Carl Panzram | Biography

Drifter Carl Panzram killed, by his own admission, 21 people. Unrepentant and unremorseful even at his hanging in 1930, Panzram insisted that attempts to reform criminals like him were futile. Panzram was born on a Minnesota farm in 1891 into a family which the father abandoned seven years later. The troubled youth began drinking at an early age and was first arrested at the age of eight for disorderly conduct. He ran away from home at the age of eleven but was caught and sent to a reform school, the Minnesota State Training School at Red Wing. There he was sodomized. He also developed a strong dislike for organized religion. He committed arson while there but was discharged at the age of 13. Next, he ran away from a Lutheran boarding school and began hopping freight cars on his way west. He was assaulted by four railroad hobos in a boxcar at one point. After another stint in a reform school, Panzram enlisted in the U.S. Army at the age of sixteen. He was soon court-martialed for theft and spent the next three years at Fort Leavenworth prison. For a time, he was shackled to a 50-pound iron ball and ate beans infested with worms. "All the good that may have been in me had been kicked and beaten out of me long before," Panzram later wrote of his time in Leavenworth.

After his discharge, Panzram robbed and sodomized victims in three midwestern states. By 1920, Panzram was on the East Coast, where some profitable robberies netted him several thousand dollars. He bought a yacht and recruited several New York-area sailors as crew. He let them drink themselves into a stupor, then raped and killed them. The bodies were dumped overboard. He committed a similar crime in Angola, where he claimed to have hired eight African men as guides for a crocodile hunt, whom he then shot and fed to the crocodiles.

In August 1928, Panzram was arrested in Washington, D. C. and tried to escape. As punishment, his arms were pinioned, and he was suspended several inches of the ground for more than a day. The agony caused him to confess to several murders, and a sensitive prison guard, Harry Lesser, took pity on him and encouraged him to write his memoirs, which went unpublished until 1970.

Panzram was sentenced to 25 years at Fort Leavenworth. In June of 1929, he smashed the skull of a prison laundry worker and was tried on murder charges for the first time. He received the death sentence. When a reform group tried to fight it on his behalf, he wrote them a letter which read, in part: "I wish you all had one neck, and I had my hands on it.... I believe the only way to reform people is to kill them." He was hanged on September 5, 1930.