Caril Ann Fugate
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Caril Ann Fugate (born 1944) was the thirteen-year-old accomplice of spree killer Charles Starkweather.
She lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in 1956, she started dating Charles Starkweather. He was five years her senior, a dropout, and a truck unloader at the Western Newspaper Union warehouse. On January 21, 1958, Fugate came home to find that Starkweather had shot her parents to death (though this is far from clearly factual, as Starkweather claimed she was in the home during all three murders.) Fugate made lunch while Starkweather choked her baby sister to death.
During the next seven days, the pair lived in the house, turning away all visitors, which made Fugate's relatives suspicious. Starkweather and Fugate then fled, driving across Nebraska on a spree of robbery and murder that claimed seven more lives before they were arrested. Fugate's downfall was to admit holding a .410 shotgun on a young high school couple in a car while robbing them of $4.00. The couple was shot and killed later that evening. The girl was found partially naked, and brutally stabbed multiple times in the abdomen after being shot. Both Starkweather and Fugate accuse the other of the girl's murder. Starkweather admitted to killing the boy.
Starkweather was executed in the electric chair in 1959. He insisted that although he had personally dispatched most of the victims, Caril had murdered several as well. It remains unknown as to Caril's actual involvement, since Starkweather was executed accusing her, and Fugate refuses to talk about it.
Caril Fugate was tried for her role in the murder spree. The jury did not believe Fugate's claim that Starkweather had held her hostage, because she had plenty of opportunities to escape. She was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nebraska Correctional Center For Women in York. She was a model prisoner and was paroled in 1976 after serving 18 years. She now lives in Michigan and works as a medical assistant. She never married and reportedly refuses to discuss the case.
Fugate's name has emerged again because of comparisons to Kara Borden, the 14 year old girlfriend of accused murderer David G. Ludwig. Modern discussions of the Starkweather-Fugate case draw parallels to the Ludwig case and have raised some questions as to Fugate's guilt.
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