most of his killing spree was his girlfriend (and possible accomplice) Caril Ann Fugate. Among the victims were Caril’s own mother, step-father and little sister.
My guest, Edgar award winner and bestselling author Harry N. MacLean, knew the Starkweather family as a boy in Lincoln, Nebraska. One of his main goals in writing his book, “Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America”, was to examine more closely whether 14-year-old Caril was complicit in the murders, or instead coerced by Starkweather to participate.
The author’s website: https://www.harrymaclean.com/
Transcript:
Erik:
Welcome all to another episode of the most notorious podcast. I’m Erik Rivenes. It’s so great to have Harry McLean as my guest today. He is an Edgar Award winner and best selling author whose work includes the true crime classic in Broad Daylight, a Murder in Skidmore, Missouri. And he is here to talk about his latest book out on November 28th, called Starkweather, the Untold Story of the killing spree that Changed America. Thank you so much for your time today.
Harry:
Well, it’s my pleasure to be with you.
Erik:
So this was a Personal journey for you, right? Writing this book, you knew members of the Starkweather family growing up.
Harry:
It is. You know, Charlie was in Lincoln, Nebraska. That’s where he had been raised, as had his companion, Caril Fugate. And I grew up in Lincoln. My family goes back a couple generations. And my brother was in a class with Charlie Starkweather. And I knew three of his victims as well. One was the, the boy, Michael Ward, who was not killed by Charlie, but both of his parents were. So I knew our families were friends, let’s put it that way.
Erik:
Wow. As you document in your book, he had quite a reputation as a bad kid in school. Do you remember hearing about him in his antics pre killing spree?
Harry:
I don’t. He was out of junior high by the time I got there. But my brother was there the same year he was, and they had a class together. This is a shop class. And oddly enough, he has a very distinct memory of. Charlie was the butt of a lot of jokes and kind of tricks in those days, even though he was a fighter at the same time. And my brother recollects in shop class that when there was a recess, they bolted one of his projects like a boat or something to the piece of wood that it was attached to. And then when he came back, he couldn’t pick it up, and they all couldn’t pick it up, and they all laughed heartily about that. That’s the only direct memory that anybody in the family has of him.
Erik:
Interesting. So Charles Starkweather, you write, was born on November 24, 1938, third of seven children. And the StaRkweather family struggled, right?
Harry:
Yeah. The dad was an alcoholic, and he also had some sort of a back problem that restricted his working. So the mother, Helen Starkweather, worked and I think provided most of the income for the family. And the other kids worked too, from as soon as they were able. Back in those days, you could work when you were twelve or 13. And they all contributed to the family household, as did Charlie. When Charlie was working, he turned about a third of his paycheck over to his mother.
Erik:
But despite their difficulties, he seemed to have fond feelings for his mother and father.
Harry:
Yeah, it’s one of the interesting things when you put this case up against, or put him up against other psychopaths. His family was fairly cohesive. He was very close to his mother and loved her deeply. And he had kind of a lot of conflicts with his father. But he also talks quite fondly about him and his brothers and sisters. He got along with them all. He was close to his older sister, younger sister. Sorry, and one or two other members, but he was fine with all. There wasn’t any of that conflict in the family that often set something like this up.
Erik:
Yeah, he was very distinctive looking. Right. Could you describe his physical appearance?
Harry:
He was short, which was probably his dominant characteristic, at least, is the way he was portrayed. And I think in his own mind as well. He was about five foot four. The average American in 58 was five foot seven, male. And he had really thick, bright red hair. It’s been compared to either Lucille Ball’s hair, if anybody. I love Lucy or Bozo the clown, and I’ve never seen a color picture of it, so I don’t really have a firm image in my mind other than that it stood out and it caught people’s attention. He was bow legged, which was a real problem for him growing up, in the sense that everybody from his earliest school days mocked him and made fun of his bow legs and would imitate him when he was walking and poke and make fun at him.
He also was slightly pigeon toed and he had a stutter in spite of all of this. However, by the time he hit junior high, he looked kind of uncannily like James Dean. Same sort of aspect. You really have to see a picture of him to see what the similarity. And James Dean became kind of his hero. And you can see pictures of him, of Charlie after he’s been captured. And he always has a cigarette hanging in his mouth, very much like James Dean did. And he strikes poses very similar to James Dean poses where he’s the rebel without a cause and he’s kind of angry and yet he’s there present with you in the photograph, and it’s kind of an eerie similarity.
But overall, James Dean was five foot eight, so there was a great difference there. But anybody who writes about him or saw him in those days, right when the James Dean movies were coming out, will remark on the similarity between the two.
Erik:
There’s a moment in his life, correct, where he is no longer a passive victim of bullies, he not only becomes a bully, but he becomes the scariest one in this school.
Harry:
Yeah, he just kind of took it most of the way through grade school and became kind of isolated. He kind of hung by himself most of the time or with his brothers. The stories I’ve heard of people that were in school with him was relentless. And it also went on at church. And after the church was out, there were stories about girls making fun of him and acting like they were bowlegged and talking about where it was his horse and so forth, and put a stutter in with that and this bright red hair, and you can see what those years were like for him. And eventually, he got into a situation with the school kids, and his dad complained to the school. School did nothing. And there was another incident not too much later, about a month, where the kids were following him down the street, mocking him.
This is his own memoir, by the way, and took a picture from him that he had painted for his mother. And he got home, and his dad saw him. The shape he was in called the school. School said, we can’t do anything. So the dad said to chaRlie, okay, that’s it. The next time this happens, take a shot at him. Punch him out. And Charlie took it to heart.
He was kind of set up for that, I think, anyway. But this instruction from his dad, he took to heart. And, in fact, that’s when his personal violence on his schoolmates began.
Erik:
Right. He went way overboard in his bullying. I mean, not that bullying should be tolerated in any way, shape, or form, but he was just an Uber bully. He didn’t just push someone, try to intimidate them with words. He wanted to inflict pain, and he seemed to enjoy it.
Harry:
Yeah, I mean, what had happened was the anger and the resentment had coalesced in him and now became available to him when he was attacked and kind of drove his reaction to the mocking and the making fun of him. And so it was always disproportionate. Not always, but by and large, it was disproportionate to what was happening, what the event was. And when he got started, I think I mentioned this in the book, but back in those days, when two guys fought, by and large, it was a one punch deal, or the two boys kind of wrestled until they fell on somebody, got the other one in a headlock, and they fell on the ground. And then somebody said, the person on the bottom said, I give. That was pretty much the types of fights in those days. And Charlie, that wasn’t him. If he got a good blow in, he stuck with it and got on top of the well, he kicked him if he got him down, which was totally unheard of in terms of fighting protocol, at least in junior high school in those days.
And he would rub their face into the, into the gravel until his rage had dissipated. And that’s when his reputation started, because that’s pretty scary stuff. You don’t know what he’s going to do, what’s going to happen if you do taunt him. So people started staying away from him. They still made fun of him, but it was behind his back, and I think he knew that, and I think that fueled his anger as well.
Erik:
Yeah. So you’ve already mentioned the person who will forever be connected to him, Caril Ann FugaTe. Would you tell us about her, her difficult childhood and how she and Charles Starkweather would eventually meet?
Harry:
Caril was born in 1943. Charlie met her when she was twelve. And the broad view is she was with him when ten of the eleven murders. Well, I should rephrase that. She was his companion through several of the murders that make up the story, although her guilt or innocence is the subject of the great part of the book. But she lived in a poor part of town, and her parents were poor. And her dad, her biological dad, was not only a drunk and a violence, he was also a pedophile. Now, whether he ever abused her is not certain.
She never said it, but he was convicted on three different occasions of pedophilia. And he also brought violence home onto the mother and into the household. So that was her upbringing. And they had to move so often because of the inability to pay the rent and the fights that she went to, like, six schools in five years. And the impact of that is you never really attach or develop friendships or relationships with teachers or students, and you’re always behind. So her grades were not very good, and she became a tough little kid. There’s no question about it. She stuck up for herself, and she had a way of coping with things, which was to kind of dissociate from them.
Harry:
She did not let the anger get a hold of her or the pain or the suffering that went with the violence. And finally, her mother and father got divorced, and a mother married a World War II vet who didn’t make much money. But he came home every night sober and was not a drinker and was not violent. So her life kind of stabilized when she turned ten. And she had a little sister then Betty Jean, by her mother and her stepfather, which she became very attached to when she met Charlie, everything started. That’s kind of the beginning of the end right there. And it was her sister who was dating a friend of Charlie’s who suggested that Charlie and Caril get together on a double date and that whole relationship. It’s important to remember exactly when I mentioned that her guilt or innocence is a major focus of the book.
It’s important to remember that she was only twelve when Charlie got a hold of her. She was 14 when the crime spree started, but she was twelve. And in the eyes of the law, a twelve year old is a child. So really you have a child. When you look at whether she’s responsible for what happens, it’s really important to keep that young age in mind. She and Charlie went together for about two years, year and a half to two. It’s not quite clear Charlie’s. He felt great connection with her and a great shift in his emotional reaction to the world because now he had a girlfriend and that made him.
Gave him status in his own eyes. It kind of set up his fantasies about the two of them going out on the outlaw trail and ending up as they did end up, and they were quite close. He would see her every day after school. He moved away from his parents, and Caril’s stepfather did not like him and did not want him around and accused Charlie of getting Caril pregnant. The mother, surprisingly said, this is a 13 year old girl now. She’s entitled to go out with who she wants to go out with. And so that allowed Charlie to see Caril almost every day after school. He would pick her up at school some days.
Other days he would park his car where she could get it, even though she was 13, and drive and meet him after school. But whether she had a rough side to her personality, as I’ve said, and it wasn’t really combative. It was kind of mouthy. If you talk to the teachers and the students, she also was quite quiet. A bunch of her fellow students were in school when she was. Didn’t barely. They. They barely remembered her when the thing broke, when the whole murder string became public.
And she had a very kind side to her, too. She was very close to her mother and she was very close to her little sister, who was about two and a half years old when the murder started. So she had kind of a dual personality, one personality that she developed to cope with her young life and the traumas in it and the dysfunction and the other side which really related to her mother and her father. Now, if you kind of use pop psychology to look at her relationship with Charlie, you would say something like, she wanted to be the most important person to someone. And she actually used a phrase like that. I’ve seen it in her writings because of the dysfunction of the house. And she also had an older sister, and she was an adolescent. And Charlie was.
He was 17 at that time, and she was kind of a sitting duck for someone like Charlie to kind of come in. And he was smart enough to sense that in her, that need to be the most important person to someone. And he, in my view, from reading his memoirs and studying him, might not have intentionally knowingly exploited that, but he certainly did, whether he understood he was doing it or not. And that was a very important part of their relationship.
Erik:
Was this brought up in newspapers at all? Was it an issue with anyone that a twelve year old girl could date a boy almost five years older than her? Or was it still not a big deal in the 1950s?
Harry:
Yeah, the age difference was always pointed out. The fact that it was statutorily illegal was never mentioned. And I’m talking about, I’ve gone through all the newspaper articles, I’ve gone through all the books, and Charlie basically, statutorily was raping her and went back and looked at the statute at that time. Oddly enough, if you want to look at something, that’s anachronism. The statute at that time said for somebody under 19 or under to have sex with a girl under 16 was second degree rape, I believe, unless she was previously unchaste, if you can imagine that in today’s world, anyway. In other words, if she hadn’t had sex before, Charlie wouldn’t have been raping her. And that’s not really relevant here because I don’t think she had. But what would be so critical today with the age difference in terms of legal liability and the legalness of the sexual relationship was not considered – never seen anything written about it. Caril denied that they had sex. It’s not believable from everything else I’ve read and talked to about people from that time period, but more in terms of the reaction of the press and the people to her was she was basically smeared. And it’s an interesting phenomenon that I deal with at some length in the book, because people were convinced that she was as guilty of murder as Charlie was, that she had actually murdered people herself, not just participated or helped them out, but had actually murdered people. And that was always the assumption in the press, the way they framed things, the language they used. And part of that was, I’m convinced that she was a poor girl from a poverty ridden home in a trashy part of town. She was, to use the language, she was white trash, use the language of the time. And the fact that she was with Charlie and obviously sexually involved with him to the average eye, certainly that was a major part of the reaction, not only the people in Lincoln and the rest of Nebraska, but law enforcement, too.
You see that in their attitude toward her. I don’t know what the attitude would have been if she’d have been a country club girl, but certainly it played a role in the way she was perceived by the press, by law enforcement, and by just the average and Lincoln citizen.
Erik:
So it’s around this time, not long before he begins his spree. At least this is what he says. He starts having these visions of a figure he called death who visited him at night. And he described this figure as being half bear and half human.
Harry:
Yeah, his fantasy world was growing larger and starting to kind of take over his own reality. And in the fantasy world, he was a cowboy, either a good guy or a bad guy or a sheriff or an outlaw. And I was, too, at that age. I mean, in those times, we were all kind of cowboys and indents and games like that. But he took his quite seriously. He would tell people that he had a gang. He was into guns. He was always into guns from even his childhood.
HIs dad took him out and taught him to shoot, and he had some guns in this fantasy world that developed in part in reaction to, I believe, the way he was treated and perceived was that he was this dramatic, cowboy outlaw figure that was going to go out in a blaze of glory. And the one thing that was missing, as I said, did happen. He needed a girlfriend. That strengthened this whole fantasy that he was living with. And it all came into being, in my perception, when he did have a dream about this figure. And then later he would say that he actually saw the figure in the window. And I think it’s a mixture of probably being awake and asleep, but his understanding of that. And I guess there was actually a discussion or words exchanged between himself and this figure who was death, was that he would not live a long life.
Death was not too far away for him, but he would go out in a blaze of glory. He would be a criminal, heroic character and have an end that brought this into reality, this view of him. And that was fine with him, actually, for the first time in his life, he had a fix on his life, on what it was going to be. And he had a goal and some guidelines and some structure to it. Okay. I’m not going to live long. That’s okay. Because life is pretty cruddy anyway, even with Caril.
And so I’ll go out this way. He couldn’t foresee what was going to happen in terms of TV and movies and books and all that cultural phenomena that developed around him. But he certainly knew. He knew enough about cowboys and outlaws to know there could be a great dramatic finish to it. And that gave him really, for the first time in his life, gave him a sense of purpose.
Erik:
Yeah. So it was an encounter, right. With a gas attendant named Robert Colvert. That was a real turning point for him. The first time he killed someone.
Harry:
That’s along that same line. I think he reached the point where to begin to take this fantasy seriously. He needed to move it into reality. He needed to stop fantasizing about it and do it, start the actual reality of this path that he had now foresee for himself. And there’s some dispute about this. I’m convinced that he killed Colvert on purpose. He did rob the gas station outside of Lincoln, and he later admitted that he did kill Colvert. And to me, the motive was actually to see a.
What it felt like to kill somebody and to begin moving into the outlaw fantasy and making that real. And in fact, he felt good. It did make him feel good to have committed murder. This is his own language and comments he made to a psychologist. He came out of that killing feeling pretty good about himself and where he was in life.
Erik:
So would you walk us through the events leading up and through the brutal triple murder he committed on January 21, 1958? And if you could explain, by the way, how you handled the fact that you had to deal with two completely different versions of what happened, one from Caril Ann and one from Starkweather.
Harry:
January 21, 1958. Charlie was involved in the murder of Caril’s mother, stepfather and little sister. The big debate always has been whether Caril was present when he killed her parents and little sister. That is the great question. If you’re looking at guilt or instance here, was she there for that? Because if she was, whichever answer you give definitely clearly affects the sequence of events that follow and her culpability in those events. Charlie initially said in the first five or six statements that he made, he said that Caril was not there, that she was at school, that she didn’t come back until 4:00 in the afternoon, and that he had murdered them around two or 2:30. There are timelines involved in phone calls that are probably a little bit more detailed than you want to go into. But I took it to a level of detail which had never been done before in my perception, in order to try and nail that down.
Was she there? Because if she was there when he murdered her parents and stayed, that says something about her. If she was there under the theory that she was a hostage, which is what he told her, that he had her Parents holed up somewhere, then that’s something totally different. I mean, they were murdered on the 21st of January. Caril claims she came home and Charlie then told her that the parents were in, her little sister were gone, that she was keeping them hostage. And she eventually went along with that under her telling of it. And over the next six days, including that first day, they lived in the house together. And this is really held against her a lot in terms of guilt or innocence. People came to the door.
In one case, a couple of policemen came to the door. Her sister came to the door, her sister’s husband, Charlie’s brother, over these six days to see what the problem was. And she obscured what the problem was, was know Charlie was inside and basically said the family was sick. And she posted a note on the door saying that everybody had the flu, don’t come in. And she alerted Charlie when two uniform policemen came to the door that they were coming. So that’s often held against her. That behavior is guilty behavior. On the 27th, a Monday, the killings were on Tuesday, and the following Monday, they fled the house.
Caril’s grandmother, tough little character named Pansy street, came and said, I know Charlie’s in there. I know what’s going on here. I know my daughter, something’s wrong with her and I’m going to go get the cops and come back. And so Charlie said, we’re getting out of here. He and Caril got in his car, 49 Ford, and left Lincoln. And there’s a series of things that they did, getting the car fixed, getting the tires fixed, getting gas and so forth, that probably, again, are a level of detail that you don’t need to know. But they ended up in mid to late afternoon, probably around 330 or four, in a little town called Bennett. And they visited a farm where the two of them had gone shooting before.
The Starkweather family had gone shooting over the years. By that I mean hunting. Although Caril didn’t hunt herself and Charlie murdered the farmer, Mr. August Meyer – just shot him in the back of the head and blew his head off. Now, this is where the two stories converge, or diverge, I should say. Each one of them has a different version of how Mr. Meyer was killed. And from that point, on through the rest of the murders, each of them tells a different story about what happened.
Charlie’s story changes. As I mentioned in the beginning, when he’s picked up, he says, she didn’t have anything to do with any of the murders. I killed them all. And by the end of it, by the time his trial comes up, he’s saying, she killed this person and that person. So it was that night. Well, that late that afternoon, they killed the farmer. Charlie killed the farmer. The question is whether Caril knew what was going to happen and who saw what and so forth.
There’s no question that he blew his head off with a shotgun in front of her. And their car had gotten stuck down the road because the snow had melted and gotten mushy. And they walked up to the farm to get some horses, to borrow Mr. Meyer’s horses to pull the car out. So now he’s dead, they’ve killed him, and their car is still stuck. They go back and they try and get the car out. Eventually this farmer comes along, sees them, helps them get the car out, and off they go. There’s a couple more incidents in there where they go back into Lincoln and they come back and eventually what happens is the car gets stuck again and they abandon it.
And they’re walking down a county road and a car pulls over a teenage boy, 17, and the girl, I believe was 16, Bobby Jensen and Carol King. And they offer him a ride even though they’re carrying – Caril’s carrying the twelve gauge by this point, and Charlie’s carrying the 22. And even though they’ve got these weapons, they offer them, offer a ride. Two stories here about what happened completely diverge. They go back to where their car had been parked. There’s an old abandoned schoolhouse there and a seller like a hurricane seller or tornado seller that they had stayed in a little bit earlier before they went to the farmer’s house. So they take the kids back there.
Charlie initially admits that he killed both of them, killed the boy first and then killed the girl. Well, Caril sat in a car outside – she didn’t see what happened. That’s what Charlie said. That’s what she said. Later on, Charlie says that she killed the girl. So now they’ve murdered three people. Charlie has murdered three people since he left Lincoln.
And he decides that they need to get out of Lincoln. I mean, they need to get out of Bennett. So they flee back to Lincoln, which is where everything starts to get bizarre because they’re going right back to the scene of their initial crime. And by this time the bodies had been discovered. There’s an overlap in here that’s kind of hard to keep straight of when the killings happened and when they were discovered, because often by the time they were discovered, Charlie and Caril were on murdering the next crime scene, let’s put it that way. And the cops were always at least one crime scene behind. They figured that after the Bennett killings, after they’d figured out who it was, that they would flee the area. Instead, they go back to Lincoln and they spend the night.
This is still Monday. They spend Monday night in Lincoln. It’s freezing below, freezing out. And they sleep in the car. Charlie’s, by this time, he’s got the other Ford, the car that was driven by Bobby Jensen. He took that car. And they go to the Wards’ house. They go there that morning to the house of Lauer Ward.
Lauer and Clara Ward, big mansion. They’re a wealthy family, very prominent in Lincoln society, and they go in in the morning and take over the house. And about a little later that day, the people in Bennett are looking for the two teenagers, and they discover the bodies around one or two. And by that point, Charlie and Caril are in the Ward house. And that afternoon, probably around that time, that the cops have found the bodies of Mr. Meyer and the teenagers, the Wards, the husband and the wife and the maid, Lilyan Fencl, are murdered in the Ward house. And that freaks everybody out, because now they’re back in Lincoln. They haven’t left, and they’ve killed this prominent family in broad daylight.
Cops have no idea where they are. Cops are at least two big steps behind them wherever they go. And Lincoln goes into a state of absolute panic. And that’s a whole nother discussion, what they did and how they responded. But about the time that they have found the bodies in Bennett and begun the crime scene investigation, Charlie and Caril are heading out of Lincoln, through the sand hills in Nebraska and up into Wyoming. And the next day should be the 29th. The police find the Ward bodies because he hasn’t come to work that day. So his cousin goes out and finds the bodies in the house.
This is when Lincoln really freaks out, when they found the Ward bodies. And the National Guard is called out to patrol the streets of Lincoln with submachine guns. And people flee over the state line into Iowa, South Dakota. And people that stay, lock their houses, get their guns out, and prepare for a meeting with Charlie, because at this point, they’re terrified. They don’t know. He pops up wherever he wants to. No one knows what he’s going to do he kills rich people, he kills poor people, he kills old people, he kills young people, and it just blows away the feeling of safety in Lincoln and actually all over Nebraska.
And that night, after the killing of the teenagers and Mr. Meyer were discovered. They were freaked out in North Platte, they were freaked out in Gering, Nebraska. They were locking their doors. That’s how far that fear had spread because of these unpredictability and viciousness factors. When they found the bodies, around noon on the 29th, the Ward bodies, the bodies in the Ward house. And the word went out, and that’s when people lost it. About 3 hours, 4 hours later, they captured Charlie in Wyoming.
He was spotted in Douglas and there’s a great shootout, cops chasing him through town, firing at his car, at his tires and everything. And he gets away and he’s running through the badlands about 110 miles an hour. And they finally run him down and he stops and gives himself up. So there’s the fantasy come to reality. And he and Caril have split earlier because when he was fleeing into Wyoming, he killed a shoe salesman from Montana. He needed a new car. He figured the Ward car that he was in had been identified as the car he was in. So he stopped, took a car from the shoe salesman who was taking a nap, and killed him and took off.
And Caril stayed. That’s factually complex too, but the point is she remained there, was picked up by the cops, and Charlie took off to escape in the salesman’s car. So they were now separate. They were both arrested, and amazingly enough, the next day. So they’re in Douglas, Wyoming, and they’ve killed somebody in Wyoming. And the next day the Lincoln district attorney, county attorney, and some other cops from Lincoln flew out there and got them and brought them back. They didn’t actually make it back till the 30th, but they were returned to Lincoln, Nebraska on the 30 January. And from there you get into the whole judicial process.
Erik:
Charlie Starkweather, he used guns in that first triple murder. And it was just brutal. brutal, especially what he does to the little girl. Starkweather was an absolute monster. But at the Fugate home, he took Caril’s mother’s butcher knife, and he had spent a lot of time throwing knives into walls. And it’s a combination of guns and this knife, right, that he used to kill over the next few days.
Harry:
That’s true. I mean, his favorite possession were guns, but he also carried a hunting knife with him and he also used his butcher knife. He would sit, actually in his little one room apartment, he would sit there with Caril and throw his knife into the wall. I haven’t seen a picture, but I can imagine what the wall looked like. And when they were staying in the house, he did the same thing, throwing the knife into the wall. And in the first round of killings, he used both his. 22 and his knife. So they were both killing weapons for him.
Erik:
So I’m going to assume here that Caril’s account of the murder of her family is true. Again, he visited her family alone, killed them. He then hid the bodies in some buildings on the property away from the house. He cleaned up. And when Caril showed up, things were tidy. Right. No reason to suspect that something had happened to them there on the premises. That’s the idea.
Harry:
That’s true, yeah. I mean, if she had looked closely, she could have seen signs of violence there. But just to jump ahead a little bit, police looked at those rooms, too, and didn’t see the signs of violence. So you can’t really say that she should have. But, yeah, she bought this hostage theory that he had them parked away in a house and had people, his friends, looking after them, and if she tried to run away, he would have them killed. She resisted at first by her own speaking, and finally bought it. At least she said she did. And I think that’s a great debate around that.
And that’s one of those things where you have to remember how old she is and how immature her cognitive and critical functions were to hear something like that and how scared she was. Charlie was holding a gun on her. She admits that and Charlie admits that. So it was a real traumatic situation for her. But, yeah, they were out in the back buildings. The three bodies were out there when she came home. And for the rest of the time, because it was January and freezing cold, and I’m sure the bodies were frozen stiff.
Erik:
Yeah, I think it was his brother Rodney. right, who grew concerned enough to visit the house? Charlie had borrowed his. 22 and returned it, but there was some damage to the butt of the rifle because he had used it to bash one of his victims. So Rodney looked around, discovered the bodies, the police arrived, and then the APB was issued.
Harry:
Yeah. I mean, and the cops had been out there before and did not look in the outbuildings or they would have seen the bodies. But, yeah, because his brother and Caril’s brother in law went out there on the Monday the 27th, after they’d been out there several times before, and decided to take a look in the outbuildings, which actually, two rounds of cops had failed to look at the outbuildings after going out there. They found the bodies. That was about 3:30 or four. Monday afternoon, the 27th.
Erik:
There was a lot of criticism of the Lincoln Police Department. Many believed that if they had done their job more thoroughly on the Robert Colvert murder, they could have caught him before he committed more murders.
Harry:
Yeah, I mean, there was some criticism at the time, and they appointed this independent investigator, I guess, to look at how the police department handled it. And he gave him a clean belt of health. And I go into that in more detail than has been previously done by that, I mean, what the police department could have done in the first killing of Robert Colvert, Charlie used to hang out at the gas station, and he would drink Coke. Sometimes he’d sleep there, and one of the guys would wake him up in the morning because he had a garbage route with his brother, and he’d wake him up at 4:00 so he could go get on. This went on for weeks. Now, this guy wasn’t – he was gone by the time the killing happened. But he knew Charlie just from Charlie hanging around.
And they didn’t put Charlie together with that, with the killing ever, until Charlie confessed months later. And there’s other reasons why they didn’t. But he had never been arrested, so they had no mug shots that they could show the gas station of people and saying, is this a guy that hung out here? And there was another lady in town who was kind of suspicious, and she talked about the red hair, but they couldn’t show her a mugshot either. But the critical point is that it was very clear to the investigators. Two people interviewed the gas station attendant who lived and who said, Charlie hung out here. I knew him. I used to wake him up to go to work. Had they asked him, do you know where he worked? One simple question.
Seven or eight words. It’s my belief, the whole scenario, the whole crime spree, would have come to an end after One murder because he knew where he worked. He was a garbage man. And I went back and researched it. There were three garbage companies in Lincoln at the time, and it would have taken probably five minutes to determine that it was because, you know, you call up and you say, do you have any red haired guys working the early shift? Short, five foot four? It’s hard to describe how collapsed it all would have been. They would have figured Starkweather within three to four minutes of the phone call. It would have taken ten minutes to get in touch with all three garbage companies, and I doubt any other one had a five foot four man with red hair and bowlegged who worked there. They would have had Charlie that afternoon, or at least the next afternoon had they asked that question.
And the thing that really burns me so, you know, it’s not a sophisticated police department. And you can point the finger at them. You don’t necessarily need to say you screwed up here, but you can point the finger to the failure to do it, to ask that sort of question. But what really is unfair in the whole thing is that the fellow that wrote the report, who did the independent investigation turns around and blames the gas station attendants for not offering the information that Charlie was a garbage man. But that’s one critical fact. Had they said garbage man, I’m absolutely convinced Charlie would have been arrested that day or the next day and never seen the light of day again.
Erik:
So in these murder accounts, and you very helpfully in your book, print both accounts, Carils and Starkweather’s. Reading them back to back, it’s like the difference between night and day. In Starkweather’s versions, he always portrays himself as kind of a gentleman bank robber who only kills because inevitably all of his victims go for his gun and he ends up having to defend himself over and over again. And In Caril’s accounts, She’s basically frozen with fear. Most of the time she’s with him, scared to death of him, exhausted, hungry, confused, and always looking for a way to escape.
Harry:
Yeah, I mean, it’s two completely different versions. And one thing that’s important to note is that, as I said earlier, Charlie’s versions changed. And there’s many more versions which I outline in the book. Oral statements made, letters to his mother, letters to the law and so forth about who killed who. Caril’s version is almost always the same from when she’s picked up and talks to the law about it to when she’s interrogated for six, 7 hours without any legal representation or even an adult there to her trial, that testimony, there’s a few minor changes, but basically she’s pretty consistent. And if you’re judging people’s credibility, that’s one thing you look at. She was telling the same story from the beginning. Charlie was always shifting.
Erik:
Yeah. So there’s a lot of scrutiny of Caril. A lot of people seem to have it out for her. And no one really is taking into account the fact that she was only 14. But the criticism towards her was largely, why didn’t you escape or try to escape? You had plenty of opportunities to make a break for it, and you didn’t, right? She heard that all of the time.
Harry:
Yeah. And what she’d say was, I was a hostage. I felt he was going to kill my parents if I tried to escape. That’s what she says. She’s pretty consistent in that, that I was scared to run. There are times where she clearly could have run if she wanted to. When the cops came to the door, she could have gotten away. And that’s what the critics focus on.
The several times where when the cops, Charlie’s taking a nap and the two uniformed cops come to the door and she doesn’t say anything to him, she, in fact, wakes Charlie up. And another instance where she’s sitting outside in the car in the ward driveway and Charlie’s inside. She sits out there for half an hour. She could have left if she wanted to, but those criticisms missed the fact that she believed that her parents were hostage. Now, that belief is kind of hard to accept on its face, but once again, you’re talking about a 14 year old, unsophisticated girl who’s never even been outside of Lincoln, and Charlie’s got a gun and he’s doing all this stuff. And do you really expect her to say, I don’t believe that parents are hostage. She knows that they’re gone somewhere. And so you really expect her to run when in her mind, she thinks that Charlie has her parents and little sister hostage?
Erik:
One of the interesting moments in this story is when Caril runs from the car into the arms of the deputy sheriff who was there at the scene. A lot of things were happening one after the other. At this moment in the story, as you said, Starkweather murders a salesman in his car. Merle Collison happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And after this murder, another car pulls up, right? Can you walk us through this chain of events that leads to Starkweather’s capture?
Harry:
Well, yeah. What’s happening is the good Samaritan who thinks that these two cars are somehow in trouble stops by to help him out. And Charlie kind of is going to kill him, too, and does attempt to kill him. That’s pretty detailed, too. Exactly what happens. The guy gets in a fight with Charlie and gets the gun away from Charlie. It’s the first time Charlie’s lost control of an incident like this. And at that point, Charlie jumps in his car, realizing that he’s done, and peels out.
Caril, probably a little bit before that, according to her, sees for the, now that she’s free, sees the squad car pull up. It’s a highway patrol car who has stopped by also to see what’s going on, if they need any help. And she runs into that car and claims he’s going to kill me. It’s Charlie Starkweather. He’s killed all these other people. He wants to kill me. And now, if you look at it skeptically, now that she’s going to be captured in any event, she runs to the police car and says, basically, she is a victim who’s been held hostage. That’s her story.
And you can look at it either way. The cynical take is that she saw that it was all over and that she now played the victim. But in any event, they take her to the Douglas County Jail, and Charlie’s off running around now in Merle Collison’s car, and the cops go after him.
Erik:
So when Starkweather finally surrenders, he seems pretty cool with the whole thing. He seems cheerfully resigned to his fate, and he’s happy to talk with authorities about everything he has done.
Harry:
Yeah, this is part of the theory of his motivation from the beginning. He really doesn’t care to have a long life. It doesn’t amount to much. And he’s got a girlfriend, and now he’s got these cops chasing him through the Badlands, taking shots at him. I mean, what a great finish to the great outlaw Western fantasy. He does decide that he doesn’t want to be killed. They’re getting close to him, and they actually shot the .30 through his rear window and nicked his ear. And that started to bleed on, and that’s when he pulled over.
I think he decided that he didn’t want the story to end with his being killed, so he pulled over. Now the cops and everybody also say he was a coward. And as soon as he saw his own blood, he lost his guts and pulled over. Well, the fact was, he’d also run out of bullets, so he couldn’t fight him. He said, if I had bullets, we would have had a shootout. And I suspect that’s true. If he’d have had bullets for his gun. I think the idea of a shootout with a state patrolman and a local Douglas sheriff would have been a great ending for him.
But as it was, he had no bullets and got out. And there was a little bit of an uncertainty there for a while. But he got cuffed and he just started talking. He started confessing to everything, telling him the stories of this and that. And, yeah, I think he directed the end of his life, and he was pleased with the result. Now, I’ll say this, I’ve never seen it put together like this before. So I expect to have debate over this, but that’s the way I see it.
Erik:
Debate over how he approached his fate?
Harry:
Yeah. And that he was really playing out this fantasy. A lot of people just see him as kind of a dumb killer who was trying to get away, trying to do all this stuff, kept running into people who got in his way and killed him, and finally he got arrested. But the way I see it from the depth, and once again, I’ll say with umpride, I’ve gone into more depth, and I’m sure you’ve read the book, you’ll see the level of detail to support anything that I say. It’s my theory, but I think it’s a good solid one.
Erik:
So once they are taken into custody, Caril Anne Fugate gives this famous, you write, 166 page statement. Would you describe the circumstances under which she gave that statement and how it incriminated her?
Harry:
Well, the statement was actually made beginning on the following Saturday. They were arrested on Wednesday. They got back to Lincoln on Friday, and they took her statement and Charlie’s statement beginning on Saturday. And that went on with her into Monday. And she was asked several times, and this is subject to debate, too, but she was asked several times if she wanted a lawyer. She didn’t even know the difference between a defense lawyer and a prosecutor. And she said, yeah, but the prosecutor won’t defend me. And there are several other instances where the prosecutors taking her statement did mention a lawyer, and she would say, yeah, but I want a lawyer, but who would take it? The prosecution maintained throughout the trial that she never asked for a lawyer.
But at 14 years old, she now knows that her mother, father and little sister are dead, that they’ve been killed by Charlie, and that she’s got an older sister and the grandmother. But that’s pretty much it for her. And she’s stuck in a mental hospital because they don’t have jail facilities for a female juvenile. She doesn’t know why she’s in a mental hospital. And even if they told her, I’m not sure she could comprehend what it was they were saying and what they were doing, and they interrogated her there on two occasions and totaling. The stories vary a little bit about whether it was six to seven hours. One story takes it up to about ten. But in any event, she did not have a lawyer.
She didn’t have a parent. She didn’t have any advocate. She didn’t have anybody there looking out for her. She had the prosecutor, a uniform policeman in one case, and the director of the hospital in a room with her taking the statement that would ever, ever be allowed in today. It was before that string of cases under the Warren Court that said there had to be warnings and advisements before you took a confession. The Escobito and Wainwright cases, and those hadn’t happened yet. So there was no restriction on what the cops did. They didn’t have to tell them about a lawyer or anything.
In my view, she did ask for one and they advised her not to it. She incriminated herself so thoroughly that it almost reverses and saying nobody who had done this stuff and was this clever and deceitful would admit to it all. If she knew what she had done was a crime, she wouldn’t admit it. Now, by that I mean, let’s talk about what she did do that could be considered. She was charged with the felony murder, which means you commit a felony, any felony, in the course of a murder, whether you murdered the person or not, really isn’t the point. If Charlie murdered Bobby Jensen while the felony, while a separate felony was being committed, and she committed the felony, she would be as guilty as Charlie of the murder of Bobby Jensen. So there was in the car, when they were driving in Bobby Jensen’s car with him and Carol King, she says, at Charlie’s direction, she took $5 from Bobby King’s wallet and basically gave it to Charlie. Well, that’s a felony.
And so then Charlie murders Bobby Jensen an hour or so later. Then they charge her with felony murder, the felony being the theft of the money and the murder being that of Bobby Jensen. And she said she did the money thing under Charlie’s coercion and that it really wasn’t a decision of hers to make. There are other instances where she alerted, when they’re in the ward house, she alerted Charlie to the fact that Lauer Ward, the father and husband, was pulling into the driveway. And she had to be pretty clear then what was going to happen to him when he did come in, that Charlie would kill him. She was never charged with that. But if you go through, I go through every one of the murders and look at her culpability. So there are instances, and she also held a gun on the maid in the house, Lilyan Pencl, at Charlie’s direction.
So there are instances, and that’s a felony in and of itself. And so there are instances, other instances with which she was never charged but would have been charged had she not been convicted of the felony murder and Bobby Jensen’s death. She would have been charged with every one of those other ones, they were going to get her one way or another, and they took the easiest one. And if they missed on that, they were going to charge her with the maid. They were going to charge her with Claire Ward. She was going to go down one way or another. But that question is, was she fully capable of making a rational decision, given her age and given the crime she had seen and the loss of her parents, was she capable of not doing what Charlie told her to do? And that’s in a nutshell, kind of the issue. It’s more complicated than that.
And the statement, she says stuff in the statement that any fully functioning, fully rational adult would never have said. She admits to walking down the path with a shotgun, carrying a shotgun. If she had been guilty, she would never have said that. Now, that doesn’t really resolve the issue, but that’s kind of the approach. Charlie accused her of killing the maid and Carol King. The cops were actually convinced that she killed the maid, and that’s probably what they would have charged her with next had she been acquitted. But I looked at the evidence that they had to support that belief. And there were all sorts of statements that cops made that could never be verified, and I couldn’t verify them, and I found some contrary to it.
But that’s kind of her situation. She gave this 166 page statement, and in it, she admits to enough stuff, not so much what she was charged with, but a lot of other things. And it was like, well, if she didn’t do this, she did a bunch of other things, so it’s easier to convict her.
Erik:
Yeah. I mean, again, a 14 year old girl out with a guy who’s absolutely obsessed with knives, and when it gets to this point where the maid was killed, that the maid was stabbed many, many times in our bed, it’s just so hard to believe that Caril could have done that. The sheer ferocity of it, the rage that had to be behind those stabbings. If she had been ordered by Starkweather to kill the maid, she would have likely stabbed her once, right? Not over and over and over again.
Harry:
Yeah, that’s kind of where the thinking stops. And you just kind of take a look at the whole situation and say, is this 14 year old girl really going to get on top of that maid? And where’s the rage? What’s the source of the rage that’s going to cause her to stab her that many times? And the maid’s fighting back, not very successfully, but that sort of violence, out of control violence, it’s not hard to imagine Charlie having that sort of violence at all. Plus, she’s tiny. Caril is barely 5ft at the time of the trial. She came in at 95 pounds. She’s a little thing. You can see the pictures in the book. She’s a tiny little thing.
And to think that she got out there with a knife, it’s not impossible. But I don’t understand where the anger and rage would have come from if Charlie told her to do it. She could have stabbed her once and then quit. But, yeah, like you say, it’s hard to actually picture her doing this.
Erik:
Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to ask you about this is interesting. Starkweather, as you said, changed his story to implicate Caril. And some believe that this was because of a note she had sent him, a rather curt note that was supposed to have turned him against her. But he seemed to still love her, right? And you think that was one of the reasons why he might have flipped on her, is that he had this messed up romantic idea that they were destined to leave the world together. It was like a warped Bonnie and Clyde fantasy.
Harry:
Yeah. He kind of substantiated this early on because he said, now, once again, it’s subject to debate who said this, but that he said, I’m happy being executed as long as I have Caril sitting on my lap. Now, Charlie was executed in 15 months. So he was making these statements 15 months from his trial. And that became a great line and a great debate over who said it. I’ve determined in the book that he said it, not his lawyer and not his dad, and that fits the whole theory was that she needed to go out with him. What a great story that would be if she went out with him, not literally sitting on his lap. But she needed to be convicted, too, to do the real Bonnie and Clyde thing.
And for her to stay innocent kind of screwed up his story. Now, that’s not the way he saw, but I’m convinced once he saw that, it really occurred to him that she might not get the death penalty even though she was going to be convicted. I think he started to say, she needs to go with me and would say that. And as a matter of fact, as an aside, that’s the critical Line in a song that Bruce Springsteen wrote about. And he changed it a little bit. He said, basically, it’s fine with me as long as my pretty baby is sitting in my lap. That’s not what Charlie said. He said as long as either she or Caril was sitting there.
But that reflects my belief that it was even a more dramatic ending than him if she went too, than if he went by himself.
Erik:
Yeah, that’s the song, Nebraska. So Starkweather’s defense team really wanted to argue insanity. Right? Which went against this idea that Starkweather had of himself as this dark antihero kind of…
Harry:
You know, what sort of a story is that? Guy goes crazy and kills a bunch of people. And his favorite line was, well, let’s say a line he used a lot was, no one remembers a crazy man. And so that would blow his whole fantasy out of the water. He couldn’t. And he told them, instructed them not to claim insanity as a defense. They did anyway, but there was not one psychiatry. Well, they found a couple of psychiatrists who said that he was, but that he was crazy. But he got up in the stand himself and told the story, what he’d done.
And it wasn’t a crazy version of events. And I don’t think the jury gave it any credence at all, this insanity thing. He’s a psychopath or a sociopath, whatever you want to say. But he did not fit the definition of insanity. And his parents didn’t want him to raise that defense either. So the speculation goes, because it would look poorly on the family.
Erik:
Right. And his attorneys warned that even though their client might try to convince the jury that he was sane, the fact that he was claiming self defense in each of these murders proved that he was delusional.
Harry:
Yeah, that was one of the arguments that a sane man would not even debate the issue of raising the insanity defense at all. And the lawyers did what they could with it. But his conviction, in my view. Well, first of all, he confessed to everything, so the only way out was insanity. And he simply did not fit the legal definition of insanity. And he didn’t want to go down that path. He wanted to be – the antihero is not insane, to use your phrase. Yeah.
Erik:
So a final question. Could you share with us what happened to Caril from her conviction until now?
Harry:
She was committed. She got a life sentence after her conviction on the felony murder, and she was committed to the Department of Corrections, and specifically the York, Nebraska, was called the York Reformatory for women at this point. She was 15, and she stayed there for 17 years. And she was released in 1976 on parole. And she had an immaculate record as an inmate for 17 years. She was not disciplined or given any sorts of any sort of reprimand over those 17 years. And she was the model inmate. She became a mentor to other girls that were there. She got her high school degree.
She got a certificate for a type of nursing assistance and was working in the town itself on a job by the time she left. She was giving talks around the state to youngsters about not hanging around with the wrong people. And she was flawless almost for 17 years. And then she got out and she worked in a hospital as an aide for 22 years and was never convicted or charged with any sort of crime that I was able to find. And she got married with a man that had four or five stepsons. And she had a stroke when she was about, let’s see, 72. And then she had a heart attack, and then they had a car accident. Her husband died in the car accident.
And she was pretty – well, pretty bad shape by then. And no one knew where she was. Her lawyer didn’t know where she was. I couldn’t get any of her cousins and so forth to talk. Other reporters couldn’t find her. There was a Showtime series called the 12th Victim. They couldn’t find her.
I’m about giving up on it, saying, oh, I probably know more about her life now than she does. But the people, particularly reporters, would always say to me, did you find Caril? Did you find Caril? And I’d have to say, no. Well, then I won’t go into the particulars, but it kind of fell on my lap. One of the people I’d been asking for months finally told me where she was and jumped in a plane. Jumped on a plane and flew up there to where she was and had about an hour interview with her until I was asked politely to leave.
Erik:
Just briefly, what were your impressions of her?
Harry:
Well, visually, she was even tinier than I thought. There was just this little person in a wheelchair. She was like a six year old girl, except, of course, she had white hair and she had had a stroke. She couldn’t talk very well, although her roommate could talk for her. She could kind of read what she wanted to say. And I didn’t ask her about the killings or anything. I knew what her version was, and I doubt if it would have gotten way too complicated if I’d have tried to dig into that stuff. So she was pleasant to me.
She was very nice to me. We had a nice conversation. Under the context of what I just said about her and the shape she was in and me and what I was doing, the actual contents of that conversation and the details of that hour I spent with her, I really would like to save for the reader of the book.
Erik:
Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, I know that this has been a project that you’ve wanted to work on for years and you’ve finally finished it. It must feel great, very satisfying, a huge accomplishment.
Harry:
That’s a good way to put it, because I kind of stayed away from this story over a lot of years because I knew it was going to be tough, and tough for me personally to go back into that period of my life. And there was a lot done on it. And then she applied for a pardon in 2017, they turned the pardon down in 2020, and that kind of sparked my interest again. And then I got on TV and looked at her and watched her explain her innocence and said to myself, no one really has looked at that question of her guilt or innocence. And that kind of sparked my interest. And I kind of kept resisting it because I knew what it was going to involve. But in the end, I thought, this is going to sound a little arrogant, but this story has never really been told from beginning to end. And the book is 432 pages.
And I went down every path I could and say this too. When I started off, I had no belief in her innocence or guilt. It really didn’t matter to me. I had no bias to find her guilty or innocent. And a lot of the stuff that’s been written or produced takes an angle on it, and I go right down the middle now. I shift around as the story goes on then that’s part of the process of writing and researching the book.
Erik:
So I’ll put the link to your website in the show notes harrymclean.com this book is available everywhere, bookstores online, all on November 28th. Thanks again for coming on.
Harry:
It’s my pleasure. Pleasure might not be the right word, but it’s been interesting to see what you focused on. You obviously read the book thoroughly, which is not always the case, and I certainly appreciate that. It’s nice to have an interview with someone who has read the book thoroughly and takes it seriously. So thanks for that.
Erik:
Again, I have been speaking to Harry McLean. He is the author of Starkweather, the Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America. This has been another episode of the most notorious podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobweb to Corner of the world. I’m Erik Rivenes and have a safe tomorrow.
