Carl Panzram was born on a farm near Warren, Minnesota, on June 28, 1891, to German immigrant parents. He was sent to the Minnesota State Training School at eleven, where he was beaten and raped, and burned the place down. From there he spent almost his entire life in institutions, escaping repeatedly, and by his own account was brutalised at every one of them. He wrote later that the system had taught him precisely one thing, which was to hate. He used a string of false names, among them Jefferson Rhoades.
He robbed, burned and killed across the United States, and abroad. He said he had shot six men in Angola after hiring them for a boat crew, and killed sailors and boys in the ports he passed through. He burgled the house of former President Taft in Connecticut and used the proceeds to buy a yacht. He confessed to twenty-one murders and to more than a thousand rapes of men and boys.
He was sentenced to twenty-five years at Leavenworth in 1928 for burglary, and told the warden on arrival that he would kill the first man who crossed him. In June 1929 he beat the prison laundry foreman to death with an iron bar.
In Leavenworth a young civilian guard, Henry Lesser, showed him ordinary kindness and gave him a dollar, and Panzram, who said nobody had ever done such a thing, asked for paper and wrote an autobiography of about twenty thousand words. It is a genuinely remarkable document: flat, literate, entirely without self-pity, and an indictment of the reformatories and prisons that had held him since he was eleven. He refused to appeal, wrote to a group campaigning against his execution telling them to mind their own business, and asked to be hanged. He was executed at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930, and his reported last words to the hangman were that he could hang a dozen men while the man was fooling around.