Charles Starkweather and his girl Caril Fugate were serial killers in the fifties. You can find a synopsis of their story here.
Here's an interesting take on the story by Bob Hall, a writer who grew up in Charles Starkweather's neighborhood in Nebraska. Bob Hall:
I'm afraid the outlaw who most affected me [was] a mass murderer named Charles Starkweather. In 1958, when I was thirteen, Charlie and his girlfriend Caryl Fugate killed eleven people in and around my home town of Lincoln, Nebraska. The papers always referred to it as a "killing spree." "Spree" ... like a perverse joy ride. What could compel a young, not too dumb garbage man from the midwest to snuff out innocent lives in a week-long paroxysm of wildness? I've mulled that over for nearly forty years.I was too young to really know Charlie, but he and his dad collected my family's garbage, and I went to junior high with Caryl Fugate. I remember Caryl telling Miss Ralston, our art teacher, "You old bitch! Someday I'm going to kill you!" While Caryl and Charlie were on their rampage, Miss Ralston, to the delight of her students, stayed home and locked her doors. As a teenager in Lincoln, I understood pent up anger and boredom and I appreciated someone who could give adults cause to cringe in their pretty white-fenced homes. The killings themselves seemed the incidental means to an end. The important thing was that, for a little while, Charlie completely disrupted life in a world that begged for disruption. The discovery of his first victims caused an uproar and school was dismissed early. We weren't told why so, upon leaving the building, I was amazed to see hundreds of cars clogging the streets -- terrified parents anxious to save their kids from the homicidal maniac who had hung out in this very schoolyard.
We despised parents and teachers for being solicitous of our welfare, for locking us in even as one of our peers was breaking dramatically free. We made mental lists of potential victims for Charlie's rifle even as we reveled in his ability to paralyze the entire state. His name was on the evening national news. We imagined him terrorizing the blue highways in his stolen car, going nowhere and everywhere, taking shit from no one, having sex openly and freely. He surely realized that his actions would lead to the electric chair. But then execution freed him from the draft and taxes and marriage and children and church and old age. Charlie would not grow a paunch, go bald, get cancer, have to give up smoking. He'd never again suffer insurance salesmen, beg for bank loans, cringe before teachers. Like James Dean, he could be cool forever.
Charlie has always been my notion of an outlaw -- Robin Hood and Pretty Boy Floyd done up as a fifties hood. It was hard to pity his victims who, for me, existed only on an abstract, B-movie plane. They were dead adults and death was the inevitable result of growing up. Even then I knew Charlie was despicable: a cowardly, bullying, indiscriminate killer. But then one must not scrutinize outlaw heroes too closely. Since 1958, as the reality of Charlie has devolved into nightmares of Manson and Dahmler, Vietnam and Rwanda, we've become inured to the body count. Blood that's not ours is so much catsup. Like the Romans, we prefer our entertainment red, whether served up by Stallone, CNN or comic book noir.
Charlie's rampage on the bleak winter prairie has become the romanticized stuff of Hollywood in at least two films: Badlands and Starkweather. (Tim Roth -- fine actor though he is -- couldn't capture the essence of fifties frustration in the TV version; Martin Sheen in Badlands was on the money.) Bruce Springsteen made Charlie a mournful ballad in the Nebraska album. Natural Born Killers was the Starkweather legend gone MTV. Even a folksy guy like Garrison Keiler once called Charlie his adolescent hero. Mine, too. I don't like it, but I understand it.
Charlie's brother Bob was my age. God, the shit that kid must have suffered! He never talked much, but I liked him. If you caught his eye in home room, he'd flash you the best Marlon Brando impression I ever saw. I knew the youngest Starkweather, David, when he was in the theatre department at the U of Nebraska. He was a fine actor and playwright. I never had the guts to ask him about his brother, but I can't imagine Charlie was his hero. He would have been too close and too real.
Recently, I was back in Lincoln and visited my father's grave, something I had not done since my mother died ten years ago. At that time the mourners had obscured the flat markers of the adjoining plots. This time, while I was staring blankly at Dad's permanent residence, my girlfriend said, " Bob, your father's buried next to Charlie Starkweather!" Indeed he was. I doubt that Dad minds much. He always liked one quote from Charlie which has stuck with me over the years:
'Why'd you do it, Charlie?' asked a reporter from the Evening Journal.
Charlie replied, 'We were only trying to get out of town.'
Do we have something similar in Maryland?
