Short Fuse
Excerpted from the true crime graphic novel by Lili Ristagno about the Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate murders in 1950s Nebraska.
Today most people are familiar with the concept of mass murder: a series of killings is committed within a short period of time, without evident provocation. The victims are often random, unlucky strangers. In 1958, the idea of a “killing spree” did not exist.
If 1950s America did not yet have a category in which to place angry young men like Charles Starkweather, they soon would. The antisocial and reckless would be part of the zeitgeist: delinquency and gunplay in Rebel Without a Cause, switchblades and frank sexuality in West Side Story, teen tragedy songs about dying fiery deaths in crashing cars. Violence was in style.
Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate were in many ways much like other young people of their time and place, if from very low-income families. They went to high school, cruised in hot-rods, read comics, went to the movies. Neither was clinically insane, and neither had a police record.
Nevertheless, the media in Lincoln, Nebraska at the time dismissed the murder spree perpetrated by Starkweather as the actions of a disturbed, immature half-wit. His message of anger was largely invalidated by this refusal to examine it.
Today, as then, the residents of Lincoln are conservative and stolid. There is little sense of nostalgia. The town has no reason to look back upon itself because very little changes. It is a community built in the middle of a prairie, the vast plains pressing in. People are at once friendly and distant, as if the vigilance necessary to subjugate the land also subdues emotion.
Because Lincoln is a college town, one might expect it to be progressive. It is not. Students frequent the same establishments their parents and grandparents did. They flock to King’s Drive-Thru Burgers, the Stuart Theatre (where Charlie and Caril enjoyed many a black-and-white shoot-‘em-up flick) and the Tastee Freeze, not for the sake of kitsch but because they are all still there. There is scant ethnic diversity. Social divisions tend to still be financial. Angry letters appear on the local editorial page demanding harsher laws against “junk cars” that can deplete a neighborhood’s status. Born poor, a teenager of his era, it began to seem to me Charlie had little choice but to rebel.
I lived in Lincoln while researching Short Fuse. I met many who were connected to the story in some way: a guy whose dad cut Charlie’s hair (his father still kept the barbering chair in the basement), the woman who worked the lunch counter where Caril bought burgers and fries the day the farmer was shot, parents who attended school with Charlie and Caril. Some people were related to the victims, some to the prosecution, and some to the jail guards.
One Lincolnite I met attended junior high with Starkweather and recounted escaping his classmate’s temper when Charlie complimented him on his Western-style shirt. “I knew what that meant!” he told me. He had immediately stripped off the garment and handed it over as to Charlie as they stood in the schoolyard. Starkweather accepted, offering his own plainer shirt in return. Fifty years later, the man remembered feeling lucky Charlie “didn’t beat it off me! He was one tough guy!”
A ninth grade girlfriend recalls a different boy. “He was one of the finest boys I’ve ever known,” she said. “He never swore, drank, smoked, or tried to put his arm around me.” Another woman describes the Charlie she knew as “an awfully sweet boy.”
Everyone who was alive when the killing spree took place remembers it with surprising freshness. Kids were sent home from school in the middle of the day as reports swirled about an unknown madman on the loose. Two hundred members of the National Guard patrolled the streets in Jeeps mounted with machine guns. Clear in people’s minds to this day is the atmosphere of growing horror as some realized they had dated the suspect; that he’d picked up their garbage; that they knew his family.
The longer I was in Lincoln, the more I realized that Starkweather’s short-lived reign of terror was in a way the last thing that had any real impact there, and that it was still fairly recent news as far as the town was concerned.
And yet, it was also a taboo subject. The telling of these stories was infuriatingly vague. Again and again, I was subtly rebuffed. Memories were facile. Narration was brief and detached. The topic seemed too distasteful to dwell upon, even among those who purportedly embraced the distasteful. I found skaters, barflies, punks and hipsters to be uniformly circumspect about their unique piece of local lore. The self-proclaimed rebellious subculture proved as conservative as their forbearers in this matter, unwilling to confront the aberration in their collective past.
Was their wariness a deliberate obfuscation, a sly calculation to protect a bona fide Lincoln iconoclast from being exploited? I was, after all, an outsider. I sensed a tightening of the circle. I would never penetrate the secret heart in this fragment of history. The crime scene was closed off.
Short Fuse is published by Dymaxicon and available from Amazon.
