There was nothing inhuman, grave or violent that Carl Panzram could not do – on unimaginable scales. By the time he was executed in 1930, at 39, he admitted to have committed “21 murders; thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons; and sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings,” across 30 countries.
“You will find that I have consistently followed one idea through all my life: I preyed upon the weak, the harmless and the unsuspecting.”
For his grisly crimes, he was “not in the least bit sorry,” since he “hated the whole damned human race including himself.” In his own words, Panzram had no conscience, he didn’t believe in man, God nor the Devil.
“In my lifetime I have broken every law that was ever made by both man and God. If either had made any more, I should very cheerfully have broken them also.”
The Making of a Serial Killer
How did Panzram, born to a poor farming family in Minnesota, become the most horrific beast in history?
Panzram’s boyhood was as brutal as his ghastly career. When he was 7, Panzram’s father abandoned his family that included his 6 siblings. At the age of 12, Panzram began his criminal career by stealing cake, apples, and a revolver from his neighbor’s home. To treat his burgling skills, his mother sent him to Minnesota State Training School where he was beaten and sexually abused.
To take revenge for his physical and sexual battering, Panzram began urinating and masturbating into beverages that he served to officers at the school; he was also found dumping rat poison into a commander’s coffee. In a fit of rage, Panzram even set fire to and destroyed one of the school’s buildings.
“I was reformed all right…I had been taught by Christians how to be a hypocrite and I had learned more about stealing, lying, hating, burning and killing. I had learned that a boy’s penis could be used for something besides to urinate with and that a rectum could be used for other purposes than crepitating.”
However, after he pretended to be ‘reformed,’ Panzram was released, at the age of 14, to work on his mother’s farm and attend school. But after a row with a teacher, Panzram ran away from home to pursue a transient life. But the misery didn’t end. In a boxcar, he was gang raped by four hobos.
“I cried, I begged and pleaded for mercy, pity and sympathy, but nothing I could say or do could sway them from their purpose. I left that box a sadder, sicker but wiser boy.”
In 1907, at the age of 16, Panzram enlisted in the United States Army, but was convicted of larceny and served a three-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth’s United States Disciplinary Barracks, where he was then tortured and beaten savagely on a daily basis.
“Well, I was a pretty rotten egg before I went there, but when I left there, all the good that may have been in me had been kicked and beaten out of me.”
After his release in 1910, Panzram embarked on a career of spectacular brutality, traveling around the world burning and burglarizing buildings, and raping countless young men and boys. In his autobiography Killer: A Journal of Murder, Panzram wrote he was “rage personified” and that he would often rape men to dominate and humiliate them.
In 1915, Panzram burgled a house in Astoria, Oregon, but was arrested when he tried to sell some of the stolen items. He was sentenced to seven years in prison at Salem’s Oregon State Penitentiary. To punish his unruliness, the wardens hung him from the rafters for hours, turned a hose on him, and kept him in solitary confinement for weeks, leaving him to feed on cockroaches. Despite the agony and the 61-day solitary confinement, Panzram escaped in 1918.
Panzram committed his first murders aboard his yacht, the Akista, in 1920. He lured 10 sailors away from New York bars, got them drunk, raped them and shot them with a .45 caliber pistol he stole from the house of former president Howard W. Taft. He then dumped their bodies near Execution Rocks Light, in Long Island Sound. Later in Angola, Panzram sodomized and killed a young boy.
“I sat down to think things over a bit. While I was sitting there, a little kid about eleven or twelve years old came bumming around. He was looking for something. He found it too. I took him out to a gravel pit about one quarter mile away. I left him there, but first committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him, and he will never be any deader.”
In 1928, Panzram was arrested for a series of burglaries and, for his horrific criminal record, received a 25-years-to-life sentence at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. “I’ll kill the first man that bothers me,” Panzram threatened the warden; the caveat invited him a solitary job in the prison laundry room. But in 1929, he battered the laundry’s foreman with an iron bar. After committing his last murder, Panzram was sentenced to death. He refused to appeal his sentence; when human rights activists tried to save him from gallows, he sent them this message:
“The only thanks you or your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it… I have no desire to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me, and I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill them.”
Panzram was asked if he had any last words; this is what he said:
“Hurry up you Hoosier bastard; I could kill 10 men while you’re fooling around!”
Sources:
http://murderpedia.org/male.P/p/panzram-carl.htm
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82j6cf9/entire_text/
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/04/01/carl-panzram-the-serial-killer-who-used-a-presidents-gun
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/carl-panzram-diary-monster-article-1.337979
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