by Ian Brady
Panzram’s first efforts were modest. At eight years of age he was charged with being drunk and disorderly. At school, he was regularly chastised for disobedience, and thrived on it. He then burgled a neighbour’s house and ran away from home — perhaps another sign of attention-seeking, or the first stirrings of the obsessive independence which was to characterise his whole life. Having reached the ripe age of eleven, he was sent to reform school by some fool judge who thought it would do him some good. It did, in a manner that society would live to regret.
They made the fatal mistake of trying to break his spirit by beating and whipping him for the least infraction of the petty rules. It was like trying to douse fire with petrol. The day was not far off when Carl would be making rules of his own. If the authorities believed cruelty was a virtue, he would give them a taste of their own improving and reforming remedy.
There was one form of mental arithmetic for which he had developed an avid passion: keeping account of every wrong done to him, along the resolution to pay it back with interest at the first opportunity.
He had by then conceptualised his real enemy. Mankind. ‘I began to hate those who abused me. Then I began to think I would have my revenge as often as I could injure someone else. Anyone at all would do. If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.’ That statement by the adult Carl reflects the misanthropic rationale of possibly the majority of serial killers, consciously or subconsciously, and no deterrent will sway them slightly from their chosen mission. In this they possess the zeal of the converted, martyrs. Revenge becomes the raison d’être.
His one religious experience consisted of being sent to a Lutheran school, where again they tried to teach by beatings. In the course of one such lesson in violence from the preacher, Carl drew a stolen revolver and tried to shoot him but the hammer fell on a dud bullet. He knew that this attempted murder would mean his being sent back to reform school or worse.
His beliefs and lethal philosophy of life were now irreversible: ‘The only way to reform people is to kill them.’ The articulate birth of a highly intelligent, homicidal psychopath, icy and incisive, divulging the incipient cancer in his youthful soul. A La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche or de Sade would have heartily applauded his sentiments.
Carl promptly hopped a freight train and headed out into the unsuspecting world to avenge himself on life.
Panzram is another prime example of multi-motivational, multi-attributable reprisal. When dealing with authorities of any description, individually petty-minded tyrants, you must never wait for anyone to accept responsibility, for it is against their cowardly nature to do so. You must, without hesitation or pointless consultation, confer responsibility on the obvious culprits and decide the price you will make them pay, one way or another.
In short, you must act as tyrannically as they do, but solely on your own authority. Panzram did not need to be taught this principle, of course, as you shall see.
We next observe the still youthful Carl imprisoned for robbery. He and another youth of similar violent disposition managed to escape and go on a spree of robbery and indiscriminate mayhem. An existential celebration of freedom, in which action for the sake of action was both a means and an end.
Totally out of character for a man who loathed discipline and authority, Carl joined the army. Certainly not from patriotism. The brevity of his formal stay suggests there was an ulterior motive involved — most probably to hide from the police and simultaneously gain expertise in the use of firearms and all forms of destruction. He quickly earned himself a court-martial for insubordination and received three years in an army prison, where he promptly destroyed the prison workshop by setting it ablaze.
Secretary of War then was Howard Taft. Characteristically, still keeping personal accounts and settling old scores, Carl profitably robbed Taft’s home some years later! Taft must be considered fortunate that Carl didn’t burn the house down as well.
Released from the army prison, his criminal career became rather aimless. For four or five years he was in and out of various prisons for robbery and other offences. Finally he received a somewhat excessive sentence of seven years for burgling the house of a bank president. In later years, Carl maintained that he had struck a deal with the police for a lenient sentence in exchange for telling them where the proceeds of the burglary were stashed away, but that the police had then double-crossed him.
He decided to settle that account by immediately burning down part of the prison, after which he was battered unconscious by guards and transferred to a stricter prison regime in Oregon. There he repeatedly attacked the brutal guards, who in turn savagely beat him and kept him shackled in windowless punishment cells. Next he started a riot and, again, set fire to and totally destroyed the prison workshop!
Despite progressively inhuman treatment, year after year, they could not break Panzram’s spirit. He seemed to possess superhuman will and strength, which caused him to be feared by every guard and admired by every prisoner. Psychologically, a state of affairs the prison authorities regarded as a disaster.
Holding all the top cards, they had still lost the game, because unless attacking in packs, prison guards who pose as macho are innately spineless, and, equating their uniforms with intelligence, their already inferior brains slowly atrophy.
Although they know the public needs them, they are still regarded as social pariahs normal individuals would not wish to befriend. Which is why prison guards suffer from an inferiority complex. Many are actually certifiable psychopaths and psychotics, who can kill prisoners and get away with it because they are part of the law enforcement industry, testifying for one another for collective safety. They stick together to reinforce their mutual corruption and mendacity.
Decent people in their ranks, with ideas of reform and rehabilitation, soon depart when they see the negative reality of the penal system. Thus only the inadequates are left to run the prison, by collective violence. Sadly, as most of the prisoners are themselves inadequate, unsuccessful petty criminals, this caters to the delusional superiority of the illiterate guards, the majority of whom are ‘uniform freaks,’ i.e., people who can’t manage to retain and function in any capacity unless they have a uniform, any uniform, to bolster their psyche and protect them from revealing their lack of intelligence.
As touched upon earlier, some serial killers suffer from a non-affective category of schizophrenia, as good and evil continue the eternal struggle for control of the psyche. If the next illustration, of how this polarised tension warred even within Panzram, were not fully documented and officially authenticated, you would tend to disbelieve it.
By a stroke of good fortune, the inhumane warden of the prison was shot dead during the pursuit of an escaped convict. In the incestuous manner in which penal establishments are run solely for the profit of the staff, his equally ruthless brother became warden. This man tried the same harsh treatment on Panzram, who reacted by smashing up everything in sight with a two-handed axe.
The warden persevered in his policy of benighted brutality until he overstepped even prison standards by using methods of punishing prisoners that had been forbidden by state law and was dismissed.
The new warden who took over from him was a man called Murphy. He was that remarkable exception, a Christian who actually practised what he preached. Hearing of Panzram’s fierce reputation, Murphy decided to use kindness where brute force had obviously failed. He saw to it that Panzram was given back his privileges, such as books and access to canteen facilities.
Panzram was naturally suspicious of this new approach and remained hostile and uncommunicative towards the prison authorities, wondering what game they were up to.
One day Murphy took the bull by the horns — one might say literally, with a man such as Panzram — and managed to have a conversation with Carl, which led to an astonishing offer being made to him.
Murphy must have been a man of shrewd psychological insight. He saw that Panzram could
stand up to any amount of punishment with contempt and was perfectly at ease on such familiar ground, so he hit on what he considered would be a real challenge, a real test of will for Panzram. Murphy offered to allow him to leave the prison on his own, so long as Panzram gave him his solemn word that he would come back to the prison by his own volition by evening.
Panzram probably thought he was talking to a madman or a fool and readily accepted the offer.
But deep in Panzram’s psyche, there obviously remained a remnant of the integrity he had been born with, a quality he had long forgotten and probably, at a conscious level, would have regarded as a fault. His criminal integrity was, of course, never in question; he bore it proudly like shining, battered armour. But the subconscious rules every person, and Carl must have felt bemused as, having made no conscious decision, his footsteps led him inexorably back to the prison gate as evening fell.
From personal experience, I myself can vouch for how the subconscious can take over complete physical control of the body, but that’s another story.
This episode could have proved a crucial change of course in Carl’s nihilistic path through life, and many lives would have been saved as a result. But sometimes ostensibly small things, misdemeanours, can irreversibly sway the soul.
One night Carl got drunk with a woman and failed to return to the prison on time, so he decided to go on the run. Soon he was captured after badly injuring the arresting officers. For this he was sentenced to a further ten years. The die was cast. Panzram was now destined to evolve into one of the most prolific serial killers in early American history.
In the spring of 1918 he managed to escape.
To most people, 1918 meant the end of the first World War in Europe. But to Carl Panzram it signalled time to begin in earnest his own personal war against humanity. And, perhaps conscious of the ironic parallel, he took to sea as a sailor and ended up in war-scarred Europe, as though drawn to the sweet smell of destruction.
However, he wasn’t infected by it. After a few minor scrapes with the law, he sailed back to America — this time obviously drawn to the country upon which all his psychic resentment and thirst for revenge was centred. Impatient to start settling accounts, he must have found that particular voyage very long indeed. One can imagine his great head poised like that of a natural predator, eagerly sniffing the air for approaching land and the human prey he hungered for.
For him, it was a modest beginning. He broke into the house of the Secretary of War, making a good haul, with which he bought a sailboat, but not for leisure activities — unless you count opportunistic murder.
He began to offer jobs to sailors, usually to two at a time, got them intoxicated on his boat, robbed them of all they had, raped them and then put a bullet through their heads. Binding the bodies in anchor chain, he tossed them into the sea far offshore. He killed a total of ten sailors by this method, before miscalculating one dark night, running the boat onto the rocks, thus fortuitously sparing the lives of his two latest prospective victims who were on board.
Back to square one, Panzram got work on another ship and headed for the Belgian Congo. Here and there, he — to use his phrase — ‘practised a little sodomy,’ caving in the head of one black youth after raping him. A time later, he shot ‘six niggers’ and fed them to the crocodiles, simply to steal their canoe, which someone else rashly, but just as promptly, then stole from him.
Seeing no future in hunting crocodiles, he returned to America and hunted males, sodomising and killing. Some obtuse man tried to steal a sailboat which Panzram had stolen from another man. Panzram killed him. His total of rapes and murders passed the twenty mark.
Doing a bit of freight train-hopping in the company of two hoboes, Panzram was surprised by a young railroad cop who was checking the wagons. Panzram turned the tables on him by drawing a gun and ordering him to remove his trousers. He then ‘practised a little sodomy on him,’ and, just for the hell of it, ordered the other two hoboes to rape the cop as well, which they did. An apt act of revenge on authority from Panzram’s point of view. Needless to say, after being used and tossed out of the freight car, the distressed and sorely tried policeman wisely kept his silence and, presumably, his trousers.
Panzram was next caught burgling a rail office. He received a stiff sentence of five years and was sent to the notorious Dannemora Prison. There he was faced with the same old inhuman regime and reacted violently as usual.
He made an escape attempt but only managed to break his ankles when dropping from the wall. Doing punishment in ‘the hole,’ his compensatory visions of destruction and mayhem became progressively more feverish and grandiose, as did those of the Marquis de Sade when incarcerated in the Bastille.
Panzram’s solitary dreams included the derailing of a passenger train, the burning down of fully occupied grand hotels, and putting drums of cyanide in reservoirs supplying cities with drinking water. No act of destruction was too great for his resentful, seething psyche. Had the globe been miraculously transformed to an orange in his massive fist, he would have crushed it till the last pip squeaked.
‘The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it hath.’ — The Talmud
Or, as Carl himself put it, ‘I was so full of hate that there was no room in me for such feelings as love, pity, kindness or honour or decency. I hated everybody I saw.’
Penal fanatics please carefully note, for you are systematically fostering many more Panzrams in your human warehouses at this very moment and, when they are eventually set free, or set themselves free, some of your number won’t have time to whistle ‘Dixie’ or even say ‘Amen.’
Panzram, now afflicted with a permanent limp, was unfettered from Dannemora Prison without a cent in his pocket, and nobody wants to employ ex-convicts. So was he expected to simply starve or eat out of garbage cans?
He immediately burgled a house in Washington, taking a radio to sell and buy some much-needed nourishment; the householder, a dentist, was most fortunate that he didn’t surprise Panzram in the act, for it would have been his last act. At any rate, Panzram was eventually arrested when trying to sell the radio and thrown into Washington District Jail.
It was in this unlikely and uninspiring location that some arcane mixture of time, circumstance and chance acquaintance gradually led Carl Panzram to needlessly reveal his unknown career as a highly travelled, rapacious and intelligent serial killer. There is no doubt whatsoever that the unexpected catalyst, responsible for Panzram’s out-of-character decision to finally explain himself to another human being, for the first and final time, took the incredible shape of all Panzram had hated and despised the whole of his life. A representative of the totalitarian authority Panzram reserved an incandescent rage for, namely, a prison guard.
The name of this remarkable confessor was Henry Lesser, and a less likely recipient of Panzram’s confidences could not be imagined, you might think. But all was not as it seemed.
Henry Lesser was far from being your run-of-the-mill prison guard, i.e., ignorant, brutal and lazy. He was a bright young Jew with ideals; an avid reader but not an intellectual. Like Carl, his upbringing had been impoverished and underprivileged but, very unlike Carl, he had not grown up with a chip on his shoulder or a wealth of homicidal resentment to assuage.
And perhaps there lies the key to Panzram’s puzzling affinity with this man, and his almost casual decision to consciously seal his own fate forever by totally confiding in him and imparting the details of his extraordinary acts of murder and devastation.
I believe Panzram saw in Henry Lesser the man he himself might have been. I don’t mean Panzram would have become a prison guard, of course, but rather would have evolved as a highly intelligent man who had triumphed over the adversities of his childhood and come to terms with life.
Part of him probably envied Henry Lesser. It was as if Carl was confessing to a personification of his better self, the child who had withered and died so far in the past but had not been entirely forgotten. But let us n
ot forget the almost demoniacal man Carl Panzram had actually become, one who possessed the scornful, resplendent individualism, pride, and will for revenge of Lucifer.
There can be no doubt that Panzram, in confessing, had resolved that the moment had at last arrived to embrace Death voluntarily, as an old friend and ally he had long awaited to rid him of the repugnant, tedious world he had battled with all his life. It was time for Panzram to straighten his scarred back, disregard his limp, and formally present the sum total of reckoning he had exacted from humanity.
Did they really believe that he, Carl Panzram, had let them off so lightly? That they had inflicted upon him more damage than he upon them? What fools! Now they would hear the price they had paid for crass insolence, the collective pile of worms, and know that he would have crushed a millionfold more had it been within his power! Now was the time for the insects to crowd together and kill him while he laughed and spat his venom at them.
Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroically hath finish’d
A life heroic.
— ‘Samson Agonistes,’ Milton
Panzram’s self-destructive, personal Rubicon was crossed in characteristically contemptuous style, as casually as casting his life like a bone to a ravenous dog.
His trial for burgling the dentist’s house and stealing a radio was set for 11 November. As earlier recounted, Panzram’s personal general declaration of war upon humanity had commenced in parallel with the conclusion of the First World War in Europe, which ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918. Again, a fascinating synchronicity of events in time had occurred.