The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  Some unknown force had drawn Henry Lesser’s attention and curiosity to Panzram, who was of striking, formidable appearance. With his leonine head, large black drooping moustache and ‘agate-hard eyes’ accenting his pugnacious features, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the Mexican guerrilla leader Emiliano Zapata, who was betrayed, ambushed and shot dead by the Mexican army in 1919.

  The gradual friendship between Lesser and Panzram began when Lesser broke the icy reserve of the man by inquiring about the burglary charge and his scheduled trial. Lesser, in a social manner, casually asked Panzram what his line of criminal enterprise was, and Panzram made his famous blunt reply, ‘I reform people.’

  Puzzled, Lesser asked him to explain what he meant. Panzram slowly smiled, ‘The only way to reform people is to kill them.’

  The reply and the implacable expression in Panzram’s eyes chilled Lesser. Was the prisoner insane? There was more than enough proof of Panzram’s violent temperament in his prison records, but they also showed that he had never killed anyone inside or outside of prison. However, examining the account of Panzram’s arrest by the police for stealing a radio, it quoted Panzram as having laughed at them and, when asked what was so funny, he had laconically replied, ‘Because a charge of stealing a radio is a joke. I’ve killed too many people to worry about a charge like that.’

  Naturally the police had regarded such an unasked-for and fatal confession as another more morbid joke by Panzram. But Henry Lesser, who had been impressed by Carl’s open air of unconcerned sincerity, was far from certain that Panzram had simply been indulging in gallows humour. Why would a man with the obvious strength of character and will as Panzram intentionally make such a fatal admission? He had no history of mental illness that would explain away his outlandish conduct as mere fantasy or delusion.

  During a routine cell search that same day, guards discovered that the window bars in Panzram’s cell had been tampered with and slackened in their frame. Mob-handed, the guards returned to Panzram, beat him with long, lead-loaded riot sticks, handcuffed his arms behind his back and frog-marched him down to the punishment block.

  There they attached a rope to the handcuffs, slung it over a beam and hoisted Panzram up till only his toes touched the floor — an excruciating, ancient method of torture used by the Spanish Inquisition, designed to dislocate the shoulders.

  Panzram was left like that for a total of twelve hours and he never cried out.

  Typically, as is still done today, a prison ‘doctor’ occasionally put a stethoscope to Panzram’s heart in case there was any danger of him actually dying, which would cause them to work late, filling in bothersome forms and getting their stories straight for anyone who might bother to investigate the death of a prisoner.

  That, my ‘respectable’ friends, is what you pay taxes for, and I know that it won’t worry you one bit — until you make a mistake some day and land in prison yourself, bleating for sympathy you won’t get from the outside world, because you knew what was happening and did not intervene when you had the opportunity to do so.

  I am not suggesting that Panzram was a sympathetic figure, merely that any prisoner, no matter what the offence, can end up receiving the very same treatment as Carl Panzram. You think not? Then let me remind you that Panzram was in prison simply for stealing a radio.

  The guards eventually unbound the battered and bleeding Panzram and threw him into a punishment cell, where he lay semi-conscious on the concrete. Occasionally the guards called into the cell and beat him as he lay there spitting curses at them. They again strung him up on the beam in the same position as before. He lost consciousness. When he came to, he was back in his own cell, probably because the guards were scared that he might die in the punishment block.

  Henry Lesser got to know about what had been happening to Panzram. It is against prison regulations for any guard to give a prisoner anything he is not entitled to. So, through another convict, Lesser covertly sent a dollar to Panzram so that he could buy some food and tobacco from the prison canteen.

  When the prisoner gave him the dollar, Panzram was suspicious that he was being set up so the guards could give him another beating. But the prisoner eventually convinced him that the offer was genuine, and was amazed to see tears appear in Panzram’s eyes.

  This big man, who had stood up to all the beatings and tortures the guards could hand out, had been made to weep by one kind gesture.

  Kindness can be an extremely vicious weapon, when someone has deliberately programmed himself to deal with anything but. It sneaks through the defences like a knife between the ribs.

  On one occasion, in the punishment cells, the offer of a cigarette from a prisoner once had the same effect on me, especially as I had initially threatened the prisoner when he proffered the cigarette, thinking he was only taunting me in a dire situation.

  Quite frankly, I’d rather do without such gestures of generosity in prison, as it isn’t worth the candle, and you have the trauma of having to get back into a normal character for the next run-of-the-mill, illiterate, looking-for-trouble guard or prisoner who comes along. Kindness has no place within a penal institution. It is also a sensible practise not to read any books which might induce human or altruistic sentiment.

  Turn soft in prison and the sharks will surely close in swiftly to finish you off. Once you pass through a prison gate for breaking the law, no law exists — except that of the strong and ruthless. Which explains why most prisoners are impatient to be released and give people in the outside world a taste of the same amorality they have been made to endure.

  The danger of moral ambivalence or weakness is exemplified by Panzram thanking Lesser and saying: ‘That’s the first time any screw has done me a favour.’ If you are thinking this was an oblique plea for more humane treatment, forget it.

  The usual type of people who become prison guards, social inadequates and illiterates, do so because they know they are innately substandard goods and therefore hate or are afraid of normal company. They are farther beyond salvage or reformation than most of the inmates, which is why prisoners laugh at the officially expressed ludicrous concept that prisoners are supposed to be reformed by such moral bankrupts. All is most certainly not for the best in this worst of all possible worlds.

  I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

  — Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

  As recounted, Panzram had reason enough to hate humanity from an early age. The obvious sadomasochism of his later years, his compulsive urge to inflict like indignities on others, originated from traumatic incidents he experienced as a hobo and rider of the rails.

  When he was fourteen, a group of hoboes attacked and repeatedly raped him while he was travelling with them in a freight car. During that same period, another gang of tramps offered him food, plied him with whisky, and raped him while he was intoxicated.

  As he grew older and wiser, he contracted a venereal disease from a prostitute and avoided women from that moment on.

  That is not to say that Panzram was homosexual. Like John Wayne Gacy, Panzram chose to rape men and boys as a more sexually satisfying method of catering to his sadomasochistic compulsions, adding a more vicious dimension to the punishment he was intent upon inflicting on society as a whole, and mirroring the suffering he had himself experienced in the same manner. That is the major key to enter Panzram’s psyche and methodology: his obsession with settling accounts made him believe in revenging wrongs done to him by paying back in precisely the same coin. This method of revenge reveals also that those particular wrongs suffered had traumatically hurt and damaged Panzram sufficiently for him to wish to duplicate them compulsively upon others. A logical and psychologically satisfying system of compensatory retaliation.

  We shape the present and the future by examining the past. Revenge is sweeter when supped cold, as they say. And as I said of myself in Cha
pter One, Panzram echoed: Might is Right.

  I reiterate, you will observe throughout world history that the rights or wrongs of ethics are dictated merely by strength. Everything is ethical if you are on the winning side. The rest is window dressing for armchair moralists to fiddle around with.

  Meanwhile, in the Washington District Jail, Panzram had been informed that newspaper reporters had heard of the remarks he had made about having murdered many people. Panzram refused to entertain their offers of interviews. But, amazingly, he told Henry Lesser that, if he could get him some paper and a pencil, he would write his own life story.

  There is not the least doubt in my mind that, to some extent, Panzram was being cleverly manipulated by Lesser and the prison authorities.

  Lesser must surely have felt it his duty to pass on Panzram’s confessions to the authorities — as subsequent leaks to newspapers confirm — who would have then encouraged Lesser to gain Panzram’s confidence further and report to them any incriminating facts Panzram divulged to him in trust. A man of Panzram’s experience and intelligence must have known about this collusion right from the beginning, but it had not affected his liking for Lesser as an individual.

  There is no question that Lesser must be given full credit for the astonishing revelations Panzram was about to commit to paper. Had Panzram hated him as much as he did the other prison guards, he would not have given Lesser the time of day, let alone the privilege of being the first person to be told the homicidal details of his life.

  This extraordinary relationship between Panzram and Lesser can be more readily comprehended in the context of my earlier analysis, namely, that the dismal future which remained to Panzram was not worth the effort and that the time had come for him to depart this life, but not before experiencing the primal satisfaction, the resentful and triumphant joy, of telling all the world the horrific price he had inflicted upon humanity for the wretched life they had inflicted upon him since childhood.

  It would also have appealed to Panzram’s ironic sense of justice that he should force them to murder him for murder — thus, in one stroke, making a mockery of their claims to moral superiority and, simultaneously, impelling them to perform the only favour he now wished from the pathetic hypocrites: that of ending his miserable life and letting him escape from their loathsome company for eternity.

  The vengeful, unholy litany of almost his entire existence had been anticipating this glorious moment of presenting his final judgmental invoice to wan faces, before scathingly bidding farewell, that in heartfelt sorrow he had not killed more of them! Death had been his one constant reason for living. His solitary love. Yet perhaps even Panzram, in his final hour, would happily smile at some long-forgotten childhood memory, a Kane ‘Rosebud,’ as it suddenly surfaced from the depths, reminding him of the innocence he once briefly owned.

  Lesser secured pencil and paper for Panzram. This act then being against prison rules is further evidence that the prison authorities were manipulating the situation. As Panzram penned his brief autobiography over the weeks, he gave it to Lesser in sections and chapters.

  The time for Panzram’s trial arrived.

  In accordance with his suicidal intent, he refused to be represented by an advocate and chose to speak for himself in court. As soon as he entered the witness box it became clear why.

  He swiped trivialities out of the way by immediately admitting he had stolen the radio and then directed a cold, malignant statement at the jury:

  ‘While you were trying me here, I was trying all of you too. I’ve found you guilty. Some of you I’ve executed. If I live I’ll execute some more of you. I believe the whole human race should be exterminated. I’ll do my best to do it every chance I get. Now, I’ve done my duty, you do yours.’

  They did.

  The judge, obviously taking the threats seriously, sentenced him to twenty-five years. Panzram was returned to Washington District Jail, where he continued to write his life story for Lesser.

  The time for Panzram’s transfer came. The authorities had wisely arranged that Lesser would be one of the escorts to accompany him, to exert a calming influence. Panzram was manacled to other convicts and transported by train to Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas.

  Penitentiary?

  Sinning is the best part of repentance.

  — Arabic proverb

  On the train to Leavenworth, Panzram intended to make an attempt to destroy the train by pulling the emergency cord when the train was on a dangerous bend, in a tunnel, or steaming at maximum speed. A convict informed on him to one of the prison guards escorting the train. Panzram attacked him and was pulled off by the guards, who then wisely disconnected the emergency cord.

  From personal experience, I can assure you that, if you are without hope, it is surprisingly easy to face death when consoled by the certainty that you will take some of the enemy with you.

  Having finished his written life story and given it all to Henry Lesser, it is safe to conclude that, in a sequestered region deep in Panzram’s psychopathic personality, some psychic tremor decided it was now time for him to speed up the process of contemptuously closing the door upon life. He had begun to ease himself into a compensatory death-wish syndrome, a state of expedient dissociative reaction, an irresistible, self-destructive impulse which, in more meager design and spite, had hounded him practically the whole of his waking existence.

  The cold embrace of steel manacles, the sweaty rankness of crowded prisoners, the arrogant indifference of ignorant guards, the bleak prospect of another brutal prison, all now travelling inexorably towards him along the desolate, monotonous rails — what better than to end it all in a final cataclysmic act of mayhem and destruction, dashing himself and the whole contemptible mess of them into a crashing, craggy grave! And him the sole one glad to go! The Nietzschean sense of dancing delight when rushing eagerly to meet the singing void. Oh, yes, the void indeed croons sweetly at such times. You may hear it yourself one day, and remember.

  Panzram’s deathly disposition would have been added to by the glacial gestalt Leavenworth presented as the train drew to a halt.

  Shrouded in snow grimy from the smoke from the boiler house stacks, it looked like a stale, mouldy wedding cake made of granite, the five storeys of small cell windows like black currants. An unappetising offering to a starving spirit.

  Panzram started his stretch in the manner he intended to continue.

  When the warden gave the assembled new arrivals his standard pompous catechism of do’s and don’ts, designed to impress upon them their lowly status, Carl deigned to make only one laconic comment, ‘I’ll kill the first man that bothers me.’

  The warden was not amused. Haughtiness of office made him blind to the obvious sincerity of the threat. He had presumably been less than diligent in the examination of Panzram’s recorded history — particularly his astonishing devotion to the art of demolishing prison establishments single-handed.

  Carl was put to work in the prison laundry. A location almost custom-made to exacerbate his volatile temperament. Add to this the fact that the prison was grossly overcrowded, prisoners unavoidably invading the spatial territory of one another, becoming as aggressive as rats in a cage, and you can predict Panzram’s reaction.

  To get moved from the laundry detail, the overseer being an illiterate thug and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Panzram deliberately and overtly broke the rules, ending up in the punishment block.

  He and the overseer of the laundry had taken an immediate dislike to one another, which perhaps explains why the overseer, instead of being grateful to get rid of Panzram, suicidally requested that Panzram be returned to work in the laundry after his punishment was over. It appeared that the man was out to humiliate or break Panzram. An unwise ambition, to say the very least, and a fatal misjudgment of character. He would have perhaps been safer had he slapped a grizzly bear across the nose.

  Panzram was furious at being sent back to the laundry and the venom of his hated enemy. Th
e place was worse than ever in the prevailing hot weather. He came to a pragmatic decision and bided his time patiently. Panzram already psychically and electively preparing for his own immolation, the overseer was as good as a ‘dead man walking’ — a term usually reserved for prisoners under sentence of death.

  In the short interval before he took action against the overseer, Panzram received a letter from Henry Lesser, informing him that he had shown Panzram’s written account of his life to a very well-known writer and literary critic named H.L. Mencken.

  This, at first glance, suggests that Lesser had not been in collusion with the prison authorities or the police to obtain Panzram’s confessions, but I still believe that he had been, and had probably written a second copy of Panzram’s story for himself.

  The laundry overseer’s last day on Earth arrived.

  A good day to die weather-wise, an irritating one for a prisoner working in the humid laundry, scorching sun making temperatures and tempers rise to the boiling point. Warnke, the fat overseer, waddled down between the steaming vats in the laundry to inspect the arrival of some machine parts just unpacked from crates — unaware that Panzram had done it with a crowbar.

  As Warnke examined the new components, he heard a characteristic limping tread behind him. It was the last thing he would ever hear.

  With a cathartic yell of hate and triumph, Panzram swung the heavy crowbar down onto his skull, and kept frenziedly swinging it until Warnke’s head resembled a crushed watermelon oozing red and grey jelly. The white supremacist was as dead as Abraham Lincoln. Panzram, now raging with bloodlust and purgative nihilism, swung the dripping crowbar at anyone foolish enough to block his chosen path. He limped inexorably out of the laundry and into the prison proper like a latter-day wounded Attila the Hun without his horde, his Rome the warden’s office.

  Panzram smashed his way into the general offices, glass and splintered wood flying everywhere, the puny clerks fleeing at his colossal approach. The warden was not there. Panzram, as though by homing instinct, altered his course towards the punishment block and ordered the guards to open the gate, which they, eyeing the gory crowbar hanging from Panzram’s great fist, wisely declined to do.