In the summer of 1928 a young guard at the District of Columbia jail began slipping a prisoner paper and pencils. The prisoner wrote in batches and passed the pages back, and the guard carried them out a few at a time. The stack grew to 361 loose leaves of lined paper, never numbered in order. It took more than 40 years to reach print.
That manuscript, Carl Panzram’s, is one of the oldest of its kind still held in a public collection, and it set a pattern that has repeated across the century that followed. Men and women convicted of murder have written at length in cells and asylums, on death row and under whole life terms. Some wrote at the urging of a lawyer or a psychiatrist, some for money, some to argue with the world that had locked them up. Their pages have been seized, banned, smuggled, litigated and sold. The fights over them have reached a Japanese censor, the Supreme Court of India and the European Court of Human Rights, and the questions those fights raised have never been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.
Panzram was a lifelong prisoner from Minnesota, held in Washington in 1928 on charges of housebreaking and theft. The guard was Henry Lesser, a 26-year-old from Fall River, Massachusetts, who had started at the jail that March. According to the finding aid for Panzram’s papers at San Diego State University, guards beat Panzram twice in August 1928. Lesser was moved by it, had another guard pass him a dollar, and the two became friends. Lesser urged him to write his life story and supplied the materials.
The university describes the result in general terms: an account of a life of theft, robbery and killing, of the abuse Panzram said he had suffered in reform school, jail and prison, and of plans he said he had made to kill on a large scale. 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 an event.
The confessions in it mattered in court only in part. In the Washington jail Panzram confessed to killing three boys in the eastern United States; he was never tried for any of them. He was convicted instead of the first-degree murder of Robert Warnke, the laundry foreman at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, killed in June 1929. A federal jury at Topeka returned the verdict in April 1930, and Panzram was hanged at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930, as the Federal Bureau of Prisons list of federal executions records.
Lesser spent the next four decades trying to get the manuscript published. He sent copies to journalists and scholars, among them H. L. Mencken, the criminologist Sheldon Glueck and the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, who had examined Panzram before his trial. Most sent it back. In 1955 the writer Tom Gaddis, author of Birdman of Alcatraz, obtained it, and after years of delay the book was finished with the Oregon reporter James Long. Killer: A Journal of Murder appeared in 1970. The university’s records say it sold poorly and went out of print, and that a 1995 film adaptation brought the story a wider audience. In 1980 Lesser gave the handwritten pages, the letters and related papers to San Diego State, where they remain in the special collections. He died in 1983.
The manuscript reached print not because its author wanted fame, though he gave contradictory signals on that, but because one guard believed it had something to teach about prisons. That motive, the reformer’s, would recur.
In Japan, a few years before Panzram began writing, a condemned man wrote a book of more than a thousand pages and saw a part of it printed before he was hanged.
Sataro Fukiage was the son of a weaver in Kyoto’s Nishijin textile district. He was convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl in Kyoto in 1906, served more than 15 years at Miike Prison in Fukuoka Prefecture, and was released in March 1922. In 1925 the Maebashi District Court convicted him of murder, with other charges, of three girls killed in 1923 and sentenced him to death. The Tokyo Court of Appeal imposed the same sentence on April 24, 1926.
The book began at the suggestion of his court-appointed lawyer, who urged him to write the story of his life to steady himself during the first trial, according to a 2022 Bunshun Online retrospective built on the period newspapers. Fukiage took to it with energy. Before the appeal court in April 1926 he said he had written more than a thousand pages so that society would know his history and such crimes might be prevented, and that he wanted the royalties spent on memorial services for the victims. He filed his final appeal on the last possible day, reportedly to gain time to finish it. It was dismissed on July 2, 1926.
He called the book Shaba, a Buddhist word for the everyday world. It was planned in three parts, and only the first was printed, in 1926, shortly before his execution. Gendai Business, the Kodansha site, describes a volume of about 308 pages with two sequels announced as forthcoming; it reports that he received a copy shortly before his death and that few copies survived. He dedicated it to the girls who had died because of him. The book was soon banned, probably as contrary to public order and morals, the Bunshun retrospective says, and the other two parts never appeared.
The Bunshun writer read it as self-dramatizing and uneven in tone, but of some value for its argument that surroundings shape people. Fukiage built the book around the image of a child born pure and spoiled by poverty and bad handling, and closed it with a short set of precepts for parents about hunger, schooling, play and a happy household. He was hanged at Ichigaya Prison in Tokyo at 10 a.m. on September 28, 1926. The Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, reporting the execution that evening, noted that his autobiography had been published.
Some prison books were commissioned by the state’s own experts. Leonarda Cianciulli, a fortune teller and secondhand-clothes dealer from Montella in Irpinia, was convicted on July 20, 1946, by the assize court of Reggio Emilia of murdering three women of Correggio in 1939 and 1940, with theft and desecration of corpses. The court rejected a psychiatrist’s finding that she was wholly insane and held her partly of unsound mind. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison and three in a criminal asylum; in practice she spent the rest of her life in judicial asylums.
The psychiatrist was Filippo Saporito, director of the criminal asylum at Aversa, and it was at his request that she wrote her memoir there. Francesca Mogavero, in her 2024 book on the case, puts the manuscript at more than 700 handwritten pages; Focus, the Italian science magazine, puts it at about 800. In it Cianciulli denied that she had killed out of hatred or greed and presented the killings as acts of a mother’s love, the same claim she had made to the court.
What she wrote is now the main source for her early life, and historians handle it with care. Barbara Bracco, whose history of the case was published by Il Mulino in 2018, treats both the memoir and Cianciulli’s statements cautiously, according to a review in Doppiozero, because details may have been embellished, shaped by the way the psychiatrist saw her, or meant to protect her son, who was tried with her and acquitted. In 2010 a University of Bologna team led by Augusto Balloni drew on the memoir, her letters and the trial papers for a book of new research, and one chapter in it, by Raffaella Sette, studied her handwriting.
Cianciulli died of a stroke at the women’s judicial asylum in Pozzuoli on October 15, 1970. Two photographs taken for her file that July, about three months before her death, were published for the first time in May 2024, after a Ferrara publisher spent some 15 years in her prison and clinical records. Il Resto del Carlino reported that the file added nothing of significance to what was known of the crimes. The memoir had already said what she wanted said.
Japan produced another death-row book nearly half a century after Fukiage’s. Kiyoshi Okubo, a 36-year-old parolee, killed eight girls and young women in Gunma Prefecture between March 31 and May 10, 1971. The Maebashi District Court convicted him of murder, with other charges, on February 22, 1973, and sentenced him to death. He did not appeal.
He was moved to the Tokyo Detention House, and in October 1973 a book was published under his name, Ketsubetsu no Sho: Shikeishu Okubo Kiyoshi Gokuchu Shuki, roughly "A Chapter of Farewell: The Prison Notes of Death Row Prisoner Kiyoshi Okubo." Bunshun Online, in a 2026 account of the case, describes the book as an argument that no one understood how badly he himself had been wronged, and reads it as the work of a man who saw himself as the victim.
The journalist Keiko Horikawa, writing about the Buddhist priest Fuso Watanabe, a volunteer prison chaplain for more than 50 years, describes Okubo’s years at the detention house: about three years in a single cell, exercising, reading and writing notes, refusing the guards' repeated urging to accept religious counseling. His sister wrote to him and sent him clothes until the end. He was hanged on January 22, 1976, at 41.
The case went on in other hands. The writer Akira Tsukuba published a nonfiction book about it in 1982, and in August 1983 the TBS network aired a drama based on that book, with the comedian Beat Takeshi as Okubo. The prison notes were the one account he wrote himself.
Few prison memoirs have ended in a conviction for their author. Edward Wayne Edwards’s did, though by an indirect route.
Edwards was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1933 and spent his early years in a Catholic orphanage. In the 1950s and early 1960s he was a car thief, robber and escapee, and in 1961 the FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list. He served his federal sentence at Leavenworth, credited a guard there with turning his life around, and was paroled in 1967. He then toured as a reformed man, giving talks to young people about staying out of crime. In 1972 he published an autobiography, Metamorphosis of a Criminal, which carried the same message. Its account of his childhood is his own; he later told the Associated Press that his publisher had embellished most of it.
The book sat on shelves for decades. In March 2009 a Madison television station and the Daily Jefferson County Union revisited the 1980 killings of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, both 19, in Jefferson County, Wisconsin. One of Edwards’s daughters, then living in Ohio, read the coverage. In early May 2009 she called Detective Chad Garcia of the Jefferson County sheriff’s office, told him her suspicions about her father and pointed him to the 1972 autobiography, the Daily Jefferson County Union later reported. Garcia read it and went to Ohio to interview her.
Edwards was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 30, 2009, and charged with the Wisconsin murders. In June 2010 he pleaded guilty to the two Wisconsin killings and to the aggravated murders of Billy Lavaco and Judy Straub in Summit County, Ohio, in 1977. He then confessed to killing his foster son, Dannie Boy Edwards, in 1996, and in March 2011 a three-judge panel in Geauga County sentenced him to death. He died of natural causes in custody in Columbus, Ohio, on April 7, 2011, less than a month later.
The memoir had been meant as a warning to the young. In the end it served as a guide for a detective reading backward through a life. It proved nothing about the killings by itself; the convictions rested on his pleas.
The most consequential legal fight over a prison manuscript began in a Tamil Nadu sub-jail. Shankar, known as Auto Shankar, a former auto-rickshaw driver who ran illicit arrack and a brothel on the southern edge of Madras, was convicted with members of his gang of six murders committed in 1987 and 1988 and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of India dismissed his appeal on April 4, 1994.
According to the Supreme Court’s later judgment, he wrote an autobiography of about 300 pages while held in the Chengalpattu sub-jail in 1991 and handed it to his wife, with the knowledge of the jail authorities, to pass to his lawyer. He asked that it be published in Nakkheeran, a Tamil weekly. The magazine announced the series on May 21, 1994. Its editors later told the court that police and prison officials feared their links with the condemned man would be exposed, and that Shankar was pressured into disowning the publication; the state denied it. On June 15 the Inspector General of Prisons wrote to the editor that the serial was written by someone else in Shankar’s name, called it unlawful and warned of legal action. Nakkheeran printed parts of the account in June and then stopped.
The editor, R. Rajagopal, went to the Supreme Court. On October 7, 1994, Justices B. P. Jeevan Reddy and S. C. Sen ruled in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu. The court declined to decide who had written the manuscript, treating it as Shankar’s only as an assumption. It held that a right to privacy was implicit in the right to life and liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution; that material in the public record, including court records, was generally open to publication; that officials could not claim privacy over their official conduct; and that no law gave the state power to impose a prior restraint on the press. The magazine could print what the public record held, at its own risk beyond that.
The judgment outlived the case and is still cited as a leading Indian ruling on privacy and the press. Shankar himself was executed in 1995, according to Amnesty International. His autobiography, whoever wrote it, is remembered chiefly for the law it made.
In Britain the same quarrel ran the other way, and the prisoner lost.
Dennis Nilsen, a Scottish-born former Army cook and civil servant, was convicted at the Central Criminal Court on November 4, 1983, of six murders and two attempted murders of young men in London between 1978 and 1983. While on remand he wrote extensively about his life and the killings, and the writer Brian Masters, who corresponded with him, drew on those notes for Killing for Company, published in 1985. It won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for non-fiction.
From about 1992 Nilsen wrote an autobiography of his own. By 1996 it ran to about 400 closely typed pages, and that year, at HMP Whitemoor, he gave the typescript to his solicitor, who took it out of the prison without the authorities' knowledge or consent. In 2001 a new solicitor sent a copy back to him marked as privileged legal correspondence. The governor returned it, and in October 2002 the Prison Service refused to pass it on, ruling that it was material intended for publication about his offences and did not fall within the exceptions for serious comment on crime or justice.
Nilsen argued that the refusal breached his freedom of expression. The High Court rejected him in December 2003, and the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in November 2004, holding that Masters' book did not make the restriction pointless; an account in Nilsen’s own words would still cause public outrage. On March 9, 2010, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously declared his application inadmissible, finding the restriction lawful and necessary in a democratic society.
Nilsen died in custody on May 12, 2018. The copies outside the prison survived him. Edited by his next of kin, the book was published in January 2021 under the title he had chosen, History of a Drowning Boy, after a near drowning he described from his Fraserburgh childhood. Reports at the time said it described further killings never tested in court. Relatives of victims objected to its publication. The courts had kept the book from him for as long as he lived, and no longer.
Ian Brady was convicted at Chester Assizes on May 6, 1966, of the murders of John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17. In 1987 he confessed to the killings of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12; he was never charged with them. From 1985 he was held at Ashworth, a high-security psychiatric hospital on Merseyside, and from there he wrote at length.
In 2001 the Los Angeles publisher Feral House brought out his book The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis, with an introduction by the writer Colin Wilson, his longtime correspondent. In it Brady discussed a series of other killers and claimed that such men understood the criminal mind better than psychiatrists, reporters or police. Publishers Weekly called the argument unremarkable and the chapters on individual killers gratuitous. The criminologist James Sheptycki, reviewing it in Criminal Justice Matters in 2003, read it as Brady’s final statement.
Brady died at Ashworth on May 15, 2017. Eight years later a second manuscript surfaced. In July 2025 a BBC Two documentary reported that the archive of the theologian Alan Keightley, Brady’s interviewer, who died in 2023, held 394 typed pages of an unfinished autobiography titled Black Light, covering his relationship with Myra Hindley and stopping shortly before the murder of John Kilbride. Keightley had written that Brady described the full manuscript as at least 600 pages. A former Greater Manchester Police detective called the material extraordinary. Keith Bennett’s brother said that any missing pages should be given to police, and the force said it would act on any credible evidence. Keith Bennett has never been recovered. As of October 2026, no handover of the missing pages to police had been reported.
Brady’s books reached print freely; it was the pages he did not publish that his victims' families wanted.
Danny Rolling pleaded guilty on February 15, 1994, to the first-degree murders of five students in Gainesville, Florida, in August 1990, with other charges, and was sentenced to death that April. While he awaited trial he became engaged to Sondra London, a writer the Florida Supreme Court described as his fiancée and biographer. In August 1993 the St. Petersburg Times reported that she had published his prison writings, in which he described Florida State Prison as hell on earth.
Money followed the pages. In December 1999 a judge ruled that neither Rolling nor his former fiancée would benefit from his writings or artwork, and the St. Petersburg Times reported that the victims' families stood to receive the proceeds instead. Rolling went on writing and drawing on death row for years. He was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006.
Set side by side, the cases look less like a genre than a running argument. Panzram’s pages were carried out of a jail by a guard who wanted reform; Cianciulli’s were asked for by a psychiatrist; Fukiage’s began on a lawyer’s advice. Okubo wrote to explain himself and Brady to lecture. Edwards wrote as a penitent, and his book became the thread his own daughter handed to a detective decades later.
The authorities' answers have been just as varied. A Taisho-era censor banned Fukiage’s first volume within months. The Prison Service kept Nilsen’s typescript from him and the courts of two jurisdictions agreed, while the Supreme Court of India, faced with a condemned man’s serial in a Tamil weekly, told a state government it had no power to stop the presses. A Florida judge sent Rolling’s proceeds to the families of the people he killed.
None of these books settled anything about the crimes. Historians read Cianciulli with caution and Okubo as self-pity; reviewers dismissed Brady; Edwards conceded his publisher had embellished his life. Nilsen’s last book was reported to describe killings no court would ever weigh. What the pages preserve is the voice each author chose for himself or herself, set down in a cell, and the long dispute, among guards, judges, publishers and the families left behind, over who should be allowed to hear it.
• 1906: Sataro Fukiage kills an 11-year-old girl in Kyoto; later convicted and sentenced to life.
• May 7, 1925: Maebashi District Court sentences Fukiage to death; he begins his autobiography on his lawyer’s advice.
• 1926: The first volume of Fukiage’s Shaba is printed and soon banned; he is hanged in Tokyo on September 28, 1926.
• August 1928: Carl Panzram begins writing his life story for the guard Henry Lesser in the District of Columbia jail.
• September 5, 1930: Panzram is hanged at Leavenworth.
• July 20, 1946: Leonarda Cianciulli is convicted at Reggio Emilia; she later writes her memoir at the judicial asylum of Aversa.
• May 6, 1966: Ian Brady is convicted at Chester Assizes.
• 1970: Killer: A Journal of Murder, built on Panzram’s manuscript, is published; Cianciulli dies at Pozzuoli on October 15.
• 1972: Edward Wayne Edwards publishes Metamorphosis of a Criminal.
• October 1973: Kiyoshi Okubo’s prison notes are published in Japan.
• January 22, 1976: Okubo is hanged at the Tokyo Detention House.
• November 4, 1983: Dennis Nilsen is convicted at the Central Criminal Court.
• 1985: Brian Masters publishes Killing for Company, drawn on Nilsen’s remand notes.
• 1991: Auto Shankar writes his autobiography in the Chengalpattu sub-jail.
• August 1993: Sondra London publishes Danny Rolling’s prison writings.
• October 7, 1994: The Supreme Court of India decides R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu.
• 1996: Nilsen gives his typescript to his solicitor at HMP Whitemoor.
• December 1999: A Florida judge rules that Rolling and his former fiancée may not profit from his writings or artwork.
• 2001: Feral House publishes Brady’s The Gates of Janus.
• October 2002: The Prison Service refuses to pass Nilsen his manuscript.
• October 25, 2006: Rolling is executed at Florida State Prison.
• May 2009: Edwards’s daughter points a Wisconsin detective to his 1972 autobiography.
• March 9, 2010: The European Court of Human Rights declares Nilsen’s application inadmissible.
• April 7, 2011: Edwards dies in custody in Columbus, Ohio.
• January 2021: Nilsen’s History of a Drowning Boy is published.
• July 2025: A BBC Two documentary reports the Black Light typescript in Alan Keightley’s archive.