Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather
Bettmann/Getty ImagesCaril Fugate and Charles Starkweather before their killing spree.
Caril Ann Fugate was only 13-years-old when she met 18-year-old Charles Starkweather, and from the beginning, the teenager was enamored by his charm. Shortly after meeting, Fugate’s infatuation with Starkweather would lead her down a path that led to her become the youngest woman ever tried for first-degree murder.
Not long after the two first met in 1956, Fugate came home to find her mother and stepfather killed – and Starkweather was the murderer. Next, he killed her infant half-sister.
It is unknown just how much Fugate was involved in the murders and if she was driven by her own homicidal rage or if she was a captive. But shortly after the death of three of her family members, Fugate fled with Starkweather and their murder spree officially began.
The pair crossed the country from Nebraska to Wyoming and racked up a body count of six people. The couple was eventually arrested in 1959 and they quickly turned on each other.
Carl Iwasaki/Getty ImagesCaril Ann Fugate in prison in 1958.
Fugate maintained her innocence, saying that the only crime she committed was holding a gun on a high school couple while Starkweather robbed them. Her companion told a very different story.
Starkweather claimed that while he did the bulk of the killings, Fugate’s hands were not clean and he said that she had done her fair share of murder.
Starkweather was sentenced to death by the electric chair for his murders and Fugate, who had always said she was innocent, escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison.
This serial killer couple ended like many others with the pair turning on each other to save their own skins, but it is unique in the fact that to this day Fugate maintains her innocence.
With Starkweather long gone, it seems like the world may never know the truth behind the couple’s nine murders.
