Carl Panzram, a death row convict, coldly admitted to a horrible sequence of atrocities, including rape and mass murder, before being executed in 1930.
He chillingly completed his list of horrible acts with the comment, “For all these things, I am not in the least bit sorry.” In his jail confessions and autobiography, Panzram claimed to have murdered 21 boys and men and perpetrated sodomy on over 1,000 people, referring to himself as “rage personified.”
One of his most heinous deeds was the murder of six local guides who were preparing to accompany him on a crocodile hunting excursion. According to the Daily Star, Panzram shot the guys and fed them to the crocodiles, who “devoured their bodies with gusto”. The murderer’s thorough explanations of his crimes were too upsetting for many people. He vividly described one particular killing, writing, “His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him, and he will never be any deader.”
Panzram’s criminal spree, which lasted over three decades, is one of the most sinister in modern history. Panzram was born in Minnesota to East Prussian immigrant parents in 1891. His father abandoned him early in life, and his run-ins with the law began at the age of eight when he was taken before a juvenile court for being drunk and disorderly.
Panzram claimed that the reform school was a place of torture and sexual abuse by staff members, prompting him to burn it down. His story includes his escape from an institution, only to be gang-raped by a bunch of “hobos,” leaving him as a “sadder, sicker, but wiser boy,” doomed to perform similar horrors.
His criminal record is littered with many transgressions, most notably stealing, which has resulted in his recurrent incarceration. He was subjected to terrible treatment in prisons, with guards beating him, dangling him from the rafters, and throwing him into bleak solitary confinement where food was scant except for the rare cockroach.
In 1918, he escaped and went on a murdering spree across the East Coast, wreaking havoc. He broke into the mansion of former President William Howard Taft and stole enough money to buy the Akiska, a yacht he named.
The luxurious cruiser became a death trap as he enticed American soldiers aboard, assaulted, killed, and disposed of their bodies in the frigid depths of the Atlantic. His seaborne slaughter came to an abrupt halt when the Akista sank off the coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
He resumed his itinerant existence, stowing away on a ship, shooting down six tour guides, and feeding them to frenzied crocodiles. However, it was another burglary committed in 1928 that sent Panzram back to prison.
Incarceration did little to curtail his aggressive tendencies, as he declared to the warden that he would kill the first inmate who challenged him. True to his word, he beat the laundry foreman with an iron bar.
Panzram filled pages with a horrifying chronicle of his atrocities, which were ultimately published in the book “Panzram: A Journal of Murder” in 1970, according to All That’s Interesting. In the beginning of his autobiography, he wrote something very scary: “In my lifetime I have murdered 21 people, committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, and arsons, and last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male individuals.” I’m not sorry for any of this. I have no conscience, therefore that doesn’t bother me as per themirror.
Panzram died at the gallows on September 5, 1930, at the age of 39. Defiant till the end, he spat in the executioner’s face as they attempted to cover his head with the black hood. His final words were equally bold: “Yes.” “Get it done, you Indiana jerk! While you’re messing around, I could kill twelve men!”
