Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Mr Ward was the 47-year-old president of Lincoln’s Capital Bridge Company and Capital Steel Company, and had gone to work before Starkweather rang the doorbell. The 51-year-old maid, Lillian Fencl, answered the door. She had been with the Wards for 26 years and may have known Starkweather from this time as a rubbish man in the area. Starkweather and Caril brandished their guns and forced their way into the house.

  Mrs Ward, a 46-year-old graduate of the University of Nebraska who was active in community affairs, was the only other person at home; the Wards’ 14-year-old son, Michael was at boarding school in Connecticut. By then the Bartlett murders were front-page news so when Starkweather ordered Mrs Ward and Lillian Fencl to carry on with their household chores, they readily agreed to cooperate. Meanwhile Starkweather went wandering about the mansion’s elegant rooms, amazed by their opulence. Before noon, he ordered Mrs Ward – not the maid – to serve him pancakes in the library, then petulantly changed his order to waffles.

  While Starkweather was enjoying his late breakfast, 25 armed policemen were surrounding August Meyer’s farm. Starkweather’s abandoned car had been found nearby and the police were convinced the two fugitives were holed up there. A bulletin on the radio news said that they would be taken just as soon as the tear gas arrived. But when the gas cleared and the state troopers went in all they found was August Meyer’s dead body. The bodies of Robert Jensen and Carol King were found soon after. Within the hour a hundred policemen were combing the frozen countryside.

  Around 1 p.m. Starkweather allowed Mrs Ward to go upstairs to change. When he went to check on her, he claimed she came out of her son’s room with a .22 calibre pistol and took a shot at him. She missed and turned to run. Starkweather threw his hunting knife at her. It stuck in her back. He dragged the groaning woman into her bedroom and put her on the bed. The Wards’ dog then began to worry him. He broke its neck with a blow from his rifle butt. Later, suspecting that Mrs Ward might try and make a phone call, he bound and gagged her and covered her with a sheet.

  Later in the afternoon Starkweather called his father and asked him to tell Bob von Busch that he was going to kill him for coming between him and Caril. He also wrote a note, addressed to ‘the law only’, saying that he and Caril had intended to commit suicide after he had killed the Bartletts but Bob von Busch and others prevented them by coming round to the house.

  Around 6 p.m. Mr Ward arrived home. When he came in through the kitchen door he was confronted by Starkweather brandishing a rifle. Ward made a grab for the gun and in the ensuing fight, the rifle fell down the stairs into the basement. Ward tumbled down after it, and Starkweather followed. Starkweather got to the gun first, and shot Ward in the back as he turned and ran back up the stairs. Despite his wounds, Ward kept going. He ran through the kitchen and the living-room and was opening the front door when Starkweather caught up with him. He shot Ward again, this time in the side of the head.

  ‘I asked him if he was all right,’ Starkweather said later, ‘but he did not answer.’

  Starkweather took the maid upstairs, took ten dollars from her purse and tied her up. He left Caril to watch her, while he took seven dollars from Mrs Ward and tried to dye his hair black with shoe polish. Caril packed some clothes while Starkweather loaded up Mrs Ward’s blue Packard with tins of food he found in the kitchen. As evening fell they drove down Belmont Avenue one last time, then headed west out of Lincoln on Highway 34.

  Next morning a relative of Lauer Ward’s went to his house to find out why he had not shown up at work. He found Ward dead just inside the front door. The two women were dead too. Both had been stabbed repeatedly, with the same double-edged blade that had been used to mutilate Carol King. The knife was never found. Starkweather maintained that the two women had been alive when he left them. But Caril said later that Starkweather had admitted to her that he had killed Mrs Ward with a kitchen knife and that, after he had tied Lillian Fencl up and stabbed her, she screamed. So he put a pillow over her face and kept on stabbing her every time she hollered.

  News of the killings spread quickly. A picture of Starkweather and Caril grinning was on the front page of the evening paper. Now nine were dead and Starkweather was still in the area. People in Bennet and Lincoln barricaded themselves in their houses. Gun stores were packed. People were buying anything that would shoot. One shop reported selling over forty guns in two hours as parents armed themselves to escort their children to school. Lincoln’s mayor posted a $1,000 reward for Starkweather’s capture. Soon a hundred-strong posse gathered outside the sheriff’s department – though some of its members were not entirely sober. The governor called out the National Guard. Soldiers cruised in jeeps with machine guns mounted on them. The city was sealed off and searched block by block. And an aircraft circled the city, looking for the blue Packard Starkweather had stolen. But the fugitives were long gone. They pressed on westwards throughout the night. They claimed that, as they went, they wrote notes, boasting of what they had done, and tossed them out of the window. None was ever found.

  In the small hours of morning Starkweather fell asleep at the wheel and only just managed to keep the car out of a drainage ditch at the side of the road. He persuaded Caril that having sex was the only thing that would wake him up enough to keep driving. It did not work. Ten minutes later he pulled off the road again to sleep.

  At first light they set off again. At around 9 a.m. they crossed the state line into Wyoming and found themselves in the Badlands – an area scarred by ravines that provided a safe haven for the outlaws of the Wild West. At midday they stopped in the small town of Douglas where they filled the car with petrol and bought Pepsi and chocolate bars to keep themselves going. It was there that they heard on the radio that the Wards’ bodies had been found and police were looking for Mrs Ward’s Packard. Starkweather decided to look for another car.

  About twelve miles beyond Douglas, Starkweather saw a Buick parked off the highway. In it, Merle Collison, a 37-year-old shoe salesman, was asleep. Married with two children, he was on his way home from a sales trip to Grand Falls, Montana. Starkweather woke Collison and told him they were going to swap cars. Collison left the door locked and ignored him. Starkweather got the .22 pump-action rifle from the Packard and shot at Collison twice through the window of the car. Collison agreed to the trade and opened the door. But Starkweather cold-bloodedly blasted him seven times – in the nose, cheek, neck, chest, left arm, right wrist and left leg. The fugitives transferred their belongings – and their booty – into Collison’s Buick. With Collison still jammed in the front seat and Caril in the back, Starkweather tried to drive off. But the handbrake was stuck fast. Caril said Starkweather turned to Collison’s corpse for help.

  ‘Man, are you dead?’ Starkweather asked when there was no reply.

  While Starkweather struggled with the handbrake, Joe Sprinkle, a 29-year-old geologist, drove by. Seeing Collison slumped in the front seat of the Buick, he thought there had been some sort of accident. He stopped and walked back to the Buick.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked. Starkweather stuck the rifle in his face and explained that he could.

  ‘Raise your hands. Help me release the emergency brake or I’ll kill you,’ Starkweather snarled.

  It was then that Sprinkle noticed the bullet wounds in Collison’s dead body. Instinctively he grabbed for the gun. Sprinkle knew that if he did not get the gun away from Starkweather he was a dead man. As the two men grappled in a life-or-death struggle in the middle of the highway, Wyoming Deputy Sheriff William Romer drove by. He pulled up about 25 yards down the road. Caril got out of the Buick and ran down to the patrol car.

  ‘Take me to the police,’ she said, pointing at Starkweather. ‘He just killed a man.’

  Sensing the danger, Starkweather spun round, letting go of the gun. Sprinkle lost his balance and fell back into a shallow ditch. Abandoning the Buick, Starkweather ran back to the Packard and roared off back towards Douglas. The deputy put out an all-points bulletin and, wit
h Caril on board, gave chase. A few miles down the road he was joined by another police car. In it were County Sheriff Earl Heflin and Douglas Chief of Police Robert Ainslie. With the two police cars in hot pursuit Starkweather pushed his speed up to 100 mph. When he hit Douglas, the traffic slowed him and Heflin got off a couple of pot shots at his tyres with his handgun. For a moment, Ainslie got close enough to lock bumpers, but the bumper tore loose as Starkweather jumped a red light and overtook a lorry on the inside. As he cleared the town, Starkweather put his foot down on the accelerator again and his speed climbed towards 120 mph. Heflin got out his rifle and started shooting at the Packard. One shot smashed the back window. Then Starkweather screeched to a halt. Bleeding copiously, he thought he had been shot. In fact, a piece of flying glass had nicked his ear.

  The police pulled up behind him. Starkweather got out of the car and started to walk towards them. The police shouted for him to put his hands up. As the police shot at the road in front of him, Starkweather put his hands behind him and coolly tucked in his flapping shirt tail. Then he lay face down on the road and surrendered.

  The police blustered about his arrest.

  ‘He thought he was bleeding to death. That’s why he stopped. That’s the kind of yellow son of a bitch he is,’ the arresting officer told reporters.

  However, in the public’s mind, Starkweather was already a new kind of brooding anti-hero. When the prisoners were taken to the state penitentiary they were met by a crowd of newsmen, photographers and news cameramen. Caril, with her head covered by a scarf, played up to the cameras. But it was Starkweather, ignoring the media, who got all the attention. Wearing tight jeans, a black motorcycle jacket, cowboy boots with a butterfly design on the toe, handcuffed and with a cigarette dangling from his lips, he was the perfect young rebel killer. America had already been rocked by the image of the wayward teenager. They had seen a brooding James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and a cocky and threatening Marlon Brando as the motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One. Elvis Presley had just burst on the scene with wild pelvic gyrations that scared the pants off conservative middle-America. But here, in the person of Charles Starkweather, was the embodiment of their fears. Here was the ultimate juvenile delinquent. Local Nebraskan newspaper the Omaha World Herald captured the mood. In a vitriolic leader it declared: ‘The Starkweather story brought back to mind a thousand others. The sideburns, the tight blue jeans, the black leather jacket have become almost the uniform for juvenile hoodlums. And the snarling contempt for discipline, the blazing hate for restraint, have become a familiar refrain in police stations and juvenile courts.’ FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover promised a nation-wide crackdown on juvenile crime.

  At first Caril told police that she had been Starkweather’s captive and had had no part in the murders. She had only gone along with him because her family was held hostage. But later she undermined her story by saying that she had witnessed their murders. Then she became incoherent and had to be sedated.

  Starkweather remained unrepentant. In a note to his parents, ostensibly apologising for the trouble he had caused them, he wrote: ‘I’m not real sorry for what I did ’cos for the first time me and Caril had more fun, she helped me a lot, but if she comes back don’t hate her she had not a thing to do with the killing all we wanted to do was get out of town.’ He later compared himself to a soldier, killing only when he had to, to achieve an objective.

  He quickly confessed to all the murders – except those of Clara Ward and her maid Lillian Fencl. As far as he knew, he maintained, they were alive when he left the house. Despite being charged with the murder of Merle Collison in Wyoming, Starkweather was quickly extradited back to Nebraska. He was ridiculed for being afraid of flying when he refused to go back to Lincoln by plane. In fact he thought that travelling by car he would stand a better chance of escaping.

  Caril Fugate and Charles Starkweather were both charged with first-degree murder, making Caril the youngest woman to be tried on this charge in the US. They both pleaded not guilty and were tried separately. Starkweather’s lawyer tried to get him to enter an insanity plea. Starkweather refused.

  ‘Nobody remembers a crazy man,’ he said, insisting that all the killings had been in self-defence.

  Starkweather’s trial for the murder of 17-year-old high-school student Robert Jensen began on 5 May 1958. The prosecution quickly established that the six bullets in Jensen’s head had all been shot from behind, demolishing Starkweather’s self-defence argument. Throughout the prosecution case, Starkweather acted cool, chewing gum and rocking back on his chair. The only time he showed any emotion was when an ex-employer said that Starkweather was the dumbest man who ever worked for him. Starkweather went crazy and had to be restrained.

  The ex-employer’s testimony was part of the defence lawyer’s strategy to show his client was mentally incompetent. In fact, Starkweather had an above-average IQ. The defence attorney also read out some of Starkweather’s confessions, hoping to show that his state of mind was abnormal and confused.

  When Starkweather took the stand, he was asked why he was mad at Caril when they were at the derelict school. He replied that it was because of what she had done.

  ‘What did she do?’ he was asked.

  ‘Shot Carol King,’ said Starkweather.

  This was not the first time that Starkweather accused Caril of killing Carol King. During his time on remand he had begun to fall out of love with her. He had also accused her of finishing off Merle Collison when his gun jammed.

  Three psychiatrists appeared for the defence. They claimed that Starkweather had a diseased mind. But, under cross-examination, they admitted that this did not amount to a recognised mental illness and none of them was prepared to have Starkweather certified insane. Prosecution psychiatrists agreed that Starkweather had an anti-social personality disorder, but was legally sane. The jury also agreed. They returned a guilty verdict and recommended the electric chair.

  During his court appearance, Starkweather become a TV celebrity, appearing on the news each night. Many teenagers identified with the cool and unrepentant Starkweather. Fan mail flooded in, though some urged him to turn to God. Admirers overlooked the fact that one of his first victims was Caril’s stepsister, a two-and-a-half-year-old child.

  Five months later Caril Fugate became the youngest woman ever to be tried for first-degree murder in the US. She was tried for being an accomplice in Jensen’s murder. Although there was no suggestion that she had actually pulled the trigger, her admission that she had taken Jensen’s wallet meant that this case would be easier to prove than one where it was simply her word against Starkweather’s.

  Starkweather himself was the prosecution’s star witness. Taking the stand, he told the jury that he no longer loved Caril and did not care if she lived or died. At one time he was even reported as having said: ‘If I fry in the electric chair, then Caril should be sitting on my lap.’

  He said that she had known he was involved in the murder of the filling-station attendant Robert Colvert and that she had been present when he had killed her family. She had gone with him willingly and had even expressed a desire to be shot down with him when the denouement came.

  Caril’s attorney believed that she was innocent, but could not shake Starkweather’s story, which was partially corroborated by witnesses to their spree and early statements to the police. She was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  She continued to protest her innocence, but settled in to become a model prisoner at the state women’s reformatory at York, Nebraska. In 1972 she was the subject of a documentary called Growing up in Prison and in 1976 was released on parole. In 1983 she appeared on TV to protest her innocence once more and took a lie detector test on camera. It indicated that she was telling the truth. However, a public opinion poll in Nebraska showed that most people did not believe her.

  On death row Starkweather spent his time writing. He also talked for more than eighty hours to James Melvin Reinhardt, a professor of
criminology at the University of Nebraska, explaining why he had taken to crime. His main motive was to take ‘general revenge upon the world and its human race’.

  ‘The people I murdered had murdered me,’ he said. ‘They murdered me slow, like. I was better to them. I killed them in a hurry.’

  Poverty was another reason. ‘They had me numbered for the bottom,’ he said. He blamed the world and was sure that other people hated him ‘because I was poor and had to live in a goddamned shack’. But there was a way out of this class trap – ‘all dead people are on the same level,’ he said.

  He saw his murderous spree as the only way out of a life of drudgery. ‘Better to be left to rot on some high hill, and be remembered,’ he wrote, ‘than to be buried alive in some stinking place.’

  Now Starkweather had everything he wanted. He was going to die – but he was famous. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to see his name in the papers.

  Professor Reinhardt published The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather, which alleged that Starkweather was paranoid and that this problem was self-inflicted. Starkweather’s own account was published in Parade magazine under the title ‘Rebellion’. The piece was heavily cut and ended up as a homily to wayward youth, advising commitment to God, regular church-going, and respect for authority. ‘If I had followed these simple rules, as I was advised to many times, I would not be where I am. today,’ it concluded.