Reporter remembers 'dull, cold, cruel killers'

By Bill Gallo, Special to the Rocky

Published January 29, 2008 at 12:30 a.m.

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Photo by Dennis Schroeder © The Rocky

Del Harding holds some of his notes from the Charlie Starkweather trial from 50 years ago. Harding is a former Rocky Mountain News reporter who worked for the Lincoln, Nebr., Star, during the Charlie Starkweather killing spree of the 1950s. He was the only reporter to be at each of the murder scenes and he covered the murder trials of Starkweather and Starkweather's 14 year old girlfriend Caril Fugate as well as Starkweather's execution. He also was the only reporter who testified at Starkweather's trial.

Photo by Del Harding

Charlie Starkweather is led from the Lancaster County Courthouse in Lincoln, NE by the Sheriff during his trial in 1958.

Photo by Del Harding

Caril Fugate, 14, Charlie Starkweather's girlfriend, in custody at the Douglas Wyoming Jail January 30, 1958.

Photo by Dennis Schroeder © The Rocky

Photo by Del Harding

Charlie Starkweather is led from the Lancaster County Courthouse in Lincoln, NE by the Sheriff during his trial in 1958.

Photo by Del Harding

Caril Fugate, 14, Charlie Starkweather's girlfriend, in custody at the Douglas Wyoming Jail January 30, 1958.

Photo by Dennis Schroeder © The Rocky

Photo by Del Harding

Charlie Starkweather is led from the Lancaster County Courthouse in Lincoln, NE by the Sheriff during his trial in 1958.

Photo by Del Harding

Caril Fugate, 14, Charlie Starkweather's girlfriend, in custody at the Douglas Wyoming Jail January 30, 1958.

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Even now, Del Harding says, he can close his eyes and see the devastated bodies of young Carol King and Bob Jensen lying at the bottom of the stairs in a storm cellar near Bennet, Neb.

That disturbing image has never quite left him. It's been 50 years since Harding, then a 25-year-old newspaper reporter making 70 bucks a week, descended those stairs and beheld the two slain teenagers. The memory still angers him.

"They were nice farm kids, young, all-American kids," said Harding, who lives near Fort Collins. "Good kids who stopped their car to give strangers a lift."

Their murderer? Charles Starkweather, the 19-year-old Lincoln misfit who became one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history. And if Del Harding doesn't miss his guess, Starkweather was abetted in his gruesome tasks by his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.

"I did not believe then, and I don't believe now, that she was Charlie's unwilling hostage," Harding said.

Starkweather's first victim was a gas station attendant who was shot to death Dec. 1, 1957. Then in January 1958, Starkweather and Fugate began an eight-day rampage in Nebraska and Wyoming, a bloody road trip that was later dissected in a dozen books, fictionalized in Hollywood movies and entrenched in American folklore.

Harding was the first newshound on the story. He visited every death scene, covered both murder trials and witnessed Starkweather's execution in June 1959.

Now 75 and living in retirement with his wife - don't ask for his address, especially if you're a conspiracy nut or a Charlie Starkweather cultist - Harding vividly remembers the late afternoon of Jan. 27, 1958:

Night police reporter calls his desk at the Lincoln Star. Something's up at 924 Belmont. Better get over there.

Harding hopped into his '54 Olds. In the shed behind the broken-down house were three bodies: Caril Ann Fugate's mother, stepfather and 2-year-old half-sister. All killed six days earlier.

What police called "the most shocking series of murders in Nebraska history" would end 50 years ago today near Douglas, Wyo., north of Cheyenne, when police captured Starkweather, a 5-foot-5 dropout who fancied himself the new James Dean, and Fugate, a fatalistic woman-child who had flunked first grade.

Doubts about Fugate

Theories about the case abound. One suggests that Starkweather was crazy.

Harding's response: "When his defense attorneys tried to convince the jury that Charlie was insane, that (infuriated) him no end. He did not want to be found insane, and he hated his lawyers for the tactic. In fact, he was on much better terms with the prosecutor."

Another theory: Fugate, paroled from a life sentence in 1976, was innocent.

Harding's response: "I am convinced . . . that she may have killed several of the victims herself," based on hundreds of his conversations with lawmen, Starkweather's own testimony, inadmissable polygraph tests and Fugate's icy demeanor in court.

Charlie's father thought so, too. Before and during his son's trial, Guy Starkweather frequently phoned Harding at 2 or 2:30 in the morning, evidently drunk, eager to ramble.

"He never made excuses for Charlie, and he never apologized for him," Harding remembers. "But he said to me, numerous times: 'When Charlie goes to the chair, Caril Fugate oughta be sittin' on his lap.' "

When Charlie went to the chair, Harding was there to see it.

"Frankly, the execution is a much more pleasant memory," he said. "One funny sidelight. I was always the typical 'Type-A,' aggressive reporter. So I elbowed my way to the front of the execution room and sat down in the first row. But we were sitting on folding metal chairs on a rubber mat, and it occurred to me that electricity and metal might not be such a good combination. I moved back into the second row."

When it was over - three audible jolts of current, a doctor's stethoscope set against Starkweather's immobile chest, the nods and acknowledgments - Harding took stock:

" 'Gee, that's not so bad,' I thought. I still think that. It was relatively painless, quick and clean compared to what he had done to the people he killed. And anybody who doesn't believe it should have been down in that storm cellar in Bennet."

'Disgusting' glorification

Harding says he never wrote a book about the Starkweather rampage because, after covering the case nonstop for a year and a half, he was sick of it. In 1961 he got married, moved to Denver and spent seven years at the Rocky Mountain News, mostly as a beat reporter covering City Hall. He never again worked a story as dramatic or bloody as Starkweather.

To hear him tell it, the ghosts never got to him. "No post-traumatic stress syndrome," he laughs. "Reporters aren't allowed to have that. You just steel yourself to awful stuff."

Harding left newspapering in 1968, took a series of public information jobs and retired as a California-based NASA spokesman in 1994. In 2000 he underwent quadruple bypass surgery. Last summer, when reporters from Lincoln and London and U.S. News & World Report started calling as the 50th anniversary of the Starkweather killings approached, he got his old notebooks up from the basement. A scrapbook stuffed with clippings. He revisited the story of a lifetime.

Waving off the social analysts who saw in Charles Starkweather the signs of trouble on the American horizon and the moviemakers who mythologized him, the hard-nosed reporter of old speaks bluntly.

"It's disgusting to make a folk hero out of a mass killer," he said. "There was nothing glamorous or romantic about what Charlie and Caril did. To me, they were perfectly matched misfits. Dull, cold, cruel killers and nothing else."

Half a century later, the dead teenagers at the bottom of the stairs still tell him that.

The rampage

On Dec. 1, 1957, Charles Starkweather shot and killed Robert Colvert, 21, a Lincoln service station attendant. A few weeks later, Starkweather and girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate began a deadly rampage.

* Jan. 21, 1958: Marion and Velda Bartlett, Fugate's mother and stepfather, are shot, and her 2 1/2-year-old sister, Betty, is strangled.

* Jan. 27: August Meyer, 70, is shot in his Bennet, Neb., home. Robert Jensen, 17, and Carol King, 16, are killed near Bennet.

* Jan. 28: C. Lauer Ward, 48, a Lincoln businessman, is shot; his wife, Clara, 46, and their maid, Lillian Fencl, 51, are stabbed in their Lincoln home.

* Jan. 29: Merle Collison, 37, a Great Falls, Mont., shoe salesman, is shot nine times near Douglas, Wyo. Later that day, Starkweather and Fugate are captured.

* May 23: Starkweather is convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

* Nov. 21: Fugate is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

* June 25, 1959: Starkweather is executed by electric chair.

* 1976: Fugate is paroled.

The legacy

Filmmakers and other artists have kept the legacy alive. Among the movies inspired by the rampage: Badlands,Wild at Heart, Kalifornia, Natural Born Killers and a TV mini-series Murder in the Heartland.

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