The Charlotte News
Tuesday, November 18, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from the U.N. in New York that the U.S. had prodded other members this date to ignore Soviet stalling tactics and act quickly on the U.S. call for combined action to seek peaceful uses of outer space.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile had been launched into space the previous night, but the Air Force had been silent this date on the fate of the rocket. If the 100-ton missile hit its target, the U.S. would have taken another great step forward in its campaign to develop a long-range carrier for a nuclear warhead against any target on earth. The three engines of the Atlas had built up more than 350,000 pounds of thrust before the missile was launched. When it soared swiftly upward into the black night sky, the brilliance of its exhaust flames had almost blinded newsmen watching from a platform 3 miles from the launchpad. The thunder of the rocket's engines had shaken the area of the Atlantic Coast as it climbed upward for about a minute and then curved gracefully away to the southeast. Four minutes later, it resembled a great star hanging in the sky and then 30 seconds after that, had suddenly vanished from view as its fuel burned out. Reportedly, it was aimed for a target 3,000 miles down the Atlantic Ocean tracking range. The launch had contrasted sharply with the previous Atlas launch of September 18, when the rocket had to be blown up 80 seconds after liftoff, the first time the U.S. had attempted to fire an Atlas "all the way".
In Kansas City, it was reported that blizzard conditions had crippled the northern plains this date, as a giant storm system rolled slowly into Canada leaving much of middle America covered with heavy, drifted snow, tornado litter and rain-swollen streams, to which at least ten deaths had been attributed. It was one of the earliest major winter storms in the history of the Weather Bureau, sweeping from Texas and Louisiana to Minnesota and Wisconsin, from the slopes of the Rockies to the Mississippi River. The storm center had moved to the Minnesota-Canadian border during the night and was expected to pass into western Ontario by evening, resulting in diminishing winds and generally improved conditions over the northern plains late this night. Heavy snow drifting was reported over the Dakotas and northwest Minnesota, making travel by road hazardous. Freezing temperatures ranged from 21 below zero at Alamosa, Colo., to 7 above at Goodland, Kans., and 12 above at Dalhart, Tex. Hopes had faded in Arizona for the safety of three Boy Scouts missing since Saturday in the snow-covered and bitter cold Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson, where more than 150 searchers had trudged through deep snow drifts on Monday to try to find the boys, all of Tucson, ranging in age between 12 and 16.
In New York, the woman who had stabbed the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on September 20 in a Harlem department store while he was signing his new book, Stride toward Freedom, had been sent the previous day to an insane asylum, Matteawan State Hospital in Beacon, after a Bellevue Hospital report said that she was "not of sound mind". The 45-year old black woman had never provided a coherent reason for the nearly fatal attack on the 29-year old civil rights leader who had led successfully the Montgomery, Ala., boycott of municipal buses in 1955-56. He had been in the hospital under treatment for two weeks following the attack.
In Washington, a Federal grand jury this date indicted Arnoldo Barron of New York on charges of acting illegally as an agent of the revolutionary movement in Cuba. Mr. Barron was a naturalized U.S. citizen.
In Taipei, Formosa, the Communist Chinese shelling of the offshore islands again lapsed into silence this date, it being an even-numbered day, and the Nationalists on Quemoy made plans to reopen the primary schools. The Communist Chinese had made an informal agreement to fire only on odd-numbered days to permit resupply of the islands for the civilian residents.
In Barcelona, 14 Socialists, five of whom were outstanding local lawyers, were reported this date to have been arrested for working undercover against the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
In Washington, the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct among unions and management this date heard from Teamsters member Raymond Shafer, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked whether he had engineered a wave of bombings, shootings and acid-throwing incidents in Texas labor disputes. (A man who had worked around and for the Teamsters, Buck Owens of Odessa, Tex., also testified regarding a tape of a 1955 conversation between him and Mr. Shafer regarding the matter. Whether he was acting naturally at the time of the taping is not indicated by the record.)
Also in Washington, Al Hayes, president of the International Association of Machinists had begun this date a personal effort to work out a settlement in the strike which had grounded Capital Airlines for 34 days.
In Lincoln, Neb., the prosecutor
planned this date to resume efforts in his cross-examination to shake
the testimony of 15-year old Caril Ann Fugate, on trial for aiding
and abetting the first-degree murder of Robert Jensen, 17, assisting
her erstwhile boyfriend, Charles Starkweather, 19, who had been
convicted of the same murder the previous May and sentenced to death.
Mr. Starkweather had admitted to eleven killings, ten of which,
including the murders of Ms. Fugate's mother, stepfather and baby
half-sister, had occurred in late January while he was accompanied by
Ms. Fugate. She claimed that she was the captive of Mr. Starkweather,
that if she did not do as she was told by him, her family, whom she
claimed not to know had already been killed, would be killed by a
third-party holding them hostage away from the family home. The
prosecution had alleged that she was present during the murders of
her family, had several opportunities to escape the web of Mr.
Starkweather but chose not to do so, and had voluntarily assisted him
in some of the subsequent murders, including that of Mr. Jensen and
his 15-year old girlfriend, Carol King, killed at the same time by
Mr. Starkweather. All of the January killings had occurred between
January 21 and 29, seven of them in the latter three days, occurring
in Lincoln, Bennet, Neb., and near Douglas, Wyo., where Ms. Fugate
surrendered to law enforcement and Charles was finally caught shortly
afterward, following a high-speed car chase. Mr. Starkweather had
also admitted the killing of a young service station attendant on
December 1, 1957. The previous day, the prosecutor had asked her, over her counsel's objection, about the stabbing death of the housekeeper at the home of the Lincoln couple who had also eventually been murdered on January 28. Charles had contended in his testimony that he did not know that the deaf housekeeper was dead when they departed that home on the evening of January 28, taking place after the murders of Mr. Jensen and Ms. King, and a farmer in Bennet whom Charles had known, all on January 27 in the presence or within earshot of Ms. Fugate. She admitted having a gun in the room where the stabbing of the housekeeper took place and holding a flashlight for Charles at the time, and that she had held a gun on the maid at one point in a downstairs room, the actions, she claimed, having been done at the direction of Charles, while she was continually acting under the false belief that her family was still alive and in danger of being killed if she balked. Her counsel had objected that the matter was unduly prejudicial as she was charged only with the murder of Mr. Jensen, but the court ruled that her counsel had opened the door on direct examination by discussing the murders of the three people at the house in Lincoln. Caril had denied that she had in her possession at the time of her arrest, to which the sheriff of Douglas, Wyo., had earlier testified, the Lincoln Star story on the deaths of her family members, but admitted having glanced at several clippings of the Lincoln Journal of January 28, though only seeing a picture of herself and Charles, which she had helped to clip herself while at the Lincoln home of the murdered couple and their housekeeper, and not understanding that the three were already dead because she had not had time to read the accompanying story. Taking her story in its most charitable light regarding her claim of being held hostage by Charles to do his bidding on penalty of dire consequences, especially given her young age, the inconsistencies in her story when posed against the reality of the newsprint found on her person and to which she admitted seeing, beg the question whether she may have known of the deaths in fact but had repressed the realization as it had been too much of a shock for her to accept as a reality when it occurred, that her affective emotions for Charles had been so conflicted by his actions in killing her family that she had made herself believe it had been a bad dream of some sort or an imagined reality which had not actually occurred, and that they were still alive elsewhere, that for her survival mentally during the ordeal, she had made up the notion that her family remained alive, thus able to blot out the obvious headlines confronting her, not wishing to read the stories accompanying the pictures. If, as she contended, she and Charles played a game of sorts in clipping the pieces from the newspaper, it would ordinarily prompt the question why she had not become suspicious of such a game as obfuscating the terrible truth that her family was in fact dead. The uncharitable view, of course, is that she was acting after her arrest and always had known of her family's deaths and had nevertheless gone with Charles, perhaps out of a genuine fear that he would kill her if she did not. She may have only become aware of the death of her family after seeing the newspaper stories on January 28, after the three murders in Bennet on the 27th, then, in reading the stories, realized her legal jeopardy for those three murders if she altered her story, and so decided to stick with the notion that she had been acting under duress regarding the survival or not of her family. Either of those scenarios, however, does not fully explain why she had not escaped when she had apparent opportunity on several occasions to do so after the murder spree had begun and she became fully aware of Chuck's murderous script, repeated in her presence. Why, if she feared legal consequences, did she finally surrender near Douglas right after the last murder, and not earlier in Lincoln? Why did she not shoot Charles when she had the opportunity with the gun and, according to her February 2-3 post-arrest statement read into the record by the prosecution, he had asked her to do so?
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that after being convicted in City Recorder's Court of assault with a deadly weapon, a 19-year old boy this date had received a six-month sentence to the roads for cutting another boy on November 9 with a knife outside Firemen's Hall in Charlotte. The victim testified that he received about 100 stitches to close his wound in his arm. The defendant had been charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, a felony. His attorney appealed the six-month sentence to Superior Court, which would result in a trial de novo, with the right to a jury. He would also be tried in Superior Court for an alleged knife assault on a Wingate College student. Another 19-year old boy involved in the same November 9 incident had pleaded guilty to simple assault, a misdemeanor, and received a 90-day sentence, suspended on payment of a $50 fine and court costs. The prosecutor argued to the court that the latter individual had started the fight by first hitting the victim, as he had admitted in his testimony, and thus had sought a stiff sentence for him as well.
In Newark, N.J., a 26-year old man had admitted the previous night that he had stabbed to death his mother, 46. Police found her body, stabbed and strangled, beneath a sofa and charged him with homicide. His 24-year old brother said that he had returned to their apartment in the evening and found his brother walking in a daze and could see his mother's bare legs protruding from underneath the living room sofa. He asked his brother what he had done, to which he had responded, "I stabbed mother." The previous morning, he and his mother had reported to a probation officer based on his having been charged and apparently previously convicted with impairing the morals of a minor. The previous Friday, he had been arrested on a disorderly conduct charge for allegedly creating a disturbance at a tool company where he had been laid off the job the previous day. His younger brother told police that his brother had been acting strangely since the layoff.
There are 8 million stories in the
Naked City
Because we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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