Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [7]
On Monday morning Velda’s mother Pansy Street was also getting worried. She turned up at Belmont Avenue and shouted until Caril showed herself. When Mrs Street refused to believe the flu story, Caril reverted to the story about her mother being in danger. Mrs Street went straight to the police station. While she was there, Guy Starkweather phoned, relating the story Laveta had told him. The police sent a second squad car out to Belmont Avenue. When they knocked on the door, they got no answer. So they broke in.
But Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate had already figured that the game was up. Caril had packed a bag with some clothes and a few family snapshots. Starkweather had wrapped his hunting knife in a blue blanket, along with Marion Bartlett’s shotgun, the barrel of which he had sawn down, and a .32 pistol he had found in the house. And they slipped out of the house the back way. By the time the police turned up, everything was neat and tidy. With nothing to excite their suspicions, they took Pansy Street home and let the matter rest.
Bob von Busch and Rodney Starkweather were not so easily satisfied. At 4.30 p.m. they went over to Belmont Avenue to check the place out for themselves. Almost immediately they found the Bartletts’ bodies. The hunt was now on, but the young fugitives had several hours’ start.
After picking up two spare tyres from Starkweather’s garage the couple stopped at the Crest Service Station to fill up with petrol and buy maps. Then they turned south, out of Lincoln, on to the open highway, heading across the frozen farmlands of the Great Plains. They stopped at the small town of Bennet, where Starkweather bought some ammunition at a service station and they ate a couple of hamburgers. Starkweather often came to Bennet to spend time in the surrounding countryside. An old family friend, 70-year-old August Meyer, had often let him hunt on his land in return for half the kill.
Meyer lived two miles east of Bennet, down a dirt track. Starkweather thought they might be safe there, for the night at least. But there had been a six-inch fall of snow and the track was muddy. Their car got stuck. Nearby was a derelict schoolhouse with a cyclone cellar, where the children would have taken shelter from the tornadoes that tore across the Great Plains every spring. Starkweather and Caril went down into the cellar to warm up before traipsing up to Meyer’s farm on foot, ostensibly to ask the old man’s assistance in shifting the car. However, at the farmhouse Starkweather shot Meyer and his dog. He later claimed that he had shot Meyer in self-defence when, after a heated argument the old man had gone into the house to get a coat, but came out on the porch firing a rifle.
‘I felt a bullet go by my head,’ Starkweather said. But Meyer’s gun had jammed after the first shot. ‘Meyer started running back in the house, and I shot him at almost point-blank range with the sawn-off.’
He also blamed the incident on Caril: ‘Caril got pissed off because we got stuck,’ he said. ‘She said that we ought to go up and blast the shit out of him because he did not shovel the lane.’
Caril said that Starkweather had simply asked Meyer if he could borrow some horses to drag the car out of the mud, then shot the old man as he went into the barn.
Starkweather dragged Meyer’s body into the wash-house and covered it with a blanket. The two of them ransacked his house for money, food and guns. Their total haul was less than a hundred dollars. It included a pump-action, .22 calibre repeating rifle, some socks, gloves, a shirt, a straw hat and some jam and biscuits. They took a brief nap before trudging back to the car. After an hour or two of digging they managed to shift it. But it slid off the track into a ditch and Starkweather damaged the reverse gear trying to back it out. Eventually they were rescued by a farmer, a neighbour of Meyer’s, who towed the car out with his truck. Starkweather