Interview

Liza Ward, whose grandparents were two of the victims of the Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate murder spree in the late 1950s, discusses which parts of Outside Valentine are based on actual research and what is entirely fiction.

Your book is centered on the Charles Starkweather killing spree that happened in 1957, before you were born. What drew you to this particular story? What inspired you to write Outside Valentine?
In January of 1958, while my father was at boarding school on the east coast, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate pushed their way into my grandparents' home and murdered them. My great aunt and uncle became my father's legal guardians and moved into the house where he had had grown up. I used to visit them in the summers, never making the connection that such horrible things had happened inside those walls.

For so long I was consumed by my grandparents' death. The nature of their death was the only thing I knew about my father's parents. This tragedy cast a heavy silence over my family. No one ever talked about who they had been. I spent a great deal of time hungrily combing books searching for any sort of detail that would bring me closer to understanding what had happened. I tried to remember the carpets at my great aunt's house, the arrangement of furniture, the arrowheads my father had collected as a boy, wondering if the murderers had noticed, run their ...