Over 20 Murders And More Than 1000 Acts Of Sodomy: Meet The Most Cold-Blooded Serial Killer In History
Carl Panzram was considered the most cold-blooded killer in history, not only because of the crimes he committed or the nature of them, but majorly because he never felt bad for them!
When we think about true crime documentaries or movies, we find it thrilling to watch, we even enjoy it with a tub of popcorn sometimes. But when you actually think about the things that have happened in our past, when you seriously try to feel the pain of the victims, it all feels so chilling, and you don’t feel that far away from them.
Carl Panzram — Birth And Early Life
All the fictional crime-based movies and series that have been made so far, are inspired (more or less) from the real-life stories of some psychopaths, and today you will read the story of one out of hundred such psychopaths, that was — Carl Panzram.
If you look him up on Wikipedia, this is how the website describes him — an American serial killer, rapist, robber, burglar, and arsonist. Fair enough. But why is he called ‘the most cold-blooded serial killer in history’?
It is not the ‘kind’ of crimes he committed, it is the ‘amount’ of the crimes that he committed, and yet he had no remorse or guilt for them. Panzram was born in a middle-class family in 1891 and raised with eight siblings. Just at the tender age of five or six, he was caught lying multiple times, and also stole several things.
Since the nature of these crimes was small and petty so no one noticed the criminal behaviour that was slowly developing in his mind over time. In 1903 at the age of 11, he was tried in a juvenile court, over being drunk.
The Early Onset Of Crime
Panzram was caught and put in a juvenile correctional facility in Minnesota. The facility was far from being a place that would reform him or give him a better life.
Rather, in that facility, he was constantly beaten, tortured, and raped by staff members. The horror was so much that the place was named ‘The Paint Shop’ because kids would leave the facility all red with bruises and blood.
Panzram was tortured to a point that he wanted to burn down the entire place, and he did so in 1905 when he was just 13 years old. No one found out who did that, so he got away with it.
Soon after, he was found stealing money again, and he also threatened a cleric with a gun at that age. He left home to become a migrant worker, and often traveled via buses and trains. He admitted that once he was gang-raped by a group of migrant workers on a train.
Panzram soon entered the world of crime along with one of his inmates, and they would conduct robberies, thefts, and arsons throughout Montana. At the age of 15 (the year 1907), Panzram enrolled himself for the United States Army, and shortly after the selection, he was convicted of theft and thrown into Leavenworth Prison till 1910. He claimed that the goodness and humanity, left in him was smashed out during this sentence.
Becoming Of A Criminal
Once he was out of the prison in 1910, he was thrown back into the streets and he started his old business of theft and burglaries. He would steal anything and everything, from bicycles to yachts, and during this tenure, he was caught and imprisoned multiple times.
While in jail, he would often attack and hit officers and refuse to follow their orders. The officers would then beat and punish him harsher every time, thereby turning him into a man who had nothing but only hatred left in him by this time.
In his autobiography, Panzram mentioned that these incidents in his life, turned him into someone with extreme levels of rage and anger. He started raping the men whom he would rob. And since he had spent considerable time in prisons, he built his physique well. He was a man of massive physical strength and giant stature.
In and out of several prisons, Panzram was once traveling towards Texas on a train and he got into a small town where he assaulted, beat, and strangled a man, only to steal $35 from him. He continued his thefts, and was jailed again in 1911 for stealing a bicycle, and jailed again in 1913 for conducting a robbery on a highway. Every time he was out of jail in no more than a couple of months.
Every time he was arrested, he used different names and IDs to hide his true identity. This gave him an edge over the police and authorities. There was no internet or a central citizen database at that time to track people with so much accuracy. Hence, the criminals stayed one step ahead of the government.
In 1915, Panzram was finally caught for robbing a house in Oregon, and there he was sentenced to seven years in prison. The warden of that jail was famous for treating the inmates harshly and he would often beat the prisoners, as well as subject them to isolation and other methods of torture.
Panzram not only challenged the warden and other officers that he would escape from the prison but also helped a fellow inmate escape. He was given several isolation sentences, including solitary confinement of over two months. But he finally escaped prison in 1917. But his luck ran out soon, he was recaptured and imprisoned again, only to break out and escape again in 1918.
Panzram then changed his look, shaved off his mustache, and started using the name ‘John O’Leary’. He moved to New York City and got an identity of a sea-man. He set off sailing on a ship to Panama where he tried to steal a small boat with the help of a drunken sailor.
No, the sailor wasn’t only drunk, but he was crazy as he killed everyone who was on board and was arrested. Panzram was a well-traveled man. He went to Peru to work in copper mines, then traveled to Chile, Texas, Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Hamburg.
Beginning Of Serious Crimes
The year was 1920 and Panzram robbed the home of the officer who was responsible for his sentence in Leavenworth Prison, when he had enrolled himself in the US Army, back in 1908. He stole a large number of bonds, jewellery, and cash, as well as a handgun. That was the time when he went on a murder spree that not only lasted as long as a decade but also spanned across multiple countries.
He bought a yacht named ‘Akista’ from the stolen money. Panzram would lure the sailors away from NY city bars, buy them drinks, rape them and shoot them with the stolen handgun. He would then dump their bodies near Long Island. He claimed to have murdered around ten sailors in a similar manner. This spree ended only when his yacht drowned near Atlantic city and two of his last victims ran off to unknown places. In the same year, he was arrested for burglary and for possessing a loaded handgun. In 1921 he served six months sentence in Connecticut.
Panzram then traveled to South Africa and reached Luanda, the capital of Angola. He started working in an oil rig there, and soon after he burnt the rig down. While being in Angola, he claimed to have raped and murdered a boy of 10–11 years old. In his confession to this particular murder, 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 rented a boat with six rowers, shot all of them down, and threw their bodies in a river only to be consumed by the crocodiles.
He was soon back to the United States, where he raped and killed two small boys. He beat one of them with a rock in 1922 and strangled the other later in the same year. After these two murders, he worked as a night watchman in Yonkers, where he raped a 15 years old boy named George Walosin. While in Providence, he stole a small boat that he used to sail to New Haven, to find more victims to rob, rape, and murder.
In 1923, in New York, he stole a yacht that belonged to the chief of police of an area. He picked up Walosin again, promised him a job on the boat, but instead raped him. In the same year in summer, Panzram claimed to have killed another man with a pistol that he stole from someone’s yacht. He then threw the body into the river.
After witnessing this scene, Walosin jumped overboard and swam to the shore. He rushed to the police to report his rape and murder. Soon, an alert went out for captain ‘John O’Leary’ the alias that Panzram was going at that time.
Sooner than he expected, he was arrested in New York, and just two weeks after his arrest he escaped from jail. He conned his lawyer by giving him the ownership of a stolen boat, in return for bail money. The boat was soon confiscated by the authorities, and he was arrested again after two more months.
The Final Capture
In 1928, he was arrested again for stealing a radio and some jewellery from the home of a dentist. During his interrogation, he confessed to having killed three young boys, just a few weeks ago — one in Salem, one in Connecticut, and the third one in Philadelphia. He himself wrote a letter stating that he has committed multiple acts of sodomy, rape, and murders. He also admitted to poisoning the city’s water supply with arsenic.
In the knowledge of his extensive criminal record, he received 25 years life sentence, and upon arriving in the same prison he was sentenced the first time — Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary — he threatened the warden that he would kill the first man who bothers him.
He was given a job in the prison laundry room, where another inmate named ‘Robert Warnke’ was known to harass and bully other prisoners. Panzram gave him multiple warnings but Warnke didn’t listen to him. Finally, in the summer of 1929, Panzram beat Warnke to death with an iron bar. That was the incident that made the judges sentence him to death instead, as he had become a danger even for the inmates inside the prison with him.
He not only refused any appeals of his sentence, but to the human rights activists, he wrote —
The only thanks to 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, he befriended an officer named ‘Henry Philip Lesser’, who would often help him buy cigarettes inside the prison. This simple act of kindness awed Panzram, and while on death row, he asked for writing material, and that was the time he wrote a detailed summary of his crimes, with time and date-stamps. He also wrote about his nihilistic philosophy and dark thoughts. He clarified that in none of his robberies, murders, or rapes, he felt even a little bit of guilt, remorse, or regret. His autobiography starts with the following lines —
In my lifetime I have murdered 22 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and, last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1000 male human beings. For these things, I am not in the least bit sorry.
He was finally hanged on September 5, 1930, and as the officers attempted to make him wear the black hood before his execution, he allegedly spat in one of the executioner’s faces. When the officers asked him for his last words, he said —
Yes, hurry it up you Hoosier bastard! I could kill a dozen more men while you’re screwing around.
He has a grave at Leavenworth Penitentiary Cemetery, where instead of his name, only his prison number is written — 31614.
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References:
Carl Panzram | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers
Carl Panzram (28 June 1891 - 5 September 1930) was an American serial killer. He used aliases such as "Carl Baldwin"…murderpedia.org
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