Caril Ann Clair (née Fugate), a woman linked to 10 murders in the Midwest more than 50 years ago, has been critically injured in a car accident.
Clair, 70, was injured in a single-vehicle accident. Her husband, 81-year-old Frederick Clair, was driving the SUV. He was killed in the accident.
In 1958, when she was 14, Clair was arrested in connection to 10 murders with then-boyfriend Charles Starkweather. The victims were killed in Nebraska and Wyoming, and included Clair's mother, stepfather and two-year-old sister.
The killing spree is the deadliest in Nebraska history, and inspired a Bruce Springsteen song and the movie "Badlands."
Clair plead not guilty and maintained her innocence, saying she had tried to break things off with Starkweather. The jury found her guilty in the robbery and murder of a 17-year-old boy. She was sentenced to life in prison, and served 18 years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled mandatory life sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional.
From there, her sentence was changed to 30 to 50 years. Clair was paroled in 1976 and came to live in Michigan, where she lived with a family that befriended her after seeing a documentary of her on TV. She worked in a Lansing, Mich., hospital and married Frederick Clair at age 63.
Starkweather did not share the same fate. At the time of the murders, he was 19 years old and tried as an adult. He was executed in the electric chair in 1959.
