Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [3]
Starkweather left home for good. He moved in with Bob von Busch, who had just married Barbara. Soon he was persuaded to move out of their cramped apartment and he took a room of his own in the same apartment block, one of the very few in town at the time.
Starkweather and Caril went on dates to the cinema, sometimes alone, sometimes with Bob and Barbara. Or they would just drive around, listening to distant rock ’n’ roll stations on the radio. Starkweather also liked to get out of the small city of Lincoln, which had a population of just 100,000 in 1958. He found Nebraska’s capital city claustrophobic and felt contempt for the local people’s law-abiding, Christian ways. Lincoln had just three murders a year before Starkweather went on his spree, and boasted more churches per head than any other city in the world. Out in the huge, flat countryside around Lincoln, Starkweather felt at home. He had craved the solitary life of a backwoodsman since he was a child.
‘When the sun was setting in its tender glory,’ he later wrote of an early experience of the wilderness, ‘it was as though time itself was standing still. The flames still burn deep down inside of me for the love of that enchanted forest.’
Out in the woods he would experience that feeling again.
‘I would sit down against a large tree,’ he said. ‘I gazed above and between the lagged limbs into the sky for miles and miles.’
Caril shared that romantic view of the natural world. She would accompany him on hunting trips and, in the evening, they would lie back, holding hands, and stare up into the clear, starry, black Nebraskan sky. There he told her of the deal he had made with death. Death, he said, had come to him in a vision. Half-man, half-bear, it had taken him down to hell, but hell was not as he had always imagined, ‘it was more like beautiful flames of gold’. The few other people he had trusted enough to tell his vision to had thought him crazy and had changed the subject. But Caril said she loved him and that she wanted to go there, to hell, with him. And in his love for her, Starkweather thought, at last he had found ‘something worth killing for’. His one great aim in life now was for Caril to see him ‘go down shooting, knowing it was for her’.
Starkweather liked to buy presents for Caril – soft toys, a record player and a radio, so she could enjoy music at home. He also bought her jewellery, including a locket with ‘Caril’ and ‘Chuck’, her nickname for him, engraved on it. But buying presents on the $42 a week he earned as a garbage collector did not come easy – especially when there was rent to pay and a car to keep on the road. Starkweather soon began looking around for an easier way of making money.
Nebraska was on the eastern edge of the old Wild West. Cattle ranchers had wrested it from the Sioux and it had been cowboy country until the cereal farmers fenced it in and forced the cattlemen to move on. Starkweather felt himself very much part of that old tradition. He loved guns and spent hours stripping them down and oiling them. And he loved to shoot. Although he was short-sighted, he was a good shot and practised shooting from the hip like an old time gunfighter. He also loved detective films and true crime comics, and he began to fantasise about being a criminal. But he was not interested in being a burglar or a sneak thief. To Starkweather, crime meant armed robbery.
Although he had had a few adolescent scrapes, he had never been in any real trouble with the law. Now, to keep Caril, he started planning a criminal career. Bank robbery was plainly the pinnacle of the profession, but he thought he had better start small – by knocking over a petrol station. He chose the Crest Service Station on Cornhusker Highway that ran out of Lincoln to the north. He used to hang out there tinkering with his car