Murder She Wrote

It was a cold morning in January 1958 when Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate burst into the gracious Ward family home in Lincoln, Nebraska. Steel executive C. Lauer Ward was at work, but his wife, Clara, had been following the teenage couple's weeklong killing spree in the newspaper and was well aware that seven people had already been brutally murdered. So when the surly 19-year-old Starkweather demanded a pancake breakfast, Clara was quick to comply. Her efforts to appease the homicidal pair, however, were futile. Before the end of the day, Clara, her husband, and their maid would all be stabbed to death.

What dread and horror must Clara Ward have felt? How did she prepare herself for her own inevitable death at the hands of homicidal teens? Did she plead for her life? Were her last thoughts of her 14-year-old son, who was away at school? When her husband came home from work, did he find his wife's body before the teens attacked him?

These are questions that have haunted Liza Ward '97, granddaughter of the slain couple—and in her debut novel, Outside Valentine, she has imagined the answers. The book's publication has launched Ward's career as a novelist, and, perhaps more important, begun a healing process by bringing this dark family chapter to light.

Ward learned of her grandparents' murders when she was five or six, but the gruesome details of their deaths were never spoken of in the Ward home. Photos and stories about Clara and C. Lauer Ward were absent, too, as if any memory of them conjured too much pain.

           
"Children have an instinct for what shouldn't be said," Ward says. "It was like walking on thin ice." One can imagine Liza Ward as a young girl—serious, quiet, and watchful. She is much like that still, and though the photograph on the book jacket shows a poised, elegant woman, in person Ward seems younger than her 29 years—somewhat shy and eager to please.

Though a lot of attention has been paid to Outside Valentine—Ward was interviewed on NPR, and the book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review (September 26, 2004), an honor rarely accorded a debut novel—Ward seems grateful and somewhat surprised when a visitor compliments her on her writing, and she relates that when her book was published some of her old friends were astonished. "Part of me is pretty unassuming," she says. "I had somewhat low self-esteem in college."

It wasn't until her second year at Middlebury that she broke the family silence that enveloped its history. On campus one summer while attending the Italian Language School, she slipped into Starr Library and, driven by a rush of curiosity, sought out a book on serial killers. For the first time, she learned details about the tragedy that had haunted her family for years, reading detailed accounts of her grandparents' slaying, including "the number of times my grandmother was stabbed and how she groaned in pain."

Descriptions of the crime scene were vivid and ghastly—how her grandfather was pushed down the basement steps; how he tried to fight back; how the killers switched their order from pancakes to waffles; how the kitchen filled with the disorder of a frantic breakfast preparation. Ward could picture it because she'd visited the house often as a child. Her father grew up there, and after his parents were murdered, his aunt and uncle moved in to try and give the shattered 14-year-old some semblance of a normal life. Ward had spent many happy summers in Nebraska, largely unaware of the terrible events that had occurred on the premises.

"I was trying to find out what my grandparents were really like, what really happened," she says of her reading that day. But at the same time she felt guilty opening a door into a chapter of her father's history, a door that he had firmly closed. "Those secrets become what you're desperate to find out about," she says.

Though the Ward family dealt with the horror by closing it off and refusing to speak of it, the crimes seized the attention of a horrified American public. Starkweather and Fugate escaped from the Ward house and would kill again; eventually, 1,200 police and National Guardsmen would capture the killers outside Valentine, Nebraska.

However, the story did not end there.The brutal and random killings by the pair of teens have lived on in popular culture through films like Terrence Malick's Badlandsand Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, as well as Bruce Springsteen's song "Nebraska." And while 46 years have passed since Starkweather and Fugate terrified the Nebraska populace, interest in the story has not waned. Earlier this fall, Ward went to Lincoln on her book tour and was astounded to find 2,000 people assembled for her reading, an unheard-of turnout for any literary event. In the audience that day was her grandfather's college roommate, and others (neighbors, friends) who knew the victims well. Also in the audience were people who knew the killers. Through his portrayal in films, Starkweather, who was executed in 1959, has assumed some of the patina of James Dean, the actor whose performance in Rebel Without a Cause Starkweather aped and idolized. The residents of Lincoln who knew Starkweather, however, remember him as a punk, a bully, a brute, and Ward is angry that movies such as Badlands glorify her grandparents' murderer. "In reality," she says, "he was unattractive, stupid, and mean."

But Fugate gets a slightly more sympathetic treatment in the book. Not that Ward accepts Fugate's protestation of innocence. Fugate, who insisted she had been kidnapped and was herself a victim, was found guilty and served a prison sentence until her 1977 parole. She is currently living in Michigan and working as a nurse.

"Even if she didn't kill anyone, she had so many chances to turn him in," says Ward. "But she was the real mystery to me. When you're that young, how responsible are you?"

Ward allows readers to ponder the question of Fugate's guilt or innocence in Outside Valentine. The book weaves together three voices and three time periods: Fugate's voice from the 1950s, Ward's father's from the 1990s, and Ward's mother's from the 1960s. Though Outside Valentine is based on an actual event, Ward insists that the narrative is pure fiction.

The delicate layering of three sensibilities coupled with beautiful yet stark language has garnered it much praise: Publishers Weekly praised its "lean, luminous prose," and Booklist called it a "stunning first novel." For all its beauty, however, the strength of the book lies in its terrifying story, which is powerfully told. The murders themselves, when they finally occur, are narrated by Fugate—in a voice equally detached, juvenile, and petulant, giving the murder scene an unnerving horror.

"These voices came out of nowhere," Ward says of the characters, whose stories she began writing after she graduated from Middlebury. Several of her first short stories, published in Atlantic Monthly, the Georgia Review, and Agni Review laid the groundwork for the writing she would later do in graduate school at the University of Montana's creative writing program. During her first semester at Montana, she was reading Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry "when the voice of Caril Ann came to me," she says. When she graduated two and a half years later, her thesis was Outside Valentine.

Ward dates her awakening as a writer to a January term creative-writing course she took with Middlebury writing instructor Barbara Ganley during her junior year. The intensity of the monthlong writing experience and the concentration it demanded jump-started her desire to be a writer. "Nothing made me feel so alive," she says. "Writing is what I can do. What I live for. When I'm not doing it, I feel like half a person."

Ward was living in Montana when she wrote Outside Valentine, but she discovered another "character" for her novel while visiting her parents in New York. One evening, Ward's father returned home from work with a bag of jewelry that he had retrieved from a safety deposit box. The jewelry had belonged to Clara Ward and had sat untouched—out of sight, out of mind—for more than 30 years. Liza was fascinated by the family heirlooms and instantly realized that Clara's jewels would serve as a powerful literary symbol; the jewelry plays a major role in the narrative, both opening and closing the book.

For the past 18 months, Ward has lived in her family's summer home, a 17th-century house outside Boston that has been in her mother's family for generations. On a late fall morning, Liza Ward examines the diamond and emerald earrings, glamorous necklaces, chunky turquoise Mexican pieces, and elegant rings that once belonged to her grandmother, Clara Ward.

Though the fictional jewelry has a much richer literary and symbolic history than the real stuff, it still evokes some wonder for a reader to pick up and hold the pieces. But Ward is ready to move on.

Though she will spend the winter in Massachusetts working on her second novel—which takes as its subject her maternal ancestors—she is looking forward to spring when she will get married and move to Montana. A pile of engagement presents leans against the wall—new stuff for the brand-new house that she and her husband will build on their Montana land. "It will be our place entirely," she says with satisfaction. "This is nice, but it gets stifling sometimes."

Rachel Morton edited Middlebury Magazine from 1995–2002. She lives in Burlington, Vermont.