Today In Pop Culture: The Challenge Of Charles Starkweather

By Jeffery X Martin

While it is proper to acknowledge that this is the 30th anniversary of the explosion of the space shuttle, Challenger, it is also safe to say that the nation will be inundated with those painful memories today. There are other things to remember on this date, though, and they aren’t as glorified and politicized. The paths of glory are many, and we are all on our own road through history.

One of those roads goes through Lincoln, Nebraska. Local businessman C. Lauer Ward arrives home from work to find both his wife and his maid slaughtered. Even his dog was dead, the poor thing’s neck snapped. Ward was next. He was shot and killed by two of the most ruthless outlaws the country had ever seen: Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. The murder of the Ward family happened on this date in 1958.

Within a two-month span, between December 1957 and January 1958, Starkweather and Fugate murdered 11 people in Nebraska and Wyoming.

Starkweather was the poster boy for kids who never had a chance. He was born with a birth defect that affected the shape of his legs and a speech impediment. Both of these things led the other kids to bully him. His father was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. He had a hard row to hoe, for sure. But once he realized that he was good at sports, and became physically strong, the tables turned. He got a taste of bullying and he liked it. He liked it a lot.

He met Caril Ann Fugate when she was in junior high. He taught her to drive. Not well, apparently, because she crashed into another car. Fugate wasn’t even driving Starkweather’s car; it was his father’s. His father paid the damages, but he kicked his son out of the house. Soon afterwards, Starkweather quit his job and started planning his life of crime.

Starkweather’s first victim was a gas station attendant who refused to let Starkweather have a stuffed animal on credit. Eventually, Starkweather robbed the station of $100 and shot the pump jockey in the head.

The killer’s next victims were his girlfriend’s family. They didn’t approve of her relationship with Starkweather, and had told him to stay away from her. Instead of heeding that advice, Starkweather murdered Fugate’s mother, stepfather, and two-year-old sister.

More victims soon followed, all brutally killed. There was no sense of mercy given. These were all instances of what the experts call “overkill.”

Later, Starkweather would shift the blame for most of that to Fugate, claiming she loved to shoot people. While he was quick to rat her out, she was actually the one who got them captured. Fugate allegedly shot a man in the back of the head during a carjacking attempt. Right at that moment, a deputy sheriff drove by. Fugate ran to the car and surrendered, telling the officer that Starkweather made her do it and was right over there. The deputy shot the car’s windshield. The flying glass nicked Starkweather and he surrendered at the sight of his own blood.

They don’t take kindly to mass murderers in Nebraska, and Starkweather was electrocuted in June 1959. He is buried in the same graveyard as five of his victims.

Natural Born Killers. Kalifornia. Badlands the movie, and “Badlands” the Springsteen song. “Nebraska,” another song by the Boss. The Frighteners.

All of this art was inspired by the Starkweather/Fugate crime spree. What does that say about us?

Why can’t we have nice things?

Yes, we sent our best and brightest into space and as soon as that now infamous phrase, “Roger, go at throttle up,” was uttered, they became stardust, golden, heroes for all of us to look towards and admire, martyrs for the quest for knowledge. Look around today and you’ll see it everywhere: America at its mournful best.

But the Starkweather story is part of the fabled land of ‘Murica, that nation within the nation, where we don’t just love our anti-heroes, we need them. Without them, we have no one to live vicariously through, no one to remind us that rules are made to broken and if you have to go down, take as many of the bastards with you as you can.

It is dichotomy upon dichotomy. Think about it too much, and you’ll get a migraine.

Yeah, remember the Challenger, those astronauts who had it all and went out in a blaze of terrible glory.

Remember Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, too, who had nothing but rage, and attained the shining level of fame reserved for the damned.