When the bodies of Marion and Velda Bartlett and their not-quite-3-year-old daughter Betty Jean were found stashed behind the family's home, authorities in Lincoln, Neb., expected that Caril Ann Fugate would turn up soon.
After all, they reasoned, Fugate's boyfriend Charles Starkweather had just killed her family, so surely the 14-year-old was next—or already dead.
But when August Meyer was shot to death in his farmhouse in Bennet, Neb., and hours later the bodies of high school sweethearts Carol King and Bobby Jensen were discovered in a storm cellar, and then a waitress at a diner recalled a girl who matched Caril's description coming in and ordering hamburgers...
Investigators went from searching for an armed and dangerous 19-year-old who had kidnapped and probably killed his girlfriend to being on the hunt for a cold-blooded couple who were leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
Naturally, the truth was far more complicated.
"When you first start reading about it, it is completely inconceivable to you that she could be innocent," Nicola Marsh, director of Showtime's The 12th Victim, a docuseries exploring Fugate's role in the crimes and the irresistible killer couple trope, told E! News in an interview. But, after delving into the 65-year-old case, she saw something different.
"I think most women are very familiar with the idea of acquiescence as a survival strategy when you're dealing with somebody who seems unhinged," Marsh said. "You don't push back until you have an exit strategy."
But complicity was the snapshot captured for posterity in 1958.
Thanks in no small part to the eerily familiar media frenzy, the violence committed over the course of a week made an enduring imprint on pop culture, haunting the future work of Stephen King, Bruce Springsteen, Oliver Stone, Peter Jackson and countless others.
"I do think that the very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future," King, who kept a scrapbook of Starkweather news clippings, told The Guardian in 2000. "His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of what America might become."
While the first cited film to borrow from the Starkweather-Fugate saga was the 1963 exploitation flick The Sadist, about a madman terrorizing the American Southwest with his semi-mute teenage girlfriend in tow, the best known is director Terrence Malick's bleak 1973 debut Badlands, which romanticized the dynamic between a charming nihilist played by Martin Sheen and his wide-eyed teen girlfriend (Sissy Spacek).
But the fascination hardly dried up: In the 1990s, Juliette Lewis was tragically in the thrall of a super-creepy Brad Pitt in Kalifornia and then giddily along for the ride with Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers. The true crime miniseries Murder in the Heartland, starring Tim Roth and Fairuza Balk as Starkweather and Fugate, aired in 1994.
None of which ever helped Fugate, now 79, in her lifelong quest to clear her name.
How did Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate meet?
Caril's older sister, Barbara Von Busch (née Fugate) had a friend who was dating Rodney Starkweather in 1957. At first, the three of them and Rodney's younger brother, Charlie, made for a foursome, according to Linda M. Battisti and John Stevens Berry's 2014 book The 12th Victim, which inspired the four-episode Showtime series. But then Charlie introduced his pal Bob Von Busch to the group, and Barbara fell head over heels for who turned out be her future husband.
The new couple introduced Charlie, who was 18, to Barbara's then-13-year-old sister Caril, the older girl figuring her mom would let them at least double date.
The third of seven kids, Charles Starkweather was a high school dropout who was working as a garbageman and, like so many young men at that time, styled himself in the image of James Dean (the Rebel Without a Cause comparisons of doomed, aimless youth would come later). He had red hair, bowlegs and a speech impediment—all of which made him a target for bullies at a young age—and, as he grew older, a bad temper and a massive chip on his shoulder. He was obsessed with social status and talked about death being the great equalizer.
His mother later told reporters that Starkweather "liked a good fight...He could take it and he could dish it out."
But Fugate was smitten.
She's "falling in love," Marsh described, "and then the absolute worst possible thing you could possibly imagine happening to the person you're in love with [happens]: They have a psychotic break and brutally kill a bunch of people in front of you."
Who was the first person Charles Starkweather killed?
On Dec. 1, 1957, the body of Robert Colvert, a 21-year-old night attendant at the Crest Service Station on the outskirts of Lincoln, was found on a deserted gravel road north of the city the next day, dead of a close-range shotgun blast to the back of his head.
"I know he was young and just out of the service and had a lot of life ahead of him," Barb Colvert, whose mother was pregnant with her when her father was killed, told the Lincoln Journal Star in 2009.
A hundred dollars in bills and loose change had been taken from the station, and Lancaster County Sheriff Merle Karnopp told the Lincoln Star's Del Harding, "There is no question but that robbery was the motive."
The crime had been committed sometime between 11 p.m. the night before, when Colvert's shift started, and 4 a.m., when a customer came in and, finding the station empty, took a pack of cigarettes and left money on the counter.
It was hard to believe—for detectives or anyone else—that Colvert had been killed by a local. Had to be a drifter, someone just passing through town on his way out of their fine city.
What happened to Caril Ann Fugate's family?
Velda Bartlett, 35, had Barbara and Caril with her first husband, William Fugate, a verbally abusive alcoholic who walked out on the family when Caril was 8. Her second husband, Marion Bartlett, 57, treated the girls like his own and life was stable at 924 Belmont. The couple's daughter Betty Jean was born Feb. 11, 1955.
On Jan. 21, 1958, Velda asked Caril's boyfriend if he could pick up some old rugs and bring them over to the house.
"I went down to the Bartlett home about 1:30 in the afternoon," Starkweather later said in a taped interview. "Me and Velda got into a fight over Caril. See, they had been wanting Caril to break up with me, so she'd go with somebody else. She said for me not to come down anymore to see Caril. I said something to Velda she did not like. She hit me, about three times. Velda got me so mad, I hit her back."
Then, he said, he put a bullet in his gun.
According to Fugate, who was in eighth grade at the time, when she got home no one was in the house besides Starkweather. She says he told her that her family would be safe so long as she did what he said.
She and Starkweather remained at the house for six days, during which more than a dozen people came to the door. Fugate, who only ventured outside to get the mail, told visitors that they couldn't come in, her family was sick. She posted a note on the door that read, "Stay a way every body sick with the flu, Mis Bartlett."
Proponents of Fugate's side of the story point out in The 12th Victim that the note was certain meant to attract suspicion since nobody in the house went by Miss Bartlett.
Fugate's grandmother went to the police, insisting something was wrong at that house. But when officers knocked at the door, the teen looked OK so they believed her when she said everything was fine.
On Jan. 27, knowing the cops were going to come back at some point, Starkweather and Fugate took off.
Looking for his brother, Rodney Starkweather was the one who first found the bodies at around 4 p.m., Marion in the chicken coop and Velda in the outhouse, both shot and stabbed. Betty Jean, a month shy of her third birthday, beaten with a rifle butt and stuffed in a cardboard box left near her mother.
Who were Charles Starkweather's other victims?
Starkweather drove to nearby Bennet, Neb., where they knocked at a farmhouse belonging to 70-year-old August Meyer, a family friend.
When deputies following the trail of Starkweather's 1949 Ford arrived hours later and saw blood dappling the snowy driveway, they didn't know if they were walking into a trap.
"We were all ducking down thinking Charlie was in the house and might start taking shots at us," reporter Harding, who ended up covering the entire killing spree for his paper, told the Journal Star in 2009. "I had on this bright red cap, and it dawned on me what a target I would make. So I took off my cap." (When he was on the beat, the Star and Journal were local competitors, but had long since merged.)
Starkweather and Fugate—who authorities were still expecting to find dead—were gone. Meyer, dead of a shotgun blast to the head, was in an outbuilding on the property.
Leaving Starkweather's car behind, the pair hitched a ride with Robert "Bobby" Jensen, 17, and Carol King, 16. Starkweather turned his gun on the couple, forced them out of their vehicle and ordered them into a nearby storm cellar while—so he said on tape—Fugate sat and listened to the radio. He shot Jensen and attempted to rape King, but unable to do so (later psychological analyses determined he was impotent), he shot her and stabbed her in the genitals.
"Sadistic and aggressive" was how director Marsh described the crime scene photos she viewed while making The 12th Victim.
In Jensen's car, they drove back to Lincoln and knocked at the home of C. Lauer and Clara Ward—one of the big stately houses on Starkweather's garbage route—on the morning of Jan. 28, 1958. Housekeeper Lilian Fencl knew Starkweather because he'd shoveled snow for the family, and let the pair in. He later claimed Fencl came at him with a gun and he had to subdue her in self-defense, but the end result was that both Fencl and Clara Ward were tied up and stabbed to death.
Lauer, a steel company executive, returned home that afternoon after having lunch with Nebraska Gov. Victor Anderson. Starkweather shot him and he and Fugate left the house in the Wards' 1956 Packard. Jewelry was stolen, as well. Carol King's Bennett High School jacket was left behind and one of Clara's coats was taken.
Anderson ordered National Guard troops to join the increasingly massive manhunt, which grew to include the state police and FBI in addition to local law enforcement. Businesses closed and parents took their kids of out of school, the people of Lincoln not wanting to leave their houses until the nightmare was over.
Numerous rewards were offered for information leading to Starkweather and Fugate's capture, including $1,000 from the governor himself.
But the wanted duo had already crossed the border into Wyoming, where on Jan. 29, looking to trade cars again, they came across Merle Collison, a traveling shoe salesman asleep in his parked Buick parked along the side of the highway leading into the city of Douglas.
Starkweather fired a shot through Collison's window, prompting him to scramble out of the car—where he was killed by nine bullets that propelled him back into the car.
According to Marilyn Coffey's 1974 article "Badlands Revisited," which ran in The Atlantic, a sticky parking brake prevented Starkweather and Fugate from driving off in the Buick. Instead, a passing motorist named Joe Sprinkler, seeing two cars pulled over, stopped to assist. Starkweather pointed to the brake, but Sprinkler saw his rifle—and a dead body in the front seat—and grabbed for the gun. At that moment, a patrol car pulled up.
Fugate sprinted toward the patrol car and got right in with the sheriff's deputy, who happened to be passing by when he saw the scuffle. "Help!" the teen screamed. "It's Starkweather, he's crazy, he killed a man!"
Starkweather peeled away in the Packard. He sped toward town, a number of cars in pursuit by then, and didn't stop until a bullet shattered his window and the glass nicked his ear. After that, the wanted murderer stopped the car, got out, tucked in his shirt and, glaring at the all the guns pointed at him, got down on the ground with his hands behind his head.
An inevitably glamorized photo of Starkweather in handcuffs, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and his white button-down stained with blood, both repulsed and captivated.
Sheriff Karnop's wife, Gertrude, was tasked with escorting Fugate back to Nebraska, and she later recalled that the teen remarked, referring to the stolen outerwear she was wearing, "Isn't this a nice coat?"
However, according to The 12th Victim, there was a note in the pocket of that coat reading, "Help, police, don't ignore," that never made it into evidence back in Lincoln.
What happened to Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate after they were captured?
Starkweather never denied shooting anybody, but insisted he had always acted in self-defense. And initially he corroborated what Fugate said—that she had been his hostage.
Fugate, meanwhile, had readily signed extradition papers allowing authorities to take her back to Nebraska. Miranda rights weren't established until 1966, so no one was obligated to tell her she had the right to remain silent or could talk to a lawyer. She has said she didn't even know she was under arrest while being interviewed by detectives.
She also insisted that she didn't know her mother, stepfather and half-sister were dead until a prosecutor told her.
By then, The 12th Victim director Marsh noted, authorities were painting Fugate running from Starkweather as a cunning move, rather than an honest attempt to free herself. "The only two scenarios is she's Machiavellian and a particularly manipulative 14-year-old, or the police are complete idiots," she said, pointing to the fact that Starkweather and Fugate were at her house sitting on three bodies for six days and no officer thought to insist on searching the premises, after which six more people were killed.
And for that matter, why hadn't Starkweather, who was known to frequent the gas station where victim No. 1, Robert Colvert, worked, ever been questioned about, let alone arrested for, that crime?
"We're law enforcement, we've got a choice of these two narratives, which one are you going to pick?" Marsh continued. "There needed to be a more complex telling to the general public than, 'Here's this guy who killed a bunch of people and it just took us a really long time to catch him.'"
Why did Charles Starkweather turn on Caril Ann Fugate?
In a Feb. 7 letter to Fugate, Starkweather apologized for harming her family and asked if she had been sincere when she'd told him she loved him. "You know damn well I would never shoot you," he wrote.
But when a letter came back saying only that she never wanted to see him again, and he heard through the jail grapevine that Fugate was telling everyone that he was crazy, Starkweather's story started to change.
Fugate became his willing partner in crime. She had stabbed Carole King, he claimed, and she killed Clara Ward and the housekeeper Fencl, who he didn't even know were dead until after they'd left the Wards' house. He also called Fugate "the most trigger-happy person" he'd ever seen, alleging she had fired the last few shots at Collison after his rifle jammed.
She had a gun the whole time, Starkweather noted, so why didn't she run sooner?
On May 5, 1958, Starkweather went on trial for the murder of Bobby Jensen, which prosecutors considered the easiest to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. He pleaded self-defense, but was found guilty and, on May 23, sentenced to death.
"I don't think they tried me for Jensen," Starkweather said after court, per the Associated Press. "They tried me for the whole thing." The AP story noted he seemed to accept his fate "with a mixture of indifference and bravado that has marked his three-week trial for murder."
Fugate was 15 when her trial began. Also charged with felony murder in the first degree in perpetration of a robbery for Jensen's killing, she pleaded not guilty.
Starkweather testified that he and Fugate came up with her ruse—that he told her he'd kidnapped her parents so she'd go along with him—together. He said she should be on his lap when he went to the electric chair.
All the while, reports from the time called out Fugate's "perpetually pouty face" or otherwise inscrutable demeanor, no one ever suggesting she was just a scared, dazed kid.
"Nobody's really imagined what it was like for her to have this boyfriend, be in his car, not know her family is dead," Marsh said. "And the next time that she sees him, she now knows her family is dead, and he's on the witness stand, trying to put her in prison for life. She has no parents around her. And she's trying to absorb all that. [But in the media] she's either dopey or sleepy, or in love with him."
Fugate became—and still is—the youngest female in U.S. history to be convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Starkweather, a full-blown celebrity for the remainder of his short life, continued to paint Fugate as his eager companion, including in an essay published by Parade while he was on death row at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
"All the time the spree was taking place, I was scared," he wrote. "I was going to give up. Caril then threatened out loud that she wasn't going to give up...With a shotgun laying across her lap with the barrel pointing directly at me, and with her fast talking, she convinced me that we didn't have anything to gain by giving up."
Starkweather was executed on June 25, 1959, at the age of 20.
After Fugate's trial she was held in solitary confinement for eight months, but once she joined the general population at the Nebraska Center for Women, she set about being a model prisoner, earning the support of prison superintendent Jacqueline Crawford—who allowed well-behaved inmates brief furloughs to see their lawyers.
John McArthur, who was appointed by the court to represent Fugate at trial, continued to toil behind the scenes pro bono to overturn her conviction—a mission that lasted long enough to see his lawyer son, James McArthur, take up the cause.
Where is Caril Ann Fugate now?
The Nebraska Parole Board recommended in 1973 that Fugate's sentence be commuted to a specific number of years, rather than just "life," and the State Pardon Board gave her 30 to 50. Then-Nebraska Gov. J. J. Exon and Secretary of State Allen J. Beermann voted for commutation, while Attorney General Clarence A. H. Meyer opposed it.
Regardless, it made Fugate eligible for parole, and she was freed on June 20, 1976, after 18 years behind bars—a surprise to some because usually a prisoner has to express remorse for their crimes, but Fugate refused any form of confession, saying she'd rather never get out than say she was guilty.
Then 32, she briefly told reporters she was "very touched" by the parole board's decision. Fugate moved to Michigan, where she found it wasn't exactly easy to blend in and lead a quiet life, but she persevered, and eventually found work as a nanny (members of that family are among those who attest to her good character in The 12th Victim) and then got a job in patient transport at a hospital.
But as the 25th anniversary of the 1958 killings approached, opportunities arose to speak out on her own behalf.
In 1983, Fugate appeared on Lie Detector, a show hosted by future O.J. Simpson defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, and passed a polygraph test. Afterward she told reporters that she felt "vindicated," no matter what the rest of the world thought. "I feel free, I really do." She famously underwent hypnosis in 1989, venturing that she'd kill herself if it turned out she'd killed anybody. Tapes of the favorable session were sent to media all over Nebraska.
A decade later, when Murder in the Heartland aired, one of the girls she used to babysit asked Fugate if she would speak to her class about it—and she accepted. Fugate advised the kids that the choices they made mattered at any age, and that her worst decision—to take up with Starkweather—had affected her entire life.
Fugate worked at what is now the McLaren Greater Lansing Hospital for 20 years and in 2007 she married Fred Clair, a retired machinist and widower she met playing slots at the Mt. Pleasant Casino. By all accounts they were very happy until Clair was killed in a car wreck six years later. The long shadow of her past being what it was, police asked Clair's sons if they had any reason to believe their stepmother may have wanted to hurt their dad. According to the Detroit News, they did not and the matter was dropped.
Fugate, who's been in frail health in recent years and declined to appear in The 12th Victim, unsuccessfully petitioned the Nebraska Board of Pardons for a hearing in 1996. She tried again in 2017 and, going against lingering bitter public sentiment, the board agreed to take up the matter in 2020.
While many of the victims' family members were still angry she had been freed at all, let alone opposed a pardon, among those who wrote letters on her behalf was Liza Ward, the granddaughter of Lauer and Clara Ward and author of a 2004 novel about the murders, Outside Valentine.
Liza admitted that much of her motivation for writing the book was to work out why in the world Starkweather and Fugate did what they did, a question that had shadowed her entire life.
"Maybe the fictional truth is close enough," Liza told the New York Times in 2004. At the same time, "I feel this strange kinship toward her," she said of Fugate. "She was 14 and we've all made mistakes at that age."
When Liza went to bat for Fugate years later, she had since met the woman, and was even more convinced that she wasn't culpable in the murders and had been unfairly maligned.
"And she feels damned pain," Liza told Omaha's KETV in 2020, after the pardon board dismissed Fugate's request after less than a minute of consideration. "You can bet it. This woman has been in pain all her life."
The 12th Victim is streaming on Showtime Anytime and On Demand.