Charles Starkweather kills his girlfriend's family at their home in Lincoln, Nebraska, and begins a week-long crime spree that leaves 10 dead. The teenager was waiting for 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate to return home from school when he got into a fight with her parents, Marion and Velda. Starkweather shot them both with a shotgun as Caril Ann came in, and she watched him go to the bedroom and choke to death her two-year-old sister, Betty Jean.
Starkweather and Fugate then sat down and watched television together. When Caril Ann began to worry that relatives might show up and find the murdered family, Starkweather attached a note to the front door that said, "Stay a Way. Every body is sick with the flu." For the next two days, Caril Ann successfully turned away relatives and police officers who came inquiring about the family. When Caril Ann's grandmother finally came back to check again, the house was empty. When the bodies were finally discovered, Starkweather and Fugate were driving out of town.
For the next few days the couple sped around the back highways of the northern plains, killing new victims and stealing their cars. Among the victims were wealthy businessman, C. Lauer Ward, his wife, Clara, and their maid, Lillian Fenci. The women had been stabbed repeatedly. Over 1,200 men were assigned to capture Starkweather and Fugate, but they slipped into Wyoming, where salesman Merle Collison became their last victim.
When police officers stumbled on to Starkweather struggling with yet another victim, Fugate ditched her partner and claimed that he had been holding her hostage. Starkweather was apprehended after a high-speed chase. Initially, Starkweather went along with Fugate's hostage story but abandoned it when it came time for her trial. Both were convicted. Fugate received a life sentence and Starkweather went to the electric chair on June 24, 1959.
The man who told officers in his confession that, "The more I looked at people the more I hated them because I knowed they wasn't any place for me with the kind of people I knowed," showed no remorse to the end. He refused to donate his eyes to an organ bank, saying, "No one ever did anything for me. Why the hell should I do anything for anyone else?"
Starkweather and Fugate's crime spree was dramatized in Terence Malick's 1975 film, Badlands.
Surveyors use plummets to mark the exact spot to mark and measure boundaries. Builders and masons use plummets and plumb-lines in building all kinds of buildings as well as walls.
Now to the book of Amos. The Lord here is comparing Israel to a Wall that is straight and does not lean over, for it was built using a plumb line to keep it true. Israel has come to ruin and the Lord is saying to Amos:
"Thus he shewed me: and, behold, the Lord stood upon a wall [made] by a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand. And the LORD said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A plumbline. Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumbline [set His mind to the perfecting of Israel] in the midst of my people Israel: I will not again pass by them any more: " (Amos 7:7-8)
Another use of a plumb line is in the book of Zechariah. Both the Amos and Zechariah references use a plumb line to build or to get a central point of reference using a plumb bob:
" For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth." (Zec. 4:10)
To see a plumb line in action, look for a place where a brick building is in the process of being built and watch how the brick-layers use the line "stretched" from corner to corner and how they first set the corner with a plummet. You will see that each row of bricks are laid to the line "height" as well as touch the line across the whole row — thus keeping the row "true" – both vertically and horizontally.