A note on classification. Starkweather killed once in December and then ten times in eight days at the end of January, moving continuously and never returning to ordinary life in between. That is a spree, not a series, and it is why the case reads as it does: not a hidden man with a secret compartment in his life, but a nineteen-year-old driving west with a rifle and no plan.
Charles Raymond Starkweather was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on November 24, 1938. He was short, bow-legged, badly short-sighted and had a speech impediment, and was mocked for all of it. He worked as a rubbish collector, styled himself on James Dean, and in 1956 began going out with Caril Ann Fugate, who was thirteen. The American press called him the Mad Dog Killer.
On December 1, 1957, he robbed a filling station in Lincoln and shot the attendant, Robert Colvert. On January 21, 1958, he went to the Fugate house, shot Caril Ann's mother and stepfather and killed her two-year-old half-sister, and the pair stayed in the house for several days with a note on the door saying everyone had flu. Then they drove. They killed a family friend, August Meyer; two teenagers, Robert Jensen and Carol King; a Lincoln industrialist, C. Lauer Ward, his wife Clara and their housekeeper Lillian Fencl; and finally a travelling salesman, Merle Collison, in Wyoming.
Nebraska came close to panic. The National Guard was called out in Lincoln, schools closed, and armed men patrolled their own streets. It ended on January 29, 1958, near Douglas, Wyoming, when a passing deputy stopped at Collison's car, Starkweather ran, and a chase ended with him surrendering because, he said, a bullet had broken his windscreen and cut his ear and he thought he was bleeding to death.
He was convicted of first degree murder in May 1958 and executed in the electric chair on June 25, 1959, aged twenty. Caril Ann Fugate, who has always maintained she was a hostage, was convicted of first degree murder, served seventeen years and was paroled in 1976. The case is the source for Badlands, Natural Born Killers and a good deal of American popular culture besides.