“He was 25 years old. He combed his hair like James Dean. She was 15. She took music lessons
and could twirl a baton. For a while they lived together in a tree house.
In 1959, she watched while he killed a lot of people.”
~Opening statements taken from the trial of Charlie Starkweather, Nebraska’s most notorious serial killer.
Charles Starkweather (November 24, 1938 – June 25, 1959) was an American spree killer who murdered 11 people in Nebraska and Wyoming during a road trip with his teenaged girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. He became a national fascination in the United States, eventually inspiring the films The Sadist, Badlands, Starkweather, Murder in the Heartland, The Frighteners and Natural Born Killers. He also inspired the Bruce Springsteen song “Nebraska”, which Springsteen originally considered calling “Starkweather”. Liza Ward, the granddaughter of victims C. Lauer and Clara Ward, wrote a novel, Outside Valentine, based on the events of Starkweather’s killing spree.
Badlands, SW South Dakota
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