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BURN BABY! BURN!  During the early years of the twentieth century the German-American Carl Panzram went on a life-long campaign of murder and mayhem. He claimed to have killed 21 people, to have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies and arson attacks and to have sodomized more than 1,000 men. Born in 1891 to a family of immigrant Prussian farmers in
Warren, Minesota, Panzarm became a criminal as a young boy. His father had
deserted his family soon after Panzram’s birth and his mother could not control
him. When he was just eight years old he was brought before a juvenile court
for being drunkand disorderly. Then, after burgling the house of a well-to-do
neighbor, he was sent to reform school, where the discipline was rigid, if not
sadistic. Pazram burned the place down. Released in 1960, he began his war against the world in
earnest, starting in the west, where he committed a string of robberies and
assaults. While traveling the country he was raped by four hoboes, which
instilled a mode of revenge in him: ‘Whenever I met a hobo who wasn’t too rusty
looking,’ he later wrote in his wrote in his autobiography, ‘I would make him
raise his hands and drop his pants. I wasn’t very particular either. I rode
them old and young, tall and short, white and black.’ Having ended up in
Montana State Reformatory, he quickly escaped from jail, robbing and burning
down several churches over the next couple of months. Then he joined the army,
only to be court-martialed on 20 April 1907 for insubordination and pilfering US- government
property. Three years spent at Forth Leavenworth, where he crushed rocks under
the blistering After his release in 1910 Panzram headed for Mexico, where
he joined up with the rebel leader Pascaul Orozco, who fought alongside Pancho
Villa and Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution. He later returned to
the USA, leaving a trail of
murder, robbery, assault and rape in his wake as he moved north through Arrested in Chinook, The facility’s warden was shot dead during an escape
attempt, and although the new warden was even thougher Panzram still managed to
burn down the prison’s workshop, as well as a flax mill. he also went berserk
with an axe and incited a prison revolt, for which he was given another seven
years in jail. By now, however, the atmosphere in the prison was so tense that
the guards would not venture into the yard, so the warden was dismissed. The
next warden was an idealist who believed that Panzram might respond to
kindness. When Panzram was next caught trying to escape the warden told him he
was the ‘meanest and most cowardly degenerate’ that the prison authorities had
ever seen. Panzram agreed in this description, but to his astonishment instead
of punishing him the warden let him leave the jail on condition that he
returned that evening. Although Panzram walked through the prison gates with no
intention of going back he did, in fact, return that evening. The liberal was
maintained and Panzram continued to respond to it, that is recaptured after a
gunfight. He was returned to a punishment cell, where he was fed a diet of
bread and water, also being beaten and sprayed with a fire hose. Finally, the
ever resourceful Panzram constructed his own tools and hacked his way out of
the prison in May 1918. He headed east, stealing $1,200 from a hotel in Panzram served a six month jail sentenced in Bridgeport for pretty
theft before being arrested again for inciting a riot during a labour dispute.
Jumping bail, he headed for western Africa,
where he continued murder spree. On one occasion he was approached by a
12-year-old boy who was begging for money. He was looking for something. He
found it, too’, wrote Panzram later. ‘First I committed sodomy on him and then
I killed him.’ He smashed in the boy’s head with rock: ‘his brains were coming
out of his ears when I left him and he will never be deader’, Panzram enthused.
Panzram once decided to go to crocodile-hunting and hired six black porters to
guide him through the backwaters, later shooting them in their back and feeding
them to crocodiles. Back in the USA Panzram raped and killed three more boys.
In June 1923, while he was working as a night watchman for the New Haven Yacht
Club, he stole a boat, killing a man who clambered aboard and tossing the body
into New York Kingston Bay.
He was eventually caught attempting to rob an office in Larchmont, When he tried to escape from Clinton Prison he was tortured
by having his hands tied behind his back and then being suspended by a rope from
a beam. He could endure this for 12 hours on end, all the while screaming and
cursing his mother for having bought him to the world. Despite his horrendous
treatment at the hands of the guards, one of them, Henry Lesser sympathized
with Panzram and persuaded him to write his autobiography. Panzram did so,
making no excuses for himself in it, that he had broken any law of God and
humanity and further more commenting that if there had been more laws in
existence he had broken those, too. Released yet again in 1928, Panzram hit the
Washington-Baltimore area like a one man crime wave, committing eleven
robberies and one murder. He was soon arrested. At his trial he addressed the
jury, saying ‘While you were me here, I was trying all of you. I have found you
guilty. Some of you I have already executed. If I live, I’ll execute some more
of you. I hate the whole human race’. The judge sentenced him to 25 years in
jail. ‘Visit me’, Panzram retorted. At Forth Leavenworth Panzram told his guards ‘I’ll kill the
first man that bothers me’. True to his word, he murdered the mild mannered,
civilian prison-laundry supervisor Robert G Warnke with an iron bar. After a
hasty trial Panzram was sentenced to death by hanging. Meanwhile, Lesser had
been hawking Panzram’s autobiography around the literary establishment, which
included the legendary newspaperman H L Menken. People were impressed by it, but
when Panzram heard that they were thinking of starting a movement to work for
his reprieved he protested, saying I would not reform if the front gate was
opened right now and I was given a million dollars when I stepped out. I have
no desire to do good or become good’. The Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment also
stepped into try to save his neck, but he told it to forget it. Hanging would
be a real pleasure and a big relief’ for him, he said. ‘The only thanks you or
your kind will ever get from me for your effort is that I wish you all had one
neck and I had my hands on it. I believe that the only way to reform people is
to kill them. My motto is: “Rob ‘em all, rape them all and kill them all.”’ He
even turned on Lesser in his writing in his last letter ‘What gets me as much
about me as you do, can still be friendly towards a thing like me when I even
despise and detest my own self’. The
end could not come soon enough for Carl Panzram. He was standing on the gallows
on 11 September 1930 when the hangman, a son of |
