The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 30, 1958

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Ankara, Turkey, that the Baghdad Pact powers had said this date that "Communist imperialism" was increasing its efforts to dominate the prized oil-producing Middle East. A communiqué concluding a meeting of ministers, allies and a U.S. team, led by Secretary of State Dulles, had asserted that Russia was directing the attempts by exploiting the fear of war, economic distress and regional tension. The communiqué said that Communist "infiltration and subversion continue to be a menace" and called for "constant vigilance and increased solidarity." In the four-day meeting, the ministers had expanded the military planning staff of the Middle East alliance and heard U.S. pledges of 10 million dollars in additional aid and "mobile power in great force" to meet any aggression. The four Moslem members of the Pact, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, did not receive what they wanted most, promises of vast aid from Britain, the fifth member of the Pact, and the U.S., plus a U.S. promise to take up full membership in the alliance. It remained to be seen whether Secretary of State Dulles, attending as an "observer", had revitalized the alliance by his presence, personality and promises. The two-year old Pact had been shaken by the British-French invasion of the Suez in November, 1956, the result of nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as by the recent Soviet diplomatic offensive in the region and belief among Middle East members that they were not getting as much from Britain and the U.S. as the NATO nations or the neutral nations of Asia and Africa, which the West was seeking to woo to its side. Secretary Dulles served public notice at the opening of the conference the prior Monday that the full force of the U.S. 6th Fleet and Strategic Air Command, the only apparent "mobile power" in the area, would answer any call for help against Communist invasion. The major military achievement of the conference had been expansion of the previous military planning committee into a combined military planning staff. Conference sources said that it would be bigger and more effective than the previously loosely organized committee.

In Damascus, Syria, usually reliable sources had said this date that Syria and Egypt had agreed on measures to set up a government for their "United Arab states" under Premier Nasser of Egypt before February 20.

Also in Ankara, Turkish officials this date denied knowledge of any new incident on the Turkish-Syrian border. An Army spokesman in Damascus had claimed the previous day that one Syrian had been killed and another wounded in a three-hour gun battle on the border on Monday.

The President this date asked Congress for a five-year extension of the reciprocal trade program and increased power for him to negotiate tariff cuts. He said that it was "essential to America's vital national interests."

In Saigon, a military court this date convicted members of the Binh Xuyen organization for complicity in rebellion. The principal defendant had been sentenced to life imprisonment and the others had received sentences ranging between three and 20 years.

In Tokyo, police reported the suicides this date of two Japanese students who had failed to make high enough marks on entrance examinations for Tokyo University.

Before the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct in unions and management had appeared this date a Chicago contractor, Stephen Healy, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused again this date to say whether he had bribed union head William Maloney or held any Government contracts. He was threatened with prosecution for contempt of Congress.

Associated Press science reporter John Barbour indicates that Air Force scientists said that men may find space crawling with such mental hazards as marching squirrels, tiny rocket ships which fired pellets, and little men who swung on spaceship instruments. Reporting this date to a meeting of the Institute of Aeronautical Scientists, an experimental psychologist, George Hauty, told of three pre-spaceflight experiments, one conducted by McGill University scientists of Montréal, wanting to find out what happened when a person was deprived of all sensory stimuli for 48 hours. They found that one subject reported, "A procession of squirrels with sacks over their shoulders marching purposefully across a snow field…" Another said that he saw a miniature rocket ship shooting pellets at his arm. The volunteers, in addition to such hallucinations, became irritable and were unable to concentrate on complex ideas. The volunteers had been amused by the visions at first, but later complained that they interfered with their sleep. Researchers believed the experiments could determine if there was background activity as well as normal sensory activity in the brain. In another experiment, Mr. Hauty and another scientist had confined 30 volunteers in cockpits and put them to work for 30 consecutive hours, regulating and controlling certain occurrences using dials and buttons on instrument panels. The subjects were not permitted to sleep, though allowed 20-minute breaks at mealtimes. To the surprise of the researchers, the subjects reported hallucinations and delusions. Some were simple and poorly defined, that the instrument panel was melting and dripping to the floor, while other subjects reported well-organized phenomena such as the instruments showing a hippopotamus smiling at the subject. Another had said that he spent a good deal of time brushing away little men who kept swinging on the airspeed indicator and preventing him from reading it.

In Douglas, Wyo., it was reported that 19-year old Charles Starkweather, wanted for a wave of ten savage murders, suspected of an earlier eleventh, had been caught the previous day in the badlands of eastern Wyoming, along with his 14-year old girlfriend, Caril Fugate. They had left behind 9 people dead in and around Lincoln, Neb., where they had lived, including the discovered bodies the previous day of a couple who resided in an affluent neighborhood of Lincoln, Lauer Ward and his wife, along with their deaf maid, Lillian Fencl, and one additional murder in Wyoming, that of a salesman, Merle Collison, shot near Douglas. The initial murders in the spree had been Caril's stepfather, mother and baby sister, all discovered in sheds in back of the family home the prior Monday, though the coroner had placed the deaths no later than Saturday. The bodies of a 70-year old farmer and two teenagers, a 16-year old girl and her 17-year old boyfriend, had been discovered about a mile apart in Bennet, Neb., on Tuesday afternoon, each shot to death, with the car owned by Charles found stuck in the mud in the driveway of the dead farmer's home. Caril, after voluntarily turning herself in at the scene of the last murder in Wyoming, had told law enforcement officers that she feared Charles would kill her. Young Charles said: "They wouldn't have caught me if I hadn't stopped. If I'd had a gun, I'd have shot them." After a car chase, he had finally stopped when a bullet fired by a pursuing police officer had shattered the rear glass of the stolen car he was driving and nicked his ear, causing him to believe he had been shot. The sheriff said that it was "his own blood that got him. He thought he was shot deader'n hell when he saw that blood. He thought he was bleeding to death." Caril was being sheltered in the living quarters of the sheriff and his wife on the second floor of the jail. Two possible reasons for the slayings had emerged this date. The father of Charles, Guy Starkweather, reported, "He is to lose his sight within a year," because of being hit on the head with a piece of lumber. He believed "everything just built up inside Charlie until he went berserk." The prosecuting attorney in Douglas said that a letter to Charles from Caril's mother had been found in his pockets after his arrest, declined to reveal what the letter said, but indicated that it "had to do with Caril's mother and her attitude towards Starkweather." Whether he was actually going blind appears never to have been resolved or treated in subsequent reports, the father having also said, according to the Lincoln Star of this date, that a doctor had told him he would be blind in a year if he did not obtain a special kind of glasses—sounding thus as a bit of exaggeration, the purported "blindness" apparently being the result of having to strain his eyesight with inferior glasses rather than, for instance, some serious malady such as a brain tumor.

He would be found guilty of the murders, including the murder of the service station attendant on the prior December 1, to which he would confess, and would be executed in June, 1959. Caril would also be found guilty as an accomplice to the murder of Robert Jensen, the 17-year old boyfriend whose body was found in the abandoned storm cellar, with the evidence presented also showing her participation in the other nine January murders. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, from which she would be paroled in 1976. Her more recent attempt to obtain a pardon from the State of Nebraska has been declined. She has always maintained her innocence in the killings, indicating that she had gone along with Charles out of shock and fear that he would kill her after witnessing his sudden murders of her three family members, though her account of whether she witnessed those murders appears to have varied through time.

In Casper, Wyo., a soft-spoken 29-year old man, Joe Sprinkle, summed up his struggle with Charles by indicating, "I knew that if he won, I would be dead." Mr. Sprinkle had stopped on the side of the road to help Charles, who was apparently having car trouble. At that point, Charles "straightened up with a rifle he had hidden behind him and said: 'Raise your hands. Help me release the emergency brake or I'll kill you.'" Mr. Sprinkle then noticed a dead man, who turned out to be 37-year old traveling shoe salesman, Merle Collison, behind the wheel, and grabbed the gun, whereupon they fought in the middle of the road. He had managed to wrestle the gun away from Charles and then ran for another car facing toward Douglas. He said that his clothes were torn and as he ran, a trucker had pulled up and stopped, and he ran toward the truck, then saw the girl run from the car in which the dead man and Charles were located to a deputy sheriff's car. Then Charles had sped away in the Packard he had stolen from the Ward home. Mr. Sprinkle said he had no idea who the fellow was, that he only knew that he had a gun and was going to kill him, that unless he won the struggle, he would be dead. He said that he then drove into Douglas, returned the rifle and went back to his home in Casper. Mr. Sprinkle, a Navy veteran, was a native of Wichita Falls, Tex. It turned out that the rifle had not been loaded—as Charles had expended all of his remaining ammunition murdering Mr. Collison.

In 1972, in an interview for the NBC program, "Growing up in Prison", Caril said that she did not know that her family had been killed until after her arrest, that Charles had told her that he would kill her family unless she went with him when they left. But that appears to conflict with the police version of the visit to the home the prior Saturday night, as recounted on the last page clipped from the Lincoln Star of this date, when Caril had told the police that the family was ill with the flu, after they were already apparently dead. Where would the family have been if they were not present in the home and not actually sick? She obviously knew they were not in their beds sick. Perhaps she was able to explain the discrepancy in her testimony at her separate trial, but there does appear to be a glaring inconsistency. She said in her post-arrest statement at pages 92-95 that Charles told her that her parents and baby sister were being held hostage elsewhere by some people and would be all right. She said that she did not believe him at first, that after he had, according to her account, waited for her behind the door when she arrived home from school and pointed a gun at her. She recounted in her statement that she and Charles, while at the Ward family home, started passing the time by cutting out pictures from the newspaper stories about themselves, including the pictures of her family members, presumably from the Lincoln Star front page of Tuesday, which included the headline that her family was murdered. She claimed that only Charles cut out the pictures of her family and she cut out the picture of the two of them together. The pictures were on the same page with the story of her family's deaths; nevertheless, she claimed that Charles would not let her see the newspaper, another glaring inconsistency in her account. A casual glance at a newsstand in Lincoln on Tuesday would have told her that her family had been murdered. If he would not let her see the newspaper, it implied that there was something he did not want her to see, something, if true, she, herself, wished to avoid seeing. It is true that the police found no evidence of foul play inside the house when they investigated, no blood or bullet holes, suggesting that the murders of her family might have occurred elsewhere, though unclear where, presumably in the sheds where the bodies were found or the bodies would have been deposited in a remote location. The Star front page story this date indicates that she had witnessed all ten of the murders, and the deputy sheriff in Wyoming to whom she surrendered would quote her in his trial testimony as having said to him that she had winessed her family being murdered. In any event, her post-arrest statement—which was before Miranda v. Arizona and Escobedo v. Illinois, and thus she was not admonished pursuant to those cases, as the Nebraska Supreme Court would later find in 1966 on habeas corpus—, tells us, among other things, that after Charles had murdered farmer August Meyer at the back door to his home, and rifled through his belongings for awhile, he sat down in the kitchen and had some of Mr. Meyer's Jello, telling Caril it was good. She did not have any or eat anything, while Charles chowed down. Charles was an all-American boy who liked good Jello after committing murder. At page 36 of Caril's statement, she admits that she used her father's loaded pistol to order Carol King out of the car at the abandoned storm cellar, and does not indicate any direction by Charles that she do so, stating she did that because he had ordered Robert Jensen from the car with a gun. That is pretty damning evidence of voluntarily having aided and abetted their subsequent murders, as it occurred after she had already witnessed Charles murder Mr. Meyer and so knew him to be willing and capable of committing the act. She said that she sat in the car while Charles was in the storm cellar with the young couple for about 30 minutes, then heard two gunshots after which Charles emerged. The next morning, they both had a cup of coffee with Mrs. Ward after she offered it to them, then later brought some pancakes to Charles, and then, while Caril slept on a couch, Charles murdered Mrs. Ward upstairs with a knife belonging to Caril's mother, and, eventually, after shooting Mr. Ward when he arrived home in the evening, Charles stabbed the maid to death in Caril's presence. It is all quite grotesque, made the more so by the seemingly passionless actions of both Charles and Caril during the whole episode, acting very nearly as if under hypnosis, without conscience or any normal restraints on the impulses of the id. After reading through her statement, it is difficult to understand why she could not break free from the mental grip of Charles at any number of points when she had a loaded gun. She also knew how to drive, had driven Charles's car to school on several occasions. Given that her post-arrest statement was admitted into evidence against her, it is not hard to understand why the jury reached the verdict it did in her case.

In Atlantic City, N.J., a 67-year old handyman, enraged and nearly blinded by teargas bombs hurled into his shack, had shot and wounded four policemen late the previous night. Police said that he had run from his rude cabin with a shotgun ablaze and cut down the four officers in rapid succession before being captured at around midnight. One patrolman, who had been hit in the face during the encounter, was in critical condition in the hospital this date. Another of the wounded, a detective, was in serious condition at the hospital, also shot in the face. The two other officers, both patrolmen, were listed in satisfactory condition. Police charged the man with atrocious assault and battery by shotgun. The gun battle had started, according to police, when two .38-caliber slugs had ripped through the living room wall of a neighbor of the man. The neighbor stepped out onto his porch to see where the shooting had originated and was felled with a bullet in his hip, telling police that the shot had come from the direction of the shack. Police then surrounded the cabin and called for the man to come out, and he answered by indicating that they should get away or he would come out shooting. A group of officers then climbed to the roof of the shack and shot teargas bombs down the chimney. After a time, the man had emerged, firing his shotgun as he ran and wounding the four officers. He then sprinted toward a wooden gate on the west side of the shack, where a sergeant lunged at him, after which police had closed in from all sides to subdue the man. Takes all kinds.

In Flint, Mich., a used car dealer was selling four cars for 99 cents each and another four for $99 each the following day. The eight people who would get them had been waiting in line since the prior Tuesday. The cars had been completely reconditioned and were in good shape, with the cheaper four being worth $250, while the more expensive ones were worth about $500. They would be sold on a first-come, first-served basis and people could sell their spot in line if they chose, but could not have a relief, only receiving 15-minute breaks. An unemployed factory worker had been the first to show up on Tuesday morning and the only woman in line was a mother of three, who had been laid off from the General Motors A-C sparkplug division the previous week. She said that her husband thought she was nuts. Three students from the General Motors Institute, who had their schoolbooks with them, were utilizing fraternity pledges to bring them their food. The previous day, they had received scrambled eggs, toast and coffee in their pup tents. The first man in line, who had spent a year in Alaska, said that the cold was the worst problem, with temperatures having been in the low 30's, toughest during the night wind despite hunting outfits and heavy bundling. He said that he would take one of the 99-cent cars and also would pick up some $30 in bets from friends who said he would not stick it out. The cars in the lower price grouping included a 1953 Hudson four-door sedan, a 1950 Chevrolet two door, a Pontiac two-door and a 1952 Dodge two-door. The $99 cars were a 1953 Pontiac two-door, a 1953 Dodge station wagon, and two 1953 Chevrolets. All deals were strictly to be cash and the salesman received a $15 commission on each sale. The management said that some 200 persons per day had come to the lot to look at the cars since the sale had first been advertised two weeks earlier. Low-priced sales were not uncommon in the auto industry for promotional purposes. An elderly man who had dropped by to take a look, commented, "Now I know how a monkey in a zoo feels."

Two men had led South Carolina Highway Patrolmen on a chase this date, wrecking one car and stealing another. Cornered in a wooden area off Highway 160, not far from the North Carolina border, the men had broken out of the trap and stolen a late-model Mercury. The two men had earlier set officers on their trail after hitting and demolishing an unoccupied automobile on Highway 21 near the North Carolina border. They were believed to be heading toward Charlotte. Mecklenburg County Police, who earlier had removed roadblocks, set them up again. South Carolina authorities notified them that the two men were heading that way in a green 1956 station wagon. The two, however, had cut off Highway 21 at the 160 intersection and then fled on foot into the woods. South Carolina Patrolmen quickly brought bloodhounds to the scene, but the two had escaped and then had stolen the Mercury. Be on the lookout. They could be forming another Charles and Caril routine.

In Raleigh, Governor Luther Hodges had vigorously denounced the Klan in a strongly worded statement this date and said that the responsibility rested on the Klan for the Maxton incident of January 18, in which armed Indians had met the armed Klansmen while they were staging a rally on private property and eventually chased them away, after a short gun battle. The Klan had been menacing Lumbee Indians in the area that week, burning two crosses at or near the homes of Indians. The Governor said that the state would maintain law and order and that he had promised local law enforcement officers complete cooperation of the State Government in doing so. He said that the Klan had "shown itself to be an organization of violence and intimidation," that its leaders "rant against communism" but actually "give aid and comfort to Communist Russia by provoking incidents that are exploited in propaganda by Russia." He said that the Maxton incident was of "serious concern" because several people could have been killed or injured, that it had been "an assault on peace and good order and a slur on the name of our state." It could also, he said, stimulate other, more serious future such incidents. He said that recently, there had been intimidations and threats indicating that the Klan would at some future date assemble an armed gathering in Robeson County or at other places and put on a big show of force to intimidate further the people of the state, and he wanted to make his position clear. He said also that there had been threats that bands of armed men from out of the state would enter North Carolina.

In Louisville, a thief had snatched a large corduroy handbag from a woman, and police asked her to submit a description of it and its contents, which she did, covering four handwritten pages.

On the editorial page, "The Public Schools Should Speak Up" suggests that one of the great mysteries at present was the general silence of public school officials in the face of a severe and continuing attack on their curricula and methodology. The targets were what the schools taught, how they taught it and the results they had achieved, with substantial agreement among many critics that basic changes had to occur in the curricula and teaching methods.