Nebraska: Springsteen and Starkweather

(source)

watching Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has me thinking about Charlie Starkweather, the spree killer inspiration for the role played by Martin Sheen in Badlands, shown in the film as stimulating Bruce’s imagination for the song and album Nebraska.

Larry McMurtry, in Roads, says:

Kids in the midwest only get to see even modest levels of glamour if they happen to be on school trips to one or another of the midwestern cities: K.C., Omaha, St. Louis, the Twin Cities.  In some, clearly, this lack of glamour festers.  Charles Starkweather, in speaking about his motive for killing all those people, had this to say: “I never ate in a high-class restaurant, I never seen the New York Yankees play, I never been to Los Angeles…”

I put Perplexity AI on the job of sourcing that quote, and it gave up in failure:

The phrase you provided—”I never ate in a high-class restaurant, I never seen the New York Yankees play, I never been to Los Angeles…”—does not appear in any published 1958 interview transcript or Nebraska prison record in major archival listings. Summaries of Starkweather’s statements, including interrogation by Lancaster County officials and defense attorneys, acknowledge the existence of multi-session transcripts (over 350 combined pages) but do not index or quote this passage in digitized form. Newspaper, trial, and archival indices available online—including items at Lincoln Libraries and the Nebraska State Historical Society—lack specific reference to the Yankees, Los Angeles, or restaurant themes in direct quotations or transcript extracts.​

This absence suggests that, while the quote may be reprinted in retrospectives or literary dramatizations, it is not verifiably documented in digitized or catalogued 1958 primary sources. To definitively confirm or rule out its existence, a physical review of the transcript collections listed by History Nebraska or onsite microfilm holdings of Lincoln-area newspapers from the trial period would be required. 

McMurtry didn’t include footnotes.

A search of Google books reveals James M. Reinhardt included a phrase like this in two books that included Starkweather, one is The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather, the other is The Psychology of Strange Killers

Used copies of The Psychology of Strange Killers are dear in price but I might have to get one to review for this important website. Perhaps the original source lies in these boxes at the University of Nebraska. Here we abandon the trail, unless any readers want to cut for sign.