Revisting Starkweather, Fugate was personal for true crime author

Best-selling true crime author and Nebraska native Harry Mac-Lean knew he'd one day examine the most infamous crime in Nebraska history, the 1958 Charles Starkweather murder spree.

But MacLean's reluctance to revisit his own fraught upbringing in Lincoln, where most of the murders occurred, kept pushing that day further away.

Until now.

MacLean offers his own take on one of the nation's first mass media serial killings in his book "Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America," published in November.

An attorney by training, he set out to make the most thorough review yet on the culpability of Starkweather's 14-year-old accomplice, Caril Ann Fugate, the extent of whose participation has long been debated.

The spree – which claimed 11 lives, gripped much of the state in a panic, and sparked a manhunt – became embedded in popular culture thanks to the film "Badlands," Bruce Springsteen's song "Nebraska" and scores of books and articles.

MacLean retraced the footsteps of these mythologized outlaws whose paths intersected with his and his brother Mike's at various Lincoln haunts the two parties frequented, though they never met.

Despite being from a stable middle class family, the MacLean brothers were juvenile delinquents, Harry MacLean says, acting out and deeply traumatized after losing their father when Harry was seven. The boys set fire to a residential garage, drawing a response by firefighters. They took a joyride in a stolen car and crashed it into a tree.

The incidents brought them into the orbit of Lincoln detective Gail Gade, who a few years later oversaw one of the Starkweather crime scenes, and Hulda Roper, a Lincoln policewoman assigned to incorrigible youth. She counseled Fugate around the same time.

MacLean, who lives in Denver, said he "walked up to doing" the book several times until finally starting.

"With any book you do, the deeper you get into it the better the writing," he said. "So I had the writer's immersion but then the immersion into my own past added to it. It was like 24 hours a day, particularly the last three or four months. ... All that process was very intense."

He visited Lincoln attorney Jim McArthur, whose father John McArthur was Fugate's defense attorney. Jim handled her later appeals. His basement contains boxes of old trial files.

The files revealed the biased law enforcement and judicial systems arrayed against Fugate in a hostile environment that saw her rights violated, MacLean said. She was interrogated for hours without legal counsel and while heavily sedated. No consideration was given to the trauma she endured.

"They didn't even do a social evaluation of her where they went back to look at her childhood, talk to classmates, teachers, neighbors," he said, noting they did an evaluation for Starkweather because of his insanity plea.

If authorities had bothered to try to understand her, he said, they would have discovered her father was a violent alcoholic and a pedophile.

MacLean entered his project prepared to lean in whatever direction the evidence led.

"Guilty or innocent, it was going to be more thorough than had ever been done before. I'm talking facts. Not inferences, not speculation, not rumors."He concluded she should never have been tried as an adult and given life imprisonment based on the evidence and the inconsistent testimony of her homicidal boyfriend. Starkweather, who was 19 at the time of the killings, originally confessed to all the murders, stating Fugate had nothing to do with them, only to change his story.

Ultimately the facts could only take MacLean so far. He theorized, in part from writings the killer made while awaiting execution, that Starkweather felt driven to go out in a blaze of glory as a way to fulfill dark visions he claimed to have.

Perception played a role in Fugate's conviction. Much was made of her cold, remorseless demeanor. MacLean believes she suffered a dissociative break.

Starkweather's conviction and execution were certain given the overwhelming physical evidence against him. Fugate admitted to holding a gun at some crime scenes and to warning him of victim Lauer Ward's arrival home. She said she only did this because she was ordered to and was afraid for her life.

Her actions, even coerced, still constituted felonies, MacLean conceded.

The state was convinced she had a more hands-on role. Prosecutor Elmer Scheele believed that, despite her denials, she was present when Starkweather killed three members of her family, that she was involved in the killing of the Wards' maid, and that she participated in the robbery and killing of a young couple, Bobby Jensen and Carol King. Fugate only admitted to the robbery.

MacLean is certain the evidence shows she was not home when Starkweather killed her mother, stepfather and 2-year-old half-sister. As for any involvement in the other murders, he doubts she did more than what she said she did under duress.

He pointed to Fugate's claim that she screamed but couldn't make a sound or move when Starkweather killed Bennet-area farmer August Meyer.

"That's what dissociated people say. She was saying that 30 years before it was in the contemporary language, which to me gives her credibility."

Classism worked against Fugate, who was perceived as "poor white trash" and "a bad girl," MacLean said. Her admission to being sexually active with Starkweather was used to impugn her character, even though by law she was the victim of statuary rape.

MacLean believes Fugate, a model prisoner at York Women's Reformatory, was both a victim of trauma and a miscarriage of justice. The case against her appeared based more in moral condemnation than fact.

He did not interview Fugate. After receiving parole in 1976, she led a productive life in Michigan, married and legally changed her name to Caril Ann Clair.

She and her husband got into a serious car accident that killed him and crushed her legs. She later suffered a stroke that largely robbed her facility for speech. Now 80, she resides in a nursing home.

MacLean said he didn't feel she could tell him anything that he didn't already know. "I also didn't want to run the risk of re-traumatizing her."

He finally met with her when his book was nearly done. He had no intention of mentioning the book, fearing a negative reaction "because she doesn't feel she has been portrayed accurately or fairly."

"So when finally toward the end I told her, she became very interested and did not shut down like I suspected she might."

The crime's sinister legacy may be different for Lincoln natives who remained than it is for MacLean, who left. Even all these years later, he detects resentment by those old enough to remember that the murders tainted Lincoln's small-town charm.

He expects Fugate doubters to challenge the book.

MacLean thought he might get pushback at his Lincoln signing in November. The fact no one took issue with him, he said, may indicate a softening.

"Nebraskans are nice, kind, forgiving people," he said. "I think some of that's finally wound into it, too, where they're able to say, 'Look, she was 14 when this happened, and if she did do something we don't know what it was, but for God's sake let it go at this point.'"

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