The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Back in America he raped and killed three more boys, bringing his murders up to twenty. After five years of rape, robbery and arson, Panzram was caught as he robbed the express office in Larchmont, New York and sent to one of America’s toughest prisons, Dannemora. ‘I hated everybody I saw.’ And again more defiance, more beatings. Like a stubborn child, he had decided to turn his life into a competition to see whether he could take more beatings than society could hand out. In Dannemora he leapt from a high gallery, fracturing a leg, and walked for the rest of his life with a limp. He spent his days brooding on schemes of revenge against the whole human race: how to blow up a railway tunnel with a train in it, how to poison a whole city by putting arsenic into the water supply, even how to cause a war between England and America by blowing up a British battleship in American waters.

It was during this period in jail that Panzram met a young Jewish guard named Henry Lesser. Lesser was a shy man who enjoyed prison work because it conferred automatic status, which eased his inferiority complex. Lesser was struck by Panzram’s curious immobility, a quality of cold detachment. When he asked him: ‘What’s your racket?’ Panzram replied with a curious smile: ‘What I do is reform people.’ After brooding on this, Lesser went back to ask him how he did it; Panzram replied that the only way to reform people is to kill them. He described himself as ‘the man who goes around doing good’. He meant that life is so vile that to kill someone is to do him a favour.

When a loosened bar was discovered in his cell, Panzram received yet another brutal beating – perhaps the hundredth of his life. In the basement of the jail he was subjected to a torture that in medieval times was known as the strappado. His hands were tied behind his back; then a rope was passed over a beam and he was heaved up by the wrists so that his shoulder sockets bore the full weight of his body. Twelve hours later, when the doctor checked his heart, Panzram shrieked and blasphemed, cursing his mother for bringing him into the world and declaring that he would kill every human being. He was allowed to lie on the floor of his cell all day, but when he cursed a guard, four guards knocked him unconscious with a blackjack and again suspended him from a beam. Lesser was so shocked by this treatment that he sent Panzram a dollar by a ‘trusty’. At first, Panzram thought it was a joke. When he realised that it was a gesture of sympathy, his eyes filled with tears. He told Lesser that if he could get him paper and a pencil, he would write him his life story. This is how Panzram’s autobiography came to be written.

When Lesser read the opening pages, he was struck by the remarkable literacy and keen intelligence. Panzram made no excuses for himself:

If any man was a habitual criminal, I am one. In my life time I have broken every law that was ever made by both God and man. If either had made any more, I should very cheerfully have broken them also. The mere fact that I have done these things is quite sufficient for the average person. Very few people even consider it worthwhile to wonder why I am what I am and do what I do. All that they think is necessary to do is to catch me, try me, convict me and send me to prison for a few years, make life miserable for me while in prison and turn me loose again … If someone had a young tiger cub in a cage and then mistreated it until it got savage and bloodthirsty and then turned it loose to prey on the rest of the world… there would be a hell of a roar… But if some people do the same thing to other people, then the world is surprised, shocked and offended because they get robbed, raped and killed. They done it to me and then don’t like it when I give them the same dose they gave me.

(From Killer, a Journal of Murder, edited by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long, Macmillan, 1970.)

Panzram’s confession is an attempt to justify himself to one other human being. Where others were concerned, he remained as savagely intractable as ever. At his trial he told the jury: ‘While you were trying me here, I was trying all of you too. I’ve found you guilty. Some of you, I’ve already executed. If I live, I’ll execute some more of you. I hate the whole human race.’ The judge sentenced him to twenty-five years.

Transferred to Leavenworth penitentiary, Panzram murdered the foreman of the working party with an iron bar and was sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Lesser had been showing the autobiography to various literary men, including H. L. Mencken, who were impressed. But when Panzram heard there was a movement to get him reprieved, he protested violently: ‘I would not reform if the front gate was opened right now and I was given a million dollars when I stepped out. I have no desire to do good or become good.’ And in a letter to Henry Lesser he showed a wry self-knowledge: ‘I could not reform if I wanted to. It has taken me all my life so far, thirty-eight years of it, to reach my present state of mind. In that time I have acquired some habits. It took me a lifetime to form these habits, and I believe it would take more than another lifetime to break myself of these same habits even if I wanted to…’ ‘… what gets me is how in the heck any man of your intelligence and ability, knowing as much about me as you do, can still be friendly towards a thing like me when I even despise and detest my own self.’ When he stepped onto the scaffold on the morning of 11 September 1930, the hangman asked him if he had anything to say. ‘Yes, hurry it up, you hoosier bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.’

Here we can see clearly the peculiar nature of the logic that drove Panzram to a form of suicide. To begin with, he committed the usual error of the violent criminal, ‘personalising’ society and swearing revenge on it. The address to the jury shows that he saw them as symbolic representatives of society. ‘Some of you, I’ve already executed. If I live, I’ll execute some more of you…’ In his early days, his crimes were a ‘magical’ attempt to get his revenge on ‘society’ – magical because there is no such thing as society, only individuals. The seven-year sentence turned a petty crook into a man with a mission – to ‘teach society a lesson’. But the Warden Murphy episode seems to have been a turning point. After his escape, Panzram fought a gun battle because he was too ashamed to return to the prison and look the warden in the face. The savage punishment that followed seems to have been something of a relief. At this point, Murphy might have completed the work of reformation by looking Panzram in the face and asking how he could have done it. But Murphy’s patience was exhausted, and now Panzram despised and hated himself as much as society. The robbery and murder of sailors seems to have been an attempt to somehow convince himself that he was ‘damned’.

What Murphy had done was to make Panzram realise that his logic – that ‘society’ was against him – was based on a fallacy. When Murphy treated him with sympathy, it must have begun to dawn on Panzram that his ‘society’ was an abstraction – that the world was made up of real individuals like himself. But when Murphy’s regime collapsed because of Panzram’s betrayal, Panzram went back to his false logic with redoubled persistence. ‘They’ – other people – were the enemy. However, no one can live out such a philosophy; everyone must have at least one close relationship with another person to remain human. The twenty murders Panzram committed after his escape could be regarded as a form of self-punishment. In 1912 he had broken back into jail to try and rescue Cal Jordan; by 1920, he had turned his back on personal feelings and committed murder as a kind of reflex.

By the time he was in jail again – this time for good – Panzram had achieved complete self-alienation. He had convinced himself that the world was vile, that human beings all deserve to be exterminated, and that therefore he had nothing to live for. Emotionally, he was in a vacuum. Yet this is clearly an unnatural state for any human being, particularly for one like Panzram. The autobiography reveals that he has the makings of a ‘self-actualiser’. Lesser was surprised to find that he had read most of the major works on prison reform – no doubt stimulated by Warden Murphy; Panzram also read philosophy in jail, including Schopenhauer and Kant. (He seems to have borrowed his pessimism from Schopenhauer.) Yet this man, whose self-esteem was so high that he would allow himself to be tortured for days without giving way, had never achieved the most basic levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – for ‘security’ and for ‘belongingness’.