Serial Killer Carl Panzram #truecrime

In the early part of the 20th century an American serial killer was convicted of 5 murders but confessed to more than 20. This vicious monster killed in both North America and Africa on his murderous travels.

Carl. Panzram.

Carl Panzram was born in 1891 in Minnesota to Prussian immigrants. When he was a small child, truancy laws came into effect which forced his parents to send him and his siblings to school. His parents resented this as it prevented the children from working full time on their farm. It is said that often the children were forced to go on only a couple hours of sleep so they could work the fields and go to school.

Panzram’s first arrest occured at age 8 for drunk and disorderly conduct. Then at age of 11 he was again arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. After a subsequent series of robberies, including the theft of a firearm, his parents had enough. They sent him to the Minnesota State Training Schoolin 1903.

Later Panzram recounted how he was beaten and sexually assaulted by staff at the school. The majority of the violence occured in what the boys referred to as the “paint shop. It got this nickname because upon leaving the building, they would be “painted” with blood and bruises. After enduring the abuse for 2 years, Carl Panzram burned the school down in 1905, causing around $100,000 of damage. He was not caught for the arson, but instead talked his way into being released.

Panzram was soon sent to another reformatory. For a brief period This time the Red Wing Training School. After being paroled to his mother's custody in 1906, he convinced her that he wanted to be a priest. She sent him to the Immanuel Lutheran Church. However, this did not last and he was expelled after he pulled a gun on one of his teachers.

After he was expelled, he hopped a freight train on it’s way out of Minnesota. During this train ride, he claimed he was raped by 4 hobos, but this claim cannot be verified, but either way his rage and hatred for humanity cannot be disputed. Yet his freedom did not last and again he found himself in reform school for a brief period, until He escaped the Montana State reform school with another inmate and the 2 went on a robbery and arson spree.

In 1907, Panzram got drunk and decided to enlist in the US Army. He was repeatledly jailed for insubordination and other minor violations until in April 1908 was soon court martialed for theft of government property. He was dishonorably discharged and sentenced to 37 months of hard labor in Leavenworth military prison in Kansas.

When he was discharged in 1910, he returned to his wandering life of crime. It was during this time he began focusing on sexually assaulting other men, described himself as the spirit of hatred personified.

He would spend time in almost 20 different American prisons in subsequent years for a variety of crimes. He was a large man and due to his time at Leavenworth prison, he was also immensely strong. One of the few time he worked a semi-legal job was as a strikebreaker hired to beat union workers into compliance.

Panzram travelled to Europe and South America committing crimes all along the way. In 1920 he was back in the US he burglarized the home of the former president William H Taft in New Haven Connecticut. Panzram stole jewelry and other valuables, but more importantly he stole a 45 caliber 1911 handgun, which he would use to commit multiple murders.

After selling the items stolen from the Taft mansion, Panzram bought a yacht called the Akista. He then lured men from New York bars to back to yacht before raping them, shooting them with the stolen pistol and dumping their bodies off the coast of Long Island. Panzram would later estimate that he killed 10 men during this period. This pattern of murder only ended when the Akista ran aground and sank near Atlantic City which allowed the 2 victims onboard to escape the killers grasp.

In 1921, after serving 6 months in Bridgeport, Connecticut for burglary and carrying a gun illegally, Panzram boarded a boat to Angola, Africa. He worked as the foreman of an oil rig, which he would later burn down. While in Angola he also murdered a boy he said was roughly 11 years old. When asked about the boy, panzram said “his brains coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader.”

While in Africa, Panzram said he hired 6 locals to help him hunt for crocodiles. When they towed him to where the animals were, he shot the men, raped their bodies and fed them to the crocodiles. Knowing that people had seen him leave with the men to go hunting, Panzram left the area and was back in America in 1922.

In New York he strangled a woman just for the front. In 1928 he was arrested for a series of burglaries in Washington DC, which led to a sentence of 20 years once more in Leavenworth.

Tantrum promised he would kill the first man who came across and his victim was Robert Warnke a civilian laundry foreman, for whose murder Carl Panzram was sentenced to death.

On death row, Carl Panzram Row in my lifetime, I have murdered 21 human beings. I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons, and last but not least, I have committed ****** on more than 1000 male human beings. For all these things, I am not the least bit sorry.

His attitude of unrepentant lasted right up until the end. Where on the day of his execution, on September 5th, in 1930, he complained to the executioner. Hurry it up, close your *******. I could hang a dozen men while you're fooling around. These were the killers last words.
#crime #serialkiller #documentary