Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  Almost everyone. In fact, while the middle class was growing and the average standard of living was on the rise, the poor at the very bottom were worse off than ever. Their piece of the pie was shrinking fast, but few people cared. “Increasing aggregate output,” wrote Galbraith, “leaves a self-perpetuating margin of poverty at the very base of the income pyramid. This goes largely unnoticed, because it is the fate of a voiceless minority.” Eventually, this voiceless minority would come to be called the “underclass.”

  Although it was sold to the public as a program for jobs and civil defense, the interstate highway program was driven by the principle of growth. Some historians have called it the last big New Deal program. It might better be called the first corporate entitlement: a welfare program for corporations instead of people. It created construction jobs, but not enough jobs to make a difference, in part because rapidly improving construction equipment was continually reducing labor needs. The makers of that construction equipment, along with the makers of cement and steel and, of course, car and oil companies, were the real beneficiaries. There were trickle-down effects: those companies hired more people. Land values near the new roads skyrocketed; the need for highway engineers increased. But studies show that as many states began pouring half their capital outlays into roads, prices of goods and services were driven up. The large-scale economic effect of highway building was to drive up inflation and intensify economic upswings and downswings—exactly the opposite of what Ike had hoped. The highway bill would do little for the real economic losers.

  This, too, was a kind of violence. Each outburst of panic about the killer on the road revealed barely disguised anxiety about what a commitment to mobility really meant. Was the nation being connected, or driven apart? Was its standard of living improving, or were some people being left behind in the race for material success? Was endless growth—with its dedication to the proposition that consuming equals happiness—really the road we wanted to take?

  “We’ve built our lives on wheels,” declared a 1955 Ford brochure supporting the highway program, “and we can’t afford traffic jams.” Mobility was a sign of the times, and there was anxiety about that. Many people feared that the nation was leaving behind its roots in close-knit communities and human connection and heading toward a new culture of materialism, selfishness, and anonymity, a world where you are what you drive, and where encounters between citizens were as likely to end in bloodshed as brotherhood. The highways came to represent the nation’s ambivalence about having built its life on wheels.

  And yet, who could resist it, the allure of the open road, the highway circulatory system pumping goods and people from one side of the nation to the other? If you grew up in rural America, as I did, you probably saw the interstate as a lifeline, a long gray ticket out of town. The fascination of the transcontinental road trip—like the siren song of the frontier—is an invitation to remake yourself anew. Hitchhike your way across the USA and at the other side, you can become a new person. If that’s not utopia, what is?

  Freeway as new world/freeway as world gone wrong. We remain schizophrenic about our interstates: we can’t decide if they are delivering the American dream or destroying it. That’s probably because they did some of both. Highways linked people together and drove them apart; created opportunities for urban development while hastening white flight from city centers; offered access to the nation’s natural treasures while ramming concrete alleys over its landscapes; spawned a boom in franchises while destroying mom-and-pop stores; revitalized trucking and drove a stake in the heart of passenger rail. Roads are, as Ted Conover writes in The Routes of Man, “double-edged.” While the dream of the open road means freedom, escape, and betterment, we know that, like so many dreams, it can easily morph into a nightmare. And we acknowledge that nightmare in the bogeyman of the freeway killer.

  The first—and still the most famous—of those bogeymen was Charlie.

  This new highway program will affect our entire economic and social structure. The appearance of the new arteries and their adjacent areas will leave a permanent imprint on our communities and people. They will constitute the framework within which we must live.

  —ROBERT MOSES, 1956

  There will always be differences in the inherited sensitivities of children and no amount of effort can quite equalize opportunities. In a less complex social order, these differences do not constitute serious threats to the social interests. In modern society, however, slight differences in sensitivity and environment may have profound consequences. They may make the difference between the useful citizen and the murderer.

  —JAMES REINHARDT, 1960

  The first stretch of interstate built in Nebraska, I-80 between Omaha and Lincoln, is nearly completed, shown here with three highway overpasses and two railroad overpasses built by Capital Bridge. Courtesy National Archives (30N-362-60-284).

  1

  WHAT A MEAN WORLD THIS IS

  He won twenty dollars at the demolition derby the day before he killed his first victim—a gas station attendant—and celebrated by taking his fourteen-year-old girlfriend to the drive-in, heater running in his ’49 Ford. His January 1958 murder spree was complicated by car trouble: a flat tire, a jammed transmission, a hand brake that wouldn’t release. Between murders, he visited the mechanic for repairs, his girlfriend riding the Ford up the lift, holding a Pepsi and a shotgun. Eventually he would abandon his own car and steal a 1950 Ford hot rod with double antennas and big pipes, and then, even better, swap that for a rich man’s Packard. That’s the car he would be caught in, racing east across Wyoming on Highway 87, having killed eleven people, evaded Nebraska’s National Guard, and led police on a multistate manhunt. Nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather was America’s original highway killer, and he remains its most celebrated, with classics like Terrence Malick’s movie Badlands and Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska” based on his tale. Starkweather’s homicidal spree was the first to be explicitly linked with America’s burgeoning car culture, a trail of murders linked by automobiles and propelled by the killer’s burning need to be on the road.

  “Nobody has to tell me what a mean world this is,” Starkweather said from jail, and he seemed just the man to prove it. Causeless, rootless, remorseless: Starkweather was new to America. “He is like nothing I have ever seen,” Robert McClung, a gas station employee, said at the trial. But if Americans had never seen Starkweather, they had imagined him. He was a creature the fifties forged: an angry young rebel against everything the nation held dear—family, community, education, productivity, God. He was, in the lingo of the time, a JD, a juvenile delinquent disgusted by the adult world. In the movies he was Jim Stark, James Dean’s tortured alias in Rebel without a Cause. Starkweather, like so many teens, idolized Dean. He wore secondhand jeans and leather jackets, combed his hair into a slick pompadour like Dean’s. He spent hours practicing the star’s cigarette-dangling sneer in front of a mirror, becoming the real-life emblem of the cultural anxiety Dean evoked—a nation’s fear for its youth and, by extension, its future.

  The week after he was captured in Wyoming, Starkweather was written up in the national magazines. In U.S. News & World Report, he shared the page with an article about signage for the new interstate highway system. The accompanying picture showed a test directional sign:

  Metropolis

  Utopia

  2 Miles

  Starkweather’s violent spree intruded on a nation paving its way to Utopia. The interstate highway construction getting going as Starkweather took to the road was the biggest, most tangible sign of America’s commitment to a new self-evident truth: that the nation’s well-being depended on growth, and that growth depended on cars. But it was in the car-centered culture of America’s juvenile delinquents where that dream first showed its dark side: mobility, rootlessness, lack of human connection. Starkweather briefly became a symbol for the nation’s fear of the road it was going down—though it wasn’t enough to make anyone hit the brakes
.

  The Federal Highway Administration still occasionally uses the “Exit: Metropolis Utopia” signs that were first used as test signs in Greenbelt, Maryland, just as Starkweather went on his spree.

  • • • • •

  Charles Starkweather was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in November 1938. He was the third of seven kids, all but one of them boys. When he was three, his family moved to what Charles called a “shabby” house on the city’s northeast side. They were an unexceptional clan. His father, Guy, was a carpenter and handyman who worked off and on due to various ailments; for a short time in 1950, while he suffered from a bad back, the family was on welfare. After that, Guy’s wife, Helen, found work as a waitress. Neighbors thought they were fine. Guy Starkweather drank, and he had a temper, but so did a lot of men then. On the stand at his son’s trial, he admitted to once pushing Charles into a window. Charles hit him first, he said.

  In photographs, Guy Starkweather has a slick, skinny mustache and a smirk, his hat always cocked at a rakish angle. Helen, on the other hand, looks timid and sallow, her eyes alert like a gopher’s. In the most famous photo of the two of them, Helen’s saddle-shoed feet are pressed tightly together below her girlish skirt. Guy has his dog’s collar in one hand and his wife’s two hands in the other. Three years after Charles’s murderous spree, Helen Starkweather would file divorce papers against Guy on the grounds of extreme cruelty. Today we would focus on these suggestions of family dysfunction as a hint about what went wrong in Charles, but in the fifties, they barely made the paper. His childhood looked bafflingly normal.

  After his arrest, Charles did what most convicted killers do: he deflected blame for his actions. From prison, he constructed a story to explain his rage toward the world. Other kids teased him, he said, for his bowed legs and his red hair. It all began on his first day of kindergarten, when students got to stand and tell the class what they had done that summer. In his half-illiterate, half-brilliant style, Charles wrote that he “sat listening to them in silence as they tolded about them selves going swimg, shows, fishing, camping and some tolded about going to other states to vist their relatives.” When his turn came and he walked to the front of the room, kids began to giggle at his bowed legs. His nervousness showed:

  I was talking very quiet and I guess the other kids couldn’t hear me because I was interrupted by Mrs. Mott, “speak a little louder Charlie, so everyone can hear you,”—so I spoked louder and as I did my pronunciation of words got mixed up and all at once the whole class bursted into laughter. I goggled around at the kids laughing and I tooked a gripped of my self. I began to speak again my voice was smerying faint and cracked, the kids bursted into laughter again, I flinch, startle, flaccid, lacking in firmness, then I was competely flabbergast as my words became flat as I started to speak again I sadden they had no regard for my feelings, I swallowed dryly, glanced toward Mrs. Matt exspecting her to help me but she was observing me with unspoken admiration of my silence, then as I started to moved my lips in motion to speak Mrs. Matt said, “you may set down if you like Charlie.”

  The account is almost Joycean—and little of it seems to be true. Charles’s first teacher, whose name was not Mott or Matt, could not remember a single incident where other kids picked on or teased him. But Charles insisted that other kids’ cruelty explained everything. “Why did I become rebellious against the world and its human race?” he wrote. “ ’Cause that first day in school I was being made fun at, picked on, laughed at.” Eleven people dead: it’s a lot to blame on kindergarteners.

  In fact, no one considered Charles unusual. His grades were not great, and he repeated the third grade, but IQ tests put him at or just below average. He had a tendency to get into fights, but boys were boys back then. He was never considered a psychiatric problem or referred to the school counselor. “There were others much worse than Charles,” one teacher recalled.

  Still, somehow, during childhood Charles Starkweather built up an overwhelming resentment of people who had more than he had. He was sensitive to his “shabby” home and to his mother’s job as a waitress. He always shopped for his clothes in used clothing stores, because in those places, what people thought of him didn’t matter. “One thing sure,” he said, “I never give nobody much a chance to be dirty to me if I didn’t have to.” Even his descriptions of bullying eventually circle back to a sense of social inferiority: the other kids had gone to “shows,” gone camping, visited other states—things Charles and his family never did.

  The Starkweathers were downwardly mobile—at exactly the moment when most of the nation’s trajectory was up. The postwar years were boom time in America. The nation’s production of goods and services doubled in the decade between 1946 and 1956, and median and mean family income doubled between 1949 and 1973. Driven by the GI bill, home ownership was on the rise. After years of pent-up demand, Americans were shopping like mad: appliances, televisions, vacations—much of it with newly popular credit cards. Mostly they were buying cars. In 1955, Detroit would ship 8 million of them—a new record. It was all part of the postwar promise: people would drive their cars right into the growing middle class.

  The vision was clear to people like Alfred P. Sloan, chairman of the board of the biggest, richest corporation in the world: General Motors. In the twenties, Sloan foresaw the future of the auto industry, and it was not Henry Ford’s model of mass-producing inexpensive, long-running, no-frills cars for everyone. The future of the auto industry was in constant change: in getting consumers to want the latest style of automobile, and in convincing them that the car they drove telegraphed their status to the world.

  Sloan gave carte blanche to his chief designer, Harley Earle, to create a vision of affluence to which American consumers would aspire. Earle’s look—widely copied by the other automakers—was about physical speed, but it also meant upward mobility. “Going places” financially meant trading up automotively: from a Chevy to a Pontiac to a Buick to a Cadillac. “If you earned it,” Cadillac ads proclaimed, “why hesitate?” Oldsmobile promoted a concept called Oldsmobility: “an agile way to travel that’s in a class by itself!” Chrysler advertised “the Forward Look of Motion.” The American dream now had wheels.

  Charles Starkweather wanted a car of his own, but he couldn’t afford one. His family was left out of the nation’s headlong rush toward social betterment, and he knew it. His parents couldn’t even give him spending money for clothes or dates. Eventually, he did the only thing he could do: he got a part-time job hauling garbage with his brother Rodney. He hated it. He had to get up early, and he came home stinking of trash. Most of all, he hated the rich people whose garbage he had to handle. He treated them with a sullen arrogance. Rodney recalled that Charles would often shout “Go to hell!” from the truck at strangers. “Nobody knowd better than to say nothin’ to me when is ‘a heavin’ their goddamn garbage,” he declared.

  In 1954, at sixteen, Charles was diagnosed with severe myopia. For years, he had been unable to see the chalkboard in his classrooms. His family decided to give him a fresh start, moving him to a new school for ninth grade. He was put in a class for slow learners.

  At the new school, he met Bob Von Busch, another “tough,” who became his best friend. Bob later recalled their antics: beer runs to Kansas, hanging out at the drag races, stealing cars for joyrides, chaining the rear end of a cop car—American Graffiti–style—to a drive-in.

  “He could be mean as hell, cruel,” Bob said of Starkweather years later. “If he saw some poor guy on the street who was bigger than he was, better looking, or better dressed he’d try to take the poor bastard down to his size. But I didn’t think too much about it at the time. We were all a little like that then.”

  Before long, the two boys cemented their friendship by going in on the purchase of a 1941 Ford.

  • • • • •

  In 1955, Congress held hearings on the highway bill proposed by General Clay’s committee. The number the committee wanted the federal government
to spend on roads—$101 billion—boggled the mind. Clay’s report insisted the outlay was necessary: the nation was growing, its economy was growing, and its highways must match them in growth. “The relationship is, of course, reciprocal,” the report declared: “an adequate highway network will facilitate the expansion of the economy which, in turn, will facilitate the raising of revenues to finance the construction of highways.”

  The highway promoters were unabashed in their equation: prosperity required more cars on the road. Francis du Pont—the former head of the Bureau of Public Roads whose family owned a 25 percent stake in General Motors—testified before the House Public Works Committee in March.

  “[I]s it not true that the highway system needs of the United States of America are almost without limit,” he was asked, “and will they not be almost without limit on and on?”

  “I hope so,” du Pont replied.

  Nebraska was ready. State engineers already had plans underway for a limited-access highway across the state. Nebraska governor Victor Anderson spearheaded a regional Governor’s Conference on the Interstate Highway System in Denver that June. There, leaders of the ten states met with bankers, heads of contracting companies, and highway commissioners to discuss Ike’s proposed bill. These people knew a good thing when they saw it. Federal money for road building would guarantee a long-term gravy train for the construction industry, for cement and asphalt and steel suppliers, for bridge builders and people who built earthmovers. Together, the business leaders and the governors hammered out a joint statement urging Congress “to proceed expeditiously with the enactment of the pending road program.”