9/5/1930 - "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 the least bit sorry!" Hung by the neck until dead for murdering prison laundry foreman, 47-year-old Robert Warnke (he leaves behind a widow, Florence, and a son, Maurice), the horrific life of 39-year-old Charles "Carl" Panzram, a man-made monster of the first degree (his credo is might makes right), comes to a fitting end at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Panzram
Warnke
Born on June 28, 1891 to East Prussian immigrants, Johann and Matilda Gottlieb Panzram of East Grand Forks, Minnesota, Carl's life as a member of the farm family goes off the rails early and he is a liar and a thief by the tender age of only (his father abandons the family when Carl is a mere rugrat) ... a liar and a thief who gets meaner and meaner the older he becomes. In 1899, Panzram appears in juvenile court for the first time on drunk and disorderly charges (perhaps a cause in Panzram's misanthropy, too poor for proper medical help, the boy undergoes a mastoid operation on the family's kitchen table). 1903 sees the 11-year-old arrested and jailed for being drunk and incorrigible, and in the same year after stealing some cake, apples, and a revolver from a neighbor, his parents send him to the Minnesota State Training School in Red Wing, where Panzram is repeatedly beaten, tortured, and raped by the institution's staff (punished for infractions such as throwing a crayon at a boy, talking back to a teacher, putting sugar in his pocket stealing butter, breaking a dish, and using foul language, Panzram will vow to burn down the place someday, and does so without being detected on July 7, 1905). Paroled back to his mother in 1906, Carl is soon kicked out of the house for stealing money from his mother's purse, and at the age of 14, becomes a train hobo moving about the country. During this period of time, Carl will attempt to kill a local Lutheran cleric he finds bothersome with a revolver, and on one of his travels out to the West Coast he is raped by a group of adult hobos. Placed in the Montana State Reform School, along with inmate Jimmie Benson, Carl escapes from the institution and begins a crime spree of petty thievery which will last into the new year. At the age of 15, Panzram gets drunk in a Montana saloon, lies about his age, and enlists in the United States Army. It is no more of a home for the youth than his family's farm was, and he is soon brought up on larceny charges, found guilty, given a dishonorable discharge, and sentenced to spend two years behind bars at Leavenworth's infamous Disciplinary Barracks (where he will endure more beatings, and with hard labor the institute puts him through, becoming a heavily muscled monster of 200 pounds that stands six feet tall, stares out at the world with cold, grey eyes and sports a left arm tattoo of a boat anchor, on his right arm is another boat anchor and an Asian man's head, and on his chest there is a two-headed eagle with the word "Liberty" over one wing, and the word "Justice" over the other).
Reform School
Torture
Out in 1910, Panzram moves about the country stealing anything he can get his hands on, from a bicycle to a yacht, but doing it so poorly that under his own name or a variety of aliases, he spends time incarcerated in Fresno, California (he escapes after 30 days), Rusk, Texas, The Dalles, Oregon (guilty of highway robbery, assault, and sodomy, he spends three months in the local jail before escaping), Harrison, Idaho (and escapes from the county jail), Butte, Montana, the Montana State Prison (escaping in November after being admitted to the institution the previous April), the Oregon State Penitentiary (he is sentenced to seven years for burglarizing a home in Astoria, while there, he helps a fellow convict escape and spends 61 days in solitary confinement supping on cockroaches before escaping in September of 1917 ... engaging in two gun battles with police, he will be recaptured and returned to the prison, but escapes again by sawing through the bars of his cell and catches a freight train going east), Bridgeport, Connecticut, the Sing Sing Prison, the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York, and Washington D.C. "Rage personified" is how Panzram describes himself, and often he will also rape the victims he is stealing from. Perfect for Panzram's personality is the one job he successfully holds down during this period ... breaking the arms and legs of union strikers (he also tries to enlist in the Federal Mexican Army in Ciudad Juarez in 1910 ... a trip that also sees him attack and strangle a man once he returns to Texas for a payday of $35). Obtaining a Seaman Identification card in New York, Panzram becomes an international menace when he sails to Panama as a crew member aboard the steamship, James S. Whitney. From Panama there are criminal adventures in Peru (for a time he works at one of the country's many copper mines), Chile, London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Hamburg.
Panzram As Jeff Davis
Oregon State Prison
Panzram's Oregon State Cell
Back in the United States by August of 1920, believing the former president of the United States, William Howard Taft, is responsible for the time he spent in Leavenworth, Panzram breaks into the politician's New Haven, Connecticut home and helps himself to jewelry, cash, bonds, and a Colt M1911 .45-caliber handgun. Using the money he acquires burglarizing the 27th President's home, Panzram buys a yacht named the Akista and begins a murder spree that will last eight years. Modus operandi simple, Panzram haunts New York sailor bars, identifies his victim, gets the man drunk, lures the men on to his boat with promises of more booze, money, or a job, then once the men are aboard, makes his way out to sea where he assaults and shoots the men before dumping the bodies in Long Island Sound. Ten victims easy, Panzram is forced to find a new outlet for his hatred of mankind when he runs Akista aground in the waters off Atlantic City, New Jersey (and has to swim ashore with his expected next victim. Arrested on burglary and possessing a loaded handgun charges while using the alias John O'Leary, Panzram spends six months in jail and upon release, decides it is time to put some distance between himself and various American police departments, and transports himself to southern Africa. Arriving in the Portuguese Angola town of Luanda, Panzram talks his way into a foreman job on a oil rig that he will eventually burn down. Murder time again, in Angola the maniac rapes and beats to death an 11-year-old child (glorying in how the boy's brain oozed out of his ears) and kills with a Luger pistol a batch of six men he has hired to row him up a nearby river (the corpses are fed to the local population of crocodiles). Then its back to the United States for more trouble!
Taft
Panzram With Another Alias
Another Look
Panzram's Yacht
Two children have the misfortune of meeting Panzram in 1922, one murdered with a rock and one strangled to death. Then the monster turns to the sea again looking for victims to rob and rape, this time operating off the stolen yacht of the police chief of New Rochelle, New York. Summer of 1923 crimes include shooting a man to death and dumping his body in the Atlantic, stealing $1,000 worth of fishing nets, and raping a 15-year-old boy named Georg Walosin, who sends Panzram back to jail when he jumps off the killer's latest death boat, swims to shore, and tells the authorities all about "O'Leary's" antics. Arrested in Nyack, New Jersey, Panzram cons his shady lawyer into posting bail money for him by turning over the title to the stolen yacht ... and then skipping out on his trial. After breaking into a train dept in Larchmont, New York the following month, Panzram is arrested again and spends five years at the Clinton Prison in Dannemora, New York (there, he fights with convicts and guards, tries to firebomb a workshop, tries to club a guard to death, and trying to escape by jumping off one of the walls of the prison, breaks both of his legs and ankles, and sustains damage to his spine; injuries that will not be treated for fourteen months and will cause Panzram to walk with a limp for the rest of his life). Released in 1928, Panzram moves to Baltimore and picks up right where he left off ... murdering a man he picks up in a local bar, and of course, getting arrested yet again, this time for the burglary of a Washington D.C. dentist's home (the take is a watch and some jewelry). Confessing to three murders, and his plans to poison a large city's water supply with arsenic and to start a war between Great Britain and the United States by scuttling an English warship in New York Harbor, Panzram is not believed, but does receive a 25-years-to-life sentence for his latest theft and other criminal acts (grinning, he tells the judge to come "visit me"). Shipped off to Leavenworth, Kansas to serve his sentence, Panzram is assigned #31614 and warns the warden that he will kill the first man "... that bothers me." Sadly, on June 20, 1929, laundry foreman Robert Warnke bothers Panzram.
Sing-Sing Panzram
D.C. Panzram
Leavenworth
Cutting Panzram no slack, Warnke writes up the convict on trivial infractions that send the killer to solitary several times. Seemingly just another day, on June 20, 1929, Panzram grabs a four foot long iron bar being used as a support for a group of wooden transport boxes for finished laundry. Coming up behind where the unaware foreman is doing paperwork, Panzram brings the bar down full force on Warnke head, crushing the man's skull ... and then he hits him again and again (while calling out, "Here's another one for you, you son-of-a-bitch!"). Pulp death accomplished, with nothing left to lose, Panzram then turns on the other convicts working in the laundry ... laughing as he repeatedly swings the iron bar about as if it is a baseball bat, smashing bones, destroying desks, breaking furniture, and smashing lights until over a dozen guards finally arrive. Horrified but what they can see in the laundry, the men unlock the door of the workshop and are surprised when a blood covered Panzram walks out the door and quietly returns to his cell. Placed on trial for his latest murder on April 14, 1930, with both guards and convicts as witnesses, and Panzram serving as his own attorney, the jury hearing the case arrives at a guilty verdict after deliberating for only 45 minutes. Sentenced to be hung by the neck until he is dead (a verdict that causes the killer's face to break into a huge grin), Panzram tells do-gooders that want to appeal the sentence on the grounds of his many years of torture as a prisoner to leave him alone and wishes every one of them could be combined into one neck that he could choke to death (he even writes President Herbert Hoover to NOT commute his sentence, his own words say it all, "I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try and reform me., and I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill 'em!").
Warnke Tombstone
On a cold September 5, 1930, Panzram is taken from his cell for the last time at 5:55 in the morning (the night before, he walks back in forth in his cell, singing a pornographic song he wrote for himself). Unlike some when faced with imminent death, there are no apologies for his actions and he remains a monster to the very end ... gleeful to be gone, on the walk to the gallows he jumps at the guards to make them flinch, curses his mother for his birth, verbally attacks the whole human race, rushes up the 13 steps of the gallows ahead of the U.S. marshals escorting him, defiantly stares at the witnesses that have been assembled for his execution, puts the noose around his own neck, spits in the face of the executioner as he tried to put a black hood on Panzram, and when asked if he has any last words, responds, "Yes, hurry it up you Hoosier bastard, I could kill a dozen men while you're screwing around." Noose secured and hood in place, at 6:03 a.m., the trap doors of the gallows and open and Panzram plunges five and half feet to a death in which his body jerks about and sways from side to side. Fifteen minutes later, body lowered to the crowd, Panzram is declared dead by Dr. Justin K. Fuller, taken to the prison hospital for an autopsy, then transferred to his final resting spot at the prison cemetery in a wheelbarrow, and buried under a tombstone stating only 31614. And that should have ended Panzram's story, were it not for the work of two men ... acclaimed American psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Augustus Menninger, and Washington D.C. prison guard, Henry Lesser.
Panzram's Cell - Last Near Window
Leavenworth Gallows
Where Panzram Rots
Headlines
In the region setting up the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas with members of his family, at the request of the court during his murder trial, Panzram is examined by the good doctor, who writes about the murderer in his 1938 book, "Man Against Himself. But it is Lesser who really keeps the memory of Panzram alive. A rookie guard when Panzram is jailed in Washington D.C. in 1928, Lesser is horrified at the beatings Panzram receives from the other guards at the jail, and taking pity on the convict, sees that Panzram gets a dollar to spend on cigarettes. The first act of decency Panzram has experienced in years, a delicate friendship between the two men develops (but not fully, turning his back on the convict one day as he leaves Panzram's cell, Lesser is told in no uncertain terms to never do it again as Panzram says he might give in to his darker needs and kill the man if given the opportunity) and sensing the convict has a tale to tell, he gets the killer to tell it by supplying him with paper and pencil. The manuscript that Lesser will receive is a one-of-a-kind walk through the horrific penal systems that produced Panzram, and the sordid details of his many crimes ... a 20,000 word confession of evil and depravity. Too graphic for its time, Lesser will spend four decades trying to get the autobiography published, finally succeeding in 1970 when Panzram's story comes out as Killer: A Journal of Murder (optioned to Hollywood, in 1996 the book will be made into a movie starring Robert Sean Leonard as Lesser and Academy Award nominee James Woods as Panzram). In 1980, Lesser donates the hand written manuscript and the letters he and Panzram exchanged before the killer's death to San Diego State University, where they are housed in Malcolm A. Love Library. A glimpse into the hell of a murder's mind, the Panzram story surfaces again in 2012, when filmmaker John Borowski makes a documentary about Panzram (with a little Lesser in spots) entitled, Carl Panzram: The Spirit of Hatred and Vengeance.
Lesser
Manuscript
The Book
Artwork?
The Hollywood Take
The monster's life is ended today ... 9/5/1930!
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