H. H. Holmes may or may not be classified as a serial killer, depending on our view of whether his crimes were pathological or purely commercial. Johann Hoch and Belle Gunness were undoubtedly mass murderers and not serial killers. Earle Nelson, also known as ‘the Dark Strangler’ and ‘the Gorilla Murderer’, was undoubtedly a serial killer in our modern sense of the word.
On 24 February 1926, a man named Richard Newman went to call on his aunt, who advertised rooms to let in San Francisco; he found the naked body of the 60-year-old woman in an upstairs toilet. She had been strangled with her pearl necklace, then repeatedly raped. Clara Newman was the first of twenty-two victims of a man who became known as ‘the Gorilla Murderer’. The killer made a habit of calling at houses with a ‘Room to Let’ notice in the window; if the landlady was alone, he strangled and raped her. His victims included a 14-year-old girl and an 8-month-old baby. And as he travelled around from San Francisco to San Jose, from Portland, Oregon to Council Bluffs, Iowa, from Philadelphia to Buffalo, from Detroit to Chicago, the police found him as elusive as the French police had found Joseph Vacher thirty years earlier. Their problem was simply that the women who could identify ‘the Dark Strangler’ (as the newspapers had christened him) were dead, and they had no idea of what he looked like. But when the Portland police had the idea of asking newspapers to publish descriptions of jewellery that had been stolen from some of the strangler’s victims, three old ladies in a South Portland lodging-house recalled that they had bought a few items of jewellery from a pleasant young man who had stayed with them for a few days. They decided—purely as a precaution—to take it to the police. It proved to belong to a Seattle landlady, Mrs Florence Monks, who had been strangled and raped on 24 November 1926. And the old ladies were able to tell the police that the Dark Strangler was a short, blue-eyed young man with a round face and slightly simian mouth and jaw. He was quietly spoken, and claimed to be deeply religious.
On 8 June 1927, the strangler crossed the Canadian border, and rented a room in Winnipeg from a Mrs Catherine Hill. He stayed for three nights. But on 9 June, a couple named Cowan, who lived in the house, reported that their 14-year-old daughter Lola had vanished. That same evening, a man named William Patterson returned home to find his wife absent. After making supper and putting the children to bed, he rang the police. Then he dropped on his knees beside the bed to pray; as he did so, he saw his wife’s hand sticking out. Her naked body lay under the bed.
The Winnipeg police recognized the modus operandi of the Gorilla Murderer. A check on boarding-house landladies brought them to Mrs Hill’s establishment. She assured them that she had taken in no suspicious characters recently—her last lodger had been a Roger Wilson, who had been carrying a Bible and been highly religious. When she told them that Roger Wilson was short, with piercing blue eyes and a dark complexion, they asked to see the room he had stayed in. They were greeted by the stench of decay. The body of Lola Cowan lay under the bed, mutilated as if by Jack the Ripper. The murderer had slept with it in his room for three days.
From the Patterson household, the strangler had taken some of the husband’s clothes, leaving his own behind. But he changed these at a second-hand shop, leaving behind a fountain pen belonging to Patterson, and paying in $10 bills stolen from his house. So the police now had a good description not only of the killer, but of the clothes he was wearing, including corduroy trousers and a plaid shirt.
The next sighting came from Regina, 200 miles west; a landlady heard the screams of a pretty girl who worked for the telephone company, and interrupted the man who had been trying to throttle her; he ran away. The police guessed that he might be heading back towards the American border, which would take him across prairie country with few towns; there was a good chance that a lone hitch-hiker would be noticed. Descriptions of the wanted man were sent out to all police stations and post offices. Five days later, two constables saw a man wearing corduroys and a plaid shirt walking down a road near Killarney, 12 miles from the border. He gave his name as Virgil Wilson and said he was a farm-worker; he seemed quite unperturbed when the police told him they were looking for a mass murderer, and would have to take him in on suspicion. His behaviour was so unalarmed they were convinced he was innocent. But when they telephoned the Winnipeg chief of police, and described Virgil Wilson, he told them that the man was undoubtedly ‘Roger Wilson’, the Dark Strangler. They hurried back to the jail—to find that their prisoner had picked the lock of his handcuffs and escaped.
Detectives were rushed to the town by aeroplane, and posses spread out over the area. ‘Wilson’ had slept in a barn close to the jail, and the next morning broke into a house and stole a change of clothing. The first man he spoke to that morning noticed his dishevelled appearance and asked if he had spent the night in the open; the man admitted that he had. When told that police were on their way to Killarney by train to look for the strangler, he ran away towards the railway. At that moment, a police car appeared; after a short chase, the fugitive was captured.
He was identified as Earle Leonard Nelson, born in Philadelphia in 1897; his mother had died of venereal disease contracted from his father. At the age of 10, Nelson was knocked down by a streetcar and was unconscious with concussion for six days. From then on, he experienced violent periodic headaches. He began to make a habit of peering through the keyhole of his cousin Rachel’s bedroom when she was getting undressed. At 21, he was arrested after trying to rape a girl in a basement. Sent to a penal farm, he soon escaped, and was recaptured peering in through the window of his cousin as she undressed for bed. A marriage was unsuccessful; when his wife had a nervous breakdown, Nelson visited her in hospital and tried to rape her in bed. Nothing is known of Nelson’s whereabouts for the next three years, until the evening in February 1926, when he knocked on the door of Mrs Clara Newman in San Francisco, and asked if he could see the room she had to let…
Like Earle Nelson, Albert Fish had also suffered a blow on the head in childhood. But Fish, unlike Nelson and most other serial killers, was at large for an unusually long time, so that we have no idea of how many murders he committed over the years. The case is certainly one of the strangest in the bizarre history of serial murder.
On 28 May 1928 a mild-looking old man called on the family of a doorman named Albert Budd in a basement in Manhattan. He explained he had come in answer to a job advertisement placed in a New York newspaper by Budd’s 18-year-old son Edward. His name, he said, was Frank Howard, and he owned a farm on Long Island. The old man so charmed the Budds that the following day they allowed him to take their 10-year-old daughter Grace to a party; she left in a white confirmation dress, holding Howard’s hand. The Budds never saw Grace again; the address at which the party was supposed to be held proved fictitious, and no farmer by the name of Frank Howard could be traced on Long Island. The kidnap received wide publicity, and the police investigated hundreds of tips. Detective Will King of the Missing Persons Bureau became particularly obsessed with the crime and travelled thousands of miles in search of ‘Frank Howard’.
Six years later, the Budds received an unsigned letter that was clearly from the kidnapper. He stated that he had taken Grace Budd to an empty house in Westchester, then left her picking flowers while he went inside and stripped off his clothes; then he leaned out of the upstairs window and called her in. Confronted by this skinny naked man, Grace began to cry and tried to run away; he seized her and strangled her. Then he cut her in half, and took the body back home, where he ate parts of it. ‘How sweet her little ass was, roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished.’ (In fact, Fish was to admit to his attorney that this was untrue.) Finally, he took the bones back to the cottage and buried them in the garden.
With a brilliant piece of detective work, Will King traced the writer—the letter had arrived in an envelope with the inked-out logo of a chauffeurs’ benevolent association on the flap. One of the chauffeurs finally admitted that he had taken some of the association’s stationery and left it in a room he used to rent on East 52nd Street. This now proved to be rented by a tenant who called himself A. H. Fish, and his handwriting in the boarding house register was identical with that of the letter writer. King kept watch on the room for three weeks before Albert Fish—the mild little old man—returned. He agreed unhesitatingly to go to headquarters for questioning, but at the street door, suddenly lunged at King with a razor in each hand. King disarmed and handcuffed him. Back at police headquarters, Fish made no attempt to deny the murder of Grace Budd. He had gone to her home, he explained, with the intention of killing her brother Edward, but when Grace had sat on his knee during dinner, had decided that he wanted to eat her.
He took the police to the cottage in Westchester, where they unearthed the bones of Grace Budd. Later, under intensive questioning, he admitted to killing about four hundred children since 1910. (The figure has never been confirmed, and a judge involved in the case placed the true figure at sixteen.)
Soon after his arrest, Fish was visited by a psychiatrist named Fredrick Wertham, who would appear for the defence. ‘He looked’, wrote Wertham, ‘like a meek and innocuous little old man, gentle and benevolent, friendly and polite. If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose.’ When Fish realized that Wertham really wanted to understand him, he became completely open and forthcoming.
Fish was a strange paradox of a man. His face lit up when he talked of his 12-year-old grandchild, and he was obviously sincere when he said: ‘I love children and was always soft-hearted.’ He was also deeply religious, and read his Bible continuously. The answer to the paradox, Wertham soon concluded, was that Fish was insane. He genuinely believed that God told him to murder children.
Albert Hamilton Fish had been born in Washington, DC, in 1870; his father, a riverboat captain, was 75 at the time. Various members of the family had mental problems and one suffered from religious mania. One brother was feeble-minded and another an alcoholic. The father had died when Fish was five years old, and he was placed in an orphanage, from which he regularly ran away. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a house painter, and this remained his profession for the rest of his life. Access to other people’s homes also gave him access to children. He was 28 when he first married, but his wife eloped with the lodger. Later, there were three more marriages, all bigamous.
Fish talked with complete frankness about his sex life—he had always enjoyed writing obscene letters, and no doubt confessing to Wertham gave him the same kind of pleasure. Wertham wrote:
Fish’s sexual life was of unparalleled perversity…I found no published case that would even nearly compare with his…There was no known perversion that he did not practise and practise frequently.
Sado-masochism directed against children, particularly boys, took the lead in his sexual regressive development. ‘I have always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy anything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.’ Experiences with excreta of every imaginable kind were practised by him, actively and passively. He took bits of cotton wool, saturated them with alcohol, inserted them in his rectum and set fire to them. He also did this to his child victims. Finally, and clearly also on a sexual basis, he developed a craving going back to one of the arch-crimes of humanity—cannibalism.
I elicited from him a long history of how he preyed on children. In many instances—I stated under oath later ‘at least a hundred’—he seduced them or bribed them with small sums of money or forced them and attacked them. He often worked in public buildings and had an excuse for spending times in cellars and basements and even garrets. He would put on his painters’ overalls over his nude body, and that permitted him to undress in a moment…
Most, if not all, of his victims came from the poorer classes. He told me that he selected coloured children especially, because the authorities didn’t pay much attention when they were hurt or missing. For example, he once paid a small coloured girl five dollars regularly to bring him little coloured boys. Frequently after a particularly brutal episode he would change his address completely…Altogether he roamed over twenty-three states, from New York to Montana. ‘And I have had children in every state.’ He also made a habit of writing letters to women, trying to persuade them to join him in whipping boys.
Fish told me that for years he had been sticking needles into his body in the region near his genitals, in the area between the rectum and the scrotum. He told me of doing it to other people too, especially to children. At first, he said, he had only stuck these needles in and pulled them out again. They were needles of assorted sizes, some of them big sail needles. Then he had stuck others in so far that he was unable to get them out, and they stayed there. They’re in there now,’ he said. ‘I put them up under the spine…I did put one in the scrotum too; but I couldn’t stand the pain.’
I checked this strange story on a series of X-rays of his pelvic and abdominal region. They showed plainly twenty-nine needles inside his body. One X-ray of the pelvic region showed twenty-seven. They were easily recognisable as needles…Some of them must have been years in his body, for they were eroded to an extent that would have taken at least seven years. Some of the needles were fragmented by this erosion so that only bits of steel remained in the tissue.’
In his middle fifties, says Wertham, Fish began to develop psychosis with delusions and hallucinations. (He was 58 when he murdered Grace Budd.)
At times he identified himself with God and felt that he should sacrifice his own son. He tried to stick needles under his fingernails but could not stand the pain. He made the poignant remark: ‘If only pain were not so painful!’
He had visions of Christ and his angels…He heard them saying words like ‘stripes’, ‘rewardeth’ and ‘delighteth’. And he connected these words with verses from the Bible and elaborated them delusionally with his sadistic wishes. ‘Stripes means to lash them, you know.’
He felt driven to torment and kill children. Sometimes he would gag them, tie them up and beat them, although he preferred not to gag them, circumstances permitting, for he liked to hear their cries. He felt that he was ordered by God to castrate little boys…‘I am not insane. I am just queer.’ After murdering Grace Budd he had cooked parts of the body with carrots and onions and strips of bacon, and ate them over a period of nine days. During all this time he was in a state of sexual excitement.
His state of mind while he described these things in minute detail was a peculiar mixture. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a housewife describing her favourite methods of cooking. You had to remind yourself that this was a little girl that he was talking about. But at times his tone of voice and facial expression indicated a kind of satisfaction and ecstatic thrill. However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this certainly is beyond that border.
It became apparent that Fish was a wanted killer who had become known as ‘the Brooklyn Vampire’, who committed four child murders in 1933 and 1934, luring little girls to a basement, flogging them, then garrotting them with a rope. In 1932, a 16-year-old girl had been killed and mutilated near Massapequa, Long Island, where Fish was painting a house. Other murders almost certainly committed by Fish were those of 7-year-old Francis X. McDonnell on Staten Island in 1924, 4-year-old Billy Gaffney in Brooklyn in 1927, and 11-year-old Yetta Abramowitz, who was strangled and mutilated in the Bronx in 1927. (Billy Gaffney’s mother subsequently had a series of nervous breakdowns from grief.) Detective Will King, who investigated these murders, was not allowed to introduce them as evidence, since the D.A. was anxious to prove that Fish was sane, and too many murders might throw doubt on this.
To Fish’s delight, he was sentenced to death—he remarked with unconscious humour that being electrocuted would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’. When he was on Death Row, the prison chaplain had to ask him not to ‘holler and howl’ so loud as he masturbated during services. In the execution chamber on 16 January 1936 he mumbled ‘I don’t know why I’m here’ just before the switch was thrown.
Wertham records that he tried hard to get Fish’s sentence commuted. ‘To execute a sick man is like burning witches,’ he told the prison governor. He went on to make this important observation—even more relevant today than it was in 1936: ‘Science is prediction. The science of psychiatry is advanced enough that with proper examination such a man as Fish can be detected and confined before the perpetration of these outrages, instead of inflicting extreme penalties afterwards. The authorities had this man, but the records show that they paid no attention.’ Understandably, the governor was unmoved. Like the D.A, he probably recognized that Fish was legally insane, but felt that it made no difference—that there was no point in burdening society with the keep of such a man. What Wertham had failed to recognize is that the execution of a murderer like Fish actually serves a ritual function. The public wants to see sadistic killers executed, in the same way that children want fairy stories to end with the defeat of the wicked giant. It serves the purpose of exorcising the horror.
What turns a man into a sado-masochist? In the case of Albert Fish, fortunately, we know the answer. In 1875, his father suffered a heart attack in the Pennsylvania Station. Unable to provide for twelve children, Ellen Fish was forced to consign most of them to an orphanage. The 5-year-old boy had no idea why he had been suddenly abandoned; he was deeply miserable, and at first ran away repeatedly. Discipline in the St John’s Refuge was rigid and severe; the matron made them pray for hours every day and made them memorize chapters from the Bible. The slightest infringement of discipline was punished by flogging, administered by the matron. Fish discovered that he enjoyed being whipped on his naked bottom. His fellow orphans teased him because punishment always gave him an erection. What they did not know was that watching other boys being whipped also produced sexual excitement in him. Since it was a co-educational institution (although the boys and girls were kept strictly segregated outside class) there was naturally a great deal of sex talk. After a while, the young Fish was initiated into masturbation and other sex games. By the time his mother took him away from the orphanage two years later—she had obtained a government job—sado-masochism had been firmly ‘imprinted’ in the 7-year-old boy. He told Wertham of an occasion when he and some friends had soaked a horse’s tail in kerosene and set it on fire.
He was a sickly and introverted child, and a fall from a cherry tree produced concussion; thereafter he suffered severe headaches, dizzy spells and a severe stutter. (It has been pointed out that a large number of serial killers have suffered head injuries in childhood.) He continued to wet the bed for many years, and his companions taunted him about it. Fish’s reaction to the jeers was to retreat into a world of daydreams. At about this time he insisted on being called Albert (the name of a dead younger brother) rather than Hamilton because his schoolmates called him Ham and Eggs. He began to suffer from convulsive fits.
The daydreams were often of being beaten or watching others being beaten. When his elder brother Walter came home from the Navy and showed Albert books with pictures of naked men and women, and told him stories of cannibalism which he claimed to have witnessed, more sado-masochistic traits were ‘imprinted’. His favourite reading was Poe’s story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, with its details of mental torture, and this led him on to study everything he could find about the Spanish Inquisition. He became a devotee of true murder cases, and began carrying newspaper clippings in his pockets until they disintegrated. (He was carrying an account of the Hanover ‘butcher’ Fritz Haarmann when he was arrested.) Yet at the same time he continued to be a devoted student of the Bible, and to dream of becoming a clergyman. Having become habituated to sexual and religious fantasy from an early age, he saw no contradiction between them.
When he was 12, Fish began a homosexual relationship with a telegraph boy who excited him by describing what he had seen in brothels. This youth also introduced to Fish peculiar practices such as drinking urine and tasting excreta. By his late teens, Fish was tormented with a violent and permanent sexual appetite that never left him alone. (But this is less unusual than it sounds; the majority of teenagers could tell a similar story.) When he moved to New York at the age of 20, he quickly became a male prostitute, and spent much of his weekends at public baths where he could watch boys. It was at this time that he began raping small boys. By now the pattern was set, and even a marriage—arranged by his mother—failed to change it. A period in Sing Sing—for embezzlement—virtually ended the marriage, and he returned to homosexuality. After his wife’s desertion, he began to show signs of mental disturbance; he heard voices, and on one occasion wrapped himself up in a carpet and explained that he was following the instructions of St John. Then began his period of wandering around the United States and working as a painter and decorator; during this time, he told Wertham, he raped more than a hundred children, mostly boys under six.
When he was 28, a male lover took him to see the waxworks gallery in a museum; there he was fascinated by a medical display showing the bisection of a penis. He returned to see it many times, and ‘imprinting’ occurred again, leading to a new obsession with castration. During a relationship with a mentally defective homosexual, Fish tied him up and tried to castrate him. The rush of blood frightened him and he fled. Now he began adding castration to his rapes, on one occasion severing a child’s penis with a pair of scissors. He began going to brothels where he could be spanked and whipped. He committed his first murder—of a male homosexual—in Wilmington in 1910. In 1919 he mutilated and tortured to death a mentally retarded boy. From now on, murder also became a part of his pattern of perversion.
Here, then, we are able to study in unusual detail the development of a sado-masochistic obsession. It is impossible to doubt that it began in the St John’s Refuge in 1875, when he was first whipped by the matron of the Episcopal Sisterhood. It is possible to say with some degree of confidence that if Fish had not been sent to an orphanage at the age of 5, he would never have developed into one of the most remarkable examples of ‘polymorphous perversion’ in the history of sexual abnormality.
Then why did his fellow-orphans never achieve the same dubious notoriety? Presumably because they lacked his intensely introverted temperament, the tendency to brood and daydream about sex and pain. In short, they lacked the ability to retreat so totally into a world of fantasy. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that what turned Fish into a dangerous pervert was precisely the same tendency to morbid brooding and fantasy that turned Edgar Allan Poe into a writer of genius.
How far does this enable us to understand the serial killer? It enables us, at least, to grasp that there is a link between his abnormality and what we recognize as normality. Fish was turned into a serial killer by a kind of ‘hothouse’ conditioning that led him to spend most of his childhood brooding about sex. We must bear in mind that he was born in 1870, at a time when sex crime was almost non-existent. By the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, Fish was 18—old enough, in theory, to have committed them himself. But he was still living in a world of Victorian morality and Victorian behaviour, where ‘dirty books’ were still banned—most of the ‘obscenity’ prosecutions of that period now strike us as incomprehensible—and prostitution regarded with deep disapproval. Fish became a fully-fledged pervert by accident, starting with the accident of being sent to an orphanage at the age of 5. If Fish had been alive today, he would have had no difficulty finding material to feed his fantasies, from hard porn magazines to ‘snuff videos’. In most large American cities he would have found streets lined with male and female ‘hookers’ willing to cater to every perversion. It becomes possible to see why, some twenty-five years after the relaxation of the laws governing pornography, serial crime suddenly began to develop into an epidemic.
Earle Nelson and Albert Fish were undoubtedly psychopaths; in our own time, they would probably have been found guilty but insane. Carl Panzram is an entirely different matter; he belongs to a breed of killer that we shall not encounter again for another three decades: the highly intelligent, highly articulate ‘resentment killer’.
When Carl Panzram was locked into his cell in the Washington District Jail on 16 August 1928, no one even guessed that he was one of the world’s most brutal mass murderers. It is just possible that no one ever would have known—except for a fortunate coincidence. That same week, a young guard named Henry Lesser also arrived in the jail.
Washington DC is a hot city in August—the temperature often soars into the 90s—and the first thing Lesser noticed was the stench of human sweat and disinfectant. The prison was basically a long box, with tier upon tier of barred doors facing each other down either side. The sun entered through tall, dirty windows covered in bars. As Lesser climbed the iron stairs, he noticed the silhouette of a man framed against the afternoon sunlight—a big man with massive shoulders and a round, almost hairless head. There was something about the prisoner that made an immediate impression—Lesser declared later: ‘There was a kind of stillness about him.’ He noticed the name outside the cell door: ‘C. Panzram’. And as he started to walk away, an odd feeling made him turn round. The man was watching him, his huge hands gripping the bars of the door. Lesser asked him when his case came up in court.
‘November eleventh.’ The face was so hard, the eyes so flat and stony, that Lesser assumed he must be a gangster.
‘What’s your racket?’ he asked.
Panzram gave an odd smile. ‘I reform people.’
The two other prisoners in the cell gave a snort of laughter.
Lesser checked on why the big man was in jail. To his surprise it was not violence or extortion—merely burgling the home of a dentist. A fence had been caught selling a radio, and had admitted that Panzram had asked him to dispose of it. The police went along to a room in a cheap rooming house, and found a ‘bearlike man with a limp, a heavy black moustache and agate-hard eyes’. They handcuffed him and asked his occupation; Panzram replied indifferently that he was a thief, then suddenly grinned. When the policeman asked why he was smiling, Panzram said: ‘Because a charge of stealing a radio is a joke.’
‘What do you mean?’
Panzram said evenly: ‘I’ve killed too many people to worry about a charge like that.’
The police assumed this was boasting, and the District Attorney took the same view when they told him about it. Panzram, he said, was a ‘chiseler’, a man who tried to waste time by getting extradition to another state—claiming to have committed crimes that could never be proved against him. Panzram had a long prison record, but it was mostly for burglary and vagrancy.
Henry Lesser soon became well liked among the prisoners. A young Jew from a poor background, he was more liberal and humane than the other guards. Panzram seemed perfectly willing to engage in conversation, although he never initiated it. A few days later Lesser asked him what he meant by ‘reforming people’. Panzram said without expression:
‘The only way to reform people is to kill them.’
Lesser hurried away. What he had just heard disturbed him profoundly. Yet there was something about Panzram that aroused a curious feeling of response.
The prison governor, William L. Peak, would have found that attitude incomprehensible. He was a tough man who regarded the prisoners as dangerous subhuman creatures who had broken the laws of society, and had to take their punishment. Sympathizing with them would be as pointless as rewarding naughty children. Panzram made no secret of the fact that he hated Peak, and would welcome a chance to get his hands round his throat.
Later that day, the guards were ordered to do a ‘shakedown’ of Panzram’s tier, searching for weapons or illegal substances. Two guards entered Panzram’s cell, one of them holding a short iron rod with which he tapped the window bars, while the other one watched the prisoners. One of the bars gave a dull sound instead of a clear, metallic ring. The guards looked at one another and left immediately. Ten minutes later, they were back with handcuffs, which they clicked on to Panzram. They knew better than to bother with his cellmates; only Panzram’s immense hands would have had the strength to gradually loosen the bar in its cement setting.
Panzram was taken down to the basement of the jail. The iron beams of the ceiling were supported by thick pillars. Panzram’s hands were passed around one of these pillars, and then re-handcuffed. Then a rope was passed through the chain of the cuffs and thrown over a beam; Panzram was heaved up until only his toes touched the floor. The angle of his arms around the pillar almost dislocated his shoulders, and the pain was agonizing. For the next twelve hours he was left in this position, the prison doctor periodically checking with a stethoscope to make sure his heart was holding out.
The next morning, Lesser saw him lying on the floor of the isolation cell, the skin of his wrists in ribbons, and his arms covered with bruises where the guards had beaten him with saps. He only muttered when Lesser asked if he was all right. But when one of the other guards looked into the cell, Panzram stirred himself enough to call him a son of a bitch. Soon after, four guards entered the cell; when Panzram resisted, he was knocked unconscious with a blackjack. When he woke up, he was once again standing on his toes in the basement, his arms chained around the pillar. All night he cursed and shrieked defiance at the guards; blows seemed to make no difference. One of the ‘trusties’—a convict trusted by the guards—told Lesser that, in his agony, Panzram had roared that he had killed dozens of people and would kill more if he got the chance.
The next day, when Panzram was back in his own cell, Lesser handed the trusty a dollar to give to Panzram. He knew that a dollar meant extra food and cigarettes.
When the trusty passed on the dollar, Panzram obviously thought it was a joke. When the trusty assured him that it was no joke, Panzram’s eyes filled with tears.
Later, when Lesser passed his cell, Panzram limped to the bars and thanked him. ‘That’s the first time a screw has ever done me a favour.’ He told Lesser that reporters had been asking to see him since word of his ‘confessions’ had leaked out, but he had refused to see them.
‘But if you’ll get me a pencil and paper, I’ll write you the story of my life.’
This was strictly against the rules; prisoners were only allowed to write a limited number of censored letters. But Lesser decided to break the rules. The next morning, he smuggled the pencil and paper through the bars, and Panzram hid them under his mattress. That evening, after midnight, Lesser slipped up to Panzram’s cell and was handed a batch of manuscript. They had time for a short conversation, and for the first time, Lesser realized that Panzram had a powerful if uncultivated mind. He was startled, for example, when the prisoner told him that he had read the German philosopher Schopenhauer, and he agreed entirely that human life was a trap and a delusion.
Panzram’s autobiography began: ‘This is a true statement of my actions, including the times and places and my reasons for doing these things, written by me of my own free will at the District Jail, Washington D.C., November 4, 1928.’
As he began reading the account of Panzram’s childhood, Lesser had no idea that ‘these things’ would include twenty brutal and violent murders.
Just over a week later, Panzram limped into court. With his record of previous convictions, it was likely that the burglary charge would earn him a five-year sentence. In such circumstances, most prisoners would have done their best to seem harmless and repentant. But Panzram seemed to be in the grip of a demon. Having told the judge that he would represent himself, he sat in the witness chair and faced the jury, staring at them with his cold, baleful eyes.
‘You people got me here charged with housebreaking and larceny. I’m guilty…What I didn’t steal I smashed. If the owner had come in I would have knocked his brains out.’
This man was obviously a raging psychopath. The jurors looked pale and shaken. Panzram went on evenly:
‘While you were trying me here, I was trying all of you too. I’ve found you guilty. Some of you I’ve executed. If I live I’ll execute some more of you. I hate the whole human race…I believe the whole human race should be exterminated. I’ll do my best to do it every chance I get. Now, I’ve done my duty, you do yours.’
Not surprisingly, the jury took less than a minute to find him guilty. The judge sentenced him to twenty-five years in Leavenworth, one of America’s toughest jails.
Lesser was shocked when he heard of the sentence. But, unlike the other occupants of the Washington Jail, he knew exactly why Panzram had done it. He had been reading Panzram’s autobiography, and it revealed a man whose bitterness was so deep that he would have cheerfully destroyed the world. Lesser’s own childhood, while poverty-stricken, had been full of family warmth and affection. Now he read with horror and fascination the story of a man who had never received any kind of love, and therefore never learned to give it.
Carl Panzram had been a tramp and a jailbird since he was 14. He had been born one year before the worst depression in American history so far. His father was a poor German immigrant, an ex-soldier who had hoped to make his fortune in America. Instead, he was forced to work as a farm labourer until he scraped together the money to buy a small farm in Minnesota. A man with a violent temper and a brooding disposition, John Panzram saw his investment wasting away through drought and hard times. Carl, their fourth child, was born on 28 June 1891. By now his overworked wife was suffering from high blood pressure and dizzy spells. One day, John Panzram walked out and the family never saw him again.
Carl was a difficult child. He longed for attention, but no one had any time to give it to him. So he behaved badly to gain attention, and was only spanked and then ignored. His first appearance in court was at the age of 8, on a charge of being drunk. At school he had further beatings with a strap—on his hands, because at this stage he was sickly and often ill. One day he decided to run away out west to be a cowboy; he broke into the home of a rich neighbour and stole some cake and apples, and a revolver. But before he had travelled more than a few miles he was caught. At the age of 11 he was sent to his first reform school. ‘Right there and then I began to learn about man’s inhumanity to man.’ He was often tied naked to a wooden block, and salty water allowed to dry on his back. The strap with which he was beaten had holes punched in it, so the skin came up through them as it struck the flesh, causing small blisters; when these soon burst, the salt caused agony.
Panzram was a strongminded boy. ‘I began to hate those who abused me. Then I began to think I would have my revenge as often as I could injure someone else. Anyone at all would do. If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.’
Back home after two years, he was sent to a Lutheran school whose preacher-teacher detested him on sight and often beat him. One day Panzram stole a revolver, and when the preacher began to hit him, pulled it out and pulled the trigger. It misfired. Before he could be sent back to reform school, he jumped into an empty car on a freight train and went west.
Back in detention for robbery, he escaped with another youth, and they teamed up. ‘He showed me how to work the stick-up racket and how to rob the poor box in churches. I in turn taught him how to set fire to a church after we robbed it.’ They enjoyed destruction for its own sake—even boring holes in the floor of wagons full of wheat so the grain would run away along the tracks, and emptying sand into the oil boxes of the freight cars so they would seize up.
A brief period in the army ended in court martial for insubordination, and a three-year sentence in a military jail. The sentence was signed by the Secretary of War Howard Taft; thirteen years later, Panzram burgled Taft’s home and stole $3,000. He never forgave or forgot.
Panzram served his three years, together with an extra month for trying to escape. But he succeeded in burning down the prison workshop. ‘Another hundred thousand dollars to my credit.’ He wrote later: ‘I was discharged from that prison in 1910. I was the spirit of meanness personified.’ During the next five years his only honest employment was as a strikebreaker—which ended when he was beaten unconscious by strikers. There were also several spells in prison for burglary. But the episode that had turned him into an enemy of society had happened in 1915, when he was 23. In San Francisco, he had been arrested for burgling the home of a bank president. The District Attorney offered him a deal; if he would confess where he had hidden the loot, they would ‘go easy’ on him and give him a minimum sentence. The law broke its word; Panzram was sentenced to seven years.
In an insane rage, Panzram succeeded in breaking out of his cell, plugging all the locks so no guards could get in, then set about wrecking the jail. He tore radiators and pipes off the walls, piled up everything that would burn, and set fire to it. The guards finally broke in and ‘knocked his block off. Then Panzram was shackled and sent off to the Oregon State Penitentiary, one of the most inhumane in America.
He swore that he would not complete his sentence; the warden, a brutal man named Minto, swore that he would. One of Panzram’s first acts was to hurl his chamberpot in a guard’s face; he was beaten, then handcuffed to the door of a dark cell known as ‘the Hole’ for thirty days. A few weeks later he was flogged and thrown in again when he was caught trying to hack a hole in the prison roof. When released, he was made to wear a uniform of red and black stripes, recently designed for dangerous troublemakers. The ‘punishment’ misfired; prisoners wearing the ‘hornet suit’ were regarded by other convicts as heroes.
When Warden Minto was shot to death in a hunt for an escaped convict, his brother—who was equally brutal—took over the job. He set out to make Panzram’s life difficult; Panzram set out to make Minto’s life difficult. He broke into the storeroom and stole bottles of lemon extract—which contained alcohol—and got a crowd of prisoners drunk; they started a riot, while Panzram, who remained sober, sat back and grinned. Next Panzram burned down the prison workshops—but was caught and thrown back into the Hole. Then he was confined in a specially built isolation block called the Bullpen.
Panzram won this round. He roared and cursed all night, beating his slop bucket on the door. The other prisoners joined in. Tension was already high because the warden had cut wages from a dollar to twenty-five cents a day. The warden decided it would be wiser to release Panzram, and assigned him to a job in the kitchen. Panzram went berserk with an axe, causing everyone to flee, and had smashed all the locks in an empty block of cells before he was clubbed unconscious.
Tension mounted until guards refused to go into the yard alone. When two convicts escaped, Minto ordered that Panzram and another suspected plotter should be ‘firehosed’—a punishment outlawed by the state. The two prisoners were ‘water-hammered’ until they were battered and bruised all over. But the news reached the state governor, who sent for Minto and ordered him to resign.
The new warden, a man named Murphy, believed that prisoners would respond to kindness. When told that Panzram had been caught sawing the bars of his cell, he asked how many times Panzram had been thrown into the Hole; the guard said eight. ‘Then it doesn’t seem to be working, does it?’ said Murphy, and ordered that Panzram should have extra rations and given books to read. When, a few weeks later, Panzram was again caught with a hacksaw that someone had dropped into his cell, the warden sent for him. Murphy told Panzram that he had heard he was the wickedest man in the jail. Panzram said he quite agreed. And then Murphy gave Panzram the greatest shock of his life. He told him that he could walk out of the prison and go anywhere he liked—provided he gave his word of honour to return by supper time. Panzram gave his word—without the slightest intention of keeping it—and when supper time came, found that some curious inner compulsion made him go back.
Gradually, Murphy increased his freedom and that of the other prisoners. He revived the honours system, and Panzram became virtually a ‘trusty’. But one night when he was ‘on leave’ in the local hospital, Panzram got drunk with a pretty nurse and stayed out too late. He decided to abscond. It took a week to catch him, and then he made a determined attempt to kill the deputies who cornered him. Murphy’s critics had a field day and the honours system was undermined. Panzram was given an extra ten years and thrown back into solitary confinement. But soon after that, he succeeded in escaping. At least he had won his bet with the deceased Warden Minto.
The experience of Murphy seems to have been a turning-point in Panzram’s life. So far he had hated the world, but not himself. His betrayal of Murphy’s trust seems to have undermined his certainty that his hatred and violence were justified. It was after his escape, in May 1918, that he began his career of murder.
In New York Panzram obtained seaman’s papers and sailed for South America. He and another sailor planned to hijack a small schooner and murder everybody on board; but the sailor got drunk and tried to carry out the plan alone. In fact, he killed six men, but was caught. Panzram sailed for Europe, where he spent some time in Barlinnie Jail in Glasgow—as usual, for theft…
Back in New York he burgled the home of Howard Taft, the man who had confirmed his earlier sentence. He bought himself a yacht with the $3,000 in cash that he found.
‘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. This I done…’
He explained how he would hire two sailors, take them to his yacht and wine and dine them, then blow out their brains in the middle of the night with a revolver he had stolen. Then he would drop their weighted bodies into the sea from a rowboat. ‘They are there yet, ten of ’em.’
He hired two more sailors and sailed down the coast, robbing other yachts. It had been his intention to murder his latest two helpers, but the yacht went on to rocks and sank. Instead of killing them, Panzram paid them off.
A second attempt to become rich through burglary ended in a six-month jail sentence. Once again, Panzram signed on as a sailor, and this time went to the Belgian Congo. A job with an oil company came to an end when he sodomized the boy who waited at table—Panzram observes ironically that the youth did not appreciate the benefits of civilization. Shortly after, Panzram picked up another black boy, raped him, then battered in his skull.
‘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.’ (Panzram explains that he shot them in the back.) ‘The crocks done the rest. I stole their canoe and went back to town, tied the canoe to the dock, and that night someone stole the canoe from me.’
Back in America in 1920, Panzram returned to burglary and stick-ups. He also raped and murdered another boy. After taking a job as a caretaker at a yacht club in New Haven, he stole a yacht and sailed it down the coast. A man who offered to buy it tried to hold him up at gunpoint, but Panzram was ready for him; he shot him to death and dumped his body overboard.
The police soon caught up with him, but this time a good lawyer succeeded in getting him acquitted, in exchange for the yacht. When the lawyer tried to register the yacht, it was promptly reclaimed by its owner. By that time, Panzram was back in New Haven, where he committed his last rape murder, bringing the total up to twenty.
He now signed on as a sailor to go to China, but was fired the same day for getting drunk and fighting. The next day he was caught as he was burgling the express office in Larchmont, NY. Once again, the prosecution offered a deal; if he would plead guilty, he would receive a light sentence. History repeated itself; he received the maximum sentence: five years.
This time he was sent to America’s toughest prison: Dannemora, NY. Enraged again by sheer brutality, he attempted to escape, but fell thirty feet on to concrete and broke both ankles. There was no attempt to set them; he was simply left alone for months until they healed. ‘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.’ One day he jumped from a high gallery, fracturing a leg; he walked for the rest of his life with a limp. He spent his days dreaming of revenge, planning how to destroy a passenger train by setting a bomb in a tunnel, or poisoning a whole city’s water supply.
Within a short time of being released from Dannemora, Panzram burgled a house in Washington and stole a radio. And it was in Washington District Jail that he wrote his story of murder and vandalism for Henry Lesser…
On 30 January 1929, Carl Panzram and thirty-one other prisoners were chained together and placed on a train for Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas. Henry Lesser was sent along as one of the escorts; they hoped that his presence would calm the ‘dingbat’, as Panzram was known. It was a strange experience for Lesser—to look at this man ‘under his care’, and to know that he had committed more than a dozen sex murders, and that no one but he and Panzram knew the whole truth.
Panzram was in a bad mood. He made a grab for Warden Peak’s personal ‘trusty’, but only had time to spit on him before he was manhandled back into line. But he was heard to mutter that he intended to ‘get’ Peak—who was travelling with them—and hoped to wreck the train. Peak had somehow found out that Panzram hoped to pull the emergency cord when the train was at top speed, to try to derail it; accordingly, the emergency cord had been disconnected.
Harris Berman, the doctor who had tested Panzram’s heart while he was being flogged, sat up all night watching the ‘dingbat’. He had heard that Panzram was planning to break loose, and would try to kill Peak—or possibly himself. Panzram eyed the doctor with contempt, and made jeering accusations of sodomy with his assistant. He shouted the same accusations at Warden Peak whenever he showed his face.
When Lesser saw Panzram staring at two small boys who were peering in through the window at a station, he shuddered as he imagined what might be going through Panzram’s mind.
When the train finally pulled up in the grey stone walls of Leavenworth, the ground was covered with dirty snow. The Leavenworth rule book contained no fewer than ninety rules—including total silence during meals; breaking any single one of them entailed harsh punishment.
While Lesser and his fellow guards were taken on a tour of the five-storey cell blocks—all jammed to capacity—Warden Peak paid a call on Warden T. B. White, and warned him that the most dangerous man in the new batch was Carl Panzram. He advised White to keep him in solitary. But White, a lanky Texan, had his own ideas of reform—or perhaps he felt that Panzram was only one of dozens of dangerous prisoners. He decided to ignore the warning, and assigned Panzram to the laundry. Warden Peak and his contingent of guards returned to Washington.
When Deputy Warden Zerbst gave Panzram the regulation lecture on what was expected of him, Panzram only shrugged, then said levelly: ‘I’ll kill the first man that bothers me.’
Like so many before him, Zerbst thought this was bluff.
The laundry was one of the worst assignments in the prison: damp, badly ventilated and either too hot or too cold. The man in charge, Robert Warnke, was a short, plump civilian who was a member of the local Ku Klux Klan. He had been warned that Panzram was dangerous, but seems to have felt no misgivings as he directed him to work on a machine with a skinny burglar named Marty Rako.
Years later, in a tape-recorded interview, Rako described his impressions of Panzram. The big prisoner was a loner, seldom speaking to others. But he read throughout his spare time, including volumes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. And when he took a dislike to his dirty and illiterate cellmate, he ordered him to apply for a ‘transfer’. (One of the few privileges the prisoners were allowed was to move out of a cell if they disliked their cellmate.)
Panzram received regular letters from Henry Lesser, although many of these failed to get through—the authorities were naturally obstructive concerning anything that gave prisoners pleasure. Lesser told Panzram that he had shown the autobiography to the famous literary critic H. L. Mencken, and Mencken had been impressed by the keenness of Panzram’s mind. But he thought the confessions were too horrific to publish. Mencken had told Lesser: ‘This is one of the most amazing documents I have ever read.’
Panzram was flattered, but he had other things on his mind. He hated the laundry, and its plump foreman. But he had thought of a way out. If a prisoner was punished—by being thrown in the Hole—he was seldom sent back to his previous work; most supervisors had no desire to work with a man they had punished.
Accordingly, Panzram made no real attempt to hide the fact that he was breaking the rules by laundering extra handkerchiefs. Many prisoners were wealthy men who were serving sentences for fraud; these were willing to pay for good food and for special services. When Warnke found out, he had Panzram demoted—which meant loss of wages—and sent to the Hole.
So far, Panzram’s scheme was working. But when he came out of the Hole, he learned that the second part had misfired. He was being sent back to the laundry. Possibly Warnke felt he would lose face by allowing Panzram to be transferred, since Panzram was known to hate him. Or possibly he simply saw through Panzram’s scheme and decided to frustrate it. He also turned down Panzram’s direct request for a transfer.
The weather was becoming stifling, and new batches of prisoners made the jail intolerably overcrowded. There were so many that there were no fewer than nine sittings in the dining hall. The main meal of the day consisted of boiled rice with tomato sauce.
Thursday, 20 June 1929 looked like being another blazingly hot day as foreman Warnke walked into the laundry, and prepared to check on the prisoners. He walked down the aisle towards a disassembled washing machine that stood near some open packing cases, strolling past a heavy steel pillar that held up the ceiling—not unlike the one Panzram had been chained to in the Washington Jail—and stood surveying the washing machine. Then he turned, and realized that Carl Panzram had been standing behind the steel pillar, and that he was holding a crowbar that had been used to open the packing cases. Warnke had no time to notice anything else as the crowbar was brought down on his head, shattering the bone. Panzram screamed with rage and satisfaction as he went on pounding the skull of the fallen man’s head to a pulp. Then, when he was sure Warnke was dead, he turned on the other prisoners and guards; they fled in all directions as he flourished the bloodstained crowbar.
Like some great limping ape, Panzram shambled down the street outside, and into the office of the Deputy Warden. Fortunately for Zerbst, he was late that morning. Panzram opened the door of the mailroom and limped in, swinging the bar; yelling clerks scattered in all directions. A convict who came in with a message was chased down the street. Then Panzram made his way back to the locked gate of the isolation unit. ‘Let me in.’
‘Not with that in your hand,’ said the startled guard.
Panzram threw away the crowbar, and the guard unlocked the steel door. Now Panzram’s rage was all dissipated, he looked relaxed and almost serene as he walked into the nearest cell.
When Warden Peak heard the news in Washington, he lost no time in summoning the press and saying ‘I told you so.’ Lesser was shocked and depressed—as much by the death of a fellow prison employee as by Panzram’s predicament.
Panzram himself was startled when no one tried to beat him to death, or even drag him off to the Hole. Instead, he was placed in a large, airy cell, next door to a prisoner named Robert Stroud (who would become known as ‘the Bird Man of Alcatraz’), and although he was kept locked in without exercise, he was allowed to read all day long. He told Lesser: ‘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…’
In reply, Lesser suggested that he himself should try and raise support from influential people—like Mencken—to get Panzram a reprieve. Panzram replied: ‘Wake up, kid…The real truth of the matter is that I haven’t the least desire to reform…It took me 36 years to be like I am now; then how do you figure that I could, if I wanted to, change from black to white in the twinkling of an eye?’
Lesser declined to take no for an answer, and persuaded a famous psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, to go and see Panzram. Forty years later, Menninger recalled how he had interviewed Panzram—under guard—in the anteroom of a federal court. When he told Panzram that he did not believe he would harm someone who had never done him any harm, Panzram’s reply was to hurl himself at Menninger as far as his chains would allow him, and to shout: ‘Take these off me and I’ll kill you before their eyes.’ Then Panzram went on to describe with gruesome satisfaction all his murders and rapes.
In spite of the fact that a Sanity Commission decided that Panzram was insane, on 15 April 1930 the jury in a federal courtroom in Topeka, Kansas, found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death. Panzram was pleased with the verdict, and interrupted his defence attorney to say that he had no wish to appeal.
One problem for the state was that executions in Kansas were illegal. Panzram’s sentence caused indignation in anti-capital-punishment groups. One such group was permitted to appear outside his cell to ask him to sign a petition for clemency. They were startled to be met with shrieks of rage and obscenity. Subsequently Panzram wrote a long and brilliantly lucid letter to a penal reform group explaining precisely why he had no desire to escape the death sentence. He even wrote to President Herbert Hoover telling him not to interfere and reprieve him. He managed to make an unsuccessful attempt at suicide, eating a plate of beans that he had concealed until they had gone black and poisonous, and somehow slashing a six-inch wound in his leg. His magnificent constitution saw him through.
Shortly before six on the morning of 5 September 1930, Panzram was led from his cell, singing a pornographic song of his own composition. Seeing two men in clerical garb among the spectators in the corridor, he roared an obscenity about ‘Bible-backed cocksuckers’, and told the warden to get them out. When this had been done, he said: ‘Let’s get going. What are we hanging around for?’
On the scaffold, the hangman, who was from Ohio and therefore known as a ‘Hoosier’, asked him if there was anything he wanted. ‘Yes, hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.’
Moments later, the trap fell, breaking his neck.
Panzram remains one of the most fascinating cases in criminal history because he pursued hatred and revenge with a kind of ruthless logic. He possessed an extremely strong will—the kind of will that makes great statesmen and soldiers and reformers. It was a characteristic he shared with Michelangelo, Luther, Beethoven and Lenin. But when Panzram met with opposition, and he was sure he was in the right, he charged like a mad bull. It made no difference if he ran into a brick wall; he almost enjoyed battering his head against brick walls. Attempts to beat him into submission only made him twice as determined—and twice as violent and dangerous.
Riding the freight trains at the age of 14, he had another lesson in inhumanity when he invited four burly tramps into the comfortable box car he had found. Ignoring his struggles, they held him down and raped him. The same thing happened again in a small town in the mid-west when he approached a crowd of loafers sitting around a fire and tried to beg food. They got him drunk on whiskey, and he only realized what had happened when he recovered consciousness. The lesson Panzram learned from this was simple: Might makes Right.
Panzram was a highly sexed youth, but even the cheapest whores were too expensive for a teenage tramp. Instead, he developed a taste for sodomy. On one occasion when a brakeman caught him hiding in a freight car, Panzram pulled out a revolver and sodomized him at gunpoint, then forced two other hoboes to do the same. It was his crude and simple method of taking revenge on the world.
Sexual frustration also turned Panzram into a rapist—but not of women. After catching gonorrhoea from a prostitute, he decided that women were not for him. He picked up boys whenever he could, and when he robbed men, he often tied them to a tree to commit rape. If someone had accused Panzram of being homosexual, he would have been astonished. It was merely a sexual outlet—and an outlet for his aggression. By committing anal rape, he was somehow repaying what had been done to him; he called it the Law of Compensation.
Although he never actually says so, it is clear that he had acquired another curious perversion—pyromania, a tendency to experience sexual excitement from causing fires. He arrived in Houston, Texas, during the great fire of February 1912. ‘I…walked through the town, enjoying the sights of all the burning buildings, and listening to the tales of woe, the moans and sighs of those whose homes and property were burning. I enjoyed it all…’
His hatred of society—and of respectable people—dominated his life. Like the Marquis de Sade, he was convinced that society is built on corruption, and on the strong exploiting the weak. It gave him immense satisfaction to record the sins of those in authority—for example, of the warden of Deer Lodge Prison, Montana, who was also the mayor. ‘He wound up his career by blowing out his own brains because he was due for a bit of his own cells for charges of stealing the state funds and a host of other crimes.’
What baffles the reader of Panzram’s autobiography is why he never used his intelligence to avoid punishment. It is understandable why he tried to burn down the San Francisco jail when the authorities broke their word and sentenced him to seven years. But it is impossible to understand why the first thing he did at the Oregon jail was to throw a full chamberpot in a guard’s face, earning himself thirty days of torment.
The answer has to be that Panzram never acquired any kind of self-discipline. And it may have been this recognition that led to the virtually suicidal activities of his final years. This becomes very clear in a story told by Lesser. He had been told to test the bars of Panzram’s cell with a steel rod. As he left the cell, Panzram said in a strangled voice: ‘Don’t ever do that again. Turning your back on me like that.’
Lesser protested: ‘I knew you wouldn’t harm me.’
‘Yes, you’re the one man in the world I don’t want to kill. But I’m so erratic I’m liable to do anything.’
It was as if Panzram had trained a part of himself—a kind of savage dog—to leap at people’s throats. But the dog was now out of control…
Perhaps the cruellest thing that ever happened to Panzram was Warden Murphy’s offer to allow him to walk out of the jail if he promised to return. It was a proof that the murderous logic on which he had based his life was founded on a fallacy. To hate ‘Society’ is to hate an abstraction. Society is a mass of individuals. And when he finally betrayed Murphy’s trust, Panzram suddenly began to hate himself as well as other people. The subsequent murders were an attempt to kill something inside himself. But when Lesser sent him the dollar, and Panzram’s eyes filled with tears, he knew that it was still alive. Suddenly, he experienced an overpowering need to cleanse himself through confession…
In the 1930s, America again had a series of murders as mysterious as those of the New Orleans Axeman; the killer was known as ‘the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’ or ‘the Cleveland Torso Killer’, and the crimes are still unsolved.
On a warm September afternoon in 1935, two boys on their way home from school walked along a dusty, sooty gully called Kingsbury Run, in the heart of Cleveland, Ohio. On a weed-covered slope known as Jackass Hill, one challenged the other to a race, and they hurtled sixty feet down the slope to the bottom. Sixteen-year-old James Wagner was the winner, and as he halted, panting, he noticed something white in the bushes a few yards away. A closer look revealed that it was a naked body, and that it was headless.
The police who arrived soon after found the body of a young white male clad only in black socks; the genitals had also been removed. It lay on its back, with the legs stretched out and the arms placed neatly by the sides, as if laid out for a funeral. Thirty feet away, the policemen found another body, lying in the same position; it was of an older man, and had also been decapitated and emasculated.
Hair sticking out of the ground revealed one of the heads a few yards away, and the second was found nearby. The genitals were also found lying near as if thrown away by the killer.
One curious feature of the case was that there was no blood on the ground or on the bodies, which were quite clean. It looked as if they had been killed and beheaded elsewhere, then carefully washed when they had ceased to bleed.
Medical examination made the case more baffling than ever. The older corpse was badly decomposed, and the skin discoloured; the pathologists discovered that this was due to some chemical substance, as if the killer had tried to preserve the body. The older victim had been dead about two weeks; the younger man had only been dead three days. His fingerprints enabled the police to identify him as 28-year-old Edward Andrassy, who had a minor police record for carrying concealed weapons. He lived near Kingsbury Run and had a reputation as a drunken brawler.
But the most chilling discovery was that Andrassy had been killed by decapitation. Rope marks on his wrists revealed that he had been tied and had struggled violently. The killer had apparently cut off his head with a knife. The skill with which the operation had been performed suggested a butcher—or possibly a surgeon.
It proved impossible to identify the older man. But the identification of Andrassy led the police to hope that it should not be too difficult to trace his killer. He had spent his nights gambling and drinking in a slum part of town and was known as a pimp. But further investigation also revealed that he had male lovers. Lead after lead looked marvellously promising. The husband of a married woman with whom he had had an affair had sworn to kill him. But the man was able to prove his innocence. So were various shady characters who might have borne a grudge. Lengthy police investigation led to a dead end—as it did in another ten cases of the killer who became known as ‘the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’.
Four months later, on a raw January Sunday, the howling of a dog finally led a black woman resident of East Twentieth Street—not far from Kingsbury Run—to go and investigate. She found the chained animal trying to get at a basket near a factory wall. Minutes later, she told a neighbour that the basket contained ‘hams’. But the neighbour soon recognized the ‘hams’ as parts of a human arm. A burlap bag proved to contain the lower half of a female torso. The head was missing, as were the left arm and lower parts of both legs. But fingerprints again enabled the police to trace the victim, who had a record for soliciting. She proved to be a 41-year-old prostitute named Florence Polillo, a squat, double-chinned woman who was well known in the bars of the neighbourhood.
Again, there were plenty of leads, and again, all of them petered out. Two weeks later, the left arm and lower legs were found in a vacant lot. The head was never recovered.
The murder of Flo Polillo raised an unwelcome question. The first two murders had convinced the police that they were looking for a homosexual sadist; this latest crime made it look as if this killer was quite simply a sadist—like Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf killer, executed in 1931; he had killed men, women and children indifferently, and he was not remotely homosexual. And now the pathologist recalled that, a year before that first double murder, the torso of an unknown woman had been found on the edge of Lake Erie. It began to look as if the Mad Butcher was quite simply a sadist.
At least the Cleveland public felt they had one thing in their favour. Since the double killing, the famous Elliot Ness had been appointed Cleveland’s Director of Public Safety. Ness and his ‘Untouchables’ had cleared up Chicago’s Prohibition rackets, then, in 1934, Ness had moved to Cleveland to fight its gangsters. With Ness in charge, the Head Hunter of Kingsbury Run—another press soubriquet—would find himself becoming the hunted.
But it was soon clear to Ness that hunting a sadistic pervert is nothing like hunting professional gangsters. The killer struck at random, and unless he was careless enough to leave behind a clue—like a fingerprint—then the only hope of catching him was in the act. And Ness soon became convinced that the Mad Butcher took great pleasure in feeling that he was several steps ahead of the police.
The Head Hunter waited until the summer before killing again, then lived up to his name by leaving the head of a young man, wrapped in a pair of trousers, under a bridge in Kingsbury Run; again, two boys found it on 22 June 1936. The body was found a quarter of mile away, and it was obvious from the blood that he had died where he lay. And medical evidence showed that he had died from decapitation. It was not clear how the killer had prevented him from struggling while he did it. The victim was about 25, and heavily tattooed. His fingerprints were not in police files. Three weeks later, a young female hiker discovered another decapitated body in a gully; the head lay nearby. The decomposition made it clear that this man had been killed before the previously discovered victim.
The last ‘butchery’ of 1936 was of another man of about 30, found in Kingsbury Run; the body had been cut in two, and emasculated. A hat found nearby led to a partial identification: a housewife recalled giving it to a young tramp. Not far away there was a ‘hobo camp’ where down-and-outs slept; this was obviously where the Butcher had found his latest victim.
The fact that Cleveland had been the scene of a Republican Convention, and was now the site of a ‘Great Expo’, led to even more frantic police activity and much press criticism. The murders were reported all over the world, and in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were cited as proof of the decadence of the New World.
As month after month went by with no further grisly discoveries, Clevelanders hoped they had heard the last of the Mad Butcher. But in February 1937, that hope was dashed when the killer left the body of a young woman in a chopped-up pile on the shores of Lake Erie. She was never identified. The eighth victim, a young negress, was identified from her teeth as Mrs Rose Wallace, 40; only the skeleton remained, and it looked as if she might have been killed in the previous year.
Victim no. 9 was male and had been dismembered; when he was fished out of the river, the head was missing, and was never found. This time the killer had gone even further in his mutilations—like Jack the Ripper. It was impossible to identify the victim. Two men seen in a boat were thought to be the Butcher with an accomplice, but this suggestion that there might be two Butchers led nowhere.
The Butcher now seems to have taken a rest until nine months later. Then the lower part of a leg was pulled out of the river. Three weeks later, two burlap bags in the river proved to contain more body fragments, which enabled the pathologist to announce that the victim was female, a brunette of about 25. She was never identified.
The killer was to strike twice more. More than a year after the last discovery, in August 1938, the dismembered torso of a woman was found on a dump on the lakefront, and a search of the area revealed the bones of a second victim, a male. A quilt in which the remains of this twelfth victim were wrapped was identified as having been given to a junk man. Neither body could be identified.
One thing was now obvious: the Butcher was selecting his victims from vagrants and down-and-outs. Ness decided to take the only kind of action that seemed left to him: two days after the last find, police raided the ‘shantytown’ near Kingsbury Run, arrested hundreds of vagrants, and burned it down. Whether or not by coincidence, the murders now ceased.
The suspects? Two of the most efficient of the manhunters, Detectives Merylo and Zalewski, had spent a great deal of time searching for the killer’s ‘laboratory’. At one point they thought they had found it—but, like all leads, this one faded away.
Next, the investigators discovered that Flo Polillo and Rose Wallace—victim no. 8—had frequented the same saloon, and that Andrassy—no. 2—had been a ‘regular’ there too. They also learned of a middle-aged man called Frank who carried knives and threatened people with them when drunk. When they learned that this man—Frank Dolezal—had also been living with Flo Polillo, they felt they had finally identified the killer. Dolezal was arrested, and police discovered a brown substance like dried blood in the cracks of his bathroom floor. Knives with dried bloodstains on them provided further incriminating evidence. Under intensive questioning, Dolezal—a bleary-eyed, unkempt man—confessed to the murder of Flo Polillo. Newspapers announced the capture of the Butcher. Then things began to go wrong. The ‘dried blood’ in the bathroom proved not to be blood after all. Dolezal’s ‘confession’ proved to be full of errors about the corpse and method of disposal. And when, in August 1939, Dolezal hanged himself in jail, the autopsy revealed that he had two cracked ribs, and suggested that his confession had been obtained by force.
Yet Ness himself claimed that he knew the solution to the murders. He reasoned that the killer was a man who had a house of his own in which to dismember the bodies, and a car in which to transport them. So he was not a down-and-out. The skill of the mutilations suggested medical training. The fact that some of the victims had been strong men suggested that the Butcher had to be big and powerful—a conclusion supported by a size 12 footprint near one of the bodies.
Ness set three of his top agents, Virginia Allen, Barney Davis and Jim Manski, to make enquiries among the upper levels of Cleveland society. Virginia was a sophisticated girl with contacts among Cleveland socialites. And it was she who learned about a man who sounded like the ideal suspect. Ness was to call him ‘Gaylord Sundheim’—a big man from a well-to-do family, who had a history of psychiatric problems. He had also studied medicine. When the three ‘Untouchables’ called on him, he leered sarcastically at Virginia and closed the door in their faces. Ness invited him—pressingly—to lunch, and he came under protest. When Ness finally told him he suspected him of being the Butcher—hoping that shock tactics might trigger a confession—Sundheim sneered: ‘Prove it.’
Soon after this, Sundheim had himself committed to a mental institution. Ness knew he was now ‘untouchable’, for even if Ness could prove his guilt, he could plead insanity.
During the next two years Ness received a series of jeering postcards, some signed ‘Your paranoid nemesis.’ They ceased abruptly when ‘Sundheim’ died in the mental institution.
Was ‘Sundheim’ the Butcher? Probably. But not certainly. In Pittsburgh in 1940, three decapitated bodies were found in old boxcars (i.e. railway coaches). Members of Ness’s team went to investigate, but no clue to the treble murder was ever discovered. But then, the Mad Butcher was also blamed for the horrific Black Dahlia killing in Hollywood in 1947, in which model Elizabeth Short was tortured before the killer cut her body in half at the waist, although no serial killer has ever been known to leave an eight-year gap between murders. The Torso case remains unsolved.