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I'm Simon Ford, journalist, lecturer, and storyteller.
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And I'm Jack Morrel, former major crime detective.
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This is Psychokiller It Takes two, a series about what
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happens when two people fuse their darkest impulses and cross
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the line from obsession into murder. In our last episode,
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we met Paul Bernardo and Carla Hamulke, the so called
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Ken and Barbie killers. On the surface, they were young, attractive,
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the picture of perfection, But behind closed doors, their relationship
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was built on control, cruelty, and a shared addiction to power.
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Yeah, and like Myra Hendley and Ian Brady before them,
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we saw how love Paul, what passes for it, can
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become a feedback loop of psychopathy. Each partner reflects and
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amplifies the others instincts exactly.
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These couples blur the line between victim and accomplice, between
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the one who leads and the one who follows.
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And that's the question we're posing again, although this time
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we're winding the clock back to the nineteen fifties, to
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the wide open plains of Nebraska.
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Before social media, before the twenty four hour news cycle,
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but still a world on edge cold war paranoia. Small
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town moralism and a restless generation of teenagers who just
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discovered James Dean and rock and roll. A chicken, Yes,
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you shouldn't have Calmly.
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There out of that world came Charles Starkweather and Carol
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Ane Fugate, a couple barely out of childhood who went
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on one of the blue audius sprees in American history.
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Was it psychopathy that drove them or the collision of loneliness,
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humiliation and a society terrified by its own youth.
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We'll find out. Now. You say the word jack and
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you're dead.
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You're called this is It takes two Charles Starkweather and
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Carol and Fugate, and it all begins out of Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln,
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Nebraska in the mid nineteen fifties. It was a place
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that promised safety, family and small town decency. But scratched
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that surface and you'd find something else, isolation, conformity, and
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quiet kind of despair that could drive the lonely half mad.
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It's a landscape that shapes people. The winters are brutal,
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the distances endless, and the horizon never changes. If you
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don't fit in, there's nowhere to hide and nowhere to go.
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Charles Starkweather didn't fit in red hair, bow legged, a
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speech impediment, small for his age, he was an easy
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target for bullies, the kind of kid who carried every
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insult like shrapnel.
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That constant humiliation becomes the seed of rage. You see
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it again and again with sprey killers. The sense of
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being trapped, powerless, and ignored until something finally snaps.
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And that's a theme that echoes throughout mid century America.
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The nineteen fifties were supposed to be an age of
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stability and family values, but under the surface everything was trembling,
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Cold War panic, McCarthyism, and a growing fear of rebellious youth.
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Yeah, teenagers were suddenly a threat. Rock and roll, fast cause,
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leather jackets, and movie stars like James Dean and Marlon
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Brando showing defiance on the big screen. Starkweather latched onto that.
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He modeled himself on Dean in Rubble without a Cause,
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the outsider who refuses to bend You know something, No,
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why you read too many comic books? Well, he's real, austrated,
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he's different. Let's play I'm.
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Cute too, Except Charles didn't just play at rebellion, He
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lived it. He quits school, drifted into petty crime, and
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when he met fourteen year old carol Ann Fugate, something
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inside him clicked, like a fuse finally finding its charge.
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It's not the first time we've seen isolation breeding pathology.
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If you want to explore another example, you can check
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out our companion series The aters Ed of Psychopaths, where
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we look at ed Gean, the reclusive Wisconsin farmer whose
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world was every bit as claustrophobic and repressed as Stockweather's Nebraska.
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Exactly Gen's rural isolation, religious guilt, and moral hypocrisy. They're
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part of the same American landscape, a world of small
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towns and big secrets. The difference is stark Weather didn't
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keep his darkness locked away in a farmhouse.
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He took it on the road, and once he started driving,
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he didn't stop.
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Coming up next the road to nowhere. How a boy
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with a grudge and a girl barely old enough to
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became America's first modern spree killers. On the evening of
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January the twenty first, nineteen fifty eight, the two of
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them were back home in the Bartlet Fugate residence on
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the edge of Lincoln, Nebraska. Nineteen year old Charles Starkweather
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had arrived at the house of his fourteen year old girlfriend,
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Carol Anne Fugate, and everything changed in a few minutes
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of terrible violence.
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He shot Carol's stepfather, Marion Bartlett and her mother, Velda Bartlett. Then,
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in the same household, he murdered Fugate's two year old
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half sister, Betty Jane, clubbing and stabbing the child, all
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this before the night was out.
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The bodies were hidden on the property, in an outhouse
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behind the house or in a storm cellar, depending on accounts,
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and for the next six days Starkweather and Fugate remained
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in the Bartlet home.
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Visitors were turned away. They pinned a note on the
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door which read stay away, everyone is sick with the
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flu and signed miss Bartlett. The note itself underlined Miss
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Bartlett twice, a curious signal bearing mind in the house.
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The only Miss Bartlet was the two year old.
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So here's the chilling tableau, the killer and his teenage
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girlfriend living quietly among the bodies of her family. What
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are we to make of Carroll's role? Was she a
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victim held in thrall to a dominant older man or
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an accomplice, complicit in the bloodlust from the very start.
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Because at this moment, a family dead, the bodies stashed,
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the note posted. Carol had choices. She could have fled,
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cried out, revealed what was happening, but she didn't, and
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that ambiguity became the core of this case.
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Six days later, on January the twenty seventh, pressure was
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building up. A suspicious grandmother tried to enter their house.
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The police arrived, the bodies were discovered, the couple had fled.
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What followed was a sixty mile killing spree across Nebraska
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and into Wyoming. They were in a stolen car. They
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chose random victims. It was a rampage of fear. Eleven
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lives were lost. But it all began in that quiet
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home with that flew note on the door.
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As Charles Starkweather and Carol Anne Fugate embarked on their
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killing spree, the line between accomplice and victim blurred. Carroll,
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just fourteen years old, was thrust into a nightmare that
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would forever alter her life.
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The dynamics between Stockwether and Fugate were complex. Stockweather, a
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nineteen year old high school dropout, was charismatic and manipulative. Fugate,
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young and impressionable, found herself entangled in a relationship that
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escalated into violence.
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According to Fugate, she was coerced into participating, believing that
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her compliance would spare her family. She claimed that Starkweather
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held her family hostage and threatened their lives if she
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didn't comply.
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However, during the trial, the prosecution presented evidence suggesting that
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Fugate had opportunities to escape and could have alerted authorities.
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Witnesses testified that she was seen in public with other
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outstock Wheather on several occasions during the spree.
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This discrepancy led to a contentious debate was Fugate a
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victim coerced into complicity or was she an accomplice who
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chose to participate in the murders.
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The jury ultimately convicted her of first degree murder and
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she was sentenced to life in prison. However, her conviction
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was later commuted and she was paroled after serving eighteen years.
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The case remains a poignant example of the complexities surrounding
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young individuals involved in criminal activities. It raises questions about
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agency coercion and the capacity for moral judgment in extreme circumstances.
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In the end, the true nature of Caroline Fugate's involvement
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may never be fully understood. What is clear, though, is
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that the events of nineteen fifty eight left an indelible
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mark on all involved.
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We're both down there, Let's get out of here. Charles
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Starkweather was captured in January nineteen fifty eight, tried, convicted,
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and sentenced to death. He spent just under two years
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in custody before his execution in June nineteen fifty nine.
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The media dubbed him a teen rebel turned killer, but
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in retrospect, his crimes reveal a collision of psychological vulnerability,
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social isolation, and nihilistic rage.
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You don't understand. I could have had class, I could
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have been a conteer. I could have been somebody.
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The stir of a bump, which is what I am.
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Let's face. Carol Anne Fugate's fate was very different. Convicted
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at first degree murder, she served eighteen years before being
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released on parole in nineteen seventy six. Over the decades,
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the debate has continued. Was sheer Coa's child trapped in
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a violent relationship or an accomplice making conscious choices.
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That ambiguity is part of what fascinates historians and criminologists alike.
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But if we pull the lens forward to twenty twenty five,
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the situation becomes even more complex.
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Think about it. A fourteen year old in a relationship
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with a nineteen year old today there would be some
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kind of intervention, schools, social services, law enforcement. There would
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be risk assessments, mandatay reporting and probably ongoing case management.
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And that's not even mentioning online grooming. Today predators often
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establish control through social media, messaging apps and gaming platforms.
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A teenager in Fugate's position would have multiple points of
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detection long before a murder spree could start.
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Back in my detective days, child protection changed at a pace.
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Multi agency work became crucial, and cases like this one, coercion,
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manipulation and the early warning signs of abuse were central
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to investigations in the UK. During my service, we went
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from a fragmented system of dealing with safeguarding where agencies
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didn't really talk to each other, to multi agency safeguarding hubs,
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or as we called them, the mash. This is where
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incidents of concern were looked at by all the agencies
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and dealt with properly from the outset. If a case
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like stock Whether and Fugate happened today, the authorities would
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treat it as both a criminal and a safeguarding matter.
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And yet things haven't changed. Isolated teens, bullied or ignored
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can still fall under the sway of an older charismatic figure.
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Even with twenty twenty five protocols, the psychological dynamics, power, fear, attachment,
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they all remain constant, which.
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Is why we can't just look at stock Whether and
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Fugate through the lens of crime. We have to consider
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the social conditions, the generational pressures, and how a society
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defines culpability when children are involved.
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So we've traced their journey from small towns to carnage,
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from whispered flu notes to interstate horror. We've explored psychological pressure,
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cultural fear, coercion, and agency. And now as we draw
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this story to a close, the question remains what happens
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when two personalities collide?
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Because stories like Stockweather and Fugates show us one possibility,
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the tragic fusion of two troubled souls, where repression, humiliation,
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and isolation find a terrible outlet in violence. But the
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same dynamic. Two minds meeting and feeding off each other
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can also lead to creation discovery under positive transformation.
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The Cureis are a classic example. Mary and Pierre Curie,
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married in eighteen ninety five, worked side by side. She
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was brilliant in her own right. Together, they discovered polonium
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and radium and reshaped our understanding of radioactivity. Their partnership
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fused passion and in into scientific breakthroughs.
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Continuing the positivity, here's another striking example, Sylvia Tate and
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James Francis Tate. Over decades they collaborated in endocrinology, discovering
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and characterizing the hormone aldosterone, a joint scientific legacy that
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stands long after they died.
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They show us that the catalyst of a diad doesn't
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always have to be destructive. Sometimes two characters can and
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do a line in the service of discovery, not devastation.
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So what does that tell us about Starkweather and Fugate
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That while their union ended in blood, the underlying dynamic
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of two people amplifying each other's impulses is not inherently pathological.
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It's a force. With the right personalities and intention, it
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can tear down or build.
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Up as we close. Thank you for listening. If you've
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enjoyed this episode, please like, share, and subscribe to Psychokiller
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Shocking True crime Stories. The more people who hear these stories,
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the more I suppose awareness grows, and the safer we
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all become.
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Because you never know, a murderous diad might live next door,
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but maybe by shining light on their shadows, we can
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help prevent what should never happen.
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Next time on It Takes Two, we'll explore another pairing,
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equally fascinating, equally dangerous. Until then, stay curious and stay vigilant.
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I'm Simon Ford, journalist, lecturer, and storyteller.
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And I'm Jack Morrel, former major crime detective.
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This is Psychokiller It Takes two, a series about what
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happens when two people fuse their darkest impulses and cross
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the line from obsession into murder. In our last episode,
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we met Paul Bernardo and Carla Hamulke, the so called
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Ken and Barbie killers. On the surface, they were young, attractive,
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the picture of perfection, But behind closed doors, their relationship
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was built on control, cruelty, and a shared addiction to power.
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Yeah, and like Myra Hendley and Ian Brady before them,
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we saw how love Paul, what passes for it, can
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become a feedback loop of psychopathy. Each partner reflects and
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amplifies the others instincts exactly.
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These couples blur the line between victim and accomplice, between
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the one who leads and the one who follows.
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And that's the question we're posing again, although this time
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we're winding the clock back to the nineteen fifties, to
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the wide open plains of Nebraska.
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Before social media, before the twenty four hour news cycle,
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but still a world on edge cold war paranoia. Small
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town moralism and a restless generation of teenagers who just
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discovered James Dean and rock and roll. A chicken, Yes,
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you shouldn't have Calmly.
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There out of that world came Charles Starkweather and Carol
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Ane Fugate, a couple barely out of childhood who went
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on one of the blue audius sprees in American history.
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Was it psychopathy that drove them or the collision of loneliness,
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humiliation and a society terrified by its own youth.
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We'll find out. Now. You say the word jack and
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you're dead.
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You're called this is It takes two Charles Starkweather and
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Carol and Fugate, and it all begins out of Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln,
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Nebraska in the mid nineteen fifties. It was a place
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that promised safety, family and small town decency. But scratched
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that surface and you'd find something else, isolation, conformity, and
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quiet kind of despair that could drive the lonely half mad.
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It's a landscape that shapes people. The winters are brutal,
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the distances endless, and the horizon never changes. If you
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don't fit in, there's nowhere to hide and nowhere to go.
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Charles Starkweather didn't fit in red hair, bow legged, a
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speech impediment, small for his age, he was an easy
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target for bullies, the kind of kid who carried every
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insult like shrapnel.
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That constant humiliation becomes the seed of rage. You see
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it again and again with sprey killers. The sense of
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being trapped, powerless, and ignored until something finally snaps.
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And that's a theme that echoes throughout mid century America.
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The nineteen fifties were supposed to be an age of
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stability and family values, but under the surface everything was trembling,
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Cold War panic, McCarthyism, and a growing fear of rebellious youth.
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Yeah, teenagers were suddenly a threat. Rock and roll, fast cause,
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leather jackets, and movie stars like James Dean and Marlon
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Brando showing defiance on the big screen. Starkweather latched onto that.
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He modeled himself on Dean in Rubble without a Cause,
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the outsider who refuses to bend You know something, No,
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why you read too many comic books? Well, he's real, austrated,
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he's different. Let's play I'm.
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Cute too, Except Charles didn't just play at rebellion, He
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lived it. He quits school, drifted into petty crime, and
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when he met fourteen year old carol Ann Fugate, something
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inside him clicked, like a fuse finally finding its charge.
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It's not the first time we've seen isolation breeding pathology.
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If you want to explore another example, you can check
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out our companion series The aters Ed of Psychopaths, where
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we look at ed Gean, the reclusive Wisconsin farmer whose
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world was every bit as claustrophobic and repressed as Stockweather's Nebraska.
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Exactly Gen's rural isolation, religious guilt, and moral hypocrisy. They're
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part of the same American landscape, a world of small
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towns and big secrets. The difference is stark Weather didn't
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keep his darkness locked away in a farmhouse.
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He took it on the road, and once he started driving,
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he didn't stop.
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Coming up next the road to nowhere. How a boy
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with a grudge and a girl barely old enough to
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became America's first modern spree killers. On the evening of
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January the twenty first, nineteen fifty eight, the two of
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them were back home in the Bartlet Fugate residence on
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the edge of Lincoln, Nebraska. Nineteen year old Charles Starkweather
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had arrived at the house of his fourteen year old girlfriend,
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Carol Anne Fugate, and everything changed in a few minutes
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of terrible violence.
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He shot Carol's stepfather, Marion Bartlett and her mother, Velda Bartlett. Then,
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in the same household, he murdered Fugate's two year old
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half sister, Betty Jane, clubbing and stabbing the child, all
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this before the night was out.
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The bodies were hidden on the property, in an outhouse
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behind the house or in a storm cellar, depending on accounts,
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and for the next six days Starkweather and Fugate remained
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in the Bartlet home.
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Visitors were turned away. They pinned a note on the
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door which read stay away, everyone is sick with the
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flu and signed miss Bartlett. The note itself underlined Miss
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Bartlett twice, a curious signal bearing mind in the house.
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The only Miss Bartlet was the two year old.
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So here's the chilling tableau, the killer and his teenage
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girlfriend living quietly among the bodies of her family. What
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are we to make of Carroll's role? Was she a
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victim held in thrall to a dominant older man or
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an accomplice, complicit in the bloodlust from the very start.
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Because at this moment, a family dead, the bodies stashed,
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the note posted. Carol had choices. She could have fled,
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cried out, revealed what was happening, but she didn't, and
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that ambiguity became the core of this case.
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Six days later, on January the twenty seventh, pressure was
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building up. A suspicious grandmother tried to enter their house.
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The police arrived, the bodies were discovered, the couple had fled.
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What followed was a sixty mile killing spree across Nebraska
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and into Wyoming. They were in a stolen car. They
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chose random victims. It was a rampage of fear. Eleven
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lives were lost. But it all began in that quiet
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home with that flew note on the door.
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As Charles Starkweather and Carol Anne Fugate embarked on their
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killing spree, the line between accomplice and victim blurred. Carroll,
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just fourteen years old, was thrust into a nightmare that
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would forever alter her life.
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The dynamics between Stockwether and Fugate were complex. Stockweather, a
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nineteen year old high school dropout, was charismatic and manipulative. Fugate,
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young and impressionable, found herself entangled in a relationship that
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escalated into violence.
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According to Fugate, she was coerced into participating, believing that
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her compliance would spare her family. She claimed that Starkweather
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held her family hostage and threatened their lives if she
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didn't comply.
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However, during the trial, the prosecution presented evidence suggesting that
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Fugate had opportunities to escape and could have alerted authorities.
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Witnesses testified that she was seen in public with other
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outstock Wheather on several occasions during the spree.
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This discrepancy led to a contentious debate was Fugate a
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victim coerced into complicity or was she an accomplice who
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chose to participate in the murders.
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The jury ultimately convicted her of first degree murder and
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she was sentenced to life in prison. However, her conviction
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was later commuted and she was paroled after serving eighteen years.
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The case remains a poignant example of the complexities surrounding
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young individuals involved in criminal activities. It raises questions about
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agency coercion and the capacity for moral judgment in extreme circumstances.
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In the end, the true nature of Caroline Fugate's involvement
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may never be fully understood. What is clear, though, is
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that the events of nineteen fifty eight left an indelible
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mark on all involved.
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We're both down there, Let's get out of here. Charles
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Starkweather was captured in January nineteen fifty eight, tried, convicted,
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and sentenced to death. He spent just under two years
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in custody before his execution in June nineteen fifty nine.
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The media dubbed him a teen rebel turned killer, but
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in retrospect, his crimes reveal a collision of psychological vulnerability,
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social isolation, and nihilistic rage.
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You don't understand. I could have had class, I could
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have been a conteer. I could have been somebody.
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The stir of a bump, which is what I am.
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Let's face. Carol Anne Fugate's fate was very different. Convicted
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at first degree murder, she served eighteen years before being
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released on parole in nineteen seventy six. Over the decades,
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the debate has continued. Was sheer Coa's child trapped in
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a violent relationship or an accomplice making conscious choices.
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That ambiguity is part of what fascinates historians and criminologists alike.
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But if we pull the lens forward to twenty twenty five,
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the situation becomes even more complex.
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Think about it. A fourteen year old in a relationship
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with a nineteen year old today there would be some
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kind of intervention, schools, social services, law enforcement. There would
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be risk assessments, mandatay reporting and probably ongoing case management.
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And that's not even mentioning online grooming. Today predators often
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establish control through social media, messaging apps and gaming platforms.
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A teenager in Fugate's position would have multiple points of
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detection long before a murder spree could start.
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Back in my detective days, child protection changed at a pace.
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Multi agency work became crucial, and cases like this one, coercion,
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manipulation and the early warning signs of abuse were central
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to investigations in the UK. During my service, we went
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from a fragmented system of dealing with safeguarding where agencies
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didn't really talk to each other, to multi agency safeguarding hubs,
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or as we called them, the mash. This is where
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incidents of concern were looked at by all the agencies
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and dealt with properly from the outset. If a case
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like stock Whether and Fugate happened today, the authorities would
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treat it as both a criminal and a safeguarding matter.
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And yet things haven't changed. Isolated teens, bullied or ignored
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can still fall under the sway of an older charismatic figure.
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Even with twenty twenty five protocols, the psychological dynamics, power, fear, attachment,
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they all remain constant, which.
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Is why we can't just look at stock Whether and
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Fugate through the lens of crime. We have to consider
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the social conditions, the generational pressures, and how a society
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defines culpability when children are involved.
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So we've traced their journey from small towns to carnage,
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from whispered flu notes to interstate horror. We've explored psychological pressure,
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cultural fear, coercion, and agency. And now as we draw
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this story to a close, the question remains what happens
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when two personalities collide?
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Because stories like Stockweather and Fugates show us one possibility,
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the tragic fusion of two troubled souls, where repression, humiliation,
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and isolation find a terrible outlet in violence. But the
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same dynamic. Two minds meeting and feeding off each other
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can also lead to creation discovery under positive transformation.
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The Cureis are a classic example. Mary and Pierre Curie,
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married in eighteen ninety five, worked side by side. She
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was brilliant in her own right. Together, they discovered polonium
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and radium and reshaped our understanding of radioactivity. Their partnership
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fused passion and in into scientific breakthroughs.
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Continuing the positivity, here's another striking example, Sylvia Tate and
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James Francis Tate. Over decades they collaborated in endocrinology, discovering
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and characterizing the hormone aldosterone, a joint scientific legacy that
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stands long after they died.
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They show us that the catalyst of a diad doesn't
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always have to be destructive. Sometimes two characters can and
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do a line in the service of discovery, not devastation.
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So what does that tell us about Starkweather and Fugate
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That while their union ended in blood, the underlying dynamic
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of two people amplifying each other's impulses is not inherently pathological.
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It's a force. With the right personalities and intention, it
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can tear down or build.
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Up as we close. Thank you for listening. If you've
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enjoyed this episode, please like, share, and subscribe to Psychokiller
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Shocking True crime Stories. The more people who hear these stories,
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the more I suppose awareness grows, and the safer we
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all become.
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Because you never know, a murderous diad might live next door,
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but maybe by shining light on their shadows, we can
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help prevent what should never happen.
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Next time on It Takes Two, we'll explore another pairing,
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equally fascinating, equally dangerous. Until then, stay curious and stay vigilant.
