Spree ended in Wyoming with one final victim
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By CORY MATTESON / Lincoln Journal Star
Wilda Johnson Macy lifted each of the Cub Scouts up, high enough so they could peer through the window at the 19-year-old.
They watched his sweat wash the black shoe polish from his red hair and run down his face.
The disguise had failed, the two-state chase was over, and Charles Starkweather was in jail.
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Looking into the cell at him, the world saw a “Mad Killer,” “a yellow s.o.b.,” a “bandy-legged little gun toter.”
Macy, the Cub Scouts’ troop leader, saw a lesson for her boys.
Pressed up to the window, Macy, now 87, repeated one sentence to each of them.
“Now this is why crime doesn’t pay.”
But Starkweather had left a final victim, a shoe salesman who had driven from his home in Great Falls, Mont., early that Monday to make sales calls throughout Wyoming.
The Cowboy State was part of 34-year-old Merle Collison’s territory. He canvassed the Dakotas, Utah and Montana, too.
He’d had the job for about two years, the Great Falls Tribune reported.
Collison, the father of an infant son, served with World War II paratroopers and saw considerable combat in Europe, the newspaper reported.
On Highway 20-26, he didn’t see Charles Starkweather coming.
Reports from the time say Collison pulled his Buick over to the side of the road to take a nap.
Starkweather came upon the car and shot Collison nine times.
One of the more than a dozen photos that ran in that Thursday’s edition of the Casper Tribune-Herald showed Collison’s body the way police found it, under the dashboard of his Buick.
In the forefront, you could see the worn soles of the salesman’s shoes.
Twenty years ago, the Great Falls Tribune wrote that “a gravestone in Mount Olive Cemetery, a few clips in the newspaper library and a lone relative are the only remainders today of Great Falls shoe salesman Merle Collison.”
That remains the same today.
His wife remarried and has since died. His child has died as well.
And his cousin, Duane Collison, doesn’t remember much from the time.
“I’m over 80 years old,” he said. “That was a long time ago.”
In Douglas, Wyo., they haven’t forgotten.
By lunchtime, the news had rippled down Main Street, Lanny Heflin remembers.
He was in sixth grade at the time, the nephew of Converse County Sheriff Earl Heflin. So he knew they’d heard over the police radio that Starkweather had stolen a car, that they thought he was headed to Douglas.
And he knew the unfamiliar peal of sirens through downtown Douglas meant something big.
His uncle and the Douglas police chief chased Starkweather through town, firing at the stolen Packard. Starkweather stopped the car and surrendered soon after glass, shattered by the bullets, hit his ear and cut him.
Reporters described the chase through Douglas and the capture of Starkweather as if an epic had unfolded in eastern Wyoming.
To the Casper Tribune-Herald, Starkweather didn’t speak — he snarled.
Joe Sprinkle, the geologist from Casper who wrestled a rifle away from Starkweather, was canonized in a headline: “SPRINKLE IS 6-FOOTER.”
And authorities forever branded Starkweather as a coward to Wyoming readers.
“It was his own blood that got him,” Heflin told the Tribune-Herald. “He thought he was shot deader’n hell when he saw that blood.
“He thought he was bleeding to death. That’s the kind of yellow s.o.b. he is.”
Reach Cory Matteson at 473-2655 or cmatteson@journalstar.com.
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zen wrote on January 31, 2008 8:01 pm: