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unrepentant Starkweather. Fan mail flooded in, though some urged him to turn to God. Admirers overlooked the fact that one of his first victims was Caril’s stepsister, a two-and-a-half-year-old child.
    Five months later Caril Fugate became the youngest woman ever to be tried for first-degree murder in the US. She was tried for being an accomplice in Jensen’s murder. Although there was no suggestion that she had actually pulled the trigger, her admission that she had taken Jensen’s wallet meant that this case would be easier to prove than one where it was simply her word against Starkweather’s.
    Starkweather himself was the prosecution’s star witness. Taking the stand, he told the jury that he no longer loved Caril and did not care if she lived or died. At one time he was even reported as having said: ‘If I fry in the electric chair, then Caril should be sitting on my lap.’
    He said that she had known he was involved in the murder of the filling-station attendant Robert Colvert and that she had been present when he had killed her family. She had gone with him willingly and had even expressed a desire to be shot down with him when the denouement came.
    Caril’s attorney believed that she was innocent, but could not shake Starkweather’s story, which was partially corroborated by witnesses to their spree and early statements to the police. She was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
    She continued to protest her innocence, but settled in to become a model prisoner at the state women’s reformatory at York, Nebraska. In 1972 she was the subject of a documentary called Growing up in Prison and in 1976 was released on parole. In 1983 she appeared on TV to protest her innocence once more and took a lie detector test on camera. It indicated that she was telling the truth. However, a public opinion poll in Nebraska showed that most people did not believe her.
    On death row Starkweather spent his time writing. He also talked for more than eighty hours to James Melvin Reinhardt, a professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, explaining why he had taken to crime. His main motive was to take ‘general revenge upon the world and its human race’.
    ‘The people I murdered had murdered me,’ he said. ‘They murdered me slow, like. I was better to them. I killed them in a hurry.’
    Poverty was another reason. ‘They had me numbered for the bottom,’ he said. He blamed the world and was sure that other people hated him ‘because I was poor and had to live in a goddamned shack’. But there was a way out of this class trap – ‘all dead people are on the same level,’ he said.
    He saw his murderous spree as the only way out of a life of drudgery. ‘Better to be left to rot on some high hill, and be remembered,’ he wrote, ‘than to be buried alive in some stinking place.’
    Now Starkweather had everything he wanted. He was going to die – but he was famous. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to see his name in the papers.
    Professor Reinhardt published The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather , which alleged that Starkweather was paranoid and that this problem was self-inflicted. Starkweather’s own account was published in Parade magazine under the title ‘Rebellion’. The piece was heavily cut and ended up as a homily to wayward youth, advising commitment to God, regular church-going, and respect for authority. ‘If I had followed these simple rules, as I was advised to many times, I would not be where I am. today,’ it concluded.
    In fact, Starkweather did have something of a change of heart in prison. His murderous rampage seemed to have quenched his hatred. A gentler side took over. One of his prison guards said: ‘If somebody had just paid attention to Charlie, bragged on his drawing and writing, all of this might not have happened.’
    At the parole board Starkweather spoke of his remorse and his new-found Christian faith. It did no good. The execution was scheduled for