Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Starkweather Murders: Caril Fugate and the 1958 Killing Spree

The Starkweather Murders: Caril Fugate and the 1958 Killing Spree

Reddick, Spencer

Paperback

Biographies GeneralTrue Crime

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798171067274
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 212
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
THE TRUE STORY OF THE STARKWEATHER KILLING SPREE, AND THE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL WHO MAY HAVE BEEN ITS TWELFTH VICTIM.

In January 1958, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate cut a trail of murder across Nebraska and Wyoming. By the time the manhunt ended in a Wyoming car chase, eleven people were dead, the city of Lincoln was under armed guard, and a true crime story was born that would inspire Badlands, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. For more than sixty years, the spree killers have been remembered as a pair of doomed young lovers. This book asks whether that story was ever true.

Drawing on the trial record, the confessions, and the work of the journalists and lawyers who spent decades reinvestigating the case, THE STARKWEATHER MURDERS rebuilds the 1958 killing spree from the inside. It follows the murders one by one, from the gas station attendant killed in December 1957 to the slaughter of Caril's own mother, stepfather, and baby sister, to the teenagers shot in a storm cellar, to the wealthy Lincoln family murdered in their home. And it examines the two trials that sent Starkweather to the electric chair and Caril Fugate to prison for life, the youngest girl ever tried for first-degree murder in the United States.

At the heart of the book is a single, disturbing question. Caril Fugate always swore she was a hostage, forced to stay with an armed man who had butchered her family and would kill her if she ran. The prosecution called her a willing accomplice. There was no forensic proof that she killed anyone, and the man who accused her told the story nine different ways before he died. So which was she, killer or captive? This book confronts the objection every reader will raise, that she had chances to run or to shoot, and weighs it honestly against the terror of a fourteen-year-old in 1958.

The book also tells what happened after the verdict, the part the movies leave out. It follows Caril Fugate through seventeen years in prison, where she became a model inmate and refused a commutation that would have freed her years early because accepting it meant confessing to crimes she swore she never committed. It follows her into a quiet life under a new name, decades of law-abiding work, and a long, repeatedly denied fight for a pardon, even as the Supreme Court was deciding that children could no longer be sentenced the way she had been. It is the story of a girl judged by a 1958 courtroom under laws America has since rejected.

A gripping work of true crime and a real-life murder mystery, this is the story of the Nebraska killing spree as it has rarely been told, not as the legend of two spree killers, but as the possible wrongful conviction of a teenage girl. If you are drawn to true crime that reexamines a famous case, courtroom drama, and stories of justice and injustice in small-town America, this investigation of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate will stay with you long after the last page. For readers of In Cold Blood and fans of true crime that questions everything it thinks it knows.

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