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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. On January twenty first, nineteen fifty eight, nineteen year old Charles Starkweather changed the course of crime in the United States when he murdered the parents and sister of his fourteen year old girlfriend and possible accomplice, Carol and Fugate, in a house on the edge of Lincoln, Nebraska. They then drove to the nearby town of Bennett, where a farmer was robbed and killed. When stark Weather's car broke down, the teenagers who stopped to help were murdered
and jammed into a storm cellar. By the time the dust settled, ten innocent people were dead and the city of Lincoln was in a state of terror. Schools closed, men with rifles perched on the roofs of their houses the National Guard patrolled the street. If there is a cultural version of PTSD, the town suffered from it. Stark Weather and few Gates capture and arrest, and the resulting
trials about the killing spree received worldwide coverage. The event would serve as the inspiration for the movie Natural Born Killers and Springsteen's iconic album Nebraska. Today, the story has dropped far from the national consciousness. With new material, news reporting, and new conclusions about the possible guilt or innocence of Fugate, the tale is ripe for an updated and definitive retelling.
In stark Weather, best selling author Harry and McLean tells the story of this shocking event and its lasting impact, a crime spree that struck deep into the heart of the Heartland. The book they were featuring this evening is stark Weather, The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America, with my special guest author Harry and McLain. Good evening, and welcome to the program, Author Harry McLean.
Good evening, Thanks for having me to your program.
I appreciate it, Thank you very much. Let's talk about right away. In your extraordinary book, you talk about you were fifteen years old in January nineteen fifty eight, and Carol Fugate was thirteen years old, Charlie stark Weather was nineteen years old, and you all lived in Lincoln, Nebraska. Tell us your proximity to one of the houses and homes involved in one of the sets of murders, and tell us a little bit about how you became involved in writing this book in twenty and twenty one.
Well, I lived on the other side of town from Carol Fugate and Charlie Starkweather. I was kind of the borderline country club set. Carroll's family was quite poor and they lived in an area called Belmont, which was North Lincoln. Charlie was doing a little bit better, but he's still in North Lincoln. So while we lived in the same town, and actually my brother was in junior high school with Charlie,
we didn't run in the same circles. And it all the story begins in nineteen fifty eight January twentieth twenty first, nineteen fifty eight and ends eight days later, nine days later with the capture and in between that time period. In that time period, ten people die shot or stabbed to death, a variety of people, and Charlie clearly is involved in the killings. Carol's involvement is very debatable. It's very ambiguous. It's not clear. She claimed that she was
the hostage. She went along with Charlie on each one of these murders. She was there and participated to some minimal extent, But what was her culpability criminal or morally since she was only fourteen years old at the time. So that's the main theme in the book. And basically Charlie and Carol were going out. He was nineteen, he had met her when he was seventeen. She had just turned thirteen, and Carol's parents had told Charlie to leave
and to stay away and not come around anymore. And on the first on Monday, the twenty first, Charlie shot Carol's mother, stepfather, and little sister to death. Charlie ended up claiming that Carol was there when it happened. Carol said she was not there when it happened, that she came home later. They stay in the house for about six days, spending on how you counted, it could be seven.
On the seventh day, they leave because Carol's grandmother they've been hiding in the house and Carol's grandmother said she's going to call the cops, so they hit the road. They head out for a town south of Lincoln called Bennett, and the cops come to her home. They don't see
anything wrong. They miss pretty obvious sites that something terrible has happened there, and in fact, her parents and little sister in outbuildings frozen in the January Nebraska weather for that whole week when they were there, and they don't look out buildings, so they don't see the bodies. Carol and Charlie end up in a town called Bennett, which is about twenty miles south of Lincoln.
There they murder.
Charlie murders a good friend of his on whose property he used to hunt, and subsequent to that, they killed two teenagers, Carol King and Bobby Jensen, who pick them up while they're hitch hiking. They then hit back to Lincoln just about the time the cops have found the bodies in Lincoln of her family. They hit back to Lincoln and that night they're in Lincoln and the bodies are discovered in Bennett. The next day they're in Lincoln at a very wealthy family house. There they murder three people,
mister Ward Clara Ward and the maid Lillian Fencil. They then head out for Wyoming, and the cops are always one step behind him. They're always at least one crime scene behind him. And they head out and they they're heading towards the state of Washington, and they get into the bad lands of Wyoming. Charlie Murders shoots to death a traveling salesman who is has pulled over for a nap. Charlie wants his car because the car he's to god is hot, so he shoots him to death. About that time,
the sheriff pulls up. Eryl jumps to the sheriff's car. Charlie takes off. There's a big chase where the cops are shooting him, shooting at him, going one hundred and ten miles now across the bedlines. They eventually capture him their return to Lincoln on Friday. So all this happens from Monday through Friday. It seems like a long nightmare for the city of Lincoln because they were terrified. They knew Charlie was on the loose, they knew he was
terrifying people. They knew that no one knew where he was. The cops didn't know where he was, and in the middle of this bodies would turn out more dead people, so they were terrified. It's hard to believe it's only a five day period. They bring Charlie and Carroll back. Charlie confesses he's quite pleased with the course of events in my view, because he's going to go out as a legend. He is able to predict at that point that movies and books will be made of his adventure.
So he confesses. There is a trial on sanity, he's convicted. He's executed within fifteen months of his conviction. Carol has tried on a felony murder Bobby Jensen, the Boy and Bennett, and she's convicted and she goes to prison for her life. She's given life, she could have been given the death sentence under the rascal a lot at the time, and she goes to prison women's reformatory in York. She's out seventeen years later, still proclaiming her innocence and lives a pretty normal life.
Okay, Harry, now let's go back. We've you've abbreviated the entire story. But let's go back as you do. You said you knocked on every door, you turned over every stone, you spoke to everybody you possibly could. You looked at all of the documentation very very carefully, over and over again. Let's go back to Carol Fugates background, and then let's talk about Carl's Starkweather's background.
Carol was from a poor family, as I said, poor part of town. Her dad, her biological dad, was violent. He was a pedophile, and he beat her mother pretty badly, and they moved every five or six months. She went to six schools in five years, so she had a rep pretty rough childhood.
Put it mildly.
She did alright in school. She had a couple of friends. She wasn't the star in any sense of the word, but she was mildly well adjusted for given her background. Charlie started off well. Charlie is five foot four, flaming thick, flaming red hair, and bow legged and pigeon toed and spoke with a lisp. So everybody can think back to their childhood, how cool kids could be in school. And
they were terribly cruel to Charlie. I talked well, as I said, My brother was in school with him, but they taunted him and mocked him and chased him mercilessly through most of grade school, and finally, one day his dad sat him down and said, look, you don't have to put up with this anymore. Hit him, smack him. That was a pivot for Charlie. From that point on, he didn't run from anybody. He fought harder than most people. He fought dirtier than most people. He would a fight.
He would see somebody across the street that didn't he didn't like his looks, you'd go over and say something dim smack him in them out. His reputation started to spread across Lincoln. By then, he was he became he
became a known character. The way he kind of dealt with the way he was being dealt with treated by other kids was besides being a tough guy, he developed the fantasy world in which he was an outlaw, or he could be a sheriff, but his favorite fantasy was an outlaw and he got into shootouts with people, and he ran, and he advice with lawmen, and he had a gang and all that sort of stuff. And this this fantasy became really kind of took over his consciousness.
It became, you know, it was the contents of his self perception, that he was this outlaw and he really wanted to go out. He he didn't foresee himself living a long life at all. He was happy to go out in a blaze of glory. So he reached the point where he wanted to see if this fantasy that he had in his head about being an outlaw on killing people and getting into shootouts was real. He could
make it real. In November fifty seven, he tested out this theory and he shot to death a gas station attendant on the outside on a small road outside of Lincoln, on the edge of Lincoln, and he robbed him and shot him to death, and it worked. Charlie found it satisfying. It was a new life for him in the sense that now he was moving his fantasy into reality. All he needed now with the girl, and there comes Carol.
Carol is now the last piece in Charlie's fantasy in his puzzle, and the two of them become a unit.
Tell us about Carol's sister, Barbara, and how Carol meets Charles Starkweather in the first place.
Barbara is going with a friend of Charlie von Bush and Charlie and Bob kind of the they run together they're kind of the tough guys in Lincoln, and I do remember that about him. There were kids that got in fights at all the schools, and van Bush and Stark Oather were two of the toughest gies. And Van Bush hooked up with Barbara, Carol's older sister who she was quite close, and brought Charlie with him one night
over there and introduced him to Carol. And that was the point of the gathering was so they could meet and they became a couple almost that night, even though Carol was only fourteen and Charlie was seventeen at the time, and they were together. It was about a year and a half before the killing started. They went together for about a year and a half before the killing started.
You're right that she really liked his stories about his outlog gang and liked that he could fix cars, and liked his red hair even and even that he was bow legged, and that he was much different. So for the first time he liked her, but someone liked him, and it was important to him.
She liked the way he looked, She liked the idea that he was a tough She kind of liked the idea that the guys were scared of him. He ran hot rides out at the track outside of Lincoln on
Sunday night. She kind of liked that. And the reverse of that is that, you know the way psychologists look at somebody like Carol as they call her a sitting duck, meaning that she came from such a traumatic background at that point that what she wanted was somebody in her life to stabilize her and to whom she would be the most important person. And Charlie, I think understood that and did. He didn't overtly manipulate her, but he filled
that role very nicely for her. She was the most important thing in his life.
You say they did all kinds of things, They had a sexual relationship. And again, what happens after a year and a half is that you talk and you write about the altercation that happens at the home with the stepfather Mary and Bartlett and the mother slapping his face, and then the issue of whether Carol was involved in was present at all in the murder of her family. It's important that you look at that and delve into that issue completely and then have a conclusion as to
that possibility. Tell us about what happens in your mind, and according to Carol, that faithful day.
You put your finger right on the critical issue in the story as far as it relates to Carol's guilt innocence. If she was there when Charlie murdered her mother, her stepfather, and her little sister and continued with him, it makes sure whether she should be complicit at for it makes her complicit in the ongoing murders in the sense that she knew what was going to happen, she could run away from him. There are plenty of opportunities for run
if she wasn't there. If the first thing she saw was when she got home from school at four o'clock, was Charlie inside with a shotgun saying that he had her parents' hostage and would kill them if she tried to leave, that sends a story in a whole different direction. And Carol always claimed that she was a hostage, that she believed that Charlie was going to kill her, her parents, and her little sister and probably her if she tried
to run. And if that's the case, then the first time she saw Charlie kill somebody was when he killed the farmer outside of Bennett and that would have been the traumatic situation that would have impacted her if she was there. Of course, she's a completely different story. So
the big issue was was she there? And I resolved it through detailed analysis of the facts and some inferences that are drawn that she wasn't there, that she came home and Charlie had already cleaned up the house and buried the bodies and some outbuildings not too far away, and that she went with Charlie out of fear for her parents' lives.
At the same time, once these two were captured, they are placed in separate vehicles with law enforcement. And also this major issue again nineteen fifty eight, but then advances in the legal system where she was fourteen and she was questioned when she was accused of murder without an attorney, without a parent present, So not only the age of fourteen, but also that adult right to counsel wasn't given to her as a obvious juvenile.
And I mean the fact is she was sedated when she was interrogated initially two when they got her, she was hysterical, claming Charlie was going to kill her, and she wasn't involved in anything, which is what Charlie said in the beginning. For a month, Charlie denied that she was involved in any of the criminal activity or that she had been at home. What he killed her parents.
So he comes in jesuhysterical. They sedate her for two days, that day and that night and the next day on drive back to Lincoln, and she now believes that her parents are dead. She asked enough people. She finally asked her sister, and she's placed in the mental hospital because they don't have a facility for juvenile girls. And she's ends the next She's not treated at all, not interviewed,
not evaluated ever. She sits out there and while her trial is delayed for six or seven months because they're resolving this issue where she's going to be tried. They interrogate her on Saturday. She's back on Friday, back and they interrogate her for several hours on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. And it kind of depends what you call interrogation how many hours you can add in there, but it's it's the minimum of ten hours. And she does ask she
does ask for it. She's asked her she wants an attorney. She says, yes, I do. She doesn't really know what's going on. I mean, it's hard to imagine what state she was really in that point at the age and the trauma, and the DA and the police chief are all sitting in this room with her, and she's there all by herself, no parent, no adult, no lawyer or nothing, and she's getting interrogated. She makes a statement, then sixty six page statement, which is what ends convicting her at
the trial. It would never ever, ever be admitted into evidence today.
You said, no attorney would advise it, but also explain for our audience the felony murder rule, so that while she's confessing, she, as you write, she's tightening the noose for the prosecution.
Yeah, pelony murderer is quite controversial, and it always has been. And it's if you're involved in the crime in which a murder happens, you can in fact be convicted of the first gream murder itself. So if you're in a car, if you're sitting in the backseat of the car and you're part of it and you know what's happening, and the guy goes in and kills the owner of the seven to eleven, you're guilty of murder. Firs su gream murder just as much as he is, and you could
be sentenced to death. So what happened was, when they were driving around with the two Bennett teenagers, Charlie told Carol to take some money from Bobby Jones's wallet and put it in his What she did, she admitted it. She took his wallet, took four or five bucks out, put it Charlie's walk. So that's the felony. And so based on that, they charged her with first degree murder under the felling murder rule, and she could have been
executed because of that. Since then, the Supreme Court has held that you cannot be sentenced to death under the fellony murdered rule unless you were involved in the murder itself. You can be convicted it's ending light in prison, but you can't be sentenced to death for felling murder unless you were part of the crime of murder.
Let's also talk about the other crimes that Charlie eventually says that Carol is responsible for or involved with in terms of murder, but also when you talk about this crucial moment and the reason why Charlie changes his mind so dramatically in his confession and blaming Carrol.
When he was picked up up in the bad Lands, he said, leave the girl alone. She had nothing to do with it. He gave a written statement, in an oral statement that night he said the same thing. He drove to Lincoln the next day and he said the same thing, though he did scratch on a jailhouse wall
in Gearring, Nebraska, that Carol had killed some people. When he then gave formal statements under oath and recorded, he swore that she was not at home, that she had nothing to do with any of the killings, and that's where he testifies to in his trial. As she's coming to trial, he starts to ship and say that at one point or another he says that she was home
and had in fact murdered her little sister. He says that she murdered Carol King, one of the teenagers outside of Bennett, and he also by implication, accuses her of murdering the maid in the warhouse. So he's just kind of wrapping everything up, and he gets the real harm to Carol from all that was that these accusations made headlines in the Lincoln paper. And she's sitting there waiting for six months and then rolling all these headlines through
Charlie's trial about her. You know, they completely paint the picture that she is complicit in the curent so she doesn't really have a chance for a fair trial, however you look at it. But Charlie changed his mind about it, I think because my view is that Carol was supposed to go with him, and that became a theme that was picked up. He said to one of his lawyers, I'm happy to be electrocuted, go to the chair, as long as Carol's sitting on my lap. And I think
that's why he started, why he turned on hers. It occurred to him that she might not get the death penalty, and.
That was his idea, part of his fantasy of blazes of glory. But when he was captured by police, she ran to other people in the truck and screaming, and he ran out of ammunition, so there was no blaze of glory. So this was his next option, wasn't it.
Actually? I think it's somewhat He hinted that it is a memoir. The electrocution the chair actually made a better story for him than if he'd been shot to.
Death up in the bed line, because he gets all the press, he has the trial, there's the books, there's Bruce Springsteen talking about it, there's bad Lands, the movie, and a lot of I mean, it's what a great way to go to, you know, to be put to chair, put to death after this string of murders.
I think absolutely worked for him. The way it ended up.
You write extensively about the situation with the press, reporters and people with cameras in the jail. Tell us a little bit about that.
When you look at the criminal justice system back in those days, and particularly in the Midwest and a town like Lincoln, which was a big small town, essentially, it's stunning how crude and primitive the criminal justice system was. There were no tapes at crime scenes. Onlookers were allowed into the house where the murders of their parents had
taken place. The teenagers that were murdered were stuffed, and a storm seller on a farmer's property, and a really bad, bad, I mean unfortunate picture of Carol King that one of the teenagers was taken. She had been mutilated and shot to death, and she was naked and they took a picture. And that picture was taken by a farmer. He walked down the steps into the storm cellar and took a picture of the crime scene and Carol's state of being at the time. And the reporter for the Lincoln Journal
walked into the crime scene house of Carol's family. The knight of the murder found a picture of Carol and Charlie together, which is the famous picture which you see the two of them sitting on a love seat. He took it out, got it copied back at the offices, took it back out to the crime scene and put it back on the desk. And they haven't even investigated the crime scene yet. And this guy's walking all over everywhere,
and the sheriff they allowed. You can see pictures of the photographers taking a picture of Charlie in the jail. They went in and they talked to him, They shot photographs of him, they chatted with them. There's a reporter that I know in and gave him a pack of cigarettes and sat down and talked to him. He was invited by the share So do you want to go talk to Charlie. Yeah, I'd like to talk to Charlie. Well, taking a pack of cigarettes that don't make them happy.
So it was and Carol was never, never in cuffs or leg irons for this whole time period, Q woke free. Basically now, they would kind of hold her arm as they were walking into court or down the courthouse, but she was There was no restraints on Carol, and she was very small. She was barely five feet in, about one hundred and five pounds, so she wasn't a real threat. But when you look at it today, they're not going
to look at whether she's a threat or not. They're gonna restrain her every way they can.
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First start Ritual or add Symbolic Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual dot com slash murder for forty percent off. Now. You write that in nineteen sixty four the Continuing Attorneys for Carol fugate John MacArthur. You write that his son, at fifteen years old, assisted him, and then his son went on to go to law school and become a lawyer, and you talk about an exciting development that happened. In nineteen sixty four, the US Supreme Court issued what you
call Escabido. A suspect has a right to have an attorney as soon as the investigation turns accused. So tell us what MacArthur does as a result, and what happens before we talk about how Harold's life changes when she meets a person involved in the correctional center.
Jackie Crawford, the only restrictions on confessions obtaining confessions when Carol was arrested was the confession voluntary or not? And that comes out of the Fifth Amendment. Right clearly was not voluntary in the sense that she was sedated and all that. But this Supreme Court of Nebraska and the
US Spamport said no, it was voluntary. A couple in sixty four, as you mentioned, they came down with Escabido case, which said that the minute that you were in custody, basically they had to be advised of their right to a lawyer, and a lawyer could be present from that point on through the interrogation. Well, under that standard, clearly Carrol's confession would I don't think it really was a confession, but her statement, which nailed her in front of the jury,
would have been thrown out. And with that being thrown out, all you had left was Charlie's testimony. Well, he changed his story so many times you could never convict somebody beyond a reasonable doubt just on her testimony. So they all got tremendously excited about Escobedo when it came down. And the question then was was it going to be applied retroactively to people that had been convicted without a lawyer or the opportunity to have a lawyer prior to
it coming down. And the first inkling was that it was going to be retroactive, which means she would be well, her conviction would be thrown out. And I don't think, well, I don't know. They were so determined to convict Carol of something. They might have tried her on another one of the crimes that didn't involve the confession, but she certainly certainly would have been out from under this one, I think. And when you think about it, it's hard to you kind of see why the sub Paine Court
didn't do it. There were estimates of like fifteen to twenty thousand first degree murderers were going to be released if escabedo was retroactive. So they eventually decided that it was not retroactive, and she was stuck. She was stuck in the reformatory, and it was too bad because it looked possible, and I think her hopes really got up. I know Jim MacArthur got really he was convinced that they had a good shot at ESCAPEDO.
Let's talk about Jackie Crawford and the relationship with Carol and her life behind bars.
She went to the York Reformatory. She had turned fifteen by that time. She was fifteen by the time of her trial actually, and that was in November. She was sentenced in December, and went there and it was a very crude, not surprisingly in those days, very primitive kind of crude setting, where there was a lot of elaborate punishment systems withholding food, withholding the ability for the people
there to talk to each other. There was no therapy, there was no counseling, there was no work programs, it was no education programs. And she had the good fortune to have a woman who had moved to York to be with her husband, who was a school teacher, and she got a job out there as a propressional officer. Over two or three years, she ended up first deputy warden and then the warden itself, and she took a real interest in Carol. She was very progressive in that sense.
She brought in well, she did away with the punishment system pretty much altogether and used the kind of reward system in its place. She brought in vocational systems. Carol got her high school degree, she ended up getting her a certificate as a medical assistant in nursing homes. She took all the classes, all the courses. She ended up eventually, at Jackie Crawford's insistence, becoming the the babysitter at church
for a local church every Sunday morning. And she was looking out for these kids and becoming a part of the church and a part of the community, which was stunning when you think where she was about five years six years earlier, which is a complete outcast. But she ended up traveling around Nebraska giving talks at the schools and various fraternal organizations about how not how to make the right choice. And it was really someone said to me the other day that Carol's story is a tragedy
upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy. This was the first thing that broke her way in her whole life that I could see. She ended up with this woman that she bonded with, but it wasn't they weren't really friends. Jackie Crawford was convinced that Carol could come around and become a full blown person and be free and achieve some sort of happiness. So she did everything she did for Carol, but she did for everybody there. Carol is just kind of the most notorious person that she helped.
And by the time Carol left after seventeen years, she was in pretty decent shape, as far as you can be in decent shape after what she'd gone through.
You write about Nannette Beaver, and she had interviewed Carol back in nineteen fifty eight as a reporter, and then Nannette Beaver enters the story again tell us about that.
Well, it begins with the fact that, as I've kind of mentioned, everybody in Lincoln, whether it was the cops, the sheriff, the press, the schools, the average citizen were convinced that Carol was guilty, just absolutely convinced. And the prosecutors believed it, probably more than anybody, and they were going to try Carol murder after murder after murder, and tell they got her. I've seen the memo. I know
how committed they were. They weren't going to kill her, but they were going to get her convinced.
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See website for details. Dict and set away. One of the reasons for this attitude, this almost universal attitude which is still there today of Carol's guilt knowing participation in it, was her appearance. She had a very cold attitude when she spoke, It was very clipped. She had a harsh, kind of stonelike figure on this fourteen year old girl. It was really kind of unsettling to look at her.
So she showed no remorse anywhere. So they decided to have a right before her trial to have a press conference where she could be a human being, where she could talk and laugh for it, at least relax a little bit and show some warmth, some humanity there, some
remorse for what had happened. So she finally talked the lawyers into it and they said, okay, but we're just going to have one person to ask her questions, which was a mistake, and they picked Thennette Beaver and the rest of the press was very unhappy about this because it was kind of like a stage scene. Well, if you watch a there's a film on stark Weather and Carol and it's called Growing Up in Prison, and it's on YouTube, you can see Carol testify at this press conference,
and it's worse than you could imagine. She's stiff, she's cold, she's unfeeling, and it really cemented everybody's view of her. It's this kind of unfeeling, uncaring. I see person who
could therefore commit those crimes and not feel bad. So then Mannette Beaver ended up writing a book about her and Carol, and she was one of the few there's like two to three people in a press, in the whole press, and there were sixty seventy eighty press people in Lincoln covering this thing from not only this country, but from Japan and London and France. You'd become an international event by the time her trial came around, and there were two to three people of the press who
thought she might be in a set. Everybody else was absolutely commenced. And you can see it in the writing, or you can see it in note you can talk to their kids. There's actually all up in Fort Collins who covered it for Lincoln the Star. He's still alive, he's ninety two, and he remembers it, and he said she's absolutely convinced that Carol was evil, that she did it on purpose, that she probably put Charlie up to it.
And so you have you have two people who thought she might be innocent, and then at Beaver was one of them.
You're right about the defense attorney and the Supreme Court's denial of the petition that he files for a writ of sordio. You should pronounce this and which you say cleared the decks for parole. Explain this to us.
It's Nebraska had a very complicated system of the way you were sentenced and when you're available for parole. To actually explain that, I probably have to get my book out. But since she had been sentenced to life, let's put it this way, right, there was no specific date at
which she was eligible for parole. Right, so the lawyer got her re sentenced by the parole board to a specific time of year, a specific number of years, and I think it was like forty, which allowed her then to be have a date for which she could be eligible for parole, and she went in and the people there was a tremendous controversy over it. The press covered it. There were people from Bennett, there were other victims, families
of victims that came and testified against it. Jackie Crawford was there testifying in favor of it, and it was turned down, but they did set a number of years. Then they said in three years she'll be eligible for a parole. So at the end of that three year period, she did get parole, and by that time the people against it had kind of had kind of given up that kind of come to accept it. So it happened without a lot of controversy. When she finally got out in seventy six.
What happens when she does get out.
She's well, when the pro process is going on, there are all sorts of people around the country writing her saying we believe you're innocent, and nobody from Nebraska as far as I know, wrote in and we would like to give you a home and find you a job and give you a new start in life. And a couple from Michigan that she ended up going with and she lived with them for a couple of years, and she had her care certificate then, and she went to work in a hospital, and she also babysat every night
for three families. She worked a full day and then she babysat for four hours. Still a couple got home from work five days a week, and she lived a pretty normal life. I looked for the records of any sort of activity, any sort of bankruptcy, or anything that might indicate that there was somebody there still there, and I found nothing. She went to Mexico with their girlfriend's break.
She marched in parade, She read a lot of books, and she eventually got married, and then she got in twenty thirteen, she got in a bad car accident and it left her pretty damaged, and then she had a mile stroke and her husband died in a car accident. But her life kind of led a not unusual trajectory
after she was out of prison. So if you really you didn't ask this question, but if you really think that she was there when Charlie murdered her parents and participated in these crimes, you have to accept the possibility. Here's this girl for fourteen years, no criminal activity, no no indication of any sort of pathology at all, who for eight days turns into a monster and after that lives a completely and she's in prison. She does great in prison. She went never never a blemish on her
record for seventeen years, never heard of. So there's an eight day period she's a monster, and the rest of the time she's a pretty normal, decent human being, which is real hard to accept that theory of.
Who she is. Let's use this as an opportunity to hear these messages. Now you write, and we've skipped over it a little bit that when she's afforded these privileges from the Correctional Center at York via this Crawford, her attorney, the son of John MacArthur, Jim MacArthur, which is crucial to this story and this book. It would stay with his family, She would stay with his family. He trusted her enough and the correctional Center and trusted her to
go out on this pass into the community. But the attorney is very powerful that they trusted her enough to let her stay at their family home all those times.
Yeah, I mean they basically after a period of year, she was allowed to kind of weekend visitations. And the interesting story about that was that Jim MacArthur and a couple other fellows in Lincoln owned an apartment building and was one of the weekends that Carol came to stay with them, and they had young they had young kids
at the time. She would baby sit their kids. But on this day in particular, she went swimming along with some others in a swimming pool at the apartment building that Jim MacArthur owned, and she was spotted by it was never clear who, and a complaint was made and Jim MacArthur got a call from somebody high up in the corrections correctional system saying Carol was never to be allowed in Lincoln again. And she never did come back
after that until she was paroled. And that's just the sign of how of how much Jim MacArthur believed in her, and his wife did, the whole family did, and his father John, and how much Lincoln did not believe her.
He also is very strong when you write about the members of the Church of Nazarene being witnesses for the parole hearing as well.
Yeah, they were very articulate. I mean they were a little hesitant in the beginning, and then she became part of the part of the family went on for years, and they hired a lawyer to come in and represent him. But they testified that she was a decent human being who deserved to be given another chance. And they couldn't believe that she had done some of this stuff, but if she had, for this was a part of it, and she had demonstrated that she was a good, responsible,
kind carrying person. They had something like forty or fifty people from the congregation in Bennett, I forget the name of the church, the denomination, and they got up and gave quite quite moving testimonies. It's part of the record, actually you can read it, and it's also written up in a lot of the press, and very very powerful, very very people committed to her salvation.
Really very very interesting the press in a condemnation of Carol over the years, and especially at the very beginning, but also how things change somewhat through various programs and through various people like Ninette Beaver, but also that Carol was committed to try to get some kind of exoneration, some validation that she was innocent, and she you write that she underwent a polygraph test on f Lee Bailey's of all people's lie detector television program.
Yeah, she did, you know, every now and she would make an effort to convince people that she was innocent, and they none of them ever really worked. I watched the thing with f Lee Bailey and it's you know, it's television, and it wasn't convinced. I mean, if first of all, light detectors are are not you know, convincing, they're not allowed in court, and for a good reason there they're not very reliable. But supposedly she passed it, and I watched it and it was not convincing. I mean,
it just didn't convince me of anything. And then she went under hypnosis with a psychologist who wrote a report up and that report was just read leg junk. And then she took she took some documents. It was Charlie's initial interrogation where he said that she was not guilty and sent that out to like eighty five homes chosen at random to try and convince people in Lincoln that she was innocent. It was all kind of it was
all ineffective. I mean, I understand why she did it, but it was never going to change the heart of the peace in Nebraska.
You read about the effect on Lincoln, Nebraska at that time and then over the year subsequent years, but also how much they were criticized for their ineptitude during the initial investigation, such as when they searched a home but didn't search the outbuildings whatsoever, and days and days had gone by, and then very vivid scene where they're at another suspected place where they believe that Charles and Carol would be, but meanwhile they're in Wyoming being arrested.
Yeah.
I mean, they just never they never got a handle on it. And you know, Lincoln at that time, like I say, it was a big small town. They had two cop cars out at night to patrol the whole city. And you became a cop by in Lincoln by walking with another policeman on his beat for two weeks. You did that, and you were then a policeman yourself. I don't think it's that unusual, at least in the Midwest to have that level of policing. Mine was not a
big thing. Murders were very very rare, and usually if there were murders, it was some dispute between neighbors or husband and wife, or a robbery or gain action of some sort. It wasn't this random sort of thing. So they weren't. They weren't prepared for it when you look at it. Even so, when you look at it in retrospect, you realize that a series of errors and misjudgments and inaptitude was what allowed this last ten murders to occur. There were chances to stop it, and Charlie should have
floated to the surface. I could go into that, but it's complicated and didn't. I get criticized by current day policemen and some of the piece of police and Lincoln subsequent to Charlie who've talked to me and said, no, you're being too hard on them. They were good cops,
they were good detectives. But there was one of the lead investigators went on a TV show it came well, I think it was something like Dayline or something, and made a statement that he was convinced, you know, Carol was guilty and he thought she should be executed along with Charlie sitting on his lap. The bias toward her was incredible and consistent and persistent, and it's something I've
never been able to really understand. What I grew up in Lincoln, I know those people they're decent human beings. Is decent as you'll find anywhere, and somehow they got locked into this notion that Carol was. I actually think in the end they hated her more than they hated Charlie for some reason.
I found when I was reading this and then preparing for this, that I've seen this phenomena before, where you have this much older boyfriend who commits these heinous crimes, even involved in the family, and yet there is so much criticism heaped on the girlfriend, especially when there is some revelation that they had sex sometime after the murders.
Yeah, and that was part of it, And that's something that's hard to grasp today. Carol is always She admitted in her testimony and in her statements that she had had sex with Charlie. Later on she denied it, but I don't think her denial is very convincing. But a fourteen year old girl having sex with a nineteen year old boy at that time who comes from a poor part of town and is kind of tack yourself and
rough looking. That is part of the picture that Lincoln had of her and didn't help her situation at all. To have this kind of slutty thing about her. That was part of her image, part of her presentation in town. I think that just made it a little bit easier to see her as a criminal. It doesn't quite make logical sense, but I know it was a part of the image and the way she was presented.
You write in your book that part of the research for your book, obviously you went back to Lincoln, Nebraska, your hometown, and you went back and you've visited some of the scenes, including the home of where the Wards lived and so and after that you said that there was one very important visit you would like to make, one very important person you'd like to speak to for this book.
Well, back to the pardon hearing for a second, or maybe we haven't talked about it, but she applied for a partner in pardon in twenty nineteen. She was denied in January February twenty twenty one, and that's what got me interested in it. She did not and it was denied. And I had looked at the case earlier and stayed away from it because I was concerned. I knew it
was going to be difficult for me to do. But when the guilt or innocence thing when I looked at it that way as a lawyer, I was able to say, Okay, I'm going to go in and write this as a lawyer. As the case went on, Carol was not anywhere to be found. Her lawyer didn't know where she was, her friends didn't know where she was. Purposely or not, she was hidden. I called the sons of her husband, not by her, from another woman, and they either didn't either
didn't know, or wouldn't tell me. And it was a severe hole in the book. And by this time I spent two years researching. I probably knew more about her family and her life when she was that age and fourteen than she did, and yet I had not set eyes on her.
And it had to happen tell us about this meeting.
So I get a phone call one day, trying to say to myself, it's okay, Harriet, it's okay. You know you don't have this person, you haven't set eyes on her, you don't have any sort of personal reaction to her. But every time I talk to somebody, particularly reporters, if you talk to Carol, we talk to Carol. He talked
to Carol. And I'm sitting there trying of buffaloed and I get a call one day where the person tells me where she is and she's in a nursing home and the name of the nursing home, of the city, all that stuff. And a couple of days later I had my wife call up the nursing home and ask for Carol by her married name was what she went by then, and they said, oh, yeah, she's here. We can put you through. She can't talk very well, but
you know she can. We'll put you through on her phone. Well, that phone call didn't go through, but it signaled to me that at least they didn't have a blockade around her. At least they didn't have a fence around her. Sure that it was worth the time to go up and try and see her. So I jumped on a plane and flew there, and about five o'clock one six o'clock one evening, I walked into the nursing home asked directions to where she was. They told me, like she could
have been anybody Betty Smith. And I went down halfway down. He said, turn right here, go down there, and there's this little so the the person, the nurse, walks me down to her room and says this is where she kind of stands there and right in the doorway. It says, tiny, tiny, tiny, little gray haired woman in a in a wheelchair, and I kind of go, I see in her eyes that it's Carol, But I can't nothing else. She's barely there.
I mean, I don't know how to say. It's like a waif, it's like a It's like some sort of reflection of somebody. It's so tiny. And so then I spent the next I went in and talked to her. Did they sense she could talk? Which was not very much because of the stroke, but her roommate could explain a lot of things for her and to her. And I've seen that happen before with someone who has a stroke.
So we did have a We had a meeting. We had a conversation for about an hour, and I showed her some pictures of her family that Jim had her lawyer had had given me and said, go ahead and give them to her, and so I did. It's kind of a way of kind of a peace offering, because I was scared she was going to shut me out like she shut everybody else out from the press. And so I had a meeting with her and They're about an hour into it, somebody you know, comes in the
door and they said who are you? Who are you? And I said, well, I'm a friend of her lawyer. And they said, well, all right, stay right there. And they're gone for about five minutes, and I knew I was sunk. And they came back and they said, you're Harry McLean, right, And I said, yeah, well we got to re guardian. He wants you to go, so you got to leave. So so I left. But I had my encounter with her, for which I'm extremely grateful. Somebody was really looking out for me and making that happen.
I got to say, what was.
The one thing he wanted to say to her? And that you did? And what do you write? Was her response.
Well, when they first came in there, I realized that I had probably about three minutes. I knew I could tell from their attitude they were just going to affirm what they wanted to do, which was to toss me out. I looked at her and I thought, well, by this time I had made and I'd written probably almost ninety percent of the book by this point, and I was I had reached the conclusion that she was not there
when her parents were murdered. She did not know they were dead when she got in the house, when she went into the house and went on the Bennett and so forth, And that was that was the most important thing for her, not that she was innocent of felony murder, not that she was in it. She wanted insisted that she people had to believe that she was not there when her family was murdered, and put up with it and stayed with Charlie. And I had reached that conclusion
through detailed analysis. And I told and I thought, I'm just I'm gonna tell her that. And I said, I'm a writer. I'm writing a book. And I thought she was very bad reaction. She smiled, and I said, there's something I want to tell you, and and I told her that the book was going to reach the conclusion. And she was not at home when her parents were murdered, and her face kind of lit her eyes lit up.
She as much as she was she was missing a couple of teeth too, but as much as she was capable of lighting up and showing pleasure and maybe maybe an inkling of some sort of satisfaction of the possibility of little Piece coming her way. You could see it. I saw it on her on her face. And right then was when the two nurses came in, and it.
Was like.
If they had been a minute earlier, it wouldn't have happened, and so they Yeah, so I left, But there was that sense of having given her some indication that there would be a strong voice that believed her when she said she wasn't there when her family was killed.
That was a very very dramatic and to this book. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about your book, Stark Weather. For those that might want to take a further look, do you have a website they might take a look at, and you do any social media? Tell us about that.
Yeah, it's Harry McLean and it's m A C L e a n dot com. And it's a good website. I've gotten very favorable reviews which are either replicated or you've got a link to them on there. And I do. Yeah, I'm on Instagram. What else do I do?
Oh?
I do blog and Facebook. I'm not very particularly good at it, but but I do it. And uh, you know, I enjoy talking to people about the case and finding out about other cases that are that are going on that are some interest so that I appreciate your having me on the show very much. It's been it's been interesting and to talk with you, I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Harry McLain for coming on and talking about your brilliant book, Stark Weather. Thank you so much for this interview and you have a great night and good night.
Thanks you too, Thank you, Bye bye. Blae