Carl Panzram

• 1. Introduction

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  Carl Panzram told investigators that he had murdered twenty-one boys and men, yet only five of those killings could ever be confirmed. Authorities suspect the real toll in the United States alone passes one hundred, with more victims in Portuguese Angola. He also claimed more than a thousand sexual assaults on males of every age. Panzram was an American rapist, serial killer and habitual offender who broke out of prison after prison. Then he wrote his own account and refused to apologize for any of it. How does a boy charged with drunkenness at the age of eight grow into a man who says he hates the whole human race, himself included? What did his many escapes, false names and ocean crossings leave behind? And why did a single small kindness, late in his life, make him pick up a pen?

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• 2. A Troubled Boyhood

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  Carl Panzram was born on the 28th of June 1891 on a farm near East Grand Forks, Minnesota. He was the sixth of seven children of East Prussian immigrants, Johann Gottlieb Panzram and Mathilda Elizabeth Panzram, whose maiden name was Bolduan. Looking back, he said other children never liked him. By the age of five, by his own telling, he was already a liar and a thief.

  When he was seven, his father abandoned the family. Around the same time an infection took hold in the mastoid bone behind his ear. Surgery performed at home made it worse, and he was later taken to a hospital for more surgery. Nobody knows whether he suffered brain damage. Four of his five older brothers eventually left too. In May 1905 his stepbrother Louis Price drowned while working as a lumberjack.

  In 1899, at the age of eight, Panzram stood in juvenile court charged with being drunk and disorderly. In 1903, at twelve, he was arrested and jailed as drunk and incorrigible. Soon afterward he stole cake, apples and a revolver from a neighbor's house.

  In October 1903 his mother sent him to the Minnesota State Training School, supposedly a reform school. In his autobiography he wrote that staff beat, tortured and raped him there. The boys called one workshop the paint shop, because it left them painted with bruises and blood. Panzram hated the place enough to burn it down, which he did without being caught on the 7th of July 1905. Some accounts claim he killed a twelve-year-old boy at the school.

  In January 1906 he was paroled from Red Wing Training School, where he had been held after taking money from his mother's pocketbook. Alcoholism and a long record of burglary and robbery already marked him. Within weeks of his parole he tried to shoot a Lutheran cleric with a revolver. At fourteen he ran away to live on the streets, mostly riding trains. He later recalled being gang raped by a group of homeless men on one of those journeys.

  The rails soon carried him to Butte, Montana, in the summer of 1906.

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• 3. Soldier and Convict

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  In the summer of 1906 Panzram was arrested for burglary in Butte, Montana. He was sentenced to a year at the Montana State Reform School in Miles City. He later claimed that a guard named Bushart punished him, and that he answered by critically injuring the man with a wooden board. Solitary confinement followed.

  In 1907 Panzram escaped with a safecracker named James Benson. In the town of Terry they stole guns. For the next several weeks the pair robbed people and houses, broke into stores, and burned buildings, especially churches, in Glendive, Crane and Sidney. They parted ways in Fargo, North Dakota.

  Later that year Panzram got drunk in a Helena saloon and enlisted in the United States Army. He was assigned to the 6th Infantry at Fort William Henry Harrison. He refused orders and was generally insubordinate. Then he was convicted of larceny for stealing $88.24 worth of supplies.

  His sentence at hard labor ran from the 20th of April 1908 to August 1910 at the United States Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, approved it. Panzram later said that he had been a "rotten yegg" before the military prison, and that there "any shred of goodness left in him was smashed out."

  He left with a dishonorable discharge and went straight back to crime. He stole everything from bicycles to yachts. The list of places that jailed him, under his own name and under aliases, is long. It includes Fresno, Rusk, The Dalles, Harrison, Butte, Bridgeport, Sing Sing, Clinton and Washington, D.C. He often attacked guards and refused their orders, and they answered with beatings and other punishments.

  Years of hard labor at Leavenworth and other prisons had given him great strength and a large frame. In his autobiography he called himself "the spirit of meanness personified" and said he often raped men he had robbed.

  Before the decade was out, a new alias would cost him his first freedom in Oregon.

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• 4. Aliases and Escapes

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  In the winter of 1910 Panzram says he went to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, hoping to join the Federales, and was turned away. Later he joined the Foreign Legion of the Mexican Army at Agua Prieta, known as the Northern Brigade. After about a month he deserted, disappointed that looting had already stripped every place he visited. He stole weapons and a horse and rode toward the border until the animal died of exhaustion.

  In the summer of 1911, calling himself Jefferson Davis, he was arrested in Fresno, California, for stealing a bicycle. He got six months in county jail and escaped after thirty days. In 1913, as Jack Allen, he was arrested in The Dalles, Oregon, for highway robbery, assault and sodomy. He broke out of jail after two months. Arrested again in Harrison, Idaho, as Jeff Davis, he escaped from the county jail there as well.

  On the 7th of April 1913 Jeff Davis was arrested in Malta, Montana, for disorderly conduct. A local newspaper had fun with the case. It said the man who sold a stolen fur-lined coat for five dollars had bought five dollars' worth of experience instead. Chinook wanted him for a dentist's office burglary, and he was sentenced to a year in the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge. The prison register listed his occupation as waiter and teamster.

  He escaped on the 13th of November 1913 while working as a trustee on road work. Within a week he was caught for a burglary in Three Forks, this time as Jeff Rhoades, and got another year at Deer Lodge. He was released on the 3rd of March 1915 with a new suit, five dollars and a ticket to a town six miles away.

  On the 1st of June he burgled a house in Astoria, Oregon, and was arrested while trying to sell the loot. As Jeff Baldwin he received seven years at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. The warden, fifty-year-old Harry Minto, believed in beatings and isolation. Panzram swore he would never serve the seven years and dared the whole staff to make him.

  Later in 1915 he helped a fellow inmate, Otto Hooker, escape. While fleeing, Hooker wounded the town marshal of Jefferson, Oregon, J.J. Benson, and shot Minto dead on the 27th of September. Hooker was mortally wounded. It was Panzram's first known involvement in a killing, as an accessory before the fact. On his prison paperwork he lied about his age and birthplace. His one truthful entry was his occupation: thief.

  He spent sixty-one days in solitary confinement and escaped on the 18th of September 1917. A fifty-dollar reward went up. After two shootouts, in which he tried to shoot Chief Deputy Sheriff Joseph Frum, he was recaptured. On the 12th of May 1918 he sawed through his cell bars and boarded an eastbound freight train. He never returned to the Pacific Northwest.

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• 5. The Akista

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  At twenty-seven, with a bounty on his head in several countries, Panzram shaved off his mustache and became John O'Leary. He tried to enlist in the Army again at Meyersdale, Pennsylvania, and deserted after a few days. He worked odd jobs in Sparrows Point, Maryland, then helped a young boy rob a hotel in Frederick, Maryland.

  In New York he joined labor unions that helped him get a seaman's identification card. He sailed to Panama on the steamship James S. Whitney. There he tried to steal a small boat with a drunken sailor, and by his account they killed everyone aboard. The sailor was arrested. Panzram stayed free, worked in a Peruvian copper mine, and took the steamer Homa to Port Arthur, Texas, and onward to Glasgow.

  In Scotland he tried to rob the ship on docking and spent a short spell in HMP Barlinnie. After his release he traveled through Southampton, London, Le Havre and Paris. When his money ran out he joined a ship crew bound for Hamburg and later went home to the United States.

  A jewelry store robbery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, left him with about $1,500, and he returned to Hamburg. Two weeks later he was broke and sailed back on the same ship. On the 16th of September 1920 he burglarized the William H. Taft Mansion in New Haven, the home of the former president. He had targeted it deliberately, out of a grudge held since Fort Leavenworth. He took jewelry, bonds, an inscribed watch given for Taft's Philippine service, and Taft's Colt .45 handgun.

  With the stolen money Panzram bought a small sailing yacht called the Akista. Moored at City Island in the Bronx for three months, he lured sailors from port bars onto the boat. He got them drunk, raped them, and killed them with Taft's pistol. Their bodies went into Long Island Sound near Execution Rocks Light. Panzram later claimed ten victims this way.

  The killings stopped when the Akista ran aground near Atlantic City, New Jersey, and sank. His last two potential victims escaped. On the 3rd of October 1920, Panzram, John Delaney and J. Gilmore lashed themselves to the capstan on the Brigantien Shoals as the yacht rolled onto its side. Captain Henry Brown, on a fishing smack, rescued them on the 6th of October. O'Leary went to a hospital for shock and exposure.

  On the 26th of October he was arrested in Stamford, Connecticut, carrying a loaded .44 revolver.

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• 6. Philadelphia and Angola

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  After six months in a Bridgeport jail in 1921, Panzram borrowed $100 from a Dr. Charles McGivern, who he said had cared for him after the shipwreck. He then collected Taft's pistol, which he had left with the doctor, and traveled to Philadelphia. On the 16th of May 1921 he was in a shootout with police there. He fired at a boarding house owner and Detective Harry Walker, and was captured only when his ammunition ran out. Nobody was hurt. Bail was set at $1,000.

  Convicted of aggravated assault and inciting a riot, he faced a heavy sentence. He made bail instead and fled to Norfolk, Virginia. From there he sailed to southern Africa and landed in Luanda, the capital of Portuguese Angola. By late 1921 he was foreman of an oil rig, which he later burned down out of what he called spitefulness.

  The weeks that followed were among the worst of his life. He paid a local family 80 escudos, about eight American dollars, for access to children, and assaulted two girls in his shack. Then he raped a boy who worked as a waiter, which enraged the locals. Panzram fled through the rainforest back to the city.

  The American consul in Luanda refused to help him once his employer described the trouble he had caused. Panzram learned he had been fired, found his superior, and beat him. He then claimed he raped and killed a boy of about eleven or twelve. In his written confession he described taking the child to a gravel pit.

  He also claimed that he traveled by Belgian steamer to Lobito Bay, hired a canoe and six men, and went hunting crocodiles. By his account he shot all six men and fed them to the animals. Taft's pistol was in police hands in Philadelphia, so he said he used a Luger.

  That Luger, picked up in the Congo, gave him a new idea for his career back in America.

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• 7. Wholesale Ambitions

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  In 1922 a Hartford, Connecticut, firm called Maxim Silent Firearms Co. fitted a silencer to his pistol. Panzram hoped to become a professional hitman. When he test fired the weapon, it still made a great deal of noise. Years later he wrote that if the silencer had worked, he would have gone into the murder business on a wholesale scale.

  On the 18th of July 1922, in Salem, Massachusetts, he claimed to have raped and beaten a small boy to death with a rock. He said he strangled another boy near New Haven later that year. Between these claims he worked as a night watchman at the Abeeco Mill factory in Yonkers. In Providence, Rhode Island, he stole a 38-foot yawl from a marina and sailed to New Haven, looking for victims to rob and rape and boats to steal.

  In June 1923, at Larchmont, New York, he stole the yacht of Dr. Charles Paine. He lost rudder control and smashed it onto rocks off New Rochelle. He then burgled the Police Commissioner's yacht off Premium Point and took a .38 pistol from its galley. He picked up a fifteen-year-old boy, George Walosin, with the promise of a job on the yawl, and sexually assaulted him.

  On the 27th of June, near Kingston, New York, Panzram said he picked up a man, feared a robbery, shot him with that .38 and threw the body in the river. Walosin had seen it. At Newburgh he jumped overboard and swam ashore, then told Yonkers police what had happened. An alert went out for Captain John O'Leary, and Panzram was arrested in Nyack on the 29th of June.

  He tried to escape from jail on the 9th of July. He then tricked his lawyer, a Mr. Cashin, into accepting ownership of the stolen yawl in exchange for bail money. Panzram skipped bail and federal agents seized the boat. On the 26th of August he was arrested for breaking into a train depot. Three days later he was cleared in the stabbing death of Dorothy Kaufman of Greenburgh.

  He received five years. In jail, as O'Leary, he admitted that he was also Jeff Baldwin and wanted in Oregon for Minto's death. Oregon still wanted him to serve 14 years. He even tried to collect the $500 reward for information about himself.

  After Sing Sing, he went to Clinton Prison in Dannemora as Inmate #75182. A failed escape attempt left him with an injured spine and broken ankles. He also claimed to have badly hurt a guard who survived. He was discharged in July 1928 and claimed more murders while burgling homes between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and in Philadelphia.

  On the 30th of August 1928 he was arrested in Baltimore for stealing a radio and jewelry from a dentist's Washington home on the 20th. This time he gave his real name, though he claimed to be 41 and from Nevada. He confessed to killing three boys that month. One was a fourteen-year-old newsboy, Alexander Uszacke, whom he forced to help him rob a yacht on the Delaware River. Police confirmed his account of a killing at Pier 28 on League Island. Boston police could not confirm a Charlestown killing.

  Asked what point there was in killing a child, he answered that he hated the human race and "I get a kick out of murdering people." He wrote that he had also considered poisoning a city's water supply with arsenic, or sinking a British warship in New York Harbor to start a war with Britain.

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• 8. The Journal and What Survived

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  Panzram was sentenced to 25 years to life at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where he became inmate #31614. It was nearly the same place he had served eighteen years earlier. He told the warden: "I'll kill the first man that bothers me." Staff judged him too psychotic for ordinary work and put him alone in the laundry. The foreman there, Robert Warnke, was known for bullying prisoners.

  Panzram warned Warnke repeatedly, and Warnke kept antagonizing him. On the 20th of June 1929 Panzram beat the foreman to death with an iron bar. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He refused to allow any appeal. To death penalty opponents who offered help, he wrote that all he wished for them was that they had one neck and he had his hands on it.

  On death row an officer named Henry Philip Lesser gave him money for cigarettes. Panzram was astonished at the kindness. When Lesser also supplied writing materials, Panzram produced a detailed account of his crimes and his philosophy. He began by claiming 21 murders, thousands of burglaries and robberies, and sodomy on more than a thousand males. He said he was not sorry, had no conscience, and believed in neither man, God nor devil. He closed with a motto: "Rob em all, Rape em all and Kill em all."

  Lesser, by then a former guard, kept the letters and the manuscript. He spent four decades trying to get them published. In 1980 he donated them to San Diego State University, where they are held as the Carl Panzram papers in the Malcolm A. Love Library. Thomas E. Gaddis and Joe Long drew on the manuscript, with Lesser's help, for their 1970 book Killer: A Journal of Murder. In 2005 Fantagraphics Books published Joe Coleman's comic Muzlers, Guzzlers, and Good Yeggs, which includes a section on Panzram.

  His words reached film as well. The 1984 Yugoslav film Strangler vs. Strangler opens with a Panzram line about wishing all humanity had one neck. The German horror film Schramm begins with his line, "Today I am dirty, but tomorrow I'll be just dirt." James Woods played him in the 1995 film Killer: A Journal of Murder. John Borowski's 2012 documentary was titled Carl Panzram: The Spirit of Hatred and Vengeance.

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