Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

- In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings.

I have committed thousands of burglaries,

robberies, larcenies, arsons,

and last but not least,

I've committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings.

For all of these things I am not the least bit sorry.

I have no conscience, so that does not worry me.

I don't believe in man, God nor devil.

I hate the whole damn human race, including myself.

I am Carl Panzram.

I'm Robert Ray.

I'm Head of Special Collections & University Archives

here in the library at San Diego State University.

And what you see here are three examples

from the diary of Carl Panzram.

Panzram was arrested

for a housebreaking charge, relatively minor.

And when the police brought him in he said,

"This is a very small charge."

"I've committed numerous murders over the years."

"This is nothing."

- Authorities had no idea that he was arrested in Oregon,

that he was arrested in Montana,

and these other jurisdictions out West

because he always used a different name.

Upon his arrest he begins to talk about a couple of murders

that he committed.

This is the very first time that we can confirm

that he ever even talks about his prior crimes.

The story makes its way into the newspapers

and the story begins to gather momentum about this prisoner

that is being held in a Washington D.C. Jail,

who is confessing to lots of murders.

Inside the Washington D.C. Jail at that time

was a very young, 25-years-old jail guard

by the name of Henry Lesser.

Lesser was a new guard and somewhat idealistic,

very unlike the stereotypical prison guard of his day.

- I found out he was alive and he'd been Panzram's guard.

That's all I knew.

- Today we're going to be interviewing

a very unique individual, Mr. Henry Lesser,

who was the guard to Carl Panzram,

the most renowned murderer in his time.

He was a husky man.

He walked with a limp.

After I was a jailer for a short time

I happened to hear there was a prisoner

in the south wing where I was working at that time

who seemed to be a very interesting person.

And the first opportunity I went past his cell

and got talking to him.

- Lesser befriends Panzram while Panzram is in his cell.

He gives him cigarettes and treats him nicely

and Panzram takes a liking to the young guard

and they begin to have a friendly relationship.

- I asked him what was his record.

And he said.

How do you know?

I had to be diplomatic.

I said I just had an idea.

- I'm being held for investigation.

I reform people.

I kill them.

Put them out of their misery.

- This was something that was contrary

to the rules of the profession,

but which of course was totally consistent

with the rules of humanity.

- Colonel Peak was a superintendent

at the Washington D.C. Jail

when Henry Lesser was employed as an officer there.

- Colonel Peak had all of us into his office

going on that shift, afternoon shift.

He told us that he was informed

that we had a very dangerous man in our midst

and to be extra careful.

- The guards would come into the cell just to take a look

because they know of his previous escape attempts

and they find that some of the bars are loose.

Panzram is then taken out of that cell.

He is brought into the basement of the institution.

- Colonel Peak ordered him to the post

down in the basement of the jail,

with supported beams and ceiling.

He was tortured at the post,

his back up to the post.

He was manacled, his hands were manacled in the back.

He was forced off his feet some distance.

He was kept there all night.

The first night he didn't know where he was going,

so he didn't put up a fight,

but the second night he knew and he fought.

They subdued him with clubs

and he was kicked and dragged down to the post again.

- The D.C. Jail where Panzram was tortured

was a jail where slaves had been tortured 100 years earlier.

It was something that had to be conducted

in the most subterranean part of the institution

and something that people were really ashamed of.

- The next morning, after the second night,

I came to work and I was told

by the head tiersman, the prisoner,

who had charge of selling the men as they came in,

I was told about the torture of Panzram,

and I almost hit the ceiling.

I was greatly distressed about it.

I felt he was a man in the clutches of the law

and they had no right to do what they did to him,

even though he was a murderer and so on.

And I told the tiersman

to take a dollar into him,

because I knew he had no money

and we always had a canteen

we could buy smokes, sweet stuff, and so on.

So this man went past his cell,

he went to his cell and said,

"Carl, there's a guard here, Henry Lesser,"

"sent in a dollar to you."

- What, guard sending me a dollar?

What the hell, are you trying to do, kid me?

For Christ's sake, a guard they trusted

and they sending me a dollar, cut it out.

- Once Panzram develops a sense of trust with Lesser,

Panzram begins to open up to Lesser.

Thanks for the buck!

- And begins to tell him the story of his miserable life.

- And then I felt he had a story to tell.

I have an idea that he had something to tell us,

and I encouraged him to write his autobiography,

and he demurely said, "Jesus Christ, I can't do that."

"I went to school, got out at sixth grade."

"I've never written."

I said, "You start it, start it."

And I encouraged him.

It took a couple of weeks

until he finally started writing.

- He smuggles in paper and pencil,

because prisoners are not allowed to have these objects,

but Lesser provides him with the writing materials.

- True statement of some of my actions,

including the times and places

and my reasons for so doing these things,

written by me of my own freewill,

at the District Jail, Washington D.C.,

November 4th, 1928.

If after reading what I write

your faith in human nature isn't all destroyed,

then it never will be.

We had an arrangement,

by the time I was on the midnight shift, 12 to eight,

so we arranged that when he gets through writing

10, 15, 20 pages,

he should leave it on the bar of his cell.

And I started reading this, you know,

and it wasn't more than a week, 10 days,

that I felt I had something worthwhile.

There was an honest attempt on Panzram's part

to tell his story, society should know his part of it.

- I want society to know my side of the story,

even if only one man reads it, suits me.

Lesser was probably thinking

that it may be an example for people to understand

what makes somebody like Panzram.

Eventually Panzram wrote about 40,000 words.

- I was born a normal human being.

I was born on a small farm in Minnesota.

My parents were of German descent,

hardworking, ignorant, poor.

The rest of the family consisted

of five brothers and one sister.

My father and mother split up

when I was about seven or eight years old.

The old man pulled out one day and disappeared,

which left my mother with a family of six

and a small worked-out farm.

- He already had that kind of temperament

where he was resentful and reactive,

so he's probably going to go up

against his mother's authority and he doesn't like it.

- He got attention, but it was negative attention.

And that's the sad part of this thing,

because infants born healthy

that are nurtured

will not grow up to hurt other people, fact.

- He had five brothers, I think, and a sister.

None of them came forward to say,

"Yeah, this was a really bad situation."

"We were all abused."

And in fact, they seemed to have grown up and become okay.

- When I was a boy, six or seven years old,

I always had trouble with my ears

always aching and running with matter.

My people were too poor to have me in a hospital

so I was operated on in our own home,

on the kitchen table.

This was a mastoid operation behind my left ear.

- It could certainly have affected him.

If you had any kind of brain damage

or unbalanced brain chemistry or something like that,

it could explain free-floating anger.

You just don't feel right.

Something's wrong, you react to it,

you put labels on it, and find causes for it,

but you don't really know what it is.

It's just a complete sense of things not being right.

- He broke into a neighbor's house.

I stole everything

that to my eyes had the most value.

Those things were some apples, some cake,

and a great big pistol.

This is a resentful kid

who looks at what other people have

and wants it for himself so he decides to take it.

That's not necessarily a product of abuse.

That's just his own personality.

- I walked to the railroad yards

where I caught a freight train going to the West,

where I intended to be a cowboy and shoot Indians.

- It wasn't that long before his birth,

40 years before,

that there had been tremendous massacres

of Indians by settlers and settlers by Indians.

Genocidal Indian wars had gone on

and there was tremendous racism toward Indians.

This may have contributed to his talk about going out

and playing cowboys and Indians and shooting Indians,

because many young people at that time

were really trained, conditioned

to think in terms of killing Indians.

- It's more than 20 years ago;

I would have been a cowboy since.

I was caught, brought back home,

and beaten half to death, and sent to jail.

And from there the Minnesota State Training School

at Red Wing, Minnesota.

Right there and then I began to learn

about man's inhumanity to man.

- We're looking at punishment slips, some other records,

a statistical record book regarding Charles Panzram,

who was an inmate, 12 years old at the time,

of the Minnesota State Training School.

According to the record book

his relations with his parents was quarrelsome.

His environments defined as bad.

And in the character of his associates,

that's described as bad as well.

Trying to determine what's fact or fiction with him

is very difficult.

But he did say that he had a mastoid infection

behind his left ear and he had an operation.

And when you look at the record book

there's a line for special marks and scars.

There is a notation that says

he has a scar behind the left ear.

- We were all supposed to go to school a half a day

and work a half a day.

These were institutions

that had been devised in capitalist society

to train people for the industrial system,

to train them to become good industrial workers,

to be obedient, to be silent,

to perform the tasks that were needed by industry,

and there also was a great deal of regimentation.

- And the rest of the time

learn how to love Jesus and be good boys.

- Yeah, like they said that Jesus was the Son of God,

you know, and maybe Panzram was the son of the devil.

At the frame of the painting,

Panzram have Red Wing on the top left side.

I chose Red Wing because that was his formal education

into what it was like to live among human beings.

The beginnings of it was at Red Wing.

- They had a system in the institution,

a demerit and a credit system,

where if Panzram would act up or misbehave,

he was given a demerit slip.

- There are 27 punishment slips for Charles Panzram,

which are from his case file.

They're for such things as stealing food,

talking back to the teachers,

being disorderly, whispering,

calling a boy a snit,

putting sugar in his pocket, talking loud,

he is impudent all the time, doing very poor work,

disobedience, breaking two dishes, using bad language.

- He has that sense of callous disregard.

Kicking another boy.

Probably hyperactivity.

- Throwing a piece of crayon at another boy.

A bit of ADD.

Throwing food.

- He doesn't have a sense of focus

and a sense of life direction.

He just does what he wants for himself.

Stealing butter.

- Acts that wouldn't really be considered serious

if he was outside the institution.

Playing in school.

Just the acts of a child.

- He wasn't motivated to earn those credits

so he could get out of there.

- He will constantly be hitting his head

against a brick wall

and all they'll do is put further restriction on him,

put him in isolation, punish him.

They started me off

by trying to beat the Christian religion into me.

The consequences were that the more they beat and whip me,

the more I hated them and their damn religion.

Aren't we the same country

that praises the Judaeo-Christian ethos,

the ethic, you know, that we're Christians

and we want to help people,

we want to work with people,

but we're sure not showing it.

- They had various methods of punishing us

for doing wrong and for teaching us to do right.

The most popular with them

was to take us to the paint shop,

so-called because there they used

to paint our bodies black and blue.

- And this will also intensify his feelings

of abandonment and victimization.

- The first time he finds himself in an institution

and he begins to get his footing

and see the others around him,

he's going to realize that he's got a creative persona.

- I began to hate those who abused me.

Then I began to think

that I would have my revenge just as soon

and as often as I could injure someone else.

- He wants to one up other people,

because that's his personality.

He also likes attention.

Anyone at all would do.

If I couldn't injure those who injured me,

then I would injure someone else.

- I think this is where he begins to create this idea

that he's the worst of the worst.

Nobody better mess with him.

- The best predictor of future behavior

is what's happened in the past.

Carl Panzram attempted a number of escapes

when he was very young.

- One of the punishment slips dated March 16th, 1904,

he'd attempted to escape from school.

- I was too dumb to learn anything in school

so they took me out and put me to work

all day washing dishes

and waiting on tables in the officers' dining room.

Once each week I used to be sent to the laundry

to get the clean linen for the dining room.

One cold winter day I went there and I didn't come back.

I attempted to escape,

but I got caught, brought back,

damn near beaten to death.

- After fully investigating the above report

I would recommend that he has a spanking.

I can only imagine what their spankings were like.

- Unfortunately, the spanking was just an early indicator

of the type of punishment or torture

that he would have had inflicted on him

in other prisons later in his life.

- I began to try to figure out some other way

to punish those who punished me.

The only thing I could figure out to do

was to burn down the building

in which the paint shop was located.

This I did.

We can see evidence of kids

who may grow into psychopaths very early,

as young as three years old.

And those kids will have a tendency to blame,

they'll lie, they'll steal,

they'll be cruel to animals and other kids.

- After serving about two years there

I was pronounced by the parole board

to be a nice, clean boy of good morals.

I'd been taught by the Christians how to be a hypocrite,

and I had learned more

about stealing, lying, hating, burning, and killing

from the treatment I received while there

and the lessons I learned from it.

I had fully decided when I left there

just how I would live my life.

That night I resumed my journey to the West

that had been cut short two years before.

I was about 13 or 14 years old at the time.

I started out a hobo

and soon learned how to ride freight trains

and passenger trains inside and out without paying my fare.

One experience that I had during that time I never forgot

and it had a direct bearing

on a lot of actions later in life.

- He claims that he was assaulted, gang-raped,

by four other individuals who were on that train.

- Just as soon as we all got into the car

and shut the door and the train pulled out,

they all began to tell me what a nice boy I was.

First, they wanted me to do a little something for them.

I told them no.

What they couldn't get by moral persuasion,

they proceeded to get by force.

I left that boxcar sadder and sicker,

but wiser boy than I was when I entered it.

After that, I always went alone

wherever and whenever possible.

I learned to look with suspicion and hatred on everybody.

Forcing might make right.

Perhaps things shouldn't be that way,

but that's the way they are.

Those were the days when I was learning the lessons

that life teaches us all

and they made me what I am today.

- He turned it around, got angry,

and decided this is what I'm gonna do to others.

- Another lesson I learned at that time

was there were a lot of very nice things in this world;

among them were whiskey and sodomy.

When he did leave home

and found out pretty quickly by riding the rails

that he was a vulnerable person,

he saw the way to dominate others

was through rape or beating someone up.

And so he set himself to do that

and those were the people who are available, men and boys.

It wasn't women or girls riding the rails,

it was men and boys,

so clearly his early patterns

of dominance were set right there.

- Whenever I met one who wasn't too rusty looking

I would make him raise his hands and drop his pants.

I rode them old and young, tall and short, white and black.

It made no difference to me at all

except that they were human beings.

I knew more about sodomy

than old boy Oscar Wilde ever thought of knowing.

- Because he was abused himself in that way at Red Wing,

on the trains, and in other instances,

he may have seen this as a way,

a twisted way of getting revenge on the people

that did it to him.

- I was so busy committing sodomy

that I didn't have any time left to serve Jesus

as I'd been taught to do in those reform schools.

You're raping your own equals,

so you're showing that you're the one who's in power.

It has nothing to do with getting you sexual pleasure.

Even if you do get that, that's not the point.

The motive is to dominate others

and make sure everyone knows you're the guy,

you're the boss.

- While he's in the city of Helena, Montana,

he's 16 years old at that time

and he's in a bar and an army recruiter comes in

and gives a speech about joining the Army.

- I joined the U.S. Army in 1906 at Helena, Montana,

stationed at Fort Harrison

and in the 6th Regular U.S. Infantry and A Company.

- He lies about his age and joins the Army.

- He was trained in the military ways as a young man

and then went into the Army,

which was another form of prison.

Left, right, left.

Left, right, left.

Left, right, left.

Left, right, left.

The regimentation of Army life

does not fit in with Panzram's personality.

He steals some property from the supply house.

- I was only in the Army a month or two

when I got three years in the U.S. Military Prison

at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

My number was 1874 and my name was Carl Panzram.

One of my tasks and punishments while there

was to be shackled to a 50-pound iron ball for six months.

My part was to load my iron ball and 18-pound hammer,

a pick and shovel,

and a six-foot iron crowbar all into a wheelbarrow

and march behind the line of cons,

three miles out to the rock quarry,

and there work for 8 1/2 hours

in the hot Kansas sun busting big rocks.

But all that treatment did one good thing for me.

The harder they worked me, the stronger I got.

I was discharged from that prison in 1910.

I was the spirit of meanness personified.

- What recourse he had was to get out of Leavenworth,

he is a young man and reform.

- In theory, yes, it is that easy in theory.

- He'd already created a certain persona of this bad guy.

70% fail within three years.

- And now he's gonna go act that out.

- He is a product of his psyche and his environment.

- I had not at this time got so that I hated myself.

I only hated everybody else.

- What you see here is the first page of the diary

where Panzram goes through all the prisons

that he had been incarcerated in throughout his lifetime.

- I've been in two reform schools,

seven big prisons, and hundreds of jails.

None of them were any different from the others.

- Jesse James and Dillinger had a certain amount of bravado

and Baby Face Nelson did,

but none of them compare to the bravado of Panzram.

They would ask him what his profession was

and he would say thief.

- I could have been taught properly,

and if I had been I feel sure

that I would have led a far different life than I have done.

Some of the blame is yours for not making it your business

to see to it that such conditions

should not exist among your fellowman.

Torquemada, the Chief Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition

was known as the world's greatest torturer.

The rack,

the wheel, the red-hot irons to burn out the eyes,

pinchers to pull off parts of the body,

fire to burn, and water to drown.

But they were very crude compared to those in use today.

During my 20 years

in all the various prisons and jails I've been in,

I've undergone every kind of abuse and punishment

that the ingenious minds and many men could devise.

In the United States

we are not aware that we have such a very long and rich

and dark history of imprisonment.

There was beating, there was torture that was administered

in the American prison system for generations.

These are all things that are not reflected at all

in the textbooks,

in the sanitized version of history of American prisons

that we're all accustomed to.

- We like to forget the bad history,

but we are a product of our history, as was Panzram.

- They kicked the hell out of me.

Put me in the cooler.

- Cold, dark, that was completely isolated in a prison,

within a prison, within a prison.

Confined to that kind of space,

one gradually lost touch

with reality.

Panzram was subjected to this for long periods of time

in many of the prisons.

- The more cooler you get,

the more heat and hate there is generated in your heart.

He's gonna be the one

who will attract the tougher, meaner guards,

who themselves are trying to prove something.

- He was constantly refusing to give into the primary thing

that the prison system was trying to do to him,

which was to break his will.

He maintained his will.

He tried to maintain his dignity,

twisted as it was, as he saw it.

- They stripped naked and chained us up to the door

and then turned the fire hose on us

until we were black and blue, deaf, and half blind.

Many a man has paid

for what those men had done to me that Sunday morning.

- Panzram is tortured by the guards

who used several different methods

to control the population.

One is the snorting pole.

When the lash begins

to take away little bits of hide

and blood begins to run

and the sucker begins to jerk and yelp, jump and snort;

that's why it's called the snorting pole.

If you ever get it,

it's not the same as I did when I got it.

When a man is let down after being well-whipped,

he has blood on his back and murder in his heart.

- He's somebody who was very much produced

by the prison system.

- They are after all only convicts,

they're only criminals, so what the hell?

That attitude is what's sad.

- Back in the early 20th century,

wardens were the kings of their own autonomous kingdom.

They could do mostly whatever they wanted.

And the inner workings of the institutions

were not exposed to outside supervision.

- One of the things that he and others endured

was something called the hummingbird.

- A device that would inflict

the maximum of corporal punishment

with the minimum of harm to himself

and the most exquisite anguish on the victim.

He was put in a steel bathtub.

- In his hands he holds a common sponge.

This sponge is connected to an electric battery by wires.

- He was wet down, given electric shock.

- The sensation of the victim are that

there seems to be millions

of red-hot needles sticking into him.

The agony is intense.

- It was something that started in the 1870s in Ohio.

As soon as the battery was invented,

there was somebody to use that battery

to deliver this kind of demonic treatment to convicts.

- Two or three minutes of this

and the victim is then already free

to the grave or madhouse.

- You can appreciate through empathy

why the guy was so angry, so outraged,

because these are the people

that you're trusting to look after you, to guide you,

you know, to punish you,

but constructively, not destructively.

- To some extent he is a logical product

of the prison system, of a brutal prison system.

But on the other hand,

it's not the only possible product of the prison system,

so while it's logical, it's not necessary causal.

- If you think that you can stop crime

by catching us, locking us up,

punishing us by brutal treatment,

hanging or electrocuting us,

sterilizing or castrating us,

then you are a fool for thinking that way.

That only makes bad matters worse.

I fired and fought until my gun was empty of bullets

and I was empty of courage.

Panzram was successful

in escaping again from Oregon State Prison.

Panzram stole a white prisoner's uniform,

spread the bars, and walked right out of that prison.

- I made a break from the inside of the walls.

I still owe 14 years there.

- His ability to escape from prison was very remarkable.

I've never seen anything like it.

- He was kind of the Houdini of outlaws.

One time he broke into a prison

to help a fellow convict break out, he was caught,

but he did manage to get inside the prison.

- For all the misery and tortures

that I have went through,

I have made other men go through

many times over, only worse.

After escaping from the State Prison at Salem, Oregon

in May 1918, I changed my name to John O'Leary,

took out seamen's papers, passenger's passports,

and went to South America, Europe, and Africa.

For the next five years I was in 31 different countries.

I went up to New Haven, Connecticut.

I robbed the home of someone in that place.

I got about $40,000 worth of jewelry and Liberty bonds.

The bonds were signed and registered

with the name of W.H. Taft.

William Taft of course

was the former President of the United States,

who after he left the office,

became a law professor at Yale University,

and that's why he was living in New Haven, Connecticut.

- With that money I bought a yacht, the Akista.

- After he purchases the boat, he lives on this boat

in Long Island Sound for several months.

- Then I figured it would be a good plan

to hire a few sailors to work for me,

get them out to my yacht,

get them drunk, commit sodomy on them,

rob them, and then kill them.

My motto is, "Rob them all, rape them all",

"and kill them all."

They are there yet, 10 of 'em.

You're to blame more so than I.

If you're going to go on teaching others

as you have taught me, then you must suffer the same as I.

- Panzram was clearly a psychopath.

Psychopaths tend to blame

and not take responsibility for anything.

- He gets on a ship as a seaman and sets sail for Africa.

He gets a job with the Sinclair Oil Company.

He comes across a small boy.

He sexually assaults the boy and murders him.

- His brains were coming out of his ears

when I left him.

He will never be any deader.

I went to town, bought a ticket on the Belgian Steamer

to Lobito Bay down the coast.

There I hired a canoe.

- Panzram pulls out a gun and shoots all six men.

I threw them overboard

and the crocodiles soon finished what I had left of them.

This lesson, I was taught by others, might makes right.

At Salem, Massachusetts,

I murdered an 11 or 12 year old boy

by beating his brains out with a rock.

I left him laying there

with his brains coming out of his ears.

I met a fellow who said he wanted to buy my boat,

he tried to stick me up, but I shot him twice.

A few days later I went to New Haven

where I killed another boy.

I committed a little more sodomy on him also

and then tied his belt around his neck and strangled him.

Man made me what I am today.

- He's a cold-blooded killer

who did not care who he hurt

and he was killing people who did not hurt him.

- We can either accept it at face value and say,

this is the story

of one of the most ferocious serial killers

America has ever seen before,

or we can say it's just the empty boast of a braggart.

- We do get a lot of false confessors among serial killers.

In those days 21 was an impressive figure

and so I think we can still say

there is some possibility he exaggerated his numbers.

I don't know that he did,

but I suspect he did given

all the other patterns of his behavior,

which were to make him look like the big bad tough guy.

- The only thing that I am aware of

that Panzram was not 100% accurate on

was when he would talk about burning a flax mill down

in the Oregon State Prison in Salem.

He would say...

- And that was another $100,000 to my credit.

When they did research on it,

they found out it was only about $25,000 instead of 100.

He claims that a photograph was taken of him

while he was in Africa

and he was working with the local native population.

He claimed that this photograph appeared

in an edition of The Saturday Evening Post,

although it's very difficult to say that it's him.

The photograph is there of a white man

driving a group of natives,

and I haven't been able to disprove anything that he said.

One night while he was in the village of Larchmont,

he breaks into the local train station.

A local police officer sees Panzram who's armed with an ax.

The officer manages to knock Panzram unconscious.

He's arrested and charged with burglary.

Panzram is sentenced to five years at Sing Sing Prison.

It's decided by the prison authorities

that because he's a rebellious prisoner,

he can't be controlled,

that he should be sent to another prison

called Clinton Prison, which is in Upstate New York.

- There were many, many punishments

that were used against the convicts at Dannemora.

Being put it out in the open

and covered with water, left to freeze.

Dannemora, as it was known,

named after the village that it was in was one

of the most repressive penal institutions in America.

It's a prison that is encircled by a wall,

30-foot-high wall.

It also extends 30 feet below the ground

so that nobody can tunnel under the wall.

- It was thought of as a hellhole,

the last stop for the prisoners in the State of New York.

It's in a very remote place.

It's hundreds and hundreds of miles

from the nearest population center.

- It was made for the most incorrigible

of the incorrigible.

- I was there only a few months

when I made a time bomb and tried to burn down the shops.

The screws found it but didn't blame me for it.

After about six months of this

I was feeling pretty hot, mad, and disgusted,

I attempted to escape.

- He almost gets to the top of a 30-foot wall.

- Officers there still talk with reverence

about what Carl Panzram attempted to do.

He made a ladder out of fencing material

and the ladder broke under his weight.

- I fell about 30 feet onto a concrete walk,

breaking both of my ankles, both of my legs,

fracturing my spine, and rupturing myself.

In this condition I was carried to the prison hospital

where I lay five days and dumped into a cell

without any medical or surgical attention whatever.

- That's gonna be a message to others.

Don't try this.

This is what you'll get.

- My broken bones were not set.

My ankles and legs were not put into a cast.

In that condition I was left for eight months,

crawling around like a snake with a broken back,

seething with hatred, and a lust for revenge.

- There were many people who did die in the prison.

- They should have for humanitarian reasons

certainly had him treated right away.

- The last two years and four months

confined in isolation with nothing to do except brood

upon what I thought was the wrongs

that had been done to me.

This went on for all of my five years.

And the more they misused me,

the more I was filled

with the spirit of hatred and vengeance.

I was so full of hate

that there was no room in me for such feelings as love,

pity, kindness, or honor, or decency.

I hated everybody I saw.

He is unable to walk.

His spinal injury gets worse and he,

as a result, he remains permanently crippled

for the rest of his life.

Panzram becomes even more embittered, if that's possible.

- I used to spend all of my time figuring out

how I could murder the most people

with the least harm or expense to myself.

I'm writing it down

with a fervent wish that someone may see it

and make good use of it

to decimate some of the excess population of this world.

It was my intention to go to a place

I had picked out at a railroad tunnel.

I intended to have a large contact bomb

in the middle of the tunnel fixed

so that when the engine struck the obstruction,

the bomb would explode.

The explosion would set off

and burst some large glass containers

of formaldehyde and other gas.

The gas fumes thus generated

and let loose in the closed tunnel

would in a very few minutes kill every living thing

in the whole train and the tunnel.

I would be stationed at the rear entrance

to the tunnel behind the barricade

and armed, ready to shoot down anyone

who had life enough left

to try to get out of the tunnel.

As soon as I was assured that all were dead,

I would put on a gas mask

and enter the cars and rob the whole train.

With unlimited funds in my hands,

I then intended to steal millions of dollars

and kill millions of people.

This I intended to do by starting a war

between England and the USA.

Sounds fantastic all right,

but I am positive that I could and would have done it.

I could do a better job than the Borgias had done.

They were pikers.

They didn't kill half enough.

They should have killed everybody

and left this world for the only good things in it, nature.

This would be a damn fine world if man was out of it.

- Even to the point of planning the destruction,

you know, of the entire human race,

not unlike people that were working in ammunitions

or some kind of war efforts

to manufacture more successful weapons

at destroying the most amount of people

with the least amount of cost,

but they're getting paid and they're getting rewarded.

Oh yeah, you're doing a great service to your country.

- War, in the final analysis,

is merely murder and robbery

at the expenditure of life and property.

- The psychology of a mass murderer is somebody

who wants to add one big event

to take out as many people as they can,

has to do with a measure of their own pain

and they want as many people to pay for it as possible.

Everyone now knows, I was in pain and you did nothing.

During the summer of 1928,

he's finally released from Dannemora.

I had a goal in view.

I was working toward it as quickly as I could.

- Panzram eventually makes his way into Philadelphia,

where he meets a paperboy, a 12-ear-old boy.

Panzram sexually assaults this child and murders him.

It was the murder of Alexander Uszacke.

We were able to confirm that murder to an arrest warrant

that was issued by the city of Philadelphia.

My whole mind was bent

on figuring out different ways

to annoy and punish my enemies, and everybody was my enemy.

My intentions was to rob, rape,

and kill everybody I could, anybody and everybody.

- After Panzram leaves Philadelphia,

he goes into the city of Baltimore

where he commits a number of burglaries and assaults.

He leaves Baltimore

and makes his way down to Washington D.C.,

where he gets arrested for the last time.

- He assumed that he was made this way, but not altogether.

I think Panzram is trying to probe his own responsibility,

and he says he doesn't have a conscience,

so the 21 people he murdered doesn't bother him.

But if you read the other letters,

one wonders if he felt that entirely.

- All of my life I've been trying to figure out

just what ails me and why,

not looking for the remedy or the effect.

It's too late for the remedy

and I already know the effect.

The only way I want to be cured is to die

and get completely out of this world.

All I want is to find out the reason why I am what I am

and why I act the way I do.

I've been puzzled all my life about this.

I would sure like to know the answer

before I leave this world.

- I went to examine the laws on the set.

I was pretty sure he wouldn't do anything to me,

so he jumped up see, after I got close to the bars.

- I thought you were trying to get me

to look the other way so you could hit me.

You're brave, but don't ever do that again,

turning your back on me like that.

You're the only man in the world I don't want to kill.

But I'm so erratic, I'm liable to do anything.

- Panzram receives a sentence of 25 years to life

at the Leavenworth Prison back in Kansas.

- 25 years is an outrageous sentence for stealing a radio

and some very inexpensive items.

- I'm doomed to pass out of the picture pretty soon.

I've fully decided that I want to die.

There will be no turning aside.

In some way I shall surely accomplish my desire to die.

- When Panzram entered the U.S. penitentiary in Leavenworth,

his name was spelled P-A-N-Z-R-A-N instead of M.

- The head clerk working for the Records Clerk,

was a man by the name of George Kelly Barnes,

who history would know as Machine Gun Kelly.

It's probably just a written error

or a typographical error.

Panzram pretty much basically wanted to set the ground rules

when he first got to Leavenworth.

- I wanted them all to lay off me and leave me alone.

I told everyone that I came in contact with that

I would sure knock off the first guy who bothered me.

- He's assigned to the laundry room,

and while he's in the laundry room

he meets a civilian employee by the name of Warnke,

who is the supervisor of the day shift

where Panzram works.

- Leavenworth was under the administration

of the Federal Bureau of Prisons

and there was an effort to try to create a model prison.

- Prisoners were allowed to write

to other people, receive correspondence.

Henry Lesser maintains his correspondence

with Carl Panzram under a pseudonym, Henry James,

because they knew that the staff in Leavenworth

would be monitoring Panzram's correspondence.

April 23rd, 1929,

your letter of April 18th reached me today.

I found the $1 enclosed

or at any rate I got it to my credit here on the books.

Many thanks for both.

I have only had your letter about an hour

and I've read it three times already

and liked it better each time.

You ask me what sort of work I'm doing.

Well, to tell the truth I have an easy job,

not very much to do and that little easy.

I don't mind it much,

but I am trying to get a different job

where I'll be more by myself.

Perhaps later on I'll manage it.

Carl Panzram, Number 31614, Box 7, Leavenworth, Kansas.

- Wharton's book, "The House of Whispering Hate,"

is almost one of the most non-biased books I've ever read.

Charles Wharton was sentenced

to the institution for conspiracy

to commit mail train robbery.

- Warnke, civilian informant of the laundry,

whom the convicts regarded as a brute and a bully,

delighting to torment his prison slaves.

It was his favorite diversion to taunt Panzram

about his reported moral habits.

- Panzram had conflicts with him.

He asked for a job change

and the Bureau of Prisons would not honor that.

They did not want Warnke

to lose face with the other prisoners.

- I have worked with Panzram in the laundry

since February 1st this year.

- Panzram and Mr. Warnke had a few words

over three handkerchiefs which Panzram had

and was washing in a bleacher in the laundry.

Warnke told him that he was not permitted

to use that bleacher.

That he was not any better than any of the rest of us

and that no one was allowed to use that bleacher.

Panzram remarked that if Warnke did not lay off him,

he would get Warnke.

- He remained working in the laundry.

June 15th, 1929,

I'm still on my same job and like it less each day.

I'm getting all set for a change.

It won't be long now.

- Panzram gets a steel bar that was in the laundry room,

sneaks up behind Warnke, and smashes the bar

over the back of the man's head.

- Here's another one for you, you son of a bitch.

- And beats him down to the ground.

He kills him in front of a dozen other inmates.

Panzram then turns his rage on the other inmates

and begins an all out war.

- Panzram made his way back to the Deputy Warden's office

where Phil Holtgrave was standing.

And just as soon as he got up to Phil Holtgrave,

he dropped the iron bar

and said, "Do with me what you want to do"

"because I can't get any more of them."

- Before I finished I killed one man

and tried to kill a dozen more.

- Building 63, which back then was known

as the Deputy Warden's office, the segregation building,

is immediately where Panzram was taken.

October 31st, 1929,

I thought I would write you a letter today

because I feel pretty good just now.

In fact, I feel pretty near human.

For several different reasons here are a few.

It's so long since I've been beaten or kicked around,

chained up or knocked down

that I have almost forgotten how it feels, but not quite.

I still remember.

Another reason is that I have just finished my supper

and, man, what a feed.

I started with bacon and eggs,

candied sweet potatoes, bread and butter,

stewed prunes, and four fresh pears.

That's a sample of the meals we gather everyday lately.

After I finished throwing this feed into myself,

I sat down to smoke and read the daily paper,

in peace, quiet, and comfort.

Now perhaps you will know

why this letter is a bit different

from some of the others I've written to you.

I walk into a cell fully expecting to be chained up

and beaten to death, but what happens?

The exact reverse of that.

No one lays a hand on me.

No one abuses me in any way.

I have been in the past three or four months

trying to figure it out

and I have come to the conclusions that

if in the beginning I had been treated as I am now,

then there wouldn't have been quite

so many people in this world

that have been robbed, raped, and killed,

and perhaps also very probably

I wouldn't be where I am today.

Maybe I am wrong though.

I am too dumb to know what might have been

but I am not so dumb

that I can't see a little way into the future.

Not very far, but far enough to see the end of Carl Panzram.

- Compared to some other institutions that he had been in,

it was a relatively progressive regime.

- At that point in time you had Robert Stroud,

who was occupying two cells in the cell house.

Robert Stroud today is very famous

as the Birdman of Alcatraz,

even though he kept his birds at Leavenworth,

and he kept them when he was there with Panzram.

During his long imprisonment,

Robert Stroud secretly wrote a book

about the history of American prisons

and the history of the Federal Prison System.

"

"A History of the United States Prison System,"

at Alcatraz Penitentiary, where he was,

had been transferred from Leavenworth Penitentiary.

- Stroud had written this manuscript.

However, it was said that it had been confiscated

by the Federal Prison Authorities and destroyed.

- The Director of Bureau of Prisons said,

"No, you can't publish these."

"These glorify crime."

"These contain pornography."

"These tell lies about prison officials."

However, it was later revealed

that a copy of it had actually been preserved.

- I got those four handwritten manuscripts,

still have them.

Stroud was in cell number 10.

In that manuscript

he devoted a chapter to Panzram.

- Panzram was across the hallway, in cell 13,

so they were within earshot of each other.

- Segments of it have been obtained

and consulted for use in this film.

- And in this box is Part III

of Stroud's "History of the United States Prison System."

Here's Chapter XIX, Part III on Carl Panzram,

in Stroud's own handwriting.

- Panzram was put in number 13.

He told of sea murders by the score.

He varied the number of victims from one to 48.

He told of boxcar murders by the hundreds,

of boys he had met on the road,

induced to catch trains with him, raped, strangled,

and thrown out along the right of way.

It was obvious to anyone listening

who knew anything about such things

that the stories were pure fiction.

- There is quite a lot of similarity

between Carl Panzram and Robert Stroud.

They managed somehow after many, many years of deprivation,

they somehow managed to leave something behind.

- Because Warnke was murdered inside a federal prison,

Federal Bureau of Investigation had jurisdictional authority

on conducting the investigation.

They determined that Carl Panzram was writing

to Henry James, who they verified as being Henry Lesser.

Lesser was never chastised

for his correspondence with Carl Panzram

because he explained that he was writing

to Panzram for criminology purposes.

- He's eventually brought to trial

and he's convicted of murder in the first degree.

After his death sentence,

while he's waiting in cell for the execution date,

a local anti-death penalty group

tried to intervene on his behalf,

and without Panzram's cooperation or approval.

Panzram contacted the group and said, "Look, don't help me."

- I choose to die here and now

by being hanged by the neck until I am dead.

I look forward to that as a real pleasure

and a big relief to me.

He wanted to die

because he didn't want to stay in prison all his life.

I prefer death

before spending more years in prison.

My belief is that life without liberty is not worth having.

- If you let him out, he didn't want to die.

If you're gonna keep him in prison, he wants to die.

- The only thanks you or your kind will ever get

from me for your efforts in my behalf

is that I wish you all had one neck

and that I had my hands on it.

June 5th, 1930.

There's nothing I can do for you

to repay you for the many favors you have done for me.

- And for the vast majority that can be reached,

you need to hire people like Henry Lesser,

but you have to have a system

that rewards that kind of person, and they don't.

- Henry Lesser, with very little training,

knew to treat these people as human beings.

- I would like to be able to truthfully tell you

that I do thank you, but this I cannot do,

simply because there is no such thing

as gratitude left in me.

There was at one time, but that time is long gone.

Gratitude is one of the many things

that have been kicked out of me.

I can and do truthfully wish you good luck.

- In the isolation building there's a doorway out the back.

The back has a courtyard

that was used for recreational purposes back then

and they constructed gallows in that courtyard.

Up to that point the U.S. Government

hadn't really held an organized execution.

This was a method of execution

that was very much associated

in the public mind with lynching.

More people were lynched every year

than were executed by the government.

People of Kansas, as a result

of various populous movements that went on,

beginning in the mid-19th century,

elected not to carry out executions.

This was effectively broken with the execution of Panzram.

It's a vengeance.

We want our pound of flesh.

- Panzram sees two ministers standing there,

he immediately starts hissing

and demanding that they be told to leave.

- I don't mind being hanged,

but I don't want any preachers at my hanging.

- Like he did a lot of other times in his life,

he took on a mood of bravado.

- If you don't run those Bible backs out,

you're gonna have one hell of a time

getting me out of this cell,

and you're gonna have to fight every step of the way.

I can't win, but I have nothing to lose either.

Every man I get one of my hands on is going to a hospital.

All right, let's get going.

What in the hell are we stalling around for?

Said Panzram,

leading the procession down the hall,

almost dragging his longer legged attendants along,

like a bull on a leash.

- In "The House of Whispering Hate,"

I read this other prisoner's account

which proves the fact

that it did happen the way he described.

The people that were in authority in the prison would,

had blocked off like all the windows

so that the prisoners could not witness the execution,

But they forgot one window.

It did not look directly down on the yard

yet it permitted a slanting view.

Through it we could see the gallows

and the commencement of the ghastly death march.

- That very last window in the parole dorm,

which was what we called a dormitory

when I first started to work there,

that window was in perfect alignment

with the courtyard where Panzram was executed.

He perfectly describes the fact that all of the inmates

were all jammed in that window watching,

so probably it is an accurate account

of what occurred at that execution.

- When he came out the back door, talking about Panzram,

we saw 200 pounds of flesh

possessed of but one virtue, brute courage.

He was less to be pitied than the ashen-faced officials

shrinking from the task they had in hand.

There was no faltering in his step

as he marched out of the door into the open courtyard.

Then suddenly he bellowed, "Boo,"

and whipped around to enjoy the fear he inspired.

A frightful grin spreading over his face

as everyone startled in alarm at the sound.

Apparently this was not enough to satisfy

the brute in him, for as he passed out of sight

I saw him wheel around again

and spit full in the face of the captain of the guard,

which is what he always promised to do.

So he actually did it.

- He actually led the guards to go up the scaffold steps.

He was first.

Hurry it up you.

Hurry up you bastard,

I could kill 10 men while you're fooling around!

- Yeah, you Hoosier bastard, I could hang a dozen men

while you're fooling around.

Whether he said anything

to the executioner is still up in air.

- Hurry it up you Hoosier bastard,

I could hang a dozen men while you're fooling around.

- It was all over in a matter of seconds.

- A lot of those grave markers in that cemetery

are pretty much basically nothing more than a cement post

that sticks approximately,

I'd say probably, six, eight inches above the ground.

The inmates' names were generally stamped

in a copper plate or brass plate.

It was his last name and his inmate reg number.

Their name tags disappear all the time.

At Panzram's grave site, it was actually just

the stone post is sticking up above the ground.

His grave is unmarked.

- We have a portion of the rope from the noose

that was used to hang Carl Panzram.

We also have the blindfold cloth

that actually went over his eyes

and the weighted black hood

that was placed over Panzram's head

before the noose was put around his neck.

- I don't want any Bible-backed hypocrites

at my funeral!

Run them out and I will go out under my own power.

I don't want to cause any trouble

for I'm as anxious to get it over with as you are.

- We also have a leather and chain harness here.

It's on a metal frame for display,

but this leather and chain harness was placed on Panzram.

It was used six different times in the Kansas City area.

Merle Gill was a ballistics expert

in the Kansas City area in the 1920s.

He sold the noose, the hood,

and the eye band to the United States Marshals.

We actually have invoices for those items.

At some point later on, we don't know exactly when,

they came back into Gill's collection.

Merle Gill had been collecting firearms.

He turned that collection into kind of a traveling museum.

By 1948, he was broke.

He sold his collection to Mr. Davis,

and Mr. Davis put it all on display.

- Henry Lesser used to carry those documents

out of the Washington D.C. Jail

every night under his coat.

He spent 40 years trying to get that manuscript published.

It's an amazing story.

- He treated, you know, Panzram's writings,

you know, like they were the Magna Carta.

Without Henry Lesser

you'd never know anything about Carl Panzram.

- It was Gitchoff that brought Henry Lesser

to San Diego State

to speak at Scripps Cottage about prison reform.

- Just for him to come down and speak to the class.

In 1979, he came down.

- He was very well-received.

If Mother Teresa had come in and was talking to the group,

or Gandhi or somebody,

I mean he inspired that kind of awe

when they found out, wow, this little guy,

you were dealing with this monster?

One of my graduate students was just really enthralled

with Henry Lesser as well, him and Joel Goodman.

- While he was at San Diego State,

we recorded an interview with him.

Did he ever express any fear

about going to Leavenworth?

Oh no, no, because he had been

to quite a few maximum security prisons.

The following year, in 1980,

he decided to donate the original Panzram manuscript

to the Special Collections Department

of the library at San Diego State University.

Did he express other emotions?

Did he love anyone else?

Could he get along with anyone else?

- I never said anything about his papers

or him donating them or anything like that.

It didn't even dawn on me.

It didn't occur to me.

And somewhere along the line he made the offer,

"Would you like the Panzram Papers?"

And I said, "Well, sure, why not?"

You know, I wasn't enthused about it,

okay, I guess, I guess so.

And then I didn't realize

just how big a thing this really was,

and I notified the library,

and said, "Yeah, we'd be happy to get them."

I want to thank you very much

for traveling down from Los Angeles...

Yeah, it's a pleasure.

- And spending your day with us here.

Pleasure.

And I want to thank all of you

for inviting me down here.

It's a great day.

- And especially from the students because they would...

- That's right, it was wonderful.

- It was their emphasis in pursuing this that got you here.

Wonderful!

It's encouraging to see young people today,

you know, with this interest,

socially minded, inquiring minds,

and wanting to do something good for criminology.

He passed away in 1983.

Lesser is a heroic sort.

- I wanted to read this portion from the papers,

the Panzram Papers,

that deal with Panzram's view

of the crime problem

and where it begins and how to prevent it.

Every child has some criminal tendencies.

It is your place to correct those traits

and teach them the right way to live

while they are young and their minds are forming.

Then when they do reach the age of reason and action,

- It will be quite natural for them to live clean,

upright, honorable lives.

In that way, you will stop crime

in its source before it begins.

The main causes of why we are what we are

is because of our improper teaching,

lack of knowledge and our environments.

Teach them the meaning of such things as truth,

lie, honor, hate, love.

For each lesson just take one word,

for instance take the word truth.

Teach them by example, word, and deed

until they thoroughly know that one word, truth.

- He said it all and he wasn't a pediatrician

or a sociologist or a psychiatrist,

but he sure knew what he was talking about.

- If you are really sincere in wanting

to teach those boys how to grow up to be good men,

then you will have to go at it far differently

than the way I was taught.

- It's timeless because here is a man

who has tried to tell us

what's wrong and what we need to do,

and a man who has no education,

but had the foresight, insight,

to see it, to live through it,

and basically, you know, gave his life for it.

- Apparently, Carl Panzram had a last will and testament

but it has not been located.

In the case file there's a letter from a Dr. C. B. Van Horn,

who was the attending physician

at the Kansas Industrial School for Boys.

I have a photostat copy of his last will and testament

in which he bequeaths his carcass

to the city dog catcher of East Grand Forks, Minnesota,

to be used as dog meat.

He terminates by leaving a curse to all mankind.

- I think Panzram himself was telling us

that he should be a warning.

- He's just trying to let you know,

look what you did to me.

If you keep it up, you're gonna get me

a hundredfold, a million fold, a trillion fold, so beware.

Either listen to me or die.

- I am sorry for only two things.

These two things are,

I am sorry that I have mistreated

some few animals in my lifetime,

and I am sorry that I am unable to murder

the whole damn human race.

All that I leave behind me is smoke,

death, desolation and damnation.

Carl Panzram.