Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
ALISON GAYLIN is the author of the Edgar-nominated thriller Hide Your Eyes and its sequel You Kill Me, the Edgar-nominated stand-alones What Remains of Me and If I Die Tonight, and the Brenna Spector series: And She Was (winner of the Shamus Award), Into the Dark, and the Edgar-nominated Stay With Me. A graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she lives with her husband and daughter in Woodstock, New York. 
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About the Book
Note from the Author
The Murder Spree That Inspired Never Look Back
If April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy seem at all familiar, it could be because of the case that inspired me to create the characters—or because of the numerous other writers, from Terrence Malick to Bruce Springsteen, who derived inspiration from the same case.
In December 1957, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather murdered the family of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, escaped with Caril, and embarked on a month-long killing spree that took the lives of eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming. The pair was eventually captured, with Starkweather receiving the death penalty. Caril became the youngest person ever to be tried for first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison as an accomplice—a decision based largely on testimony from Starkweather himself.
What fascinated me most about the case was not so much Starkweather, but Caril—who by many accounts was not an accomplice but a kidnapping victim and, in my own reading of the story, tragically misunderstood.
In Malick’s marvelous Badlands, Sissy Spacek’s Holly is a guileless romantic who willingly runs off with troubled Kit (Martin Sheen) after he offs her cold-hearted, dog-murdering stepfather. In Springsteen’s bleak “Nebraska,” a brooding Starkweather hopes the “pretty baby” who abetted his murder spree is “sitting right there on [his] lap” when he goes to the electric chair. In movies like Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers, the Caril Fugate–based character is portrayed as a psychotic Lady MacBeth–in-training, for whom senseless murder is a type of turn-on.
But are any of those depictions close to reality? By all accounts, Caril was a shy, sweet girl and a loving daughter until the day Starkweather killed off her entire family—three-year-old sister included—before she returned home from school, hiding their bodies in outbuildings on her property. Throughout her seventeen years of incarceration, Caril Fugate insisted that Starkweather had lied to her, claiming her parents and sibling were being held captive by mysterious associates and would survive only if she ran off with him, cooperated with his plans, didn’t attempt to escape.