The Original Natural Born Killers

Being a gruelling account of teenage thrill-seekers and cinematic lodestars Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. First published in Empire Magazine, December, 2009

In Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers they were called Mickey and Mallory. For Terence Malick they were Kit and Holly. Quentin Tarantino conjured a more playful incarnation of their dark spirits into True Romance's Clarence and Alabama. But their real names were Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate and even though Charles has been dead since an out-of-state electrician was paid $200 to pull a circuit breaker three times in a Nebraskan penitentiary, and Caril hasn't spoken about what happened in half a century, if you mention these names to people of a certain age in the bars and diners of Nebraska and Kansas at the very least you might detect a certain shiver.

Between December the first 1957 and January 29th 1958, Starkweather and Fugate tore a bloody strip across Midwestern America. By the time they were arrested, on a stretch of highway near Douglas, Wyoming, eleven people, including a two-and-a-half-year-old child and a seventy-year-old man would be dead. For the duration of the worst part of the killing spree, the eight final days, parents turned up armed with rifles and shotguns to escort their children home from school and the National Guard patrolled street corners. In remote farmhouses fathers, uncles and elder sons took turns to stay up through the night, lamps left burning in the window, shotguns across their laps, listening for the drone of an approaching car, or worse the quiet roll of tyres, the car's engine deliberately silenced.

Mid-50s America was of course no stranger to violent crime, or even to murder sprees. Bonnie and Clyde were the obvious examples. Between 1932 and 1934 the infamous outlaws had slaughtered nine cops and nearly as many civilians. But their motive had been robbery, mostly banks and convenience stores. Certainly when people got in between the Darrow gang and what they wanted blood tended to be shed, and copiously. But Starkweather and Fugate were different, and much more terrifying. Their slaughter seemed to have no reason, or if it had a reason it was the same baffling, unnerving nihilism that the older generation detected in the angsty teen flicks of the time. It was horribly modern, as if The Greatest Generation had survived the depression, gone to war, built a new future for their children only to have them hoot with laughter and throw it back at them in disgust. Subsequently, this tension between the generations would be assuaged, in part, by the apparently endless extension of adolescence, but in the late 50s, in Lincoln, Nebraska and towns like it the generation gap had never been so wide or apparently unbridgeable.

And now, it seemed, The Rebels Without A Cause that populated the drive-in screens that the midwest's youth seemed to be drawn to like moths to a projector bulb had metastasized into something much more terrifying: murderers without a motive.

Beginnings

"What are you rebelling against?" – Mildred

"Waddya got?" – Johnny

(The Wild One, 1953)

Charles Starkweather was born so bowlegged that he once said he was sure a pig could run between his thighs without touching the sides. His bright red hair and speech-impediment didn't help him much at school either. Bowlegged peckerwood . . . bowlegged peckerwood the kids would chant when they chose not to ignore him, which was most of the time. But despite his physical shortcomings by the time he was a teenager he was, like most young men of his age, acutely concerned with his appearance. He spent hours and gallons of various unguents on his hair which he styled after James Dean. Rebel Without A Cause was amongst the movies he watched at Lincoln's movie theatres, the State or the Stuart, when he double-dated with his only real friend, a fellow minor troublemaker called Bob Von Busch. "I guess you could say that Dean was Charlie's idol," Von Busch told journalist William Allen in 1976. And there was a kind of resemblance – though it wouldn't be correct to say that he looked like him. His grin didn't have the easy charm of Dean's, it was more manic. And when he was angry his jaw thickened and his eyes narrowed threateningly.

The one feature that Charlie did unambiguously share with Dean was his acute myopia: at the age of 16 he was diagnosed as having near 20/200 vision – this means that he was unable to make out the largest letter on an opticians' chart at a distance of 20 feet (a person with 20/20 vision can make out this letter at 200 feet). A single point below this score would have rendered him legally blind. That he had managed to get through six years of schooling without this being diagnosed (the blackboard at the front of the room may as well have been on another planet, one of his lawyers remarked at the trial) is a treatment to the observational powers of the Nebraskan state school system, which nonetheless felt confident enough to provide testimony as to his poor character at his trial. (Ironically Dean's short-sightedness was one of the intangibles that gave him that dreamy aspect. The trademark winsome stare into the middle distance was not a poetic soul revealing itself but a result of the fact that without his spectacles – lenses as thick as the bottoms of beer bottles – he couldn't see a damn thing.)

School, then, had been a trial, and life after school was one of dead-end jobs to which he sometimes failed to turn up – and from which he was often fired even when he did. In most senses Charlie's childhood and adolescence weren't much different from a lot of the other kids across the towns and farms of the Midwest at the time. Averagely deprived, averagely ill-educated, averagely miserable, the averageness of it all perhaps thrown into sharp and painful relief by the glamour of the teenage rebels he saw on the big screens at the drive-ins. But while most kids get over these unavoidable realities, and construct strategies to deal with life's disappointments, something was going horribly wrong with Charlie. And it had been going wrong for a long time. James M. Reinhardt, a psychiatrist at Nebraska State University, conducted over 30 hours of interviews with him after his trial. His book, The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather, remains one of the best accounts of the development of a serial killer. For Charlie, every casual rebuff, every minor disappointment or perceived failure, was an unbearable insult, each one dripping more poison into a well that was almost bottomless.

Writing in 1960, in a passage frighteningly prophetic of a future, thankfully merely cinematic, killer Reinhardt notes: "All the while the hates were consolidating beneath the surface. He was spending hours re-enacting, in his imagination, the killings he had seen on screen. He was learning to throw a knife; he was drawing his gun against the reflection of himself before the mirror."

Sometime in 1956 after Charlie's pal Von Busch had started dating a girl called Barbara Fugate, he mentioned that she had a sister, Caril, who Charles should ask out. Though he was nearly 20 and she was just about to turn 14 Charlie did, and the two were soon going steady. Caril was a revelation to Charlie. Though she was six years younger than him she acted much older than her age, she was into every new teenage fad, wore a man's shirt in a town where it was considered to be intolerably bohemian for the boys to wear sideburns or the girls to date a boy from a different school, and swore with such gusto she even managed to surprise him. But most importantly she bought into the image that he had of himself, of the lonely outsider, ill-used and set against the world. Instead of earthing Charlie's rapidly building charge of rage and contempt, she shared it, amplified it and sent it right back to him. After all, while she might have acted a lot older she was still just a 14-year-old girl, and Charlie's age, his physical strength and sexual experience as well as his ability to get her the things she craved – a radio, gramophone records – turned him, in her eyes, into a figure to be admired. Why should his view of his life, of their future, not be similarly sophisticated? So the rage that was once just his became theirs, and they held their rapidly hardening hatred of the outside world close.

Talking about the few days before his first murder Charlie described his thoughts to Reinhardt: "Up and til now me Caril an’ me ain't done much out of the ordinary, what anybody most would do, now it's about time something different to start. These braggarts and good people are not laughing at a stupid garbage type [Starkweather worked as a garbage collector, as depicted in Badlands] . . . they'll have somethin' real interesting to say tomorrow. I've got a gun . . . I've got a girl . . . I am not afraid of dyin’ but I am goin' to have somethin' worth dyin' about, and I'm not going to be the first one to die neither."

On December 1st, 1957, at three in the morning, Charlie walked into the Crest service station on Cornhusker Highway. He was wearing a somewhat unconvincing disguise of a bandanna and a tightly buttoned hunting cap. Working on a car was 21-year-old Robert Colvert, recently out of the Navy, new to this job and with a pregnant wife at home. He had argued with Charlie a few days before about Charlie's desire to buy a teddy bear for Caril on credit. Colvert had refused. Charlie walked up to him carrying a canvas bag and a shotgun. Colvert looked up, realised what was happening and walked with Charlie to the office where he filled the sack with money from the till. Charlie told him to open the safe. Terrified, Colvert told him that he was new to the job and that the boss hadn't told him the combination. Charlie believed him. He told Colvert to get in the car with him and told him to drive. At some point during the next half hour or so Colvert attempted an escape. According to Charlie the first time the gun went off it was an accident. The second time, it wasn't.

For this first murder he had the convenient excuse of robbery – he had needed money for his rent and Colvert had just been in the way. Or maybe it wasn't quite like that; maybe it was a kind of rehearsal, a means for Charlie put himself in a position where murder was a possibility, not an inevitability, to see which he would choose. On that freezing highway, the die was cast. In either case, it was an excuse he would decide he didn't need again. Killing, from now on, would be its own justification.

Spree

"It's fate, you know. Nobody can stop fate, nobody can." – Mickey, Natural Born Killers

"If you pull the chain you can't blame the toilet for flushin'" – Charles Starkweather

When Charlie walked into the Bartlett house, where Caril lived with her mother and step-father, on January 21st just after 1 pm, he was pretty sure that nobody would be walking out again apart from him and Caril.

The row had been of the usual sort: the Bartletts hated Charlie. They always had and they didn't make any secret of it. They had told him to go to hell and never to see Caril again. There had been some pushing and shoving. Velda Bartlett, Caril's mother, had slapped him a couple of times before Caril's stepfather, Marion Bartlett, kicked him on the backside. "He kicked my ass so hard it ached for three days," Charlie remembered. Charlie had driven out down to the telephone kiosk where he phoned the trucking company where Marion worked. Marion was sick, he told them. He wouldn't be coming in for a couple of days. No need, in other words, to come round looking. He went back to the house. As he expected the welcome there was not a warm one.

In the bedroom, he found Velda and Caril. When Charlie walked in Velda jumped up in a rage and slapped him again and this time Charlie hit back, with a closed fist. Hearing the commotion, Marion came hurtling towards him wielding a hammer. Charlie swung around and fired one shot from the .22 rifle which he had been carrying on and off all day (he had intended to go hunting rabbits) which struck Marion in the head. He collapsed to the floor by the dresser haemorrhaging blood over the bare floor. Howling, his wife ran to the kitchen returning with a carving knife in her hand. As she ran towards him brandishing it Charlie shot her in the face, but unlike her husband, she didn't fall down immediately. Dazed and drenched in blood she turned and blindly made towards Betty Jean, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who was now shrieking in the bedroom next door and tried unsuccessfully to pick her up. Charlie slammed the butt of the rifle into Velda's face, and when even that didn't drive her all the way to the floor he poleaxed her with it once more. Velda finally stopped moving. Betty Jean continued to scream and Charlie slammed the butt of the rifle into the toddler's face. As she fell Betty Jean, still conscious, continued to bawl. "You could have heard her into the next state," Charlie remarked later, apparently surprised. To add to the commotion Caril yelled that Marion was moving in the bedroom. Charlie yelled at Betty Jean to shut up yet again. When she didn't he grabbed the kitchen knife and threw it at her with all the skill and force that half a lifetime of practising had honed. The knife hit Betty Jean square in the throat and she fell silent.

By now Marion Bartlett had begun to move slightly groping his way towards his dead wife and child. Charlie took the knife and drove it into Marion's neck. When it hit bone he rammed the butt of the knife with his hand, driving it in as far as the hilt.

The small, cramped house, which in a few short minutes Charlie had turned into an abattoir, was finally quiet.

"What do we do now?" asked Caril.

In one of the most striking, lyrical sequences in Terrence Malick's masterpiece Badlands Kit and Holly find themselves living in a tree house. It is a moment of bucolic peace among the slaughter. It didn't happen quite like that but for a week Charlie and Caril did play house together. "Being alone with her [Caril], was like owning a little world of our own," Charlie told Reinhart using the strangely naive, melodic language Malick would later give to Holly in Badlands. "Lying there with our arms around each other and not talking much, just kind of tightening up and listening to the wind blow or looking at the same star and moving our hands over each other's faces . . . we knowed that the world had give us to each other. We was going to make it leave us alone."

Caril put a note on the door of the Bartlett place: 'Stay a way,' it read. 'Every body is sick with the flue'. Every day Caril bought milk and bread from the milkman, Charlie occasionally went into town to buy Pepsi, their favoured soda, and his cigarettes. They watched television, Abbott & Costello movies, and had sex. Charlie practised with his knife and Caril read a comic book that arrived in the mailbox and fed the two parakeets that Charlie had bought for her, as well as her two dogs. When they used the outhouse they stepped over the decomposing bodies of Velda and Marion and moved the box that contained the corpse of little Betty Jean, which otherwise stayed on the lavatory seat.

The week-long idyll came to an end when Velda's mother became so worried about her daughter's continued absence that she came to the house. When Caril refused her entry she threatened the police and a warrant. It was time, Charlie decided, to run. On the morning of Monday, January 27th he ordered Caril to pack her things and get in the car. He had an idea of where to go. They would head to the Meyer farm. At around 10 am he started the engine and they set off. In the words of the poet, all hell followed them.

August Meyer was one of the few people that had ever shown much interest in Charlie during his 19 years. The 70-year-old bachelor lived about 20 miles out of town. His neighbours said he kept a tidy farm and minded his business, high praise indeed. He had let the youngster hunt squirrels on his land when he was a boy and when it rained let Charlie come inside and warm himself. Perhaps because he was lonely, or perhaps because he saw something in this odd-looking kid, they struck up a kind of friendship.

Charlie figured that the Lincoln cops would be unlikely to start searching outlying farms just yet – he had seen enough gangster movies to reason that the police were likely to blame the slaughter at the Bartlett's house, if they'd even discovered it, on out of towners and set up roadblocks. Charlie headed out of town to the deserted lane at the end of which was Meyer's farm. But halfway down the track, the car got hopelessly stuck in the icy mud. According to Charlie, this drove Caril into a fury. "She said we ought just to go up there and blast the shit out of him for not shovelling his lane," Charlie later remembered. (Earlier in the day she had suggested a similar fate for a short-order cook whose hamburgers were not to her liking.) Charlie headed off down the lane towards the farmhouse, when he arrived he and Meyer got into an argument. Charlie claimed, implausibly, that during it Meyer had pulled a rifle out and shot at him and in self-defence he had blasted Meyer with his sawn-off shotgun. The impact, which removed a great deal of Meyer's head, was delivered at point-blank range and Charlie had been approaching him, not backing off. But whatever the details the result was the same. Meyer's small kindnesses towards Starkweather had cost him his life.

Caril and Charlie left and then returned to the Meyer house, apparently unsure of what to do next. But by the evening they had decided to leave again. They had freed the car once, but soon it was stuck again in the icy mud of the lane. At about 8.20 in the evening Charlie saw the headlights of an approaching car and flagged it down.

There was something cosmically ironic about 17-year-old Bob Jensen and his girlfriend Carol King becoming the pair's next victims. Bob was everything Charlie wasn't. A six-foot tall, handsome high-school senior, he had played in the football team until health problems, the result of childhood polio, compelled him to give up his beloved sport. He bore the disappointment with cheerful good-grace and, still often wearing his high-school letter jacket, he filled his time helping out at his father's general store or singing in the church choir. His fiancee, Carol King, was equally popular, a cheerleader and volunteer at the local church youth group. The couple had been driving to the lay-by at the top of the lane to the Meyer farm, a popular secluded spot for the local teens to park. Bob offered Charlie and Caril a lift into the small town of Bennet. After a few minutes or so he put the rifle to the back of Bob's neck. He told him to drive them to Lincoln, he seemed to have decided that the policy of staying close to the crime scene had been successful in keeping the cops off the scent. Bob asked if he was going to shoot them. Charlie said that he wouldn't if they did what he said.

Charlie changed his mind and told them to an abandoned school he knew near August Meyer's farm. There he marched them down into the storm cellar. As Bob went down the first few steps Charlie shot him six times in the head. He then forced Carol down into the cellar and ordered her to take off her skirt and panties. He tried to rape her but found himself unable to achieve an erection and shot her. What happened next was the subject of furious disagreements between Caril and Charlie's accounts at their respective trials. According to one version of events, Charlie tried to rape Carol again after having killed her and, again unable to do so, stabbed her six or seven times in and around her vagina with a knife. Charlie maintained that though he had tried to rape Carol the subsequent injures had been inflicted post-mortem by Fugate, who flew into a rage when she came down to the cellar and saw the girl's half-naked body.

Whatever happened in the cellar, Charlie now realised he finally had a working car at his disposal. He and Caril jumped in and headed for Lincoln, where they brazenly drove past the now buzzing police station. Then, early in the morning, they drove to one of the more expensive areas of town where he had once collected garbage looking for somewhere to hole up, eat, and to get hold of some much-needed money. They chose a large two-story mansion which belonged to C. Lauer Ward, a respected company president and leading light in the Lincoln business community. At about eight in the morning the pair walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Lillian Fencl, the Wards' housekeeper for over 20 years, answered. Charlie didn't bother with any preliminaries. He showed her the gun and walked in.

The carnage police found the next day was similar to the scene at the Bennet house, albeit the blood-drenched a better class of furniture. Mrs Ward was found stabbed, lying between the two beds in the master bedroom. Her underwear had been removed. Lauer Ward, who had returned from work the previous evening to find his house occupied, was found shot slumped by the front door. He had also been stabbed through the neck. Mrs Fencl's body was found tied to a bed with fatal stab wounds to her chest and stomach as well as a number of long, more shallow cuts which suggested she had been tormented before being killed.

By now the town and surrounding villages were in a state of near panic. BRUTAL KILLER OF 6 STILL AT LARGE screamed the Lincoln Star. "People bought anything that would shoot," a gun store owner told William Allen. "In one two-hour period, I'd estimate that we sold thirty-five to forty rifles and pistols." A group of boozed-up Linoclnites attempted to form a posse in front of the town hall. Terror, as one local journalist wrote with an admirable lack of resistance to cliche, stalked the countryside.

But thankfully Caril and Charlie's killing-spree was drawing to a close. After leaving the Ward house they made their first determined attempt to get as far away from Lincoln as possible. Finally, they made it as far as Wyoming but Charlie was increasingly paranoid that the expensive 1956 Packard that Charlie had stolen from the Wards would be identified. He decided they had to get another car as soon as possible. Near Douglas, just over the Nebraska/Wyoming Border, Charlie spotted a Buick. Walking up to it he saw that a man was asleep in the driver's seat. Thirty-seven-year-old shoe salesman Merle Collinson was shot no fewer than nine times. But Charlie's luck was running out. A 29-year-old Geologist named Joe Sprinkle came across the scene. Thinking that one or both the cars were broken down he got out, only to be confronted by Charlie with a gun. As he and Charlie began to fight an off-duty deputy sheriff drove around the bend and halted. Caril looked towards the fight and ran toward the cop. "He's killed a man" she sobbed.

"Who?"

"Charles Starkweather!"

Charlie and Caril looked at each other and then Charlie abandoned the fight and leapt into the salesman's car. After a short chase Charlie crashed the car and was forced out onto the road. After tucking his shirt in he lay down on the asphalt and surrendered.

Caril and Charlie would never see one another again.

Legacy

"The very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of what America might become." – Stephen King

If, for the residents of Nebraska, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate were horrors that had seemed to leap from the movie screen there was a strange appropriateness that subsequently the movies re-adopted them. Terrence Malick's Badlands was the first of any note, and it remains an American classic (though there is something troubling about the casting of Martin Sheen. Despite his exceptional performance, he is how Charlie saw himself, not how he was). But more recently Kalifornia and Wild At Heart would draw from elements of the story. Peter Jackson would channel Starkweather as a boogeyman in The Frighteners. There are touches of it in Thelma & Louise and Christian Slater and Winona Ryder surely play chords from the ballad of Charlie and Caril for tar-black laughs in Heathers.

And the cultural appropriation didn't stop at the movies. Billy Joel's catalogue of cultural touchstones We Didn't Light The Fire sandwiched him between 'California baseball' and 'children of Thalidomide'. Bruce Springsteen would memorialize the carnage in his song Nebraska. Stephen King, fascinated by him from an early age, would channel him in his epic horror novel The Stand.

Charlie got to witness none of it. In the early morning of June 25th, 1959, amidst the distant thunder of a Nebraskan storm, Charles Starkweather was executed by electric chair in the State Penitentiary, Lincoln, Nebraska. He had no final words. His body is buried in Wyuka Cemetary in Lincoln.

Despite continuing to claim that she had been a hostage right the way through the killing spree, Caril Ann Fugate was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. After being paroled in 1976 she found work as a medical janitor. She currently lives in Lansing, Michigan, and continues to maintain her silence about the events of 1958. She is 66, 12 years older than Betty Jean would have been; and four years younger than Bob Jensen would have been, had he not stopped to help out a couple of strangers one freezing January night.