It is so easy to be judgmental.
I was reading a little bit about the Starkweather homicides on History Channel's This Day In History. You remember reading about those? They were before my time -- three years before I was born, to be exact -- but they were a milestone in post-war America: teenage alienation hits home, and scares the crap out of everybody. They so impressed Billy Joel that he included them in his it's-a-list-not-a-song "We Didn't Start The Fire."
Short form, for those unfamiliar with the saga, or with Terence Malick's Badlands: boy -- Charles Starkweather -- meets girl -- Caril Ann Fugate, boy argues with girl's parents, blows them away with a shotgun, strangles baby sister, boy and girl tool around Nebraska backroads stopping every once in a while to kill someone and grab a different car. Scare the shit out of a whole lot of people for days. Become a bogeyman and a vision in adult nightmares for years.
They were finally apprehended when they crossed the state line into Wyoming. When they were picked up, Caril Ann switches sides, claims that, far from being a participant, she was a hostage. While Starkweather originally supported her claim, at her trial he turned on her.
Yeah, yeah, I said. Hostage. Right. If I were caught, I'd claim to be a hostage, too. Then, glancing back up the story, my eye caught a detail it had missed before.
Caril Ann Fugate was 14 at the time of the murders.
Fourteen.
I remember fourteen. I remember what I would have felt like had a nineteen-year-old actually dared to look at me, let alone go out with me. I would have done anything for him... and if he turned out to be the devil incarnate, I would have not known where to turn. I wouuld have been sucked into the death spiral just as Caril Ann was.
I have not read accounts of the trial, but I imagine much was made of the fact that she did not attempt to escape. Maybe she believed he would kill her if she tried to escape -- not an unreasonable belief for anyone in her circumstances, but when you're that young you tend to feel powerless to help yourself.
But there might have been something else, too. I remember fourteen. Sometimes, when you're fourteen, you pretend bad things are just going to go away and everything is going to be all right in the end, as long as you just keep doing what you're told.
Charles Starkweather went to the electric chair -- a sociopath to the end, he refused to have his organs donated on the grounds that "No one's ever done anything for me"; Caril Ann Fugate, perhaps helped by her youth, was sentenced to life in prison. She was paroled in 1976, having spent more than half of her life in prison. She lives an uneventful life now, refusing to discuss the murders which made her infamous.
I don't know. Maybe Starkweather was right: maybe Caril Ann was every bit the willing participant he said she was. It's never possible to know what another human being is thinking. And psychopaths don't spring into adulthood full blown -- they have to start somewhere, maybe this was where she would have started, who knows.
But, my God, she was just fourteen. A psychiatrist once told me that "everyone is psychotic when they're fourteen." And yes, they don't all kill people; but then again, how many of them have Charles Starkweather as the devil at their side?
I lived in Florida when Ted Bundy killed the sorority girls at FSU. The fear was horrible -- and we had a lot more tools, such as television, for hunting him down. I can only imagine what your mom went through. For the longest time I was a death penalty supporter on the grounds that murderers such as Starkweather or Bundy committed crimes against the whole community as well as their vicitms.
ReplyDeleteBut in Caril Ann Fugate's place, I would probably have done what she did. I would have been too terrified to do anything else, and would probably have felt almost like it wasn't real.