A Look at a Serial Killer: Carl Panzram

We don't know how much of what Carl Panzram told us was true. What we do know is he was a very troubled man who, in my estimation, was the most horrific serial killer in American history.

The son of Prussian immigrants, Carl Panzram started his life off troubled. By age 8 he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and by his teen years he was a full blown alcoholic. At age 14 he decided to leave home. Soon after this, he claims to have been raped by a group of hobos. As he got older, his crimes became more violent. The first crimes were based on thievery. He once stole from William Taft and in fact he used one of his stolen handguns in several murders. At age 29, after years of imprisonment and petty crimes, he stepped up to the biggest crime of them all: murder.

He began his crime in New York. He would get sailors from the bars, rape them, shoot them, and dump their body in a river. Throughout his life Panzram claimed it wasn't so much that he was gay but that sodomy was degrading. His goal was to make people suffer as much as possible.

He wanted them to feel the pain he had felt. After he tired of killing sailors, he moved to Africa. There he would kill and rape a child and murder 6 villagers. He fed those men to the sharks. He would return to America and commit a number of murders. They would all involve stealing, rape, and then murder.

He was charged with burglary in 1928 and he wanted to let everyone know what he had done. He confessed to two murders and had his autobiography written by a befriended prison guard. Panzram went to prison and ended up killing another inmate. The world had had enough and he was sentenced to death. Panzram did not argue. He wanted to leave this world. His last words were:

"Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill 10 men while you're fooling around!"

Carl Panzram's rage will never be understood. He once described himself as "rage personified". Perhaps this quote from his autobiography best sums up his life.

"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 sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry."