Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  • • • • •

  The flight of Charles and Caril was complicated by car trouble. First, the Ford had a flat tire. Then the spare had a bent rim. By the time they collected more spare tires from Charles’s garage, the transmission was grinding. They stopped at the nearest service station to have it packed with sawdust—a common practice in the fifties to quiet noisy gears. Caril sat in the car, her stepfather’s loaded shotgun on her lap, and drank a Pepsi while the Ford went up on the lift.

  For some reason, they did not have the bent tire rim fixed there but continued on to Tate’s, another garage, where they replaced it. They bought ammunition at the station and hamburgers at the adjoining diner. Then they drove to the farm of seventy-year-old August Meyer, a family friend of the Starkweathers who often let Charles hunt on his property. Meyer lived outside the tiny farm town of Bennet, about six miles southeast of Lincoln.

  Bennet today looks much as it did then: a tiny town—population 544, according to the sign at its edge—with a few storefronts and a grain elevator clustered along the banks of a sluggish river. In 1958, the road out to Bennet from Lincoln had just been paved. August Meyer’s farm sat on the edge of the small town. As Charles and Caril made their way up the muddy, slushy two-track, the Ford got stuck. They hiked the rest of the way up to Meyer’s house. When they got there, Meyer came out, and Charles asked to borrow some horses to pull out his car. Then—he later said in self-defense—he shot Meyer in the head. He dragged the old man’s body into a nearby washhouse and covered it with a blanket. He and Caril rifled through Meyer’s house for anything useful. They collected some socks, gloves, a sweatshirt, a hat, a pump rifle, some snacks, and less than a hundred dollars in cash. They found a spade and went back to dig out the Ford.

  As soon as they freed the car and got it going, it slid into a ditch. In trying to get it out, Charles stripped the reverse gear. A farmer who lived nearby saw them and stopped. He had a cable, and he attached it to his car and pulled them out. Charles gave him two dollars for his trouble.

  The pair then drove up another lane toward the Meyer house. Charles peeked in the window at Meyer’s body and saw the blanket on it had slipped. Fearing someone had been there, they fled. They drove back to Tate’s service station and bought shells for the .22 and a map of Kansas, hoping to throw police off their track. Then, with that odd indecisiveness, they went back to Meyer’s farm, where they got stuck again. They abandoned the car and began walking along the road, each of them carrying a gun. The unlucky teenagers who happened to drive by were Robert Jensen Jr. and his girlfriend, Carol King. Starkweather later reported that Jensen stopped and considered whether or not to pick them up. But then he recognized Charles.

  “You have a Ford, right? A ’49?” he reportedly said. He too was a Ford man. His was a 1950 model, with double antennas, white sidewall tires, and loud “pipes.” It was a hot-rod car, but seventeen-year-old Bob Jensen was no hoodlum. He and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Carol King were the perfect opposites of Starkweather and Fugate: good students, popular at school and attached to their families. Carol King was a cheerleader and a majorette, and Bob Jensen was class president and a former football player. They were engaged. Their yearbook photos—she in a lace-trimmed Peter Pan collar, he in a plaid, button-down shirt—appeared in almost every newspaper story on the crimes. They look mature and already a little staid, each smiling slightly, as if contemplating the day when they would trade in Bob’s hot rod for a station wagon.

  Their bodies were found the next day in a storm cellar, a dank cryptlike hole on Meyer’s property that was all that remained of an old school. The teens appeared to have been marched down there and executed. Bob had been shot six times around his left ear, from behind. Carol had been shot in the head from behind. Her body was lying on top of Bob’s, partially undressed, and she had been stabbed multiple times in the vagina with a stiletto-type weapon that was never found. Newspaper accounts referred to this as “an unnatural sexual attack.” Later, Charles confessed he had tried to sexually assault King but it was too cold. Then he withdrew that confession, insisting he had only said it to protect Caril. She was the one who had actually killed King, when he left her guarding the girl. He claimed he hadn’t even seen it happen.

  When Jensen and King were found dead, the story of the crime spree went national. The killing of a working-class family in a poor neighborhood of Lincoln was hardly news outside eastern Nebraska, but a pair of model teenagers murdered by their delinquent counterparts was headline stuff. Hunt Teens in 6 Slayings, screamed the Chicago Tribune’s inch-high headline. Jensen and King were widely described as “popular”; Starkweather now became the “brutal killer of 6.” The story hit home in a nation already panicked over juvenile delinquency. If America needed proof that the kids were not all right, here it was, in a photograph of the fugitives pinched from the Bartlett house by a reporter. It was the perfect foil to the clean cut school photos of Robert Jensen and Carol King: the blue jeaned Charles and Caril sprawled on a settee, she clutching a cheap white purse, he with cigarette dangling—James Dean–style—and a smirk.

  • • • • •

  This was not the first time America had fretted over its youth, nor would it be the last. But the Eisenhower-era panic was wide-ranging and intense, because it linked up with larger, deeper anxieties about the sweeping changes overtaking American life.

  Historians today doubt there was any measurable increase in juvenile crime during the fifties: the flames of panic were fanned by the media and Hollywood. The FBI helped too: it issued reports claiming that delinquency had spiked 70 percent since 1948. In 1954, at televised congressional hearings on juvenile crime and comic books, teachers, ministers, doctors, police officers, social workers, legislators, and teenagers all offered theories about this “steadily mounting problem of nationwide proportions.” By 1955, an estimated two hundred bills relating to juvenile delinquency were bouncing around Congress. Books rolled out regularly with titles like Juvenile in Delinquent Society, 1,000,000 Delinquents, Youth in Danger, and The Shook-Up Generation. Popular magazines like Life, Look, Time, and Newsweek ran lurid tales of teens gone wrong.

  As the nation wrung its hands, analysts tried to point fingers. Slums, broken homes, working mothers, community breakdown, immigration, gangs, insufficient social services, and bad schools were all blamed for teen waywardness. TV and movie violence were denounced. Comic books, particularly crime and horror comics, came under special scrutiny. From today’s vantage point, it looks a lot like cultural McCarthyism. The fifties are famous today for their postwar reembrace of traditional values. Overhyped fears about rebellious youth fit right in with that picture: the men in gray flannel suits hating Elvis, drag racing, and Dean. But to see the delinquency panic as merely conservative backlash is to miss out on its true nature. There was a surprising amount of introspection and cultural questioning in the nation’s fears for its youth.

  At its root, America’s concern for its kids reflected widespread dismay at the lifestyle taking shape in the postwar years. This was partly class anxiety, as the GI bill and prosperity threw open the doors of the middle class to a massive influx of hopefuls. How could the old standards of behavior be maintained if the traditional elites were no longer running the show? But delinquency anxiety also reflected real cultural misgiving: what was this new world America was building? Politics were militaristic and society was materialistic. If the kids were on the wrong path, wasn’t it the adults who had led them there? As a Yale professor wrote in the New Republic in 1960, “juvenile delinquency in America is largely a reflection of institutions and values which typify our way of life.”

  One of those values was mobility. The Saturday Evening Post’s five-part 1955 series “The Shame of America” began its list of sweeping social changes with “increased mobility [that] results primarily from the invention of the automobile and from the demands of our economy for a working population which can migrate easily from place to place.” Or as Benjamin
Fine put it in 1,000,000 Delinquents, “When a child thinks of himself as a transient, he is much less inclined to be governed by what society thinks of his behavior, and has a harder time finding constructive outlets for his energy.” Fine called the phenomenon “rootlessness.” In Youth in Danger, Robert Hendrickson blamed the “new mobility of our population” for leaving families to “drift.” Mobility was frequently invoked to explain why California’s delinquency rates were so high: more of the state’s residents were recent transplants.

  The new mobility ranked high on every list of causes for the teen crime wave. But this put the nation in an odd position. Mobility was the very ideal the postwar nation was embracing—not least in the construction of a nationwide system of express highways. Linked as it was to social mobility, physical mobility—even as its dark side was being gleaned—was fast becoming national dogma.

  Hollywood understood this contradiction best, and movie-makers mined it to good effect. In the more than sixty delinquency-themed movies made in the fifties, mobility is both problem and solution. The delinquent may be a sign of social breakdown—a threat to old ideals of family and community—but he’s also a hero, an icon of a new era of speed, power, glamour, and freedom. James Dean embodied that doubleness brilliantly—the angry rebel, the new hero.

  “What can you do when you have to be a man?” anguished Jim Stark asks his father in Rebel without a Cause. His father has no answer. The older generation—conformist, distant, hypocritical—can’t offer the teens a decent model for how to be adults. The only thing for the kids to do is retreat to their car-centered world, where manliness is proved behind the wheel. Mobility signified the breakdown—Jim’s family moves every time he gets into trouble—and it also provided the only relief, letting the hero prove his worth to the girl he loves. And it propelled Dean into immortality in September of 1955, when he slammed his Porsche 550 Spyder into the side of a 1950 Ford Tudor two weeks before Rebel’s release. Americans feared what Dean represented, and they made him a hero and an icon, too. Danger was part of the allure.

  • • • • •

  In Lincoln, delinquency was a problem no less than anywhere else. One person who took it to heart was Lauer Ward. On January 28, he had a meeting with Governor Victor Anderson. The interstate program was underway, working east from Sarpy County to the outskirts of Omaha, and already a freeway revolt was forming in the city. People from working-class communities on the eastern edge of town were joining together to resist the taking of their homes. A public hearing was scheduled for the next day. There was also the problem of getting money released for the 10th Street viaduct. Furthermore, there was talk at the federal Department of Labor about setting minimum wage rates for state contractors working on interstate jobs. The prevailing wage rate the labor secretary wanted was much higher than the wage Nebraska firms like Ward’s paid. The governor needed to take a stand against the Washington busybodies.

  But by the time Ward met with Governor Anderson, he was distracted from his highway concerns by the unfolding crimes in Lincoln. The morning papers had reported the bodies discovered at the Bartlett home. By the afternoon, August Meyer’s body had been found in Bennet, and by the day’s final editions, the bodies of Jensen and King had been found in the storm cellar. All the stories reported that Starkweather and Fugate were being sought for questioning. Six murders and two teens on the run: Lauer Ward was visibly disturbed when he and Governor Anderson met at 5:30. Caril Ann Fugate was the age of his own son, Mike. What was happening to America’s youth? The company president and the governor looked at the papers and puzzled over how kids could go so wrong. What Lauer Ward couldn’t know was that as he talked to his old friend, those very teens were already terrorizing his own home.

  • • • • •

  After killing King and Jensen, Starkweather had taken Bob Jensen’s Ford and driven about a hundred miles west on Highway 6. But then, for some reason, he turned around. He later claimed Jensen’s car was running badly and he wanted another one. But there were cars to steal outside of Lincoln. Returning to Lincoln was illogical, but what he did next was bizarre. He drove to Lincoln’s toniest neighborhood and spent the day in the home of one of city’s most prominent families: the Wards.

  No one has ever figured out exactly why Charles and Caril chose the Ward household to victimize. Charles later claimed he had picked it at random. In other comments, he said Caril picked out the house. But his garbage route boss told police that people had seen Charles shoveling snow for the Wards. Other people suggested he sometimes did odd jobs for the Wards’ maid. She may have even invited him in to warm up and have a bite to eat. Perhaps that was when he first got a look at the “best things in life.”

  Irving Junior High, which Charles Starkweather had attended, was just a couple blocks from the Wards’ home. It was a nice school on the swank side of town: Charles was removed by his family—or kicked out, stories differ—after eighth grade. Before going away to Choate, Michael Ward had also attended Irving. He was four years younger than Starkweather; it’s possible the two of them overlapped at a school where, undoubtedly, the younger boy fit in better. Charles may have known who the Wards were; he may even have harbored a secret resentment of them. It’s tempting to think he was thinking of Michael Ward when he complained about “ ‘uppity’ kids from big houses whose old man was a doctor or a president of a bank.”

  But even if Charles didn’t know the family’s name, what he did know was that if he was numbered for the bottom, the people who lived in that house were marked for the top. The Wards’ sprawling white Colonial—bay window, sun porch on the side—was a far cry from the Starkweathers’ “shabby” old house or the Bartletts’ “slummy” shack. It sat in the elegant Country Club section of Lincoln where Charles had collected garbage, two blocks from the club’s gated entrance. The house had a big, well-landscaped lawn and a separate garage out back. After getting a couple hours of sleep on the street, Charles and Caril pulled Bob Jensen’s car partly into the Wards’ rear garage. Charles, holding a rifle, knocked on the kitchen door, and Lillian Fencl, the Wards’ fifty-one-year-old deaf maid, answered it.

  Once again, a clear narrative of what happened has never been possible, because Charles’s and Caril’s accounts differ. They both agree that Lauer Ward was already at work when they arrived. They took Clara Ward and Lillian Fencl hostage, then spent the day hanging around the house. Caril took a nap, and Charles asked Clara Ward to make him breakfast. He asked for pancakes, then changed his mind and asked for waffles. At around lunchtime, Clara went upstairs to “change her shoes.” After forty-five minutes, Charles went up to see what was taking so long. He claimed she emerged from one of the bedrooms with a .22 and shot at him. He dodged the bullet and, when she tried to run past him, threw a knife into her back. He dragged her into the bedroom and tied her up, leaving her bound and bleeding, but alive. Back downstairs, he and Caril guarded Fencl. When the newspaper arrived in the late afternoon, they cut out its front-page pictures of themselves and the Bartletts. The pictures, found on them after their arrests, cast doubt on Caril’s claims that she didn’t know her family was dead.

  Charles hated “uppity kids from big houses whose old man was a doctor or a president of a bank.” The Ward home today looks much as it did in 1958. Photo by the author.

  When Lauer Ward was due home, Charles waited by the kitchen door. As usual, he claimed there was a scuffle, reporting that he shot Ward as he was attempting to open the front door and flee. He then took Lillian Fencl upstairs and tied her up in a bedroom, leaving Caril to stand guard over her while he rifled through the house for food, money, and fresh clothing. He sent Caril to get some new clothes, and she picked out a suede Western jacket from Clara Ward’s closet. Both women, Charles claimed, were alive when he left them, implying that Caril was the women’s real killer. At one point, he took a polygraph that suggested he believed Clara Ward was alive when he left her house.

  Caril, however, claimed that Charles had kill
ed Clara Ward by stabbing her in the throat and later stabbed the bound Lillian Fencl to death while Caril stood watch at the window. Neither Charles’s nor Caril’s version of the events in the Ward house makes complete sense. Lauer Ward was discovered dead just inside the living room, still wearing his coat. He had been shot in the throat and the temple, and stabbed between the shoulder blades after he fell. Clara Ward was found wearing only a nightgown and lying on the floor beneath two beds that had been pulled together as if to hide her. She was bound and gagged and had been stabbed once in the back and many times in the chest and throat. Lillian Fencl, gagged and tied to a bed in another bedroom, had been stabbed many times in the chest, stomach, arms, and legs. These stabbings, like the sexual assault of Carol King, were done with a heavy, stiletto-like knife that was never found.

  Charles and Caril pulled Bob Jensen’s Ford the rest of the way into the garage. They made their getaway in Clara Ward’s Packard Patrician.

  • • • • •

  When the bodies of the Wards and Fencl were discovered on the morning of January 29, Nebraska panicked. The license plate number of the Packard was broadcast over and over. State troopers, sheriffs, and deputies sped to Lincoln. Governor Victor Anderson, shaken by his friend’s murder, called out the National Guard, “all the experienced combat men we can get,” and posted troops at the National Bank of Commerce. Schoolkids were organized into groups to be walked home: “Come out, Charlie!” they yelled. But for grown-ups it was not fun and games. Hotels filled up with employees frightened to go home. Some home owners left their cars in open garages, keys in the ignition, in case the pair showed up looking for a vehicle. Others stockpiled ammunition and weapons. Men with guns stood watch as children left school; gangs of vigilantes roamed the streets. Local sheriff Merle Karnopp began assembling a posse by collecting men at bars and giving them guns.