In the winter of 1957-58, 20 years after the gangster fugitives of the ‘30s and their Hollywood counterparts and two years before In Cold Blood’s Clutter murders, a Nebraska teenager named Charles Starkweather embarked on an eleven-person killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming with his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, beginning with a service station attendant, followed immediately by Fugate’s three immediate family members. The headlines that followed sparked panic across the Mid- and Southwest. Preachers, parents, government officials, anyone with a pulpit or dinner table condemned the acts as emblematic of the emergent rock and roll culture and the dangers of teen sex. Rumor spread that the killers had slaughtered everyone in Nebraska, most of Iowa, and were headed through Oklahoma “looking forward to murdering everybody in Texas,” where another teenage boy four years Starkweather’s junior had become enraptured by the spree.
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