Carl Panzram was hanged at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, on September 5, 1930. A federal jury in Topeka had convicted him of the murder of Robert G. Warnke, the civilian foreman of the prison laundry, whom he struck down from behind on the morning of June 20, 1929. That was the only killing for which he was ever tried. He had spent most of his life in reform schools, jails and prisons, and by his own account he had been in about 200 jails.
He became known far beyond the cases in the court record because of what he said and wrote. In the District of Columbia jail in 1928 he confessed to police that he had killed three boys in the eastern United States, and detectives in Salem, Massachusetts, Philadelphia and Connecticut found that some of his details matched real deaths. In the same jail a young guard, Henry Lesser, gave him paper and encouraged him to write the story of his life. The manuscript Panzram produced, now held by San Diego State University, claims many more killings and blames the treatment he received in institutions for what he became. None of those wider claims was tested in court, and his prison records, the university notes, show convictions only for burglary and larceny before the Leavenworth killing.
According to the San Diego State University finding aid for his papers, Panzram was born on June 28, 1892, in East Grand Forks, Minnesota. The university's catalog record for the related Henry Lesser collection gives his years as 1891 to 1930, so the birth year differs between the university's own records. His father left the family when he was about eight, and his mother raised him and six brothers and sisters alone.
When he was 11, the finding aid says, he robbed a neighbor and was sent to the Minnesota State Training School. The school, a state reform institution for boys and girls, had moved to a site near Red Wing in 1891 and took the name State Training School in 1895, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Panzram later wrote that he was beaten and sexually abused there. The finding aid records those claims, and the university's description of his manuscript says he returned again and again to the punishments used in reform schools and prisons, which he blamed for the violence he committed outside them.
He left home at about 13 or 14, the finding aid says. In 1905, after an arrest for larceny, he was committed to the Montana State Reform School. He later joined the Army and was imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for violating the 62nd Article of War, a military offense, serving a three-year term.
After the Army he worked, by his own account, as a railroad guard and a strikebreaker and served briefly in a Mexican military force before returning to crime. The finding aid lists prison terms in Oregon and Montana. When Washington police checked his history in October 1928, the Evening Star reported, the records showed that he had escaped from the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he was serving one to seven years for burglary, and that he had used the name John O'Leary during earlier terms. The university records the aliases Jeff Davis, Jefferson Baldwin, Jack Allen and John O'Leary.
Panzram described a long period of work and travel outside the United States. The San Diego State University finding aid summarizes it: work on a Grace Line ship to Panama, then in copper mines in Peru, in Chile, and again in Panama as a labor foreman for a United States fortification division and for Sinclair Oil. In 1919 he was in Scotland, where he was jailed. He later traveled through Europe and Africa, including Angola and the Congo, again working for Sinclair Oil.
These details come from his own account. The finding aid notes that his claims to have killed people in Angola and passengers on a yacht are not confirmed by his prison records.
He came back to the United States in 1922, according to the finding aid, and served time at Sing Sing and at Clinton Prison in Dannemora, New York. The Evening Star reported in 1928 that the records then available showed him free in the summer of 1922 and next in custody in 1923, when he was committed to Sing Sing for burglary, and that by October 1923 he was serving a term at Dannemora after a burglary conviction in White Plains. The exact dates of those New York terms were not reported.
In the late summer of 1928 Panzram was arrested on a charge of housebreaking. The Washington Daily News reported in October 1928 that he had been arrested in Baltimore on September 1 and brought to Washington; a 1930 Washington Daily News summary said he was arrested in Washington on September 1; the San Diego State University records say he was jailed in Washington in August 1928. He was accused of breaking into homes in the city, including a doctor's house in northwest Washington, and taking a radio set and jewelry. Police said the radio was in his possession when he was caught.
He was held at the District of Columbia jail. Its superintendent, Major William L. Peak (the name is also printed "Peake" in several reports), later described him as the most dangerous prisoner he had handled. Early in October, attendants found Panzram trying to pry apart the bars of his cell with a chain pulled from his bunk, the Evening Star reported, and he was moved to the row of cells used for condemned men although he faced no death sentence. In conversations with jail staff and reporters he said he was 35, called himself a seaman, and said he had served time in 11 prisons, three reformatories and about 200 jails since he was 12. He told them he wanted "either liberty or death."
Henry Lesser was born in 1902 in Fall River, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children, according to the San Diego State University finding aid for his papers. He left school in the 10th grade, joined his brothers in Washington, and worked in a men's clothing store until he was fired for trying to organize the salesmen into a union. After work as a hospital attendant he was recommended for a guard's job and started at the District jail on March 1, 1928.
In August 1928, while Panzram awaited trial, guards beat him twice, the finding aid says. Lesser was moved by this and had another guard pass Panzram a dollar. The two became friends. Lesser encouraged him to write his life story and supplied the paper and pencils. Panzram wrote in batches and handed the pages to Lesser, who took them out of the jail a few at a time. The finished manuscript runs to 361 loose leaves of lined paper. Because it was written and handed over in pieces, the pages are not numbered in sequence and their first order is not known.
The university describes the content in general terms: his account of larceny, robbery, burglary, killings and sexual crimes, the abuse he said he suffered in reform school, jail and prison, plans he said he had made to kill large numbers of people, and the ways he offered for checking his stories. His central argument was that he had done as he had been taught. Lesser's wife later typed a transcript in three parts, and Lesser annotated it, often noting whether he had been able to verify a particular event.
Some weeks after his arrest, Panzram asked to see Major Peak and said he wanted to confess to killing two boys. Peak called the police, and Detective Richard W. Mansfield was sent to take the statement, the Evening Star reported on October 20, 1928. Panzram said he had killed a boy near Boston about six years earlier and another near Philadelphia that August.
At first the confession was doubted. Boston police said they had no record of such a killing. Detectives suspected Panzram was trying to be moved out of Washington before he could be tried on the housebreaking charge. Panzram then wrote to prosecutors in Philadelphia and Boston and to police in Connecticut, insisting that he had committed the crimes, and the Washington Daily News quoted him as saying that the state would be able to prove the motive. Lieutenant Edward J. Kelly of the Washington homicide squad, who took one of the confessions, said Panzram had given details that only someone present could have known.
The confession about Massachusetts reached a city that had an unsolved case. Henry McMahon, 12, of Salem, had disappeared on July 18, 1922, and his body was found in bushes near a large rock three days later. He had last been seen walking with a stranger. In mid-October 1928, Salem's city marshal, Daniel J. Phelan (also printed Phalen), telegraphed Washington that Panzram's account matched the case and asked that Panzram be held even if he was released on the local charge.
Salem police sent a photograph around. In October 1928 three women and a young man who as a boy had played with Henry looked at it, and all of them identified Panzram as the man they had seen with the child, the Washington Daily News reported. Captain Gideon Pelletier of the Salem police and Lieutenant William F. Murray of the Massachusetts State Police then traveled to Washington with a murder warrant. In more than two hours of questioning at the jail, Panzram would neither confirm nor deny the Salem confession. A Massachusetts officer had said the man seen with Henry walked with a limp, and the Washington Daily News reported that Panzram showed a similar unevenness in his walk when he was told to cross the jail office.
Soon afterward he wrote to the Salem prosecutor, describing in detail how he had met the boy and killed him, and said he would say nothing further except in open court. The two Massachusetts detectives left Washington without him. They told reporters that a Salem grand jury might be asked to indict him and that they could not take him north until the Washington charge was settled. By early November, the Washington Times reported, Massachusetts had a warrant charging him with the McMahon killing and had lodged a detainer against him. He was never tried for it.
Little was reported about Henry McMahon beyond his age, his home in Salem and the place where he was last seen, in a berry patch outside the city.
The boy Panzram said he had killed near Philadelphia in August 1928 was identified as Alexander Luszock, 14. A boy's body had been found that August on the Philadelphia waterfront, unidentified, and buried in a potter's field without an autopsy. After the confession, Philadelphia authorities had the body exhumed, and it was identified as Alexander's, the Evening Star reported on October 25, 1928. One report described him as a newsboy.
Detective Sergeants Hepburn and Curran of the Philadelphia police then questioned Panzram at the jail with Lieutenant Kelly, and the Evening Star reported on October 26, 1928, that he had given them a full confession that day. The Philadelphia detectives told Kelly the account matched the facts in every detail, including items left with the body. A Philadelphia grand jury indicted Panzram for murder, and extradition proceedings began, but the United States attorney in Washington insisted on trying the housebreaking case first, and the Evening Star later reported that the evidence in the murder cases was not then considered conclusive. Panzram was never tried in Pennsylvania.
The third confession came in a letter to the police chief of New London, Connecticut. Panzram wrote that he had killed a youth of about 16 or 17 who had told him he was from Brooklyn and had an uncle, or by another account a father, in the police. He said he could not be sure whether it had happened near New London or near New Haven. In a postscript, quoted by Washington papers, he wrote that he had spent 18 years murdering people and thought it was time someone murdered him.
Chief Harry Tuttle of the West Haven police and Lieutenant Kelly then took a detailed statement, the Evening Star reported on November 3, 1928. Tuttle checked it against his records of a youth found strangled near New Haven and said it matched in every detail. The youth had never been identified. Tuttle obtained a first-degree murder warrant but said he would not seek an indictment until he had tried to identify the victim and obtained Panzram's New York arrest record. There was a problem of dates. Panzram placed the killing in 1922, while the Evening Star reported that the body was found on August 9, 1923, and police were trying to establish whether he was already in a New York jail by then. The Washington Times gave the date of the discovery as August 1928, an apparent error. No trial followed.
In a letter to a brother quoted by the Washington Daily News in October 1928, Panzram wrote that his troubles would soon be over because he was heading for the electric chair.
In early November 1928 Panzram was arraigned before Chief Justice Walter I. McCoy in the District of Columbia Supreme Court, the Evening Star reported on November 3. He pleaded not guilty, refused a lawyer and said he would conduct his own defense. The trial opened on November 12, the Washington Daily News reported.
Reports written then and after his death describe a trial in which the defendant made no attempt to win. He took the stand and admitted the housebreaking. He told the court he had waited inside the house for the owners to come home, intending to kill them, the Washington Daily News later reported. He threatened the prosecutor, the judge and the jurors, demanding their names so that he could come back for them, and said he hated the whole human race, himself included. The chief prosecution witness was a boy who had been caught trying to pawn stolen goods and had led police to him; when the boy testified, Panzram drew a finger across his throat. The newspapers give two names for the assistant prosecutor: Walter M. Shea (Evening Star, 1930) and William H. Collins (Washington Times, 1930).
He was convicted and sentenced by Chief Justice McCoy to 25 years. The Associated Press, the Evening Star and the Washington Times all give 25 years, for housebreaking and larceny. He told the judge, in substance, that he could serve the time and then come back.
Panzram left the District jail for the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, at the end of January 1929. The Washington Times gave January 30 as the date of his transfer, and the Associated Press reported in 1930 that he was received at Leavenworth on February 1, 1929. Major Peak escorted him and later told reporters that Panzram rode with his cap pulled low, spoke to no one and shouted insults at other passengers. In June 1929 a Washington Daily News editorial, "Leavenworth's Lapse of Watchfulness," said Peak had warned Leavenworth officials that Panzram wanted to exterminate the human race.
From Leavenworth he kept writing to Henry Lesser. The San Diego State University description of the letters says he wrote about daily prison life, the trinkets and small inventions he made, and his views on prison and on his crimes.
Robert G. Warnke was the foreman of the prison laundry. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which lists him among its staff who died in the line of duty, says he came from Cleveland, Ohio, and was an Army veteran who had served in Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders. He began work at Leavenworth in 1921 and had served eight years. Prison officials held him in high regard, the Bureau says; he was quiet and unassuming and liked by inmates, and no trouble between him and his killer was known. He left a wife and a son. His name is on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.
Sources differ on his age. The Bureau of Prisons gives 47; wire reports at the time of his death and in August 1929 gave 40.
Early on the morning of June 20, 1929, shortly after Warnke reported to the laundry, Panzram struck him on the head from behind with a heavy iron object. The Bureau of Prisons calls it a heavy flat iron; the Associated Press also said a flat iron; the United Press and the International News Service said an iron pipe; later reports said an iron bar or a club. Warnke died of a fractured skull. Panzram then went after other prisoners in the laundry and ran into the yard swinging the iron, according to the wire reports, until a guard caught him. The United Press named the laundry guard as Phil Holtgrave. No other injuries were reported. Panzram was placed in solitary confinement, and Warden Thomas B. White opened an investigation.
Panzram made no statement about the killing to prison officials, the Bureau of Prisons says. Accounts of his reason differ. A United Press report in September 1930 said he had been ordered to report to the deputy warden for breaking prison rules and attacked Warnke only because he was the first man he saw; another 1930 account said Warnke had disciplined him for a minor violation. In a letter to Lesser, held at San Diego State University, he mentioned killing his boss in the prison laundry.
Kansas had no death penalty, but the killing happened on federal property and so fell under federal law, which allowed it. The government charged Panzram with first-degree murder in the federal court at Topeka. A United Press report from Leavenworth in April 1930 said the government was expected to ask for death.
His sanity was examined before the trial. The psychiatrist Karl Menninger evaluated him and found him sane at the time of the killing, according to the San Diego State University records, which hold copies of Menninger's correspondence with Warden White. The Associated Press reported that a sanity commission found him mentally unsound but able to tell right from wrong; the Evening Star in 1930 said a sanity board found him of sound mind. He boasted to the examiners of 22 killings and offered to describe them.
His autobiography was already circulating. In April 1930 Thomas R. Henry wrote in the Evening Star that he had read it and said it had been written down two years earlier with the help of a District jail guard; Henry's article described Panzram as having confessed to about 14 murders.
The trial was held in April 1930 before Federal Judge Richard J. Hopkins. Panzram refused to testify, the Associated Press reported. According to accounts published at his execution, he cursed the lawyer who wanted him declared insane, threatened to kill doctors who tried to examine him, and told the court that if he were freed he would try to kill the whole human race. He claimed to have killed 23 men, the United Press reported.
The jury received the case late on April 15. A jury of Kansans found him guilty of the murder of Robert Warnke, and Judge Hopkins, following the jury's recommendation of no mercy, sentenced him to be hanged at the Leavenworth penitentiary on September 5, 1930. The Associated Press report from Topeka is dated April 16, 1930. Panzram objected to any motion for a new trial, the Associated Press said, but the judge gave the defense 90 days to file one. Papers across the country noted that the sentence would bring a hanging to a state that had abolished capital punishment; the Indianapolis Times called it Kansas's first hanging in 30 years, and the Washington Daily News said he was the first man sentenced to death in Kansas since 1890.
No appeal of the conviction was reported. Panzram worked against attempts to save him. The San Diego State University records hold letters he wrote to the Society for the Abolishment of Capital Punishment and to President Herbert Hoover, asking them not to seek to overturn his sentence because he had been sane when he committed his crimes. The United Press noted in September 1930 that only a pardon or reprieve from the President could stop the execution. None came. His last letters to Lesser, the university says, mention a suicide attempt and his acceptance of the death sentence.
United States Marshal Don McIvor was in charge of the execution. The United Press reported on September 2 that three men had applied to carry it out, that the one chosen would be paid $100, and that officials had to build a gallows for the hanging.
Panzram spent his last hours reading magazine stories and smoking, according to the United Press. He refused religious comfort and asked two clergymen to leave his sight. He asked for a full autopsy after his death. Hours before the hanging he told reporters that he deserved his fate, and he repeated that he hated people. Prison officials took heavy precautions: the scaffold was built in a secluded corner of the yard, out of sight of the cell houses, and machine guns were placed in the turrets above them.
Shortly before 6 a.m. on Friday, September 5, 1930, he was led from his cell and climbed the 13 steps of the gallows. He had said he would curse the hangman, but the United Press reported that he did not. The trap was sprung at 6:01 a.m., and he was pronounced dead at 6:20 a.m. The Bureau of Prisons list of federal executions records that he was sentenced to death for murder and hanged at the U.S. Penitentiary, Leavenworth, on September 5, 1930. His age was given in the reports as 40 (United Press, April 1930) and 45 (Washington Times, September 1930).
Lesser and Panzram wrote to each other until the execution. Lesser had already tried to have the manuscript published, and he kept trying for about four decades, the San Diego State University records say. He sent copies to journalists and scholars, among them H. L. Mencken, the criminologist Sheldon Glueck and Karl Menninger. Most returned it.
Lesser himself left prison work. He became a parole officer and then junior warden's assistant at the federal reformatory camp at Petersburg, Virginia, and resigned in 1935, discouraged by the slow pace of prison reform. In 1936 he went back to selling clothes, married, and later moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he worked in a department store. He lectured on prison reform, using Panzram's life as his example.
In 1955 the writer Tom Gaddis, author of Birdman of Alcatraz, a biography of Robert Stroud, obtained the manuscript. After years of delay, Lesser's literary agent arranged a deal, and the book was finished with James Long, an investigative reporter based in Oregon. It appeared in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder. The university records say it sold poorly and went out of print, and that a 1995 film adaptation brought the story a wider audience.
In 1979 Lesser lectured to criminal justice students at San Diego State at the invitation of Professor Thomas Gitchoff and a graduate student, Joel Goodman, and was filmed in an interview. In 1980 he gave Panzram's handwritten manuscript, the letters and related papers to the university. He died in 1983. Lesser's own papers passed to Goodman and are now also at the university.
The Panzram papers include, beside the manuscript and letters, copies of his federal prison file obtained under the Freedom of Information Act: a death certificate, the prison's case report on the killing of R. G. Warnke, and correspondence between Menninger and Warden White.
Seven years after the execution, Major Peak, by then superintendent of the District's reformatory, still called Panzram the worst case he had handled in 27 years of prison work, the Evening Star reported in April 1937. Peak had supervised 11 hangings and 10 electrocutions, and he told the paper that the first execution he saw had turned him against capital punishment.
Most of what is said about Panzram rests on his own words. The following points are claims, not findings.
The total. He gave different counts at different times: about 30 to Washington jail staff (Washington Daily News, June 1929), 22 to the Topeka sanity examiners, 23 at trial (United Press), "21 other murders" (Associated Press), and between 21 and 27 in accounts at his execution. The university's description of his manuscript gives 21, and its catalog record for the papers says he claimed 23. A 1930 Evening Star feature said he had confessed to about 14. None of these totals was tested in court.
The three boys. Detectives in Salem, Philadelphia and West Haven said his details matched real deaths, and eyewitnesses in Salem picked out his photograph. But he was never tried for any of the three, and detectives at the time also said they suspected he was confessing to escape the Washington charge. Dates in his accounts conflicted with records, most clearly in the Connecticut case.
Killings abroad. He claimed to have killed men in Angola. A 1937 Evening Star account said he confessed to shooting four men he had hired to take him by canoe; United Press reports in 1930 said he claimed to have taken eight men on a boat ride and overturned it to watch them drown. The San Diego State University finding aid states that such claims are not confirmed by his prison records.
The Taft burglary. He boasted that he had robbed the house of William Howard Taft, later Chief Justice, taking jewels he valued at about $40,000, and that he sold them and bought a yacht. Reports place the house in Washington or in New Haven. The university calls this a claim, not confirmed by the records.
The plans. He told reporters and wrote that he had planned to poison a city water supply and to cause a war by blowing up a train. These are recorded in the 1930 newspaper reports and the university's descriptions as his statements only.
The reform school abuse. His account of being beaten and sexually abused at the Minnesota training school is his own, recorded in his manuscript and repeated in the university's biographical note.
Carl Panzram was executed by hanging at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas, on September 5, 1930, as recorded by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
June 28, 1892 (or 1891): Carl Panzram is born in East Grand Forks, Minnesota.
About 1900: his father leaves the family.
About age 11: sent to the Minnesota State Training School after robbing a neighbor.
1905: committed to the Montana State Reform School after a larceny arrest.
After 1905: joins the Army; serves three years at Fort Leavenworth for a military offense.
Before 1922: prison terms in Oregon and Montana; escapes from the Oregon State Penitentiary while serving one to seven years for burglary.
1919: jailed in Scotland.
July 18, 1922: Henry McMahon, 12, disappears near Salem, Massachusetts; his body is found three days later.
1922: Panzram returns to the United States.
1923: committed to Sing Sing for burglary; later at Dannemora after a burglary conviction in White Plains.
August 9, 1923: a youth's body is found near New Haven, Connecticut (date as reported by the Evening Star).
August 1928: Alexander Luszock, 14, is killed in Philadelphia.
March 1, 1928: Henry Lesser starts as a guard at the District of Columbia jail.
August or September 1, 1928: Panzram is arrested for housebreaking and held at the District of Columbia jail.
August 1928: after Panzram is beaten by guards, Lesser befriends him and encourages him to write.
Early October 1928: Panzram confesses to killing two boys.
October 20, 1928: Washington papers report that Salem police find his account matches the McMahon case.
Late October 1928: Massachusetts and Philadelphia detectives question him; Alexander Luszock's body is exhumed and identified; he confesses in full to the Philadelphia killing (reported October 26).
Early November 1928: confesses to the West Haven chief about the New Haven case; arraigned and pleads not guilty to housebreaking (reported November 3).
November 12, 1928: housebreaking trial opens; he is convicted and sentenced to 25 years by Chief Justice McCoy in November.
February 1, 1929: received at the U.S. Penitentiary, Leavenworth.
June 20, 1929: kills Robert G. Warnke, the laundry foreman.
April 1930: tried before Judge Richard J. Hopkins at Topeka; the jury receives the case late on April 15; an Associated Press dispatch dated April 16 reports the guilty verdict and a sentence to hang on September 5.
September 5, 1930: hanged at Leavenworth; pronounced dead at 6:20 a.m.
1955: Tom Gaddis obtains the manuscript.
1970: Killer: A Journal of Murder is published.
1980: Lesser gives the papers to San Diego State University.
1983: Henry Lesser dies.