November 24, 1938 - Charles Starkweather
A nineteen-year-old who killed eleven people across two states in a matter of weeks, Starkweather's case drew immediate national attention at a time when mass media was still learning how to cover such events. The concentrated timeline — ten murders in nine days — and his youth made the case a subject of sustained criminological study in the decades that followed. His killings with teenage companion Caril Ann Fugate also raised early questions about complicity and culpability that courts and the public struggled to resolve.
From Wikipedia
Charles Raymond Starkweather (November 24, 1938 – June 25, 1959) was an American spree killer who murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming between November 1957 and January 1958, when he was nineteen years old. He killed ten of his victims between January 21 and January 29, 1958, the date of his arrest. During his spree in 1958, Starkweather was accompanied by his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.
Both Starkweather and Fugate were convicted on charges for their parts in the homicides; Starkweather was sentenced to death and executed seventeen months after the events. Fugate served seventeen years in prison, gaining release in 1976. Starkweather's execution by electric chair in 1959 was the last execution in Nebraska until 1994.
Criminologists and psychologists have analyzed the Starkweather case in an attempt to understand spree killers' motivations and precipitating factors. It also became notorious as one of the earlier crime scandals that reached national prominence, much like the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's son, with the media outlets covering the case at the time openly condemning Starkweather.
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