by Ray Black
Released from Redwing, he went back to the arduous life on the farm, working from dawn to dusk and receiving endless beatings from his brothers. At the age of fourteen, however, he had had enough and hopped a freight train. Life’s harsh realities were never far away though, and not long afterwards, he was gang-raped by four hobos riding in the same freight wagon as him. Then, he was incarcerated for burglary for a year in Butte, Montana. In 1907, he and another inmate escaped and began robbing and stealing their way around the Midwest. For good measure, they also set fire to every church they saw.
Later that year, Panzram lied about his age and enlisted in the army. However, the discipline was alien to a rebellious nature such as his and before too long, he was up before a court martial on three counts of larceny. He was sentenced to a dishonourable discharge and three years’ hard labour at the forbidding Fort Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. He was just sixteen and once again found himself in a regime of beatings and torture. Prisoners were chained to fifty-pound metal balls and the days were spent breaking rocks.
Released in 1910, he spent the next few years drifting across Kansas, Texas and across the South- West to California. As before, he stole and burned wherever he went. ‘I burned down old barns, sheds, fences, snow sheds or anything I could, and when I couldn’t burn anything else I would set fire to the grass on the prairies, or the woods, anything and everything,’ he wrote later. He also raped countless men on his travels. ‘Whenever I met one that wasn’t too rusty looking I would make him raise his hands and drop his pants. I wasn’t very particular either. I rode them old and young, tall and short, white and black. It made no difference to me at all except that they were human beings.’
In Fresno, in 1911, he was arrested and sentenced to six months but escaped within thirty days. Shortly afterwards, he spent three months in jail in Dalles in Oregon before again breaking out. A week later he was arrested in Harrison, Idaho. During his first night, he set one of the prison buildings on fire and escaped with a host of other prisoners in the direction of Montana. There, he was imprisoned for burglary and sentenced to a year in Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge. By November 1913 he had escaped, but was recaptured a week later.
His time at Deer Lodge was monotonous, but Panzram stayed busy. ‘At that place I got to be an experienced wolf,’ he said. ‘I would start the morning with sodomy, work as hard at it as I could all day and sometimes half the night.’ Unusually, he served his full sentence, including an extra year for escaping, eventually being released in 1915.
A few months later, he was arrested for larceny and sentenced to seven years at the Oregon State Penitentiary at Salem, another harsh and cruel correctional institute. Beatings and torture were rife and prisoners would be hung from rafters for hours on end. Panzram was hung on several occasions, once for ten hours a day for two days.
He escaped, of course, but was recaptured. Then, he left Salem for good by sawing through his cell bars with a hacksaw blade. He hopped a freight train out of the North-West, shaved his moustache and changed his name to John O’Leary. Once again, he began to leave a trail of burglary and burned churches in his wake.
He spent the summer of 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut, stealing and raping young men. On one occasion, he broke into a large house. It turned out to be the house of William H. Taft, former president of the United States. Panzram got away with goods and bonds worth around $3,000, money he used to buy a yacht, the Akista, which he sailed along the Connecticut coast, breaking into other boats en route. His other favourite pastimes of rape and murder were never far from his thoughts. ‘I figured it would be a good plan to hire a few sailors to work for me, get them out to my yacht, get them drunk, commit sodomy on them, rob them and then kill them. This I done.’ He would take on a couple of sailors, get them drunk, shoot them when they were asleep and drop their bodies into the sea. He killed around ten men in this way in three weeks, but in late August the Akista was sunk in a storm.
Following yet another jail sentence – six months for burglary and possession of a handgun – he was arrested again but jumped bail and stowed away on a ship bound for Anngola on Africa’s west coast. There he was employed by the Sinclair Oil Company, but before too long he was up to his old tricks, raping and killing an eleven year-old boy. ‘A little nigger boy about eleven or twelve years old came bumming around,’ he wrote. He killed him by smashing his skull with a boulder. ‘I left him there, but first I committed sodomy on him and then I killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader.’
Some weeks later, in the Congo, he hired six natives to take him crocodile hunting. As they paddled downriver, Panzram shot them all in the back and fed them to the crocodiles. He realised that too many people knew he had hired the men and had to flee, stowing away on a ship bound for Lisbon. Another ship took him back to the United States. It was 1922 and he was thirty-one.
In July of that year, while he was in Salem Massachusetts, thinking about stealing another boat, he saw a twelve year-old boy who was running an errand. George McMahon was Panzram’s next victim. ‘I grabbed him by the arm and told him I was going to kill him,’ he confessed later. ‘I stayed with the boy about three hours. During that time, I committed sodomy on the boy six times, and then I killed him by beating his brains out with a rock . . . I had stuffed down his throat several sheets of paper out of a magazine.’ He was seen by a couple of witnesses who recognised him years later when he was arrested for the last time.
In Providence, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1923, Panzram stole a boat and sailed the coastline, stealing from boats at their moorings. He took on board a boy that he had befriended, George Walosin, and raped him that night. He tried to sell the boat and found a buyer but after a few drinks on board, he shot the man and threw him overboard. Next day, Walosin, who had witnessed the murder, jumped ship and told police in Yonkers that he had been sexually assaulted by Panzram.
A few days later, police boarded the yacht and arrested him on charges of sodomy, burglary and robbery. Facing more prison time, Panzram told his lawyer that if he could get him out of jail, he would let him have the boat. The lawyer arranged bail and Panzram was free. The yacht was found to be stolen, of course, and the lawyer was none too pleased to learn that he had worked for nothing.
Hoping to steal another boat and make his way to South America, Panzram headed for New London on the familiar Connecticut coast. There, searching for someone to mug, he found a boy begging. He dragged him into some woods and raped and strangled him.
Back in Manhattan, a short time after, he was taken on as a bathroom steward on the US Army Transport ship, US Grant, which was about to leave for China. The United States would not be free of him just yet, however. Before the ship had even left port, he was thrown off for being drunk and fighting with other members of the crew.
He returned to Connecticut, arriving in the sleepy village of Larchmont on the south shore of Westchester County, looking for someone to rob. The Larchmont train depot looked like a good bet. Dozens of suitcases, belonging to passengers travelling on the next day’s train, had been left in a room there. Panzram surmised there would be rich pickings in them. However, while he was rifling through the cases, a passing policeman spied him through a window. After a struggle he was arrested and taken into custody.
In the Larchmont village jail, Panzram began to confess to crimes. He told police interviewing him that he was a fugitive from prison in Oregon where he had been serving a seventeen-year sentence for shooting a police officer. They wired the penitentiary in Oregon who confirmed that Jeff Baldwin – the name Panzram had gone under – was, indeed, very much wanted in that state. There was even a $500 dollar reward for information leading to his capture. Panzram is reported to have tried to claim the reward.
Panzram was sentenced to five years in Connecticut, taken to Sing Sing prison and then moved on to the notorious Dannemora prison, one of the most brutal in the United States where some of the natio
n’s most hardened criminals were incarcerated. Again, beatings, whippings and torture were the order of the day.
Within weeks guards found a firebomb that Panzram had made and not long after he attacked a guard who had been particularly brutal towards him, hitting him on the back of the head with a heavy implement while he slept. He tried to escape by jumping from a prison wall, but the thirty feet drop broke both his legs and ankles and damaged his spine. He was merely dumped in his cell without any kind of medical attention.
At this time, Panzram was fantasising about killing as many people as he could. He dreamt of blowing up a railway tunnel or dynamiting a bridge in New York. He plotted to poison the water supply in the nearby town of Dannemora, killing the population of the entire town.
In July 1928, he was released, bitter, crippled and even more insane than when he had arrived at Dannemora. He wanted to take revenge on the world for the way he had been treated. He resumed his previous existence, committing numerous robberies and killing at least one man. He was arrested again, in Washington DC, but for the first time in years gave his real name and his string of crimes began to emerge. One policeman asked him what his crime was. ‘I reform people,’ was the reply.
He tried to escape, of course, but was caught and punished by being hoisted with his arms tied to a rafter above his head so that his toes just touched the ground. He was left like that for a day and a half, being beaten as he hung there. At some point he began to confess to the murder of young boys and talked about how much he enjoyed killing them.
One of the guards at Dannemora befriended Panzram and he agreed to write his life story for him. Over the next few weeks he spilled his sordid story onto paper provided by the guard, a 20,000-word confession detailing the thousands of crimes, numerous arrests and dozens of murders that had occupied him since Red Wing. He also reasoned that he had committed himself to a life of crime because of the way he had been treated. ‘All my associates,’ he wrote, ‘all of my surroundings, the atmosphere of deceit, treachery, brutality, degeneracy, hypocrisy and everything that is bad and nothing that is good. Why am I what I am? I’ll tell you why. I did not make myself what I am. Others had the making of me.’
He knew now there was no escape and, after being recognised as the killer of George McMahon, wrote in a letter to the District Attorney of Salem: ‘I not only committed that murder but twenty-one besides and I assure you here and now that if I ever get free and have the opportunity I shall sure knock off another twenty-two!’
Panzram was sentenced to twenty-five years in the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. He was almost back where it had all begun. The irony was not lost on him and, on hearing his sentence his face broke into a wide grin.
Arriving at the prison, he told the warden: ‘I’ll kill the first man that bothers me.’ Sure enough, that’s exactly what he did. He beat to death the supervisor of the laundry room in which he worked, a man who had, somewhat unwisely, treated him badly.
By now, his notoriety was widespread and the fact that he chose to defend himself during his trial, only added to this.
It was no great surprise that he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. On hearing the sentence Panzram turned to the judge and said: ‘I certainly want to thank you, judge, just let me get my fingers around your neck for sixty seconds and you’ll never sit on another bench as judge!’
Panzram’s body remained unclaimed after his hanging. It was dumped in a wheelbarrow and removed to the prison cemetery where it was buried in a grave marked only with the number ‘31614’.
‘I hate all the f----ing human race,’ he had written shortly before his execution. ‘I get a kick out of murdering people.’
Charles Starkweather
Charles Starkweather stalks popular culture in much the same way as his hero, James Dean. The films, The Sadist, Badlands, The Stand, Kalifornia and, more recently, Natural Born Killers, as well as the Bruce Springsteen song, Nebraska, all make reference to or tell the story of the red-haired, slow-witted, bow-legged killer who slew eleven people during a road trip through Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958 with his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.
Unlike most serial killers, there is nothing in Starkweather’s upbringing that suggested he was going to turn into a murderer. He was undoubtedly born in hard times, in the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, in November 1938, but his parents, Guy and Helen, always managed to provide for their seven children and Starkweather did not recall growing up hungry or facing the kind of struggle to survive that some people did at the time. There was no abuse, no absent father, no booze, no drugs; just a well-behaved, clean-living, strong family unit. Guy was a quiet man, a carpenter, whose crippling arthritis and bad back sometimes led to bouts of unemployment, while Helen was a hard-working mother who sometimes supplemented her husband’s income with work as a waitress.
School was another matter for young Charles, however. He was teased remorselessly for how he looked – he suffered from genu varus, a mild birth defect that caused his legs to be bowed – and the way he spoke; he also had a mild speech impediment. If that was not bad enough, he was a slow learner and never seemed to apply himself to his schoolwork. To make matters worse, it was discovered in his teens that he also suffered from severe myopia, or short-sightedness, making him almost blind.
Charles would escape to the gym, building up his body until he was strong enough to bully the bullies. Suddenly, this well-behaved boy from a good family turned into one of the town’s most troubled and troublesome young men. As his friend Bob van Busch said: ‘He could be mean as hell, cruel. If he saw some poor guy on the street who was bigger than he was, better looking, or better dressed, he’d try to take the poor bastard down to his size.’
It was around the time that James Dean was single-handedly inventing the moody American teenager on celluloid and Starkweather began to morph into Dean – he dressed like him, and bought into the whole rebellion thing, body and soul. But Starkweather was, in reality, a seething mass of self-loathing; he saw himself as a failure, living in perpetual fear of being a loser with no future.
Caril Ann Fugate was just thirteen when she met Charles in 1957. Like Charles, she had a rebellious nature and was not a great scholar. She was a pretty girl with dark brown hair and an unpredictable temper and Charles immediately fell for her. He even left school so that he could work at the Western Newspaper Union warehouse near her school, loading and unloading trucks. He was not the most diligent of workers, however, and his boss at the time was distinctly unimpressed: ‘Of all the employees in the warehouse, he was the dumbest man we had,’ he later reported.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Charles and his father was deteriorating and when Caril crashed Charles’s hotrod – insured by his father – Guy had had enough and threw Charles out of the house.
He moved into a rooming house and Caril became even more the centre of his world. He told friends that they were getting married and made up a story that she was pregnant. Her parents were not pleased when the story made its way back to them.
Starkweather took a job on a garbage truck, a job that only served to add to the desperate pessimism he felt about his life. It seemed to him that crime would provide the only way out of poverty and failure and he passed his time on the garbage truck planning bank robberies that would allow him to escape this life. During this time, a simple mantra ran through his head: ‘Dead people are all on the same level.’
On November 30, 1957, while visiting a petrol station, Charles did not even have enough money to buy a stuffed toy dog for Caril. Robert Colvert, the twenty-one-year-old attendant, refused him credit and Charles resolved to take revenge.
He returned at three the next morning with a shotgun, but left the gun in the car when he went in to buy a pack of cigarettes from Colvert who was working on his own. Starkweather then drove off, but turned the car round and went back in for some chewing gum. Again, he left the gun in the car. He drove off again, but stopped the car a short distance away, put on a
bandana and a hat to cover his red hair and walked back to the petrol station with the gun in a bag. Removing the gun, he held Covert up and took a hundred dollars from the cash register. He then made Colvert get into the car and drove him to a piece of wasteland. Colvert jumped him, trying to grab the gun, but it went off and Colvert fell to his knees. Starkweather blasted him in the head, making a widow of his young, pregnant wife. Telling Caril about the robbery later, he claimed that someone else had killed Colvert. She did not believe him.
The story of the murder made big headlines in the papers, but police believed the perpetrator to be a transient and it looked like Charles had got away with it. It made him feel empowered, someone who was beyond the normal laws and standards by which we live our lives. He felt like he could get away with anything.
Life, however, did not improve. He lost his job as a garbageman and was locked out of his room by his landlady when he failed to pay the rent. Meanwhile, Caril’s family, as well as his own, were dead against their relationship. He was getting desperate.
On January 21, 1958, he drove to the squalid, litter-strewn hovel that was Caril’s house, taking with him a borrowed .22 rifle and some ammunition. He later claimed that he had hoped to go hunting with Caril’s stepfather, Marion Bartlett, with the aim of patching up their relationship. He also brought along a couple of discarded carpet samples he had found for Velda.
Velda opened the door. Also in the house were Marion and the couple’s two-year-old daughter, Betty Jean. But it was not long before the talk developed into the same old argument. Velda did not want him to carry on seeing her daughter and Marion literally kicked him out of the house.