New insight into the chilling real-life murder spree that inspired the Woody Harrelson film Natural Born Killers is detailed tonight on REELZChannel’s series The Shocking Truth.
Charles Starkweather, then 18, went on a killing rampage with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate from December 1957 to December 1958 which left 11 people dead.
Starkweather was the instigator of the attacks while Fugate accompanied him on the bloody trip across Nebraska and Wyoming.
It began when Starkweather killed gas station attendant Robert Colvert after he refused to sell him a stuffed animal on credit.
He then killed Fugate’s mother and stepmother after they told him not to come near her home, followed by their two-year-old toddler daughter Betty Jean.
The rest of the murders took place while he and Fugate went on the run.
Starkweather claimed Fugate also carried out some of the killings, but this is something she has always denied, claiming she was being held hostage by him.
Starkweather was executed by electrocution at the age of 20, just 17 months after he was captured following a car chase.
Fugate spent 17 years behind bars before being released in 1976. She now lives in Hillsdale, Michigan. She was badly injured in a car crash in 2013, and was planning to ask for a state pardon in 2014 claiming she had been unfairly sentenced.
Their case inspired Natural Born Killers, which also starred Juliette Lewis and Robert Downey Jr., and a string of other movies including Kalifornia, Badlands, and The Sadist.
Natural Born Killers: The Shocking Truth airs tonight at 9/8c on REELZChannel.