In August 1928 a prisoner held on housebreaking charges at the District of Columbia jail was beaten twice by the guards. A young officer named Henry Lesser, who had started work there that March, felt sorry for him and had another guard pass him a dollar. The prisoner, Carl Panzram, said no one had ever done anything like that for him. Lesser, intrigued by the things he said, gave him pencil and paper and encouraged him to write down his life. Panzram wrote a few pages at a time and Lesser smuggled them out. The result was an autobiography that set out, without remorse and in plain language, a life of robbery, arson, rape and murder, and blamed it on the reformatories and prisons that had held him since boyhood. "You taught me how to live my life," he wrote, "and I have lived as you taught me."
He was born on a farm near Warren, Minnesota, to German immigrant parents; his birth date is usually given as June 28, 1891, though some records say 1892. At eleven, after stealing food, he was sent to the Minnesota State Training School at Red Wing, where by his own account he was beaten and raped, and which he tried to burn down. From then on he spent most of his life in about a hundred jails and seven prisons, among them Sing Sing, Clinton, Leavenworth and the state prisons of Minnesota, Montana and Oregon, escaping from several. He used a string of false names, among them Jefferson Rhoades.
Between his sentences he robbed, burned and killed. He said he had shot six men he hired for a boat crew in Portuguese Angola and killed sailors and boys in ports he passed through, that he had burgled the Connecticut house of former President William Howard Taft and used the proceeds to buy a yacht, and that he had committed more than a thousand sodomies of boys and men. He confessed to twenty-one murders. Only a handful have been corroborated, and his prison records show convictions only for burglary and larceny until the last one.
He was sentenced to twenty-five years and arrived at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, on February 1, 1929, as prisoner 31614. He told the warden, T. B. White, that he would kill the first man who bothered him. He was put to work alone in the prison laundry, where the civilian foreman, Robert G. Warnke, had a name for bullying the men under him. Warnke harassed Panzram, and Panzram warned him more than once. On June 20, 1929, he beat Warnke to death with an iron bar. In a letter to Lesser he mentioned the killing almost in passing.
He was tried for the murder and sentenced to death. He refused to appeal, told a society campaigning against capital punishment to mind its own business, and asked to be hanged. In segregation his neighbor was Robert Stroud, later known as the Birdman of Alcatraz, who wrote about him. He was hanged at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930, and was pronounced dead at 6:18 in the morning. His reported last words to the hangman were that he could hang a dozen men while the man was fooling around. No one claimed the body, and he was buried in the prison cemetery under his number.
Lesser kept the manuscript and spent decades trying to get it published; it appeared in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder. He went on to lecture on the prison system, using Panzram's life as his example, corresponded with H. L. Mencken, the criminologist Sheldon Glueck and others about it, and in 1980 gave the autobiography and the letters to San Diego State University, where they remain. He died in 1983.