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Frederick Clair went off the road this week near Grand Rapids, Michigan, and overturned his vehicle. He died while his seventy-year-old wife, Caril Ann, was critically injured. Ordinarily, this incident would have passed under the media radar, except that Caril Ann Clair had been quite infamous under another name back in 1958.
Caril Ann Fugate was arrested at that time with her 19-year-old boyfriend, Charles Starkweather, known today as the prototypical spree killer. Over a period of two weeks, he cut a fatal swath through the heart of Nebraska, killing ten people. (He’d also killed another man in an unrelated incident 7 weeks earlier.) Three of his victims were Caril’s own family: her parents and her sister. One was a family friend, and two others were teenagers who’d innocently offered the outlaw couple a ride.
In custody as the youngest female in America ever to be charged with first-degree murder, Caril Ann protested that she’d gone along with Starkweather, who was “crazy,” because she’d been scared not to.
“I told him I didn’t want to see him again but he came back,” she said later. “I kept telling him to leave. I told him to leave and I didn’t ever want to see him again. Don’t you think that I, every day of my life, that I think to myself, ‘Why, dear God, didn’t he just kill me and be done with it?’”
However, those who recall her behavior upon arrest said she had smiled for the cameras and enjoyed the attention.
At first, Starkweather took the blame, but he wasn’t keen to have Caril Ann saying that he took her hostage, so he told officers that she’d been an equal participant in everything that had followed his slaughter of her family. He even testified against her at her trial, saying that she herself had killed one of the female victims.
Starkweather was executed while Caril Ann went to prison. She got out in 1976 and tried to lead a quiet life. She got married and moved to another state. By some reports, she ran or worked in a flower shop, as well as became a nurse. Presumably she is now retired.
There’s a rumored book in the works, The 12th Victim, defending her as an unwilling participant and the victim of an unfair trial. It’s easy to believe she’d been scared. She was just 14. However, it’s not quite as easy to accept that she’d ignored every chance to escape or contact the police during her two weeks with Starkweather. She said she had no knowledge of her parents’ death, yet she lived in the house for a week and even hung up a sign that indicated that everyone inside was sick. There had to have been plenty of blood in the rooms where her parents were shot and her younger sister bashed to death.
The events inspired Terrence Malick’s 1973 movie, Badlands starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. Supposedly, Starkweather and Fugate also inspired Tony Scott's True Romance and Oliver Stone's highly stylized Natural Born Killers.
All three films demonstrate how couples can develop a murderous drive together, partly from individual impulses to act out and partly from the influence of someone next to them who sees them at their worst and nevertheless loves and encourages them. A girl with low self-esteem might feed off any positive attention – even “crazy” attention – and a "lone wolf" like Starkweather might be happy to have an admirer.
In fact, a film influenced Starkweather himself. He’d come from abject poverty and was short, myopic, red-headed, and bowlegged. Taunted by classmates with nicknames like “red-headed peckerwood,” he lapsed into "black moods" and developed "a hate as hard as iron" against anyone who humiliated him. When he watched James Dean play a disillusioned adolescent named Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, Starkweather found his hero.
While there are exceptions, many couples that become violent tend to follow a similar pattern. Two people meet and feel a strong attraction, or they are related and have established an intimate familiarity with each other that allows them to reveal violent fantasies. Typically one person is dominant, and he or she seduces the other into sharing the fantasy, and then into acting it out. The dominant one feels alive, while the submissive one often experiences guilt but is reluctant to withdraw.
Given how brief the murder spree was, the fact that it was spontaneous, and the fact that after her release Caril Ann lived a prosocial life, it’s likely that she got caught up with a bad guy who impressed or overwhelmed her. There’s no indication that she had enjoyed what Starkweather initiated, and while it’s still difficult to believe she couldn’t have done something to get help, she was probably not Bonnie to Starkweather’s Clyde.
News reports indicate that Caril Ann will likely survive. Although she won’t welcome media attention, it might provide a final chance to get her story told without the reactive hype that once framed it.
