Word: murders
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Caril turned them away at the door, reported the family ill. Detectives called to investigate, found no one home, a note on the door: "Stay away. Everybody is sick with the flu. Miss Bartlett." Still concerned, the family came back. A search turned up not sickness but murder. Wrapped in paper in a chicken house was the body of 57-year-old Marion Bartlett. In an outbuilding lay the bodies of Caril's mother. Velda Bartlett, 35, and little Betty Jean Bartlett. The child had been clubbed to death, the adults shot in the head...
...Fast Slow Boy. Charlie Starkweather and his girl, their faces puffed with fatigue, were locked up in Douglas' four-cell jail, both charged with murder. Caril called wildly for her dead mother until a doctor gave her a sedative and she cried herself to sleep. Starkweather grinned at newsmen, airily admitted the killings and agreed to extradition, confessed also that two months before he had committed an eleventh murder. His first victim: 19-year-old Lincoln Service Station Attendant Robert Colvert, who was held up, taken to a lonely road and shot in the head...
...against that frame of mind that Houston's citizens were up in arms last week. For Houston (pop. 901,922), with its booming pace and blooming wealth, has a blemish on its shiny pride: in 1957 it had the highest per capita murder rate in the whole country-about 15 per 100,000, or a total of 136 for the year.* What makes Houston so special? Says one cop simply: "Houston is a city of murder without motive...
Furthermore, Texas juries are traditionally soft on women murderers, even the one who was convicted in 1955 after she cut up her children, packaged them and stored the pieces in her refrigerator; she got a life sentence. Says Houston Criminal Lawyer Percy Foreman, who in one year defended 13 women charged with murdering their husbands, got twelve off free and the 13th a five-year suspended sentence: "I like to defend women in murder cases. Juries will turn a woman loose on evidence that they'd convict...
Viewing the general condition with considerable alarm, members of Houston's Junior Chamber of Commerce organized a group bluntly called the Murdertown Committee, sent observers to Chicago (murders, first-half 1957: 131) to study crime-prevention methods. Other Houstonians, scanning the city's growing, two-fisted boomtown bustle, agree that the committee will have to work fast. At week's end Murdertown notched up its eleventh murder for 1958-a good head start on last year's record...