Caril Ann Fugate

Caril Ann Fugate (born July 30, 1943) is the youngest female in United States history to date to have been tried for first-degree murder. She was the adolescent girlfriend and accomplice of spree killer Charles Starkweather.

Caril Ann Fugate lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her mother and stepfather. In 1956, at age 13, she formed a relationship with Charles Starkweather, a high school dropout five years her senior, whom she met through her sister Barbara, who was dating Charles' friend, Bob von Busch. Charles worked as a truck unloader at the Western Newspaper Union warehouse. On January 21, 1958, Fugate later claimed, she came home to find that Starkweather had shot and killed her stepfather, Marion Bartlett, and her mother, Velda. Starkweather then hit her baby half-sister causing blunt force trauma and stabbed her in the neck. During the next six days the pair lived in the house and turned away all visitors, which made Fugate's relatives suspicious. The bodies were found later in outbuildings on the property.

Starkweather and Fugate then fled, driving across Nebraska and into Wyoming on a spree of murders that claimed six more lives before they were arrested. She admitted holding a .410 shotgun on a young high school couple in a car while robbing them of $4; the couple were shot and killed later that evening. The girl was found partially nude and was stabbed multiple times in the abdomen after being shot. Starkweather and Fugate accused each other of the girl's murder, while Starkweather openly admitted to killing the boy.

Starkweather was sentenced to death and executed by electric chair on June 25, 1959. He insisted that although he had personally killed most of the victims, Fugate had murdered several as well. Although she continued to maintain her innocence, she was tried and convicted for her role in the murder spree. Based on evidence presented that Fugate had opportunities to leave her captivity, the jury found her testimony that she was Starkweather's hostage to be incredible. She was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women in York, Nebraska.

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