Caril Ann Fugate

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Caril Ann Fugate (born 31 July 1943) was the teen-aged girlfriend of spree killer Charles Starkweather. She is the youngest female in United States history to be tried for first-degree murder.

Fugate 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 later claimed to have come home to find that Starkweather had shot Marion Bartlett, her stepfather, and her mother Velda to death. Fugate made lunch while Starkweather choked and stabbed her baby half-sister Betty Jean to death. (Starkweather, on the other hand, claimed that she had been in the home during all three murders.) During the next seven days, the pair lived in the house with the bodies and turned away all visitors, which made Fugate's relatives suspicious. Starkweather and Fugate then fled, driving across Nebraska on a spree of robberies and murders that claimed seven more lives before they were arrested. Fugate's downfall was admitting to holding a .410 shotgun on a young high school couple in a car while robbing them of $4.00. The couple were shot and killed later that evening. The girl was found partially naked, and she was brutally stabbed multiple times in the abdomen after being shot. Starkweather and Fugate accused each other of the girl's murder. Starkweather admitted to killing the boy.

Starkweather was executed in the electric chair on 25 June 1959. He insisted that although he had personally dispatched most of the victims, Fugate had murdered several as well. The extent of Fugate's actual involvement is uncertain; Starkweather was executed still accusing her, and Fugate refuses to talk about it to this day.

Fugate was tried for her role in the murder spree. The jury did not believe her 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 Lansing, Michigan, and is a retired medical janitor. She never married and reportedly still refuses to discuss the case. Fugate's name has emerged again because of comparisons to Kara Borden, the 14 year old girlfriend of David G. Ludwig, who was accused of murdering Borden's parents. Fugate's unauthorized biography called Caril was written by Ninette Beaver.

Caril Ann Fugate

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