On the afternoon of January 29, 1958, a traveling salesman named Merle Collison, thirty-four, was asleep in his Buick beside the highway outside Douglas, Wyoming, when a nineteen-year-old from Lincoln, Nebraska, woke him and shot him dead. Charles Starkweather needed a new car because the Packard he was driving had been identified. But the Buick had a parking brake, something he had never used, and it stalled. A passing geologist, Joe Sprinkle, stopped to help, saw the rifle and grappled with him, and at that moment Natrona County Sheriff's Deputy William Romer drove up. Starkweather's fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, ran to the deputy shouting that it was Starkweather and that he was going to kill her. Starkweather fled, and Romer, Douglas Police Chief Robert Ainslie and Converse County Sheriff Earl Heflin chased him at more than a hundred miles an hour until a bullet from Heflin shattered his windshield and flying glass cut him. He stopped and gave himself up. "He thought he was bleeding to death," Heflin said. He had killed eleven people in two months, ten of them in the preceding eight days.
He was born in Lincoln on November 24, 1938, the fourth of seven children of Guy and Helen Starkweather; his father was a carpenter often out of work with rheumatoid arthritis in his hands, and his mother waited tables. He was born bow-legged and said he was mocked at school for a speech impediment, and he came to recall nothing good about school except physical education, where he learned to fight back and then to bully in turn. A high school friend, Bob von Busch, described a boy who could be the kindest person you ever saw and who would try to cut down any man bigger, better looking or better dressed than he was. By the time he dropped out of Lincoln High School his family was afraid of his temper. In 1956, at eighteen, he met Caril Ann Fugate, who was thirteen. He took a job at a newspaper warehouse near her school, and after she crashed his father's car during a driving lesson and he was thrown out of the family home, he became a garbage collector.
Late on November 30, 1957, he was refused a stuffed toy on credit at a Lincoln gas station. He came back several times that night to buy small things, and finally robbed the attendant, Robert Colvert, twenty-one, of about a hundred dollars at shotgun point, drove him to a remote road, and killed him with several shots to the head. On January 21, 1958, he went to the Fugate house. Caril's mother and stepfather, Velda Bartlett, thirty-six, and Marion Bartlett, fifty-eight, told him to stay away from her. He shot them both and clubbed to death their two-year-old daughter, Betty Jean, and hid the bodies in an outhouse and a chicken coop. For six days he and Caril stayed in the house with a note in the window saying everybody was sick with the flu, leaving shortly before police, alerted by Caril's suspicious grandmother, arrived on January 27. A few days later Starkweather's brother Rodney and Bob von Busch searched the property and found the bodies.
The two drove to the farm of August Meyer, seventy, a family friend in Bennet, and Starkweather killed him with a shotgun blast to the head. Their car stuck in the mud, and two teenagers, Robert Jensen, seventeen, and his girlfriend Carol King, sixteen, stopped to give them a ride. Starkweather made them drive to an abandoned storm cellar, shot Jensen in the back of the head, and tried to rape King before shooting her too; he later said Fugate had shot King, and Fugate said she had stayed in the car. In Jensen's car they drove back to Lincoln and into the home of the industrialist C. Lauer Ward, forty-seven. Starkweather stabbed the maid, Lillian Fencl, fifty-one, and killed Clara Ward, fifty, when she came home; he said he had thrown a knife at her and that Fugate did the rest. When Ward returned that evening, Starkweather shot him. The pair cut the front-page photographs of themselves and Fugate's dead family out of the Wards' newspapers, loaded the black Packard with jewelry and headed west.
The Ward killings set off something close to panic in Lancaster County. Governor Victor Anderson called in the Nebraska National Guard, Lincoln police went block by block, vigilante groups formed, and Sheriff Merle Karnopp raised a posse by arming men he found in bars. After the capture Starkweather chose to be sent back to Nebraska, not knowing that Wyoming's governor, Milward Simpson, opposed the death penalty.
He was tried in Lincoln from May 5 to May 23, 1958, before Judge Harry A. Spencer, for a single killing, the first-degree murder of Robert Jensen, including murder in the course of a robbery. His lawyers, T. Clement Gaughan and William Matschullat, argued insanity against his wishes; County Attorney Elmer Scheele called the defense a hoax. After twenty-two hours of deliberation the jury convicted him and fixed the penalty at death. He changed his account of Fugate's role several times and testified against her at her own trial that autumn as a willing participant. She was convicted of first-degree murder in Jensen's death and sentenced to life, and she has always maintained that she was his hostage. After a series of stays, the last lifted when the United States Supreme Court declined to review his case on June 22, 1959, he was electrocuted at the Nebraska State Penitentiary early on June 25, 1959, at twenty; half an hour before, the doctor due to pronounce his death, B. A. Finkel, died of a heart attack. It was Nebraska's last execution until 1994. Fugate was paroled in June 1976 after seventeen and a half years. The case inspired the film Badlands and Bruce Springsteen's song "Nebraska."