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In 1957, 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, embarked on one of America's most infamous killing sprees. Over two terrifying months the teenage couple murdered ten people across Nebraska and Wyoming, leaving a trail of fear and unanswered questions.
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Monsters have haunted our imagination since humans first sat around a midnight campfire
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Vampires rise from the dead and crawl out of their graves. The man sitting next to you changes into a wolf and devours you
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Nuclear war creates a giant lizard that surfaces from the sea and destroys an entire city
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But not all monsters cling to the darkened recesses of our nighttime fears
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Some walk around in broad daylight, killing without purpose or remorse. Some are simply our human neighbors and maybe our friends
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Today, we look into the lives of Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate, two teenagers from Lincoln, Nebraska
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A boy, a girl, and a violent three-week killing spree leaves 52 people dead
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This is the movie Natural Born Killers, boiled down to a single statement
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Oliver Stone's tale about murder and the media became an instant box office success
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but also ended up being named the eighth most controversial film in history due to its excessive violence and disturbing subject matter
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Stone needed a reason to explain why his two film characters would turn to serial killing for fun
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with no sense of human compassion to stop them, and he found it in abusive parents
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In the film, the character Mallory is repeatedly sexually attacked by her own father when she's younger
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With these memories as fuel, she kills with an unbridled glee. Her partner in mayhem, Mickey, has flashbacks of his own abusive parents
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Two broken people sharing a common bond of tragic childhood and rage
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take out their anger on a world that neither aided in their abuse nor helped save them from it
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For Mallory and Mickey, everyone is a potential victim. This story grew from the mind of Quentin Tarantino
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well known for his movies about violent people who kill with a lack of remorse
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So it's not a stretch to believe that he and Oliver Stone could craft such horrible characters
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While the film Natural Born Killers seems grotesquely unbelievable, the truth might be even more disturbing
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Tarantino didn't invent Mickey and Mallory from a twisted imagination. He based them on two actual people
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Young killers who seemingly had no reason to do what they did. No warped childhood struggles that might help explain the motive behind their cruel and random murders
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Charles Starkweather was born on Thanksgiving in 1938. He would be dead before he reached his 21st birthday, the last execution of anyone in Nebraska until 1994
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Born with genuvarum, a birth defect that left him bowlegged and growing up with a speech defect, he was the victim of bullying in his elementary school
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Angry at his tormentors he found a passion in gym class strengthening his body and eager to prove his physical superiority superiority One high school friend recalled that if he saw someone bigger than him or better looking or better dressed he pounced
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eager to teach the other person, stranger or schoolmate, that Charles was better
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But despite his struggles, Charles was described as a kind boy who would do anything for someone he liked
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And unlike his movie counterpart, he wasn't raised in an abusive home
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He had friends in school and the support of his teachers. Without horrors in his life more significant than most people have experienced, Charles could indeed be called a natural-born killer
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Charles began dating Barbara Fugate when he was 18, but she left him for Bob von Busch, a buddy of Charles'
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They stayed friends, though, and through Barbara, Charles met her younger sister, 13-year-old Carol Ann Fugate
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For the next year and a half, they dated, without a hint as to the gruesome trail of death that would follow
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Carol Ann was in love. The older, more sophisticated Charles gave her the attention she wanted and the trust she craved
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He had recently seen Rebel Without a Cause and took to dressing like James Dean, a look that made Carol Ann swoon
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He even taught her how to drive, though she did manage to crash and wreck his father's car
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Carol Ann longed to be seen as older and more sophisticated, and this 18-year-old man gave her that feeling
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Instead of running away from abuse like Mallory from the movie, she was running towards a premature maturity
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When this led to murder, she bathed in the glow of what to her was ruthless adulthood
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On November 30th, 1957, just six days after his 19th birthday, Charles found a stuffed dog at a gas station he wanted to buy for Carol Ann
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He didn't have enough money for it, and despite explaining that it was for his girlfriend
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the station manager, Robert Colvert, refused to sell it to him on credit. At three that morning
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Charles returned with a shotgun. He forced Robert to open the safe and took the money
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Charles then forced the man into his own car where they drove to a remote spot
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when Charles shot the station manager dead. Carol Ann loved the bad boy behavior when Charles told
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her about the robbery. After Charles lost his job and was evicted from his apartment for not paying
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rent, things were about to take a dark and senseless turn. The taste of murder had given him
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new life. Just a few months later, on January 21st, 1958, Charles went to the Fugates home
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armed with a rifle and ammunition. There are still questions regarding motive, but the result
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is well documented. Charles shot and killed Velda and Marion Bartlett, Carol Ann's mother and
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stepfather, and strangled and stabbed to death their two-year-old daughter, Betty Jean. Carol Ann
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and Charles stayed in the house for six days after the murders, explaining to anyone who
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came by that the family was sick with the flu. The bodies were later found in a separate
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shack on the property They left a step ahead of police who been alerted by a very suspicious grandmother who wasn buying their story Did Carol Ann spend the time in a house knowing her parents were dead and nearby How could anyone be so callous as to stay
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in such a horrid situation? The truth has remained hidden in lies and deceptions for all these years
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Carol Ann claimed that when she came home, Charles told her the family was being held hostage
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and would be safe if she did what he told her. Did she ever question where they were? Or how
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Charles was feeding them and keeping them alive during those six days. Eight days later
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after Charles and Carol Ann were captured, Charles initially claimed that Carol Ann was his hostage
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and should be released. But his story would keep changing until he declared she was a willing
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participant and was even in the home when her parents were killed. After killing Carol Ann's
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family, the couple fled to Bennett, Nebraska, to the farmhouse of 71-year-old August Meyer
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a friend of the Fugates. Charles shot him in the head and then beat his dog to death with the rifle
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They fled the scene, got the car stuck in mud and accepted some help from two local teenagers, Robert Jensen and Carole King
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Those unlucky teens were forced at gunpoint to drive the murderous couple to an abandoned storm cellar where Charles killed Robert and tried to force himself sexually on Carole King
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Frustrated that he was unable to perform, he shot her as well
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At his trial, Charles claimed that Carole Ann shot Carole King, but Carole Ann claimed that she had remained in the car
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Was she a terrified young girl, too afraid to leave the car even as someone was shot right in front of her
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Or did she act like a jealous lover, killing someone who had caught the eye of her man
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By January 29, 1958, just eight days after killing Carol Ann's family, it was all over
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The couple kept changing cars while on the run, and while trying to break into another car, the cops were alerted
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Carol Ann ran to the police, yelling, He's going to kill me. He's crazy. He just killed a man
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Charles jumped back into his car and fled. A high-speed chase, a roadblock, and a shootout led to Charles finally giving himself up
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In all, 11 people, including a toddler and two dogs, had been senselessly killed in the short murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate
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Charles got the death sentence and was electrocuted five months before his 21st birthday
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Carol Ann spent nearly 18 years in the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women in York
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Her guilt has remained in question ever since. Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino knew this couple was perfect for a tale of senseless murder and media hype
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But they felt their audience might balk at the truth, that the two killers committed murder with no comprehensible motive
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They created the abusive parents' backstory, but the reality is that the actual lovers didn't have a motive
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They were natural-born killers even more than the characters modeled after them
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In Natural Born Killers the film shows the couple leaving bloody corpses behind like breadcrumbs as if they were a sociopathic Hansel and Gretel But in this story it is the media that is the gingerbread house and a willing public
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playing the witch. The theme of the symbiotic relationship between the media and the murderers dominates natural
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born killers. Wayne Gale, a self-serving tabloid reporter, laps up the story of Mickey and Mallory Knox
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as they shoot their way through New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada, elevating the couple
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to cult hero status. These two entities, TV news and violent criminals, feed off one another
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weaving a tapestry of stories that satiate a hungry public. It is inevitable that the two
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should intersect, so that instead of just reporting news about a distant crime, the media becomes
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entangled in the story with death being a natural consequence. Our real couple, Charles and Carol
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Anne, drove in the shadows away from the glare of the media, hoping to kill, to be thrilled
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and to get away with it. But the hunger of the camera turned them into dark, demented celebrities
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Did Oliver Stone exploit that? Or did he instead accuse us all of elevating murder to entertainment
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Like the real-life Charles and Carol Ann, the fictional Mickey and Mallory start their spree
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by killing her parents. And also in a crossover between truth and movie, both couples killed out
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of jealousy. In the movie, the couple need three weeks to murder more than 50 people
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As horrible as that sounds, the real Charles and Carol Ann needed only eight days to kill ten
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Such a shooting star of deadly passion with its pointless twists and turns was all Hollywood needed to inspire its product
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Natural Born Killers centers on the relationship between the tantalizing world of serial killers and the media that glorifies them
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while the real pair who inspired the story hid from fame. In an ironic twist, Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate became the face for a fawning media, inspiring over eight movies, two songs, and countless books
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Stephen King, the master of horror, kept a scrapbook when he was a child about Charles Starkweather, and claimed that the fear he felt about this man is what led him to be a horror author
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And in a perverse twist of fate, the movie inspired by the real-life killers has been accused of inspiring its own copycat murderers, including the Heath High School shooting and the Columbine High School massacre
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So what do you think? Could there be such a thing as a natural-born killer
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What made Charles and Carol Ann do the horrible things they did? What could lead someone to a path of violence, cruelty, and murder
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Is the media culpable for glorifying violence? Or if people with an unnatural passion for killing existed long before TV, movies, and books made them infamous
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In other words, are sociopaths born or are they made? And finally, do you think you'd recognize a cold-blooded killer if you ran into one in the grocery store or at the gas station? No