This is a mistake, because in this Journal of Murder, as it is inaccurately titled, Panzram rapidly takes a back seat as the authors try to jostle the details of his past, Lesser’s simultaneous work through the penal system and his weird tie to Panzram, and the history of the various prisons and their leaders that host the killer, with the occasional dip into the unsuccessful publishing story of Panzram’s confession. The writers often only sample from him though, doing the boring history book routine and pretending like they can fill in the blanks of a man who acknowledges himself a monster, claims his goal is to eradicate the human race, openly renounces Christ and wishes to crucify him again, and desires to be killed himself. He was shocking in his time and he remains shocking in ours. No one really tells the story better or truer than Panzram himself, with his voice so resonant of hatred that readers shy away from its bluntness, cruelty, and appalling sacrilege. Gaddis and Long, the authors, supplement Panzram’s own writings, which are presented unadulterated but (I suspect) incomplete, with additional details of his history. Is it unnatural that I should have absorbed these things and have become what I am today, a treacherous, degenerate, brutal, human savage, devoid of all decent feeling, without conscience, morals, pity, sympathy, principle or any single good trait? Why am I what I am?” ~ Carl Panzram What you get then is a serious, if repetitive, psychological study of a criminal who, himself, has an odd tendency to introspect while never giving ground and a dossier on prison history, from the early 1900s juvenile reformatories with their crooked masters and torture to the creation of Leavenworth and brief, unsuccessful individuals who sought and failed to make a lasting change, specifically those who tangled with Panzram.
#KILLER A JOURNAL OF MURDER MOVIE SERIAL#
Panzram himself, serial murder and rapist, concentrates most of his epistles to Lesser on talking about how society made him a criminal, specifically through the failure of penal institutes, than in dredging up the sensationalistic details of murder and sodomy that the lurid book jacket uses as a hook. That’s how this book came about, half guilt offering from the author who was entrusted with Lesser’s quest and Panzram’s final writings and half introspection on the general penal system and its abuses and failures. This book ostensibly follows Panzram’s own written, autobiographical confession, promising to dove-tail into his murderous rampage across the United States and continual jail time, starting with thieving at age five and building towards twenty years, on and off, in various correctional facilities and jails. Panzram, as far as we know, only ever had one confidant, a guard named Henry Lesser who built a strange bond with the enraged criminal and received his written manuscript, carrying the burden of Panzram’s story long past the man’s death on the gallows. “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re screwing around!” ~ Carl Panzram
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His last words were the perfect testament to a life lived in sheer, animalistic rage.
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These sentences, scrawled on the back of Panzram : A Journal of Murder ,with its weirdly lurid cover, captured my interest, and I had to read the book. Panzram is an American serial killer, born in 1891 and hung at Leavenworth prison in Kansas in 1930.