“In a sense, therefore, Lesser’s present of the dollar was the cruellest thing he could have done. It testified that there was decency and kindness in the world. And this in turn meant that Panzram might, if he had made the effort, have achieved some kind of fulfilment in life. The mechanics of conversion demand that the sinner should make a full confession; and this is what Panzram immediately proceeded to do. Yet with twenty murders on his conscience, many of them children, he knew there could be no absolution. It was too late, far too late. He had thrown away his chances.
The implication of Abbott’s book is that people like himself and Panzram never had a chance from the beginning. But is this true? Panzram had at least one chance, under Warden Murphy. Abbott had at least one chance, when his book was accepted. Both threw them away. The real problem seems to date from their original assumption that life had no intention of treating them fairly. According to Panzram, he was cuffed and kicked as a child and came to hate his mother. ‘Before I left [home] I looked around and figured that one of our neighbours who was rich and had a nice home full of nice things, he had too much and I had too little.’ So he burgled the house and landed in reform school. There again, he claims, ‘everything I seemed to do was wrong’, so he was punished and struck back viciously. ‘Then I began to think that I would have my revenge… If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.’ This weird logic of revenge was already fully formed by the age of thirteen. And it was clearly based on self-pity, on the notion that ‘the world’ had treated him badly. So instead of using his considerable intelligence and willpower to achieve success – and in that age he might have become anything from a circus stunt man to a movie star – he wasted himself in crimes of petty resentment.
Panzram also implies that he was in some way not to blame for his crimes – that if the tiger cub is badly treated it can be expected to turn savage. There is an obvious element of truth in this; but it manages to leave out of account the whole question of free choice: the decision ‘to be out of control’ that seems common to violent criminals.
Panzram’s pattern of revolt is not unique; it can be seen in many criminals whose background and upbringing were completely unlike his. A case in point is the English ‘acid bath murderer’ John Haigh, executed in 1949 for six murders. A few years before this, Bernard Shaw and his secretary Blanche Patch were lunching at the Onslow Court Hotel, where Miss Patch lived, and Haigh was at the next table. A child sitting nearby dropped one of those toy bombs containing an explosive cap, and Haigh leaned over and snarled: ‘If you do that again I’ll kill you.’ According to Miss Patch, who told me this story in 1956, Shaw then commented that Haigh would end on the gallows. It seems as if he had instinctively recognised the ‘decision to be out of control’ that is characteristic of the violent criminal.
Yet in every other respect, Haigh and Panzram were as unlike as possible. Haigh was the son of fond parents, of strong religious inclination; he was a brilliant musician who won a scholarship to a grammar school and became a choirboy. He loved good clothes and fast cars, and in due course a car-hire swindle landed him in court. At this point, he made the same decision as Panzram. His first period in jail faced him with a choice: either the game wasn’t worth the candle and he had better make his peace with society; or society had declared war on him and he would teach it a lesson. He embarked on a career of swindling, punctuated by periods in jail, and ended by murdering several people who had entrusted him with their business affairs. The most obvious thing about his career of crime is that it was a miscalculation from beginning to end. From fifteen years of crime – many of these spent in jail – he earned about £15,000. He could have earned far more in any honest business. But he felt from the beginning that life ‘owed’ him a better start than he had been offered, and the ‘logic of resentment’ drove him to increasingly ambitious attempts at short-cuts to the things he felt he deserved.
This seems to be the basic pattern of the violent man who turns to crime. His starting point is the premise that ‘life’ has treated him unfairly. In an attempt to right the balance, he takes short-cuts to get what he wants. The result is usually the same: brushes with the law, clashes with authority, periods in jail, increasing resentment and a determination to look for even shorter short-cuts.
He may, if he is very lucky, escape the social consequences of his acts. But he cannot escape the personal consequences. This emerges clearly in a story Lesser tells of Panzram. One day, Lesser went into Panzram’s cell to check the bars. Panzram seemed shocked. ‘Don’t ever do that again. Turning your back on me like that.’ Lesser protested: ‘I knew you wouldn’t harm me.’ ‘You’re the one man I don’t want to kill,’ said Panzram, ‘but I’m so erratic I’m liable to do anything.’ In effect, Panzram had become two persons – or rather, a man and a beast. Panzram was the man who wrote that extremely clear-sighted confession, and who felt the need to warn Lesser. But he had trained his instinct to become a killer as he might have trained an Alsatian dog. When Lesser turned his back, the Alsatian growled and tried to jump.
And now it becomes possible to see precisely what causes that element of self-destructiveness in the violent criminal. He believes that he is opposed to the values of ‘society’, and that he is setting up against these his own individual values. He ends by discovering that, in a completely real and practical sense, he has destroyed his own values and left himself in a kind of vacuum. Maxim Gorky tells the story of a Russian murderer named Vassili Merkhouloff, described to Gorky by the judge L. N. Sviatoukhin. Merkhouloff was an intelligent carter, and also a man of bull-like strength. One day he caught a man stealing sugar from his cart and hit him; the force of the blow killed the man. Sentenced for manslaughter, Merkhouloff was sent to a monastery to do penance. The thought of how easily he had snuffed out a life haunted Merkhouloff; as a priest talked to him about repentance, he could not rid himself of the thought that one violent blow could kill him too. One day after his release, he lost his temper with an idiot girl who was importuning him and struck her with a piece of wood. The blow killed her. He served a term in prison and the obsession now became a torment. When he came out, his new employer was a kindly man, whom Merkhouloff liked. One day, in a kind of frenzy, Merkhouloff overpowered him, tortured and then strangled him. He committed suicide in prison, strangling himself with his chains.
Merkhouloff’s confession to Judge Sviatoukhin makes it clear that he was not insane in any ordinary sense of the word: only obsessed by the thought that if life could be taken away so easily, then human existence must be meaningless. He had ceased to believe in the reality of the will, or of human values. ‘I can kill any man I choose and any man can kill me…’ That is to say, he had lost not only the sense of his own ‘primacy’ but all sense of his own necessity. When he killed his employer, he was driven by the same compulsion that made Panzram afraid of killing Lesser. The ‘decision to lose control’ had made him afraid of something inside himself.
The same motivation can be seen in the case of the twenty-two-year-old Steven Judy, executed in the electric chair in Indianapolis in March 1981. Judy had murdered and: strangled a twenty-year-old mother and thrown her three children to their death in a nearby river. A child of a broken home, Judy had committed his first rape at the age of twelve, stabbing the woman repeatedly and severing her finger. He told the jury: ‘You’d better put me to death. Because next time, it might be one of you, or your daughter.’ And before his execution he told his stepmother that he had raped and killed more women than he could remember, leaving a trail of bodies from Texas to Indiana. Like Panzram, Judy opposed every effort to appeal against his death sentence.
It may seem that there is a world of difference between a Russian peasant suffering from ‘obsessive neurosis’ and a young American rapist. But it is important to try to go to the heart of the matter. Human happiness is based upon a feeling of the reality of the will, or the ‘spirit’. When a man looks at something he has made with his own hands, or contemplates some catastrophe he has averted by courage and determination, he experiences a deep sense of satisfaction. Conversely, the feeling of helplessness, of losing control, is a good definition of misery. Physical strength is normally something that a man would be proud of; but when Merkhouloff feels that he can accidentally inflict death it becomes a source of misery. It destroys his relationships with other human beings; he cannot like someone without feeling that a single blow could terminate the relationship. Steven Judy is in the same position. Every time he sees an attractive girl he is tormented by desire; but after killing and raping a number of women, he knows that every twinge of desire is an invitation to risk his freedom and his life. Part of him remains normal, sociable, affectionate; like all human beings, he has the usual needs for security, ‘belonging’, self-esteem. But the killer-Alsatian guarantees that he will never be allowed to satisfy these in the normal way. It has placed him outside the human race.