A Criminal History of Mankind (13 page)

Panzram lived by burglary, mugging and robbing churches. He spent a great deal of time in prison, but became a skilled escapist. But he had his own peculiar sense of loyalty. After breaking jail in Salem, Oregon, he broke in again to try to rescue a safe blower named Cal Jordan; he was caught and got thirty days. ‘The thanks I got from old Cal was that he thought I was in love with him and he tried to mount me, but I wasn’t broke to ride and he was, so I rode him. At that time he was about fifty years old and I was twenty or twenty-one, but I was strong and he was weak.’

In various prisons, he became known as one of the toughest troublemakers ever encountered. What drove him to his most violent frenzies was a sense of injustice. In Oregon he was offered a minimal sentence if he would reveal the whereabouts of the stolen goods; Panzram kept his side of the bargain but was sentenced to seven years. He managed to escape from his cell and wreck the jail, burning furniture and mattresses. They beat him up and sent him to the toughest prison in the state. There he promptly threw the contents of a chamber-pot in a guard’s face; he was beaten unconscious and chained to the door of a dark cell for thirty days, where he screamed defiance. He aided another prisoner to escape, and in the hunt the warden was shot dead. The new warden was tougher than ever. Panzram burned down the prison workshop and later a flax mill. Given a job in the kitchen, he went berserk with an axe. He incited the other prisoners to revolt, and the atmosphere became so tense that guards would not venture into the yard. Finally, the warden was dismissed.

The new warden, a man named Murphy, was an idealist who believed that prisoners would respond to kindness. When Panzram was caught trying to escape, Murphy sent for him and told him that, according to reports, he was ‘the meanest and most cowardly degenerate that they had ever seen.’ When Panzram agreed, Murphy astonished him by telling him that he would let him walk out of the jail if he would swear to return in time for supper. Panzram agreed - with no intention of keeping his word; but when supper time came, something made him go back. Gradually, Murphy increased his freedom, and that of the other prisoners. But one night, Panzram got drunk with a pretty nurse and decided to abscond. Recaptured after a gun battle, he was thrown into the punishment cell, and Murphy’s humanitarian regime carne to an abrupt end.

This experience seems to have been something of a turning point. So far, Panzram had been against the world, but not against himself. His betrayal of Murphy’s trust seems to have set up a reaction of self-hatred. He escaped from prison again, stole a yacht, and began his career of murder. He would offer sailors a job and take them to the stolen yacht; there he would rob them, commit sodomy, and throw their bodies into the sea. ‘They are there yet, ten of ‘em.’ Then he went to West Africa to work for an oil company, where he soon lost his job for committing sodomy on the table waiter. The US Consul declined to help him and he sat down in a park ‘to think things over’. ‘While I was sitting there, a little nigger boy about eleven or twelve years came bumming around. He was looking for something. He found it too. I took him out to a gravel pit a quarter of a mile from the main camp... I left him there, but first I committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader...’

‘Then I went to town, bought a ticket on the Belgian steamer to Lobito Bay down the coast. There I hired a canoe and six niggers and went out hunting in the bay and backwaters. I was looking for crocodiles. I found them, plenty. They were all hungry. I fed them. I shot all six of those niggers and dumped ‘em in. The crocks done the rest. I stole their canoe and went back to town, tied the canoe to a dock, and that night someone stole the canoe from me.’

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’.

“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.