Carl Panzram

What the record shows

Carl Panzram was a career burglar and prison escapee who, after his arrest in 1928, confessed in writing to 21 murders committed between about 1920 and 1928 in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Portuguese Angola. He was convicted of one murder: the June 20, 1929 killing of Robert G. Warnke, a civilian laundry foreman at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, he was convicted of that murder, sentenced to hang and executed at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930. The San Diego State University finding aid for his papers notes that his prison records show convictions only for burglary and larceny apart from the Leavenworth murder.

Panzram's own account, as summarized in the Wikipedia article drawn from his autobiography, begins in 1920, when he said he lured sailors from New York port bars aboard a stolen yacht and shot them, dumping the bodies in Long Island Sound. He said that in 1921 and 1922, in Portuguese Angola, he killed a boy and six men. In July 1922 he said he beat a boy to death in Salem, Massachusetts; the article identifies the victim as Henry McMahon. He also described strangling a boy near New Haven, Connecticut, in 1922 and shooting a man near Kingston, New York, in 1923. Investigators corroborated only five of the confessed killings.

The last confessed murder was that of Alexander Uszacke, a 14-year-old newsboy, in Philadelphia in the summer of 1928. On August 30, 1928, Panzram was arrested in Baltimore on a Washington, D.C., burglary charge. Held at the Washington Asylum and Jail, he volunteered confessions to the boys' killings. Philadelphia authorities indicted him for the Uszacke murder, but he was never tried on it. In Washington he was convicted of burglary and, according to the finding aid, sentenced to 25 years, to be served at Leavenworth; Wikipedia gives the sentence as 25 years to life.

In the District jail a young guard, Henry Lesser, befriended him. The finding aid records that Lesser encouraged Panzram to write his life story and smuggled the pages out. In that manuscript Panzram stated that he had murdered 21 people, committed more than a thousand sexual assaults on males and thousands of burglaries and arsons, and felt no remorse. The finding aid notes that elsewhere he boasted of 23 killings.

Within a year of his transfer to Leavenworth, Panzram killed again. The Bureau of Prisons reports that on the morning of June 20, 1929, Warnke, a 47-year-old Army veteran from Cleveland, Ohio, employed at the prison since 1921, was struck on the head with a heavy flat iron shortly after reporting to the laundry. The first responding officer subdued Panzram, who was placed in isolation and refused to make a statement. The Bureau says there was no known conflict between the two men.

Panzram was tried in federal court in 1930 for Warnke's murder, convicted and sentenced to death. The finding aid states that the psychiatrist Karl Menninger examined him and found him of sound mind at the time of the killing. Panzram refused to let anyone appeal on his behalf and, according to Wikipedia, rejected efforts by opponents of capital punishment to seek clemency for him. He was hanged at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930.

Lesser kept the manuscript for four decades. Parts of it appeared in 1970 in Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long, later adapted into a 1995 film. In 1980 Lesser donated the papers to San Diego State University.

Panzram was born Charles Panzram on a farm near East Grand Forks, Minnesota, to immigrants from East Prussia; Wikipedia gives his birth date as June 28, 1891, the finding aid June 28, 1892. According to the Grand Forks Herald, his father left when he was eight and he was first arrested at eleven for burglary. He was sent to the state training school at Red Wing, where he said staff beat and sexually assaulted him, claims not independently verified. From his teens he passed through the Fort Leavenworth military barracks, the Montana State Prison, the Oregon State Penitentiary, Sing Sing and Clinton Prison, escaping several times.