Carl Panzram
Carl Panzram was an alcoholic at the age of nine, from then on he was heavily involved in crime. He spent alot of time in corrective institutions where he was brutalised by punishments. When he finished his term in 1910 at Fort Leavenworth prison, he said ‘All the good that may have been in me had been kicked and beaten out of me long before.’
He continued to rob and steal which he shared with prison sentences. Panzram was also an arsonist and sodomizer, and paticulary enjoyed mugging people, then killing them.
In 1920, Panzram collected $45,000 from a series of robberies, he even stole from the one of the presidents of the US. From one robbery he stole a gun, from which he killed ten men.
Panzram kept on the move, sailing to Europe and working in Africa, where he regulary killed and sodomized.
When Panzram returned back to the USA he continued to commit house robberies, until he was caught.
He received a sentence of 25 years to be served at Fort Leavenworth Prison in 1928, there he wrote his memoirs. On the 20 June 1929 he took his revenge on one prison guard who had beaten him, by killing him in the laundry room.
At trial Panzram pleaded guilty to murder and thought it was his own constitutional rights to be hanged. At trial he thanked the judge and jury for the sentence of hanging. He objected when a reform group sought to prevent his hanging; he said ‘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.’ Carl Panzram, self confessed killer of twenty one persons, was hanged on the 5 September 1930 at Fort Leavenworth Prison. One jailer edited his autobiography to be published but it was rejected because of its content; it was not until 1970, some forty years later that it was published.