I first learned of Caril Ann Fugate in 1972, when NBC aired a prime-time documentary about her, titled Growing Up in Prison. I was 11, only three years younger than she had been when, in late January 1958, her boyfriend, Charles Starkweather, coerced her into accompanying him on an eight-day murder spree in Nebraska and Wyoming. At the end of it, 10 people were dead. (Starkweather had also killed a gas station attendant not long before.) Fugate was tried as an adult and initially sentenced to life in prison, despite the fact that there was little, if any, direct evidence that she was an active participant; her stepfather, mother, and 2-year-old sister, Betty Jean, were among the first people to be killed. For his part, Starkweather was sentenced to death, and in June 1959, at age 20, was sent to the electric chair.

Over the years, the case has inspired more than a dozen books, as well as feature films including Badlands, Natural Born Killers, and Kalifornia. The title track of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, recounts the saga from the killer’s point of view. It’s something of a misstatement, then, to suggest, as Harry N. MacLean does in the subtitle to Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America, that there is much left to be revealed about the story. Even the question of Fugate’s guilt or innocence—Growing Up in Prison was part of a rehabilitation effort that led to her 1976 parole—has been explored extensively.

To his credit, MacLean acknowledges this throughout Starkweather; among his theses is that the murders represented a loss of innocence for the United States. “So the stage was set as 1957 came to a close,” he writes in his introduction. “The country was filled with self-confidence and a bustling optimism. There was no real fear of an evil out there, no real fear of an evil inside.” I’m more than a little skeptical of such a claim—the 1950s, after all, were marked by the Red Scare and the Cold War, bomb shelters and the nuclear arms race. Non-white Americans were routinely subjected to segregation and racist violence. If none of that played a role, particularly, in the Starkweather story, it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. To ignore it tells us something about MacLean’s take, which is not only reportorial but also personal: a contemporary of Starkweather and Fugate, he grew up in Lincoln, the Nebraska city where the majority of the killings took place. “My older brother, Mike,” the author confides, “was in shop class with Charlie.”

Whatever else it is, in that sense, Starkweather represents a homecoming of sorts.

That’s a mixed blessing, to be honest, and it gives the book a quality of incompletion, as if we are stumbling across an investigation that is only half complete. MacLean believes, as I do, that Fugate was essentially innocent: a hostage, she called herself once the murders were finished and Starkweather was under arrest. But while MacLean is sensitive to her, both as a teenager and also as a woman who would spend 18 years fighting for her freedom, he can’t keep the focus on her case. In part, that’s because Starkweather was a charismatic figure, the ultimate agent of chaos, a bandy-legged would-be rebel in a black leather jacket and cowboy boots. “Charlie,” MacLean writes, “was James Dean before James Dean was James Dean,” overlooking the fact that the actor died in 1955. I don’t mean to argue that MacLean is sympathetic to Starkweather, whom he characterizes as a monster, just that he remains susceptible to certain long-encoded tropes.

A bigger problem with the book is its structure, which requires MacLean to recast the story of the killings again and again. Initially, Starkweather assured authorities that Fugate had not been a participant, but he went on to change his story repeatedly, eventually implicating her in four of the deaths. To parse the differences in their statements, MacLean describes each murder twice, from both perspectives. Then he repeats many of those details in his accounts of the two trials. The effect is that of an echo chamber or a Möbius strip, a circular narrative that never quite resolves. More than once, he informs us that “any crime in Lincoln was mainly small-time; there had been only seven murders in the last ten years.” More than once, he invokes Starkweather’s fantasy of being executed with Fugate. “I would be glad to go to the chair tomorrow,” he told a criminologist, “if I could have Caril on my lap.” For MacLean, the sentiment explains the killer’s decision to testify against her, even if it means dissembling; Fugate was, he wrote (in a description the author cites no less than five times), “the most trigger happy person I ever seen.”

Such an interpretation of her actions, I think, is spurious—or, at the very least, far too pat.

I’m going to avoid repeating the details of the murders; suffice it to say that each was sudden and brutal, the last seven occurring within 44 hours. The victims ranged in age from 2 to 71, and many of them were simply in the wrong place at the right time. MacLean does a good job of not sensationalizing, although the effect of his ongoing repetitions is to numb us to the horror of these events. As with the recent mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, people were “exposed with nowhere to run. Men loaded their rifles and shotguns and handguns and locked the doors.” And yet, as MacLean observes: “Starkweather’s killing of ten people in 1958 was the only mass murder that year.… The Associated Press/USA Today/Northeastern University database of mass killings shows that from 2006 through 2020, there were a total of 448 mass killings, involving 567 offenders, 2,357 victims killed, and 1,693 injured. In 2022, there were twenty-five mass murders, resulting in 156 dead.” This, in its own way, is the most horrifying piece of information in the book, a reflection in a fun-house mirror of the awful world we’ve made.

As for Fugate, she became a model prisoner and parolee who mostly kept to herself after her release. She is something of a ghost in the machine here, obscured by the figure of Starkweather again. Only at the end of the book does MacLean address the full weight of what she lost—not only her parents and her sister, but also her own unraveled life. “Person after person I talked to in Lincoln,” he writes, “said without hesitation that Caril…most likely participated in one of the killings herself.” And yet, whatever happened during those eight days, she is a victim also, the “twelfth victim,” as she has been called. Sensationalized, objectified, she remains a cipher for our collective fantasies. “Charlie won out,” MacLean insists. “He got what he wanted. This whole story was his creation.”

His creation, yes. And his destruction. Even now, his shadow overwhelms every effort to get out from under it; just consider the title of this book.•

Counterpoint STARKWEATHER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE KILLING SPREE THAT CHANGED AMERICA, BY HARRY N. MACLEAN

<i>STARKWEATHER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE KILLING SPREE THAT CHANGED AMERICA</i>, BY HARRY N. MACLEAN
Credit: Counterpoint
Headshot of David L. Ulin

David L Ulin is a contributing editor to Alta Journal