Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  That summer, as the highway bill languished in committees, Charles Starkweather completed the ninth grade and dropped out of school. He quit hauling garbage and found another job, baling newsprint and loading trucks at the warehouse of the Newspaper Union. He made twenty-five dollars a week. But he was not a stellar worker. He had to be told things multiple times and frequently fell asleep on the job. He gashed his head on a baling machine, requiring stitches. His boss speculated that he might be mentally retarded.

  The one thing Charles was good at was working on his hot rod. With his father to cosign on the loan, he had traded up from the co-owned car with Bob. He bought a used 1949 Ford sedan, and like so many industrious teenagers of the era, he worked on it constantly. He frequently charged auto parts to his company, having the cost deducted from his paycheck. When his expenses surpassed what he was paid, his boss halted the practice. To Charles, this seemed unfair. Everything at the Newspaper Union was unfair. Other workers were praised and promoted, but he was not. He especially resented the “college boys” his boss hired: he claimed he would train them, then watch as they advanced and he didn’t. To Charles, this proved that he was doomed to a marginal place. No one gave him half a chance. His Newspaper Union superiors, he griped, had him “numbered for the bottom.”

  It was not an unreasonable way to feel. Lincoln in the 1950s was, like most small American cities, a deeply class-conscious town. It was sharply divided between the neat upper-middle-class neighborhoods on the city’s south side and the slummy areas on the north. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln sat right in the middle, surrounded by architecturally splendid fraternity houses and facing the tower of the State Capitol, as if emphasizing that education and connections were the route to money and power. The Lincoln newspapers breathlessly reported the goings-on of local people who mattered: Junior League benefits; University Club lectures; the engagements, farewell parties, vacations, and country club parties of Lincoln’s high society. On Sundays, when the two papers issued a joint edition, the society pages expanded. “Patio parties, swimming parties, dinner dances and picnics were on Saturday’s schedule for Lincolnites,” reported a typical Sunday column of July 1956. Even on weekdays, pictures of local socialites took up as much space as world events.

  It was a starkly divided world, no less for the young than for the adults. On the one hand, there were the pool parties and prom dresses and engagements of the well-connected younger set. And on the other hand, there were the hot rods and blue jeans and bad attitudes of the delinquents and rebels without a cause. It was clear to Charles Starkweather which camp he was in, and it wasn’t entirely by choice.

  “They say, this is a wonderful world to live in,” he wrote from death row, “but I don’t believe I ever did really live in a wonderful world. I haven’t ever eaten in a high class restaurant, never seen the New York Yankees play, or been to Los Angeles or New York City, or other places that books and magazines say are wonderful places to be at, there hadn’t been a chance for me to have the opportunity or privilege, for the best things in life.”

  • • • • •

  “Huge Highway Bill Is Signed,” reported the Lincoln Star in June of 1956; “Work for 630,000 Persons Foreseen.” Congress had passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and it was being touted not only as a Cold War necessity, but as a welcome boost to employment in a nation that feared economic slowdown. The business world knew better. “The Boom Is Just Beginning!” cried Business Week’s headline. But the magazine’s editors weren’t talking about a jobs boom. It was a boom for the builders of construction machinery, for the makers of asphalt, cement, and steel. In fact, the magazine cheerfully declared, the highway bill would mainly benefit the materials and equipment industries. Road-building machines had grown so efficient, no new workers need be hired. The present workforce would suffice for the entire interstate program.

  It was all good news for Lauer Ward, the owner of two prominent Lincoln businesses, Capital Bridge and Capital Steel. He had just weathered a national steel strike. Now, the strike was over, and with passage of the highway bill, Lincoln immediately announced plans for a big project: rebuilding the 10th Street rail viaduct. The new overpass would connect downtown Lincoln to the proposed Interstate 80 route, slated to pass north of town. The viaduct’s location was practically in the backyard of Capital Bridge, and it was no surprise when Ward’s company got the contract to build it.

  Lauer Ward went by his middle name. His first name, Chester, he shared with his father, Chester K. Ward, who founded Capital Bridge and Steel as one company in 1925. Lauer Ward had grown up in Lincoln and had done everything by the book. He went to the University of Nebraska, becoming a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. There, he met Clara Olsen, a Delta Gamma, whom he married. Lauer Ward attended Harvard Law, then served as an officer in the Army Air Forces during World War II. After that, he returned to Lincoln to take over his father’s company, now broken into two separate companies: one that built bridges and one that cast steel.

  The Wards were prominent members of Lincoln society: Lauer Ward was a friend of Governor Anderson. He sat on the boards of several banks, was a member of the Rotary Club and the University Club, and served as vice president of the local Humane Society. Clara Ward was active in a variety of civic causes and the Junior League, and she had once been vice president of the University of Nebraska Alumni Association. They were members of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, and they socialized at the country club, just two blocks from their stately white brick home on Lincoln’s elegant south side. They were the kind of people whose parties were written about in the local society pages.

  For the Wards, Eisenhower’s new roads bill could not have been better. The new interstate standards called for grade separations of all roadways and train lines crossing the expressways. This meant the interstates would need bridges—ninety-six of them on the Omaha-Lincoln leg of I-80 alone—using the kind of precast steel girders made by Capital Steel. Of the $42.5 million spent on this section, nearly a third would go toward building its bridges.

  Although he was not given to showy gestures, in 1956 Lauer Ward bought a new Packard for Clara. At a list price of over $4,000, it was a true luxury car, with a V-8 engine, power steering, and power brakes. Its model name was the Patrician.

  • • • • •

  Charles Starkweather also had a good year in 1956: he got his first girlfriend. His pal Bob had begun dating Barbara Fugate, and he introduced Charles to Barbara’s little sister, Caril Ann. Caril and her family lived in the Belmont section of Lincoln, a slummy neighborhood of shacklike houses north of the Cornhusker Highway. Caril and Barbara’s mother had divorced their father and remarried Marion Bartlett, a night watchman at a trucking company. The girls had a two-and-a-half-year-old half-sister, Betty Jean. The family’s nondescript five-room rental house was covered in asphalt shingles shaped to look like brick. It sat in an unkempt, debris-strewn yard, with an outhouse and a crumbling chicken coop out back. There were no doors between the rooms and no phone. Marion Bartlett had only recently installed indoor plumbing.

  Charles and Caril hit it off right away. They often double-dated with Bob and Barbara, going to drive-in movies or restaurants in Charles’s Ford. Ill-educated but confident, thirteen-year-old Caril was a good match for Starkweather. She looked grown up for her age, and talked and swore like an adult. She knew how to drive, although she didn’t have a license. Her sophistication was largely a matter of attitude: after her arrest, it was reported that she didn’t know the United States had fought a war in Korea and couldn’t recognize Harry Truman in a photo. Before their fugitive trip, she had never been out of Nebraska and had barely been out of Lincoln. But to Charles, she seemed worldly and smart.

  With Caril, Charles found an escape from the feelings of social inferiority that tormented him. Her family was even poorer than the Starkweathers. She didn’t look down on Charles, but loved him for who he was—red hair, bowed legs, and all. She had so little that even the shabby prese
nts he could afford were exciting to her: a record player, a radio, cheap jewelry, and stuffed toys. Asked later about the things in Caril’s tiny room, Charles proudly replied, “If it’s there, I gave it to her.”

  According to Charles, they decided to run away together. With Caril, he would escape a world that had him numbered for the bottom. “When we would go together there would be no ‘uppity’ kids from big houses whose old man was a doctor or a president of a bank,” he said. “We’d make people the way we wanted to make them. They wouldn’t love us but that didn’t matter ’cause we thought enough of each other to last as long as we would last, and after that it didn’t matter. Anyhow, the people we got through with couldn’t hate us.”

  In other words, as he said on another occasion, “dead people are all on the same level.”

  • • • • •

  In 1957, the state issued contracts for its first section of I-80: the leg from Omaha to Lincoln. One of the first six contracts went to Capital Bridge. It was clear there were more to come. That fall, the Wards enrolled their son Michael in the topnotch East Coast prep school Choate. He was fourteen, the same age as Caril Ann Fugate.

  As people like the Wards prepared for the big boom, however, the nation slid into recession. Charles Starkweather lost his job at the Newspaper Union. His boss was planning to fire him, but Charles beat him to the punch by quitting. Then Guy Starkweather got angry that Charles was letting Caril drive his car without a license. They fought, and Guy kicked his son out of the house. Charles moved in with the newly married Bob and Barbara for a while, then got his own room in their rooming house. On North 10th Street, not far from where the new viaduct would be built, it meant he was closer to Caril. He looked for a new job, but couldn’t find one. Finally, he started hauling garbage again. He made forty-two dollars a week, less than half the average household income in Nebraska. Periodically, he failed to pay his rent and the landlady padlocked his door.

  At those times, he often stayed at the local Crest filling station on the Cornhusker Highway, not far from Caril’s house. He bummed cigarette money from its employees and hung around talking about hot rods. He would sleep in his car, and the all-night attendants would wake him up in time for his garbage shift. In spite of their kindness to him, sometime in November 1957, Charles resolved to rob the gas station. “I just got fed up with havin’ nothin’ and bein’ nobody,” he said.

  On the last day of November, Charles took Caril to the Capitol Beach racetrack, where he liked to enter the “demolition race”: it wasn’t yet called the demolition derby. Driving a battered Chevy, he won the twenty-dollar purse. To celebrate, he and Caril went out for dinner, then to the Cornhusker Drive-In for a double feature. He drove Caril home in time for her eleven o’clock curfew, collected a 12-gauge shotgun he had borrowed, and, at three a.m., drove out to the Crest station.

  On duty was Robert Colvert, a twenty-one-year-old navy veteran with a pregnant wife at home. Leaving his car out front, Charles went in and bought a pack of cigarettes from Colvert. He returned to his car, then went back and bought a pack of gum. Finally, in his car, he tied a red bandanna over his face and went into the station a third time, this time with the gun. Colvert readily gave him all the money in the cash register, just over a hundred dollars, but when Charles asked him to open the safe, he said he didn’t have the combination: he hadn’t been working there long enough. Charles believed him. Marching him outside, he told Colvert to get in the Ford and drive. Charles climbed into the passenger seat, and still holding the gun on Colvert, directed him to Superior Street, a lonely side street where local teens liked to go parking. He ordered the coatless Colvert out of the car. As Colvert walked away, he shot him once in the upper body, knocking him down, then again, point-blank in the back of his head. Police found Robert Colvert’s body the next day lying on the dirt road, telephone poles receding silently into the distance.

  Lincoln was shocked at the murder. But since the filling station was out on the highway that went from Omaha to points west, the police assumed the killer must be a transient. They canvassed pawnshops, to see if any out-of-towners had recently purchased a shotgun. Meanwhile, Starkweather tried to cover his tracks with amateurish obviousness. He paid off his surprised landlady, gave his Ford a new paint job with quick-drying paint, and went to a used clothing store and bought a bunch of clothes, paying the bill in stolen change. None of these things raised a red flag. Someone at the Crest station told the police about Charles’s visit, but couldn’t remember his name. Charles Starkweather wouldn’t even be suspected of Colvert’s murder until he confessed to it after his arrest.

  For a while, Charles and Caril enjoyed their newfound prosperity. They went to movies and restaurants and bought holiday gifts. They even made a point of going to the Crest station to look at a stuffed dog. But the money went quickly, and to make things worse, Charles was fired from his garbage-collecting job for laziness. Before long, he fell behind on his rent and was once again locked out. He started sleeping in the unheated garage where he kept his car. It was time to run away. But there was a problem, he said later: “People started gettin’ in our way.”

  • • • • •

  On January 21, 1958, Charles borrowed a .22 rifle from his brother Rodney and went over to Caril’s family home. It’s unclear whether he had murder on his mind. He claimed he and Marion Bartlett planned to go hunting. He took some discarded carpet samples he had found at a junkyard. Caril’s mother had said she would like to have them.

  Caril’s mother and stepfather did not like Charles. They saw him as a go-nowhere proposition for Caril, a perpetually underemployed hoodlum with a bad attitude besides. They might be poor, but Charles was worse: a juvenile delinquent like the ones you read about in the papers. To make matters worse, Caril had been gaining weight, and the family began to worry she might be pregnant. Charles only deepened their suspicions when he began to talk of marrying her.

  When he got to the house on Belmont Street on January 21, Charles claimed, he got into a fight with the family. According to him, they yelled at him and physically threw him out. He went to a nearby grocery store and called the trucking company where Caril’s stepfather Marion worked, saying Mr. Bartlett was sick and wouldn’t be in for a few days. Then he went back to the Bartletts.

  “People started gettin’ in our way.” Charles and Caril, photographed by his landlady, before the killings. Courtesy of the Lincoln Journal Star.

  What happened in the sad little shack on Belmont has never been entirely clear. Charles gave at least seven different “confessions.” In some versions, the family attacked him and he killed them all in self-defense before Caril got home. In others, he walked in on a fight between Caril and her family and took her side by killing them. In another version, he claimed he didn’t even murder them all: he shot Marion Bartlett, but Caril finished off her mother with a knife and beat her baby sister to death.

  What’s known is that Marion Bartlett was shot in the head with the .22. His wife Velda Bartlett was shot in the face, bludgeoned with the butt of the gun, and stabbed several times. Two-year-old Betty Jean was stabbed in the throat, then bludgeoned with the butt of a rifle. The bodies were wrapped like mummies in blankets, rugs, and paper, and secured with rope. Caril’s mother was shoved down the toilet in the old outhouse. Her half-sister was put in a box and left on the seat. Her stepfather was dragged through the yard and stashed in the chicken coop. Charles claimed that he did all this disposing of the bodies while Caril sat on the couch, watching television. Caril said she came home and found Charles there; he told her the family was being held hostage, and that if she didn’t do as he said, he would kill them.

  Charles and Caril stayed together in the Bartlett house for six days after the murders, eating junk food, watching TV, playing gin rummy, and reading comic books. They had sex. Charlie practiced knife-throwing; Caril spent one afternoon cutting out paper dolls. She fended off relatives, telling them that the family was sick in bed, and later put a no
te on the door that read “Stay a way Every Body is sick with The Flue—Miss Bartlett.” She later claimed that she did these things to keep Charles from killing her kidnapped family. Charles described these days as “the most wonderful time I ever had.”

  After repeated requests from relatives worried by the family’s disappearance, the police visited the Belmont house the night of January 25, four days after the murders. Caril came to the door in her bathrobe and told them everything was fine. The police, unwilling to be dragged into what looked like a domestic dispute, left. The next day Charles returned the gun—missing a butt plate where he’d bludgeoned Velda Bartlett—to his brother Rodney, and Rodney showed it to their father Guy. Guy Starkweather, suspecting some kind of foul play, called the police and asked them to arrest his son. The police didn’t take this request very seriously; Guy, they noted, had been drinking. Finally Caril’s grandmother visited and was told by Caril to go away, because “Mommy’s life is in danger if you don’t.” The grandmother convinced the police to send some officers back to the house with her. When they got there, no one answered the door. One police officer broke in, but the house seemed to be in order, and no one was inside. Charles and Caril, frightened by the grandmother’s persistence, had already fled.

  On Monday afternoon, six days after the murders, Charles’s best friend Bob Von Busch and his brother Rodney took matters into their own hands and searched the Bartlett premises. After looking in the outhouse where the bodies had been stashed, they called the police. An alert was issued:

  Pick up for investigation, murder, Charles R. Starkweather. May live at 3024 N St., nineteen years old. Also pick up Caril A. Fugate, 924 Belmont. Starkweather will be driving a 1949 Ford, black color, license 2-15628. This is a sedan, no grille, and is painted red where the grille was, and has no hub caps.