Charles "Carl" Panzram was a highly experienced criminal. The serial killer, spree killer, mass murderer, rapist, child molester, arsonist, robber, thief, and burglar was born on June 28, 1891 on a farm in East Grand Forks, Minnesota.
He was the sixth of seven children for East Prussian immigrants Johann "John" Gottlieb Panzram and Mathilda Elizabeth "Lizzie" Panzram (née Bolduan). He, his older brothers, and his one younger sister were all raised on the family farm, on which they were forced to work until truancy laws made it illegal for parents to not send their children to school.
Panzram's parents were unhappy to lose the free child labor, and forced them to work in the fields through the night after school; Panzram later said that he would only get two hours of sleep before he would have to get up for school. Their punishments ranged from being chained up to being starved of food.
Panzram reflected on his early childhood that he was not liked by other children. He recalled that he became meaner the older he grew. Panzram’s father abandoned the family when he was six or seven years old. Eventually, his older brothers left as well; one of them died.
In prison confessions and in his autobiography, Panzram confessed to twenty-one murders, only five of which could be corroborated by authorities; he is suspected of having killed more than a hundred men in the United States alone, plus some in Portuguese Angola.
He also confessed to having committed more than a thousand acts of rape against males of all ages. After a lifetime of crime, during which he served as many prison terms as he made escapes, he was executed by hanging in 1930 for the murder of a prison employee at Leavenworth Federal Prison.
Panzram's criminal life began in 1899, at age 8, when he was charged in juvenile court with being drunk and disorderly. In 1903, at age 11, he was arrested and jailed for being drunk and "incorrigible," a term used to describe an offense committed by a juvenile that would not be considered a crime if they were an adult.
Not long after this second arrest, he stole some cake, apples, and a revolver from a neighbor's home. In October of that same year, his mother sent him to the Minnesota State Training School, a reform school. According to his autobiography, he was repeatedly beaten, tortured, and raped by staff members in a workshop the children dubbed "the paint shop" because the room was "painted" with bruises and blood.
Panzram hated the school so much that he decided to burn it down, and did on July 7, 1905. In January 1906, Panzram was paroled from Red Wing Training School, where he had been sent after stealing money out of his mother's pocketbook.
At age 14, a couple of weeks after his parole and two weeks after attempting to kill a Lutheran cleric with a revolver, Panzram ran away from home to live on the streets. He often traveled via train cars, and later recalled having been gang raped by a group of homeless men while doing so.
Panzram claimed that after escaping from a Montana State Reform School, he and a fellow escapee named James Benson committed a string of burglaries, robberies, and arsons throughout the Midwest until the pair split up.
In 1907, at age 15, after getting drunk in a Montana saloon, Panzram enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to the 6th Infantry at Fort William Henry Harrison. Refusing to take orders from officers and being generally insubordinate, he was convicted of larceny for stealing $80 worth of supplies and served a prison sentence from 1908 to 1910 in the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. United States Secretary of War William Howard Taft personally approved Panzram's sentence.
Panzram later claimed that while he had been a bad person before being imprisoned by the military, whatever goodness was left in him was crushed by this stint at Leavenworth.
After his release and dishonorable discharge, Panzram resumed his career as a thief stealing everything from bicycles to yachts. He was caught and imprisoned multiple times, and served prison sentences both under his own name and various aliases in: Fresno, California; Rusk, Texas; The Dalles, Oregon; Harrison, Idaho; Butte, Montana; Montana State Prison (as "Jeff Davis" and "Jefferson Rhodes"); Oregon State Prison ("Jefferson Baldwin"); Bridgeport, Connecticut ("John O'Leary"); Sing Sing Correctional Facility, New York ("John O'Leary"; Clinton Correctional Facility, New York ("John O'Leary"); and Washington, D.C. (Carl Panzram) and Leavenworth, Kansas (Carl Panzram).
While incarcerated, Panzram frequently attacked officers and refused to follow their orders. The officers retaliated, subjecting him to beatings and other punishments.
In his autobiography, Panzram wrote that he was "rage personified" and that he would often rape the men that he robbed. He was noted for his large stature and great physical strength — years of hard labor at Leavenworth and other prisons left him in excellent physical shape – which aided him in overpowering his victims even when they were other fully grown men.
According to Panzram, one of the few periods in which he did not engage in criminality was when he was employed as a strikebreaker against union employees. Panzram claimed in his 1929 autobiography that after serving a short sentence at Rusk, Texas, he went to Juárez, Mexico, in the winter of 1910 to try to enlist in the Federal Mexican Army.
He took a train to Del Rio, Texas, and got off in a small town 50 to 100 miles east of El Paso. He later claimed to have abducted, assaulted, and strangled a man about a mile from town, and then robbed him of $35 (~$1,150 USD in 2023).
In the summer of 1911, Panzram, going by the alias "Jefferson Davis", was arrested in Fresno, California, for stealing a bicycle. He was sentenced to six months in county jail, but escaped after thirty days. He claimed that after his escape while riding on a train boxcar in California he disarmed an armed man he either called a "railway Detective" or a "railway brakeman" whom he then forced to rape a homeless man at gunpoint and threw them off the train.
In Oregon he made a living as a logger. In 1913, Panzram, going by the alias "Jack Allen", was arrested in The Dalles, Oregon, for highway robbery, assault, and sodomy. He broke out of jail after two to three months. While he was on the run, he used the alias "Jeff Davis". He was arrested in Harrison, Idaho, but again he escaped from county jail. He was arrested in Chinook, Montana, under the alias "Jefferson Davis" and sentenced to one year in prison for burglary, to be served at the Montana State Prison
On April 27, 1913, Panzram, under alias "Jefferson Davis", he was admitted to the state prison in Deer Lodge, Montana. He escaped November 13 of the same year. He was arrested for burglary within a week, under alias "Jeff Rhoades" in Three Forks. He was locked up in Deer Lodge for another year. He claims he committed sodomy while imprisoned. He was released March 3, 1915 with a new suit, $5, and a ticket to the next town.
He rode the rails to Oregon where on June 1,1915 Panzram burgled a house in Astoria, where he was also arrested while attempting to fence some of the things he stole.
This time under alias "Jeff Baldwin," he was received a seven year stint in the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, where he was taken on June 24. Warden Harry Minto believed in treating his inmates harshly and beatings, isolation, and other extreme forms of supposed discipline were common.
Later, Panzram swore that "I would never do… seven years and I defied the warden and all his officers to make me."
The same year Panzram helped fellow inmate Otto Hooker escape from the prison. While attempting to evade recapture, Hooker killed Warden Minto. This was Panzram's first documented murder, as an accessory. In his prison record (which noted alias "Jefferson Davis" and "Jeff Rhodes") he gave both a false age and place of birth. He stated his occupation as "thief".
Panzram was disciplined a lot at Salem, including 61 days of solitary confinement, before escaping on September 18, 1917. After multiple shootouts, he was recaptured and returned to the prison. On May 12, 1918, he escaped again by sawing through the bars of his cell and rode train cars to make his way back east. He was using a new alias, "John O'Leary," and he shaved off his mustache as a form of disguise. He never returned to the Pacific Northwest.
He ended up in New York City, where he set sail on the steamship James S. Whitney to Panama where he tried to steal a boat with the help of a drunken sailor who killed everyone on board. Panzram then travelled to Peru to work in a copper mine. After that, he traveled to Chile, Port Arthur, Texas, London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Hamburg.
In 1920, back in the United States, he committed a robbery at the Taft Mansion in New Haven, Connecticut, residence of William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States. Panzram specifically targeted Taft's mansion for revenge for his time at Leavenworth. He stole a large amount of jewelry and bonds, as well as Taft's Colt M1911 .45-caliber sidearm.
With the money from the Taft robbery, he bought a yacht, the Akista, and went on a murder spree spanning nearly a decade across several countries. Sailing south to New York City, Panzram lured sailors away from port bars onto the yacht, got them drunk, raped them, and then murdered them with the sidearm he stole from Taft. He left their bodies near Execution Rocks Light in Long Island Sound. Panzram claimed to have killed ten men this way.
The sailor murders ended after the Akista ran aground and sank near Atlantic City, during which his last two potential victims escaped. On October 26, 1920, using his alias "John O'Leary", he was arrested in Stamford, Connecticut, for burglary and possession of a loaded gun. In 1921, he served six months in jail in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Panzram caught a ship to Southern Africa and landed in Luanda, the capital of colonial Portuguese Angola. In 1921, Panzram was foreman of an oil rig in Angola; he later burned it down out of spite. His words. He claimed that while in Angola he raped and killed an 11 year old boy. In his confession, he wrote: "His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader."
He also claimed that he hired a boat with six rowers, who he executed with a pistol, and then threw their bodies to the crocodiles. Panzram also said he raped and killed two small boys in Salem, Massachusetts. He beat one to death with a rock on July 18, 1922, and strangled the other near New Haven later in 1922.
After this, Panzram got a job as a night watchman in Yonkers, New York, at the Abeeco Mill factory. Then he stole a yawl in Providence and sailed to New Haven. In June 1923, in New Rochelle, New York, he stole another yacht, this one belonging to the police chief of New Rochelle. He picked up a 15-year-old boy named George Walosin, promised him a job on the boat, and then raped him.
On June 27, on the river near Kingston, New York, Panzram used a .38Â caliber pistol from the stolen yacht to kill a man attempting to rob him on the yacht. Panzram threw the would be robbers body into the river.
On June 28, Panzram and Walosin docked at Poughkeepsie, New York where Panzram stole a small fortune in fishing nets. At Newburgh, New York, George Walosin, having witnessed a murder the day before, decided he would jump overboard and swim to shore. He reported his sexual assault to the police at Yonkers, and an bolo went out for "Captain John O'Leary." On June 29, "John O'Leary" was apprehended in Nyack, New York.
On July 9, Panzram tried to escape from jail. He also conned his lawyer by giving him ownership of a stolen boat in return for bail money. Panzram then skipped bail, and the stolen boat was confiscated by the government. On August 26, "O'Leary" was arrested in Larchmont, New York after breaking into a train depot, and was then sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
While in county jail, he confessed to the alias "Jeff Baldwin," who was was wanted in Oregon. In October, Panzram was imprisoned at Clinton Prison in Dannemora, New York. He was discharged in July 1928, and he allegedly committed a murder that summer in Baltimore, Maryland.
On August 30, 1928, Panzram was arrested in Baltimore for a Washington, D.C. burglary where he stole a radio and jewelry from the home of a dentist. During his interrogation, he confessed to killing three young boys;Â one in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut, and one in Philadelphia. Police were unable to corroborate his confession to the murder of a Massachusetts boy.
Panzram later wrote that he had contemplated mass murders and other acts of mayhem, such as poisoning a city's water supply with arsenic, or scuttling a British warship in New York Harbor to provoke a war. Panzram was sentenced to 25-years-to-life.
After arriving back at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, he warned the warden, "I'll kill the first man that bothers me." He was assigned to work in the prison laundry room, where the foreman, Robert Warnke, was known to bully and harass other prisoners. Warnke soon antagonized Panzram, despite Panzram repeatedly warning him, and Panzram beat Warnke to death with an iron bar.
He was convicted and sentenced to death for this crime, and refused any and all appeals. In response to offers from death penalty activists to intervene, he wrote,
"The only thanks you and your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it."
While on death row, Panzram was befriended by Officer Henry Philip Lesser, who would give him money to buy cigarettes. Panzram was so grateful for this act of kindness that Panzram wrote Lesser a detailed summary of his crimes and nihilistic philosophy while awaiting execution.
Panzram explicitly denied any remorse for any of his actions and began his journal:
"In my lifetime I have murdered 21Â human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and, last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000Â male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry."
Panzram was hanged on September 5, 1930. As officers attempted to place a customary black hood over his head, he spat in the executioner's face. When asked for any last words, he responded,
"Yes. Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard; I could kill a dozen men while you're screwing around!"
He was buried in the Leavenworth Penitentiary Cemetery, where his grave is marked only with his final prison inmate number, 31614. Former prison guard Henry Lesser preserved Panzram's letters and autobiographical manuscript, which he donated to San Diego State University in 1980. They are housed in the Malcolm A. Love Library as the "Carl Panzram papers".