SERIAL KILLER, CARL PANZRAM

In his lifetime, Carl Panzram plagued this world time and again with countless unthinkable acts. He killed numerous men, robbed numerous innocent people and homes, set numerous fires and even committed countless acts of sodomy. A con artist of sorts was he, being a man who lived and worked in many states, usually under cover of an alias. Panzram was an inexhaustible bandit, but he was frequently caught and imprisoned. Wholly defiant, Panzram would get into trouble by attacking guards and refusing their orders, constantly popping off at the mouth which led to his being subjected to harsh punishments. Arguably a daring mastermind, a true master of escape was Carl Panzram---the Houdini of serial killers--- who found a way to not only escape every prison sentence early, but would usually strike out with an untamable revenge against those who put him away. Carl was an alcoholic, a thief, a vandal, a burden on society and one major pain in the ass. ---Pun absolutely intended---

June 28th 1891 in Warren, Minnesota, John and Matilda Panzram gave birth to Carl Panzram, a baby boy whom they raised on their family farm. Carl was always a bit of a trouble maker, even as far as getting arrested his first time at the tender age of 8 years old, for being drunk and disorderly. Carl eventually had five brothers and one sister. He later said that his siblings were honest and dedicated farmers, though the same traits were not passed on to him. -“I have been a human animal ever since I was born…I was a thief and a liar,” he said. “The older I got the meaner I got.”- When Carl reached the age of 7, his parents ended their marriage. Of course, for people at their economic level, there was no divorce, no courts, and no alimony and child support. His father simply left the farm one day and never returned.  As a result, the family faced a bleak future. They worked the farm from sun-up to sundown with very little to show for their labors. During these early years, Carl was beaten by his brothers continuously for any reason no matter how insignificant. “Everybody thought it was all right to deceive me, lie to me and kick me around whenever they felt like it, and they felt like it pretty regular,” he later wrote.   Carl broke into a neighbor’s home when he was 11. He stole anything he could get his hands on, including a handgun. He was quickly found out by his brothers, who beat him unconscious. Carl was later arrested for the crime and in 1903 sent to the Minnesota State Training School, a reform institution for juveniles.

Located in the town of Red Wing on the Mississippi River, south of St. Paul, the Minnesota State Training School contained about 300 boys whose ages varied from 10 years old and up to 20 years old. The school population was at the mercy of the jailers who were under little or no outside supervision, a condition that promoted or at least allowed a level of abuse that cannot be imagined today. The admissions log, dated October 11, 1903, lists Panzram’s crime as “incorrigibility” and the relationship of his parents as “quarrelsome.”  When Carl arrived at Red Wing he was brought into a reception office where a male staff member examined him. The frightened boy was stripped naked and questioned about his sexual practices. -“He examined my penis and my rectum, asking me if I had ever committed fornication or sodomy or had ever had sodomy committed on me or if I had ever masturbated,”- he later wrote. It was an admonition of what was to come.

The inmates also received Christian training and when they misbehaved or failed to learn the lessons properly, they were attacked by angry, vindictive attendants. Because Carl received little formal education when he lived on the farm, he was unable to read very well. For this he was also beaten regularly. “I may not have accomplished much in a scholarly way while there but I learned how to become a first class liar…and the beginnings of degeneracy,” he said. Soon he developed a hatred for the attendants and everything connected to religion, which he saw as the cause of his suffering. -“I first began to think that I was being unjustly imposed upon. Then I began to hate those who abused me. Then I began to think that I would have my revenge just as soon and as often as I could injure someone else. Anyone at all would do,”- he later said.
The more beatings he endured, the more hateful he became. He was hit with wooden planks, thick leather straps, whips and heavy paddles. But during all that time, Carl was planning revenge. On the night of July 7, 1905, he prepared a simple device that started a fire after he left the building. The fire quickly consumed the workshop at the school and it burnt to the ground while Carl lay in his bed laughing at the spectacle of sweet revenge.

Late 1905, Carl was on his way out of the horrors of the Minnesota State Training School. He learned to say the things the staff wanted to hear and when he appeared before the parole board, he convinced them that he was a changed boy and had been “reformed” by the school. “I was reformed all right…I had been taught by Christians how to be a hypocrite and I had learned more about stealing, lying, hating, burning and killing,” he said, “I had learned that a boy’s penis could be used for something besides to urinate with and that a rectum could be used for other purposes…” During that winter, Carl’s mother, Lizzie Panzram, arrived at the Red Wing School to bring him home. Carl had changed. Never an outgoing child even at home, he became more withdrawn, quiet and brooding.

He seemingly always had an issue with alcohol, which violently expressed itself in his teen years. Constantly in and out of trouble, usually for theft and burglary, but his mother had too many other things to worry about. One of Carl’s brothers had recently died in a drowning accident and her health was fragile. She had no time for a rebellious child who had a habit of getting into trouble. She may have thought that Carl would eventually work out his own problems. But even at this early age, he felt deep resentment toward his mother. -“Mother was too dumb to know anything good to teach me,” he said years later, “there was little love lost. I first liked her and respected her. My feelings gradually turned from that to distrust, dislike, and disgust, which from there it was very simple for my feelings to turn to into positive hatred towards her.”- Carl took his life into his own hands at the age of 14 and ran away from the farm and his constricting parents. Though the world was not kind to Carl, he encountered the cruelties of this world that appeared very Christian to him. The 14-year-old Carl Panzram was gang raped by a group of homeless men.

As Jeff Davis, Jefferson Davis, Jefferson Rhodes, Jeff Rhodes, Jack Allen, Jefferson Baldwin, John King and John O'Leary, Carl Panzram hid among society and acted out his most hideous crimes. He is documented for acting in Idaho, California, Montana, Nevada, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Jersey, D.C., Maryland and or course, his home state of Minnesota. Though there is no guarantee that his crimes didn’t reach out to other states while using a different name and disguise, leaving a trail of revenge and deceit along the way. One of his more notable acts of revenge took place in Salem, Oregon. It was June 24th 1915 when he became inmate #7390 at the Oregon state penitentiary, after being arrested and sentenced to seven years due to burglary and an attempt to sell the illegally obtained property. Warden Harry Minto believed in harsh treatment of inmates, which included beatings and isolation among other discipline measures. Panzram was defiant of the Warden, which earned him a great deal of extra attention, including a 61 day stint in solitary confinement. While there, he swore -“I would never do that seven years and I defied the warden and all his officers to make me.”- He wasn’t a liar but before breaking out of Salem in 1917, he helped out a friend by the name of Otto Hooker, who just so happened to murder Warden Harry Minto while on the loose.

His stint in the military fell short when accused of larceny, which landed him in Leavenworth at the hands of William H. Taft. This not only caused a rage to fester for the military, whom he considered getting revenge against by vandalizing British naval ships as to start a war, but nobody more than William H. Taft for whom he carried a ten year grudge. Mr. Taft was secretary of war and approved the sentence, which is why he held Taft responsible for all of it. In a bitter attempt for revenge against Taft, he broke into his home upon breaking out of prison, though Taft was not there. He then decided to rob the man blind, getting away with a great number of items, including William H. Taft’s .45 caliber handgun, which came into play a short time later in his most gruesome of crimes.

It was in 1920 when Carl Panzram started his vicious career as a serial killer, that being the same year that he stole the future president’s pistol. Taft was clearly to be one of his illustrious victims, making it at least 22 victims in all. Perhaps it was two birds with one stone, when he used that very same .45 caliber to lure sailors away from bars as to beat, rape and murder them, though not always in that order. A nearby river served as the perfect dumping ground, which worked for at least 10 men, which only stopped when two potential victims escaped when shipwrecked just outside of Atlantic City.

Perhaps out of fear or maybe for sport—my money is on both-- Carl Panzram fled to Africa where he raped and murdered an 11-year- old African boy. God knows what he did to the boy, but in a confession he wrote -"His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader."- He also found time to hire at least 6 men to hunt crocodiles with him, but the plans changed once they reached the swamp. Panzram shot all 6 men to death---possibly molested them--- then dismembered them as to feed the crocodiles that he had traveled so far to see.

Back in the states Carl Panzram picked up on a different note, claiming that he had played vigilante when some punk tried to rob him. Though it wasn’t long until Panzram got right where he left off, living up to his modus operandi by finding himself two more victims. He raped and killed two small boys, beating one to death with a rock on July 18th, 1922 in Salem, Massachusetts and strangling the other with a belt on August 9th, 1923 in New London, Connecticut. From then until his arrest in 1928, Carl Panzram seemingly fell off the map, though he was undoubtedly keeping himself busy. In confession after what would be his final arrest, Panzram claimed to have killed men in D.C. and Charm City while burgling homes, as well as a another man in Philly, Pennsylvania. Only three of these last five killings are confirmed, but no number seems to be high enough to calculate the evil that lived within Carl Panzram. Clearly something happened to set off Mr. Panzram in 1920, for being an accessory after the fact is as close to murder he had ever been before that fateful year.

He served time in jails and prisons in California; Texas; Oregon; Idaho; Montana; Connecticut; New York; Washington D.C.; the infamous Sing Sing and Leavenworth, Kansas, though our nation’s capitol proved to be his undoing. It was there in a holding cell that he acted upon the kindness of a 26-year-old liberal minded guard by the name of Henry Lesser. Carl used writing materials passed on by Henry as to write his autobiography, detailing his ghastly crimes and the life and times of the 37–year-old man. With a 25 year sentence and a way trip back to Leavenworth, Carl Panzram swore to the warden -"I'll kill the first man that bothers me," – and as of June 20, 1929 he kept his word, by killing Robert Warnke, the foreman of the prison laundry in Leavenworth. Carl mercilessly beat the man to death with an iron bar, for which Carl Panzram was sentenced to death.

He refused to appeal, even threatening to kill human rights groups that attempted to appeal on his behalf. He would not be robbed of his requested death-by-hanging. On September 5, 1930, when asked by the executioner if he had any last words, Carl Panzram barked, -"Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill 10 men while you're fooling around!"- Carl died that day, but his autobiography lived on for 40 years in the hands of Henry Lesser, who fought for decades for the publication of the words of a man who lived only by this truth -"In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry." —Carl Panzram

Could it have been his parents failed marriage to blame, or the repeated acts of violence acted out upon him by his—loving--siblings? Was it his failed experiences in the Army, or perhaps his time in that Christian facility? The argument of nature vs. nurture comes to mind, raising the question of how loving his parents really were, or was it in fact the absence of love that he felt his entire life. Was this man a failed experiment by God, which was then blessed by Satan to reap havoc upon the world? Was this God, or was he made that way through years of systematic abuse? Perhaps that answers to these questions died in the gallows, or maybe it was a mystery even to him.

Leavenworth National Cemetery
Leavenworth County Kansas, USA
Plot: Row 6, Grave 24 (#31614)