SERIAL KILLER: Carl Panzram Pt. 1

In the 1920s, Carl Panzram cut a path of robbery, arson, rape, and murder across three continents... and kept a meticulous account of every crime. Shaped by brutal reform schools and violence from childhood, he declared war on society itself and never looked back. By his own count, he claimed 21 lives and felt no remorse for a single one. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com http://crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse https://www.instagram.com/crimehouse/TikTok: @Crimehouse https://www.tiktok.com/@crimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudios https://www.facebook.com/crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Crime House.

• 0:41Vanessa Richardson?

  Most crimes, even the most despicable ones, make a certain kind of sense. People steal for money. They kill out of jealousy, or rage, or desperation. There's a motive, a straight line from cause to effect. Carl Panzram didn't follow that line. He robbed and killed without a plan, without a target, and without much interest in hiding. He treated prison as a rest stop between rampages. Most of his crimes were impulsive, committed with no thought for what came next. But if there was one thread running through all of it, it was this. After a childhood of relentless abuse, Carl decided the whole world was his enemy.

• 1:24Vanessa Richardson?

  Every burned church, every stolen boat, every act of violence was payback. He didn't want to beat society, and he didn't want to escape it. He just wanted to leave it in ashes. By his own account, he would take 21 lives. And he would tell anyone who asked that he wasn't sorry for a single one of them.

• 1:59Vanessa Richardson?

  The human mind is powerful. It shapes how we think, feel, love, and hate. But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. This is Serial Killers and Murderous Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson.

• 2:13Tristin Engels?

  And I'm forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the darkest minds in history, analyzing what makes a killer.

• 2:23Vanessa Richardson?

  Crime House exists because of listeners like you. Want even more? Join Crime House Plus and get both parts of every story dropped on the same Monday completely ad-free. No waiting three days for part two, plus Crime House bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap "Try Free" at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds page. Before we get started, be advised that this episode contains descriptions of physical and sexual abuse of children, sexual violence and murder. So please listen with care. Today, we begin our deep dive into Carl Panzram, a serial rapist and murderer who spent the 1920s strangling sailors,

• 3:08Vanessa Richardson?

  killing children, and beating men to death. And then wrote it all down. Carl never asked for forgiveness, and he never claimed he was innocent. He blamed the world that made him, and he dared anyone to prove him wrong.

• 3:23Tristin Engels?

  As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how a childhood of beatings taught Carl that might makes right, why the reform schools that were supposed to fix him made him more dangerous instead, and what it means that Carl killed with a pistol he stole from a former president.

• 3:42Vanessa Richardson?

  And as always, we'll be asking the question, what makes a killer?

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• 4:45Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl Panzram was born on June 28, 1891, on a small farm along the Red River near East Grand Forks, Minnesota. His parents were German immigrants, and they were poor. Carl was the youngest of a big family, and from the start, there wasn't much left over for him. Not food, not money, and certainly not attention. His father, Johann, or John Panzram, was a hot-tempered drinker who never found the fortune he'd come to America for. It was a shame he couldn't bear. When Carl was about seven, John walked out one day, and he didn't come back. That left Carl's mother, Lizzie, to run the farm with her children. Carl and his sister went to school during the day, and the moment they got home,

• 5:30Vanessa Richardson?

  they were sent to the fields until long after dark. Lizzie was a devout Lutheran with an iron disposition, and the rule of the house was simple. Whoever was biggest and strongest was right. Carl later said he got a beating every time he so much as made a face. And Carl made a lot of faces. As his older brothers grew up, they left too, one after the other, just like their father. Soon, it was only Carl, his sister, one older brother, and their mother working a worn-out farm that could barely feed them. Carl was about 11 when he started to notice that other people didn't live this way. One of his neighbors was well off, with a big house full of nice things. To Carl, the math was simple.

• 6:15Vanessa Richardson?

  This man had too much, and he had too little. So one night, he broke in and took what looked most valuable to him, some apples, a cake, and a big pistol. Then he walked to the rail yards and caught a freight train west. He was going to be a cowboy. But somewhere along the way, he missed a connection, and he ended up right back where he started. He was caught, brought home, and by his own account, beaten half to death. Then he was hauled before the town judge. In the fall of 1903, 12-year-old Carl was sent to a reform school called the Minnesota State Training School at Red Wing. It was the first stop in a cycle of incarceration and abuse that would last the rest of his life.

• 7:00Tristin Engels?

  I wonder if his decision to get on a train and leave and play cowboy was to escape his circumstances or because it was something that had been routinely modeled to him? Because already, we know that his father left when he was very young, and his family has struggled since. And then his older brothers grow up and leave, one after the other. And with his brothers, that's a part of life. That's normal. But I wonder if he understood when that's actually developmentally normal versus seeing it happen and then emulating it? Was that ever explained to him? And not to mention, when the men in a child's life, or anyone in a child's life, repeatedly disappear, and that includes older brothers, older siblings, it can affect what that child comes to expect from relationships if they don't understand those losses

• 7:45Tristin Engels?

  or if they never hear from or see them again. People may not feel permanent to them, and attachment may mean loss rather than security. This may also explain this sudden quest for independence at such a young age. Like, perhaps he decided he was going to leave before anyone else could leave him again. But in addition to these losses, he's also being taught about power by his mother. If the rule you grow up with is essentially that whoever is the biggest and strongest gets to decide what happens, that's teaching him that relationships have a hierarchy. There's somebody with power and somebody that power is exercised on. And he was, at least until this point, the person it was being exercised on.

• 8:30Tristin Engels?

  Until he sees that this man has more than he does, decides that isn't fair, and gives himself permission to take from him. So already, at 11 or 12, we're seeing a willingness to override normal social boundaries when they conflict with what he wants or what he believes is fair. But a lot of children steal, and a lot of children run away. Certainly, millions of them live in poverty and have experienced abandonment or harsh parenting, and they don't grow up to become violent either. So that said, these are meaningful developmental experiences to pay attention to.

• 9:05Vanessa Richardson?

  I found it so interesting that Carl stole apples, a cake, and a gun. What does that mix of items tell you about what an 11-year-old thought he needed?

• 9:14Tristin Engels?

  I think it tells us a few things. One, it really shows his age. His priorities and his understanding of what is valuable are very limited. Because if this were primarily about financial gain, at 11, you would expect him to take something with actual monetary value. And if this were primarily about food insecurity, I might expect him to take more practical or sustainable food. What he does ultimately take suggests to me that this may have been about taking what appealed to him in the moment because he wanted it, or because he could. The cake is a very childlike reward. It likely represented deprivation to Carl because he grew up in poverty, and he may not have had cake regularly. The apples feel more practical

• 9:58Tristin Engels?

  when you consider that he planned this long train trip right after so he could take those with him, and they could last for a little longer. And the gun is different. The gun may have represented power to him. So that would indicate to me that he may have begun feeling powerless, or he was beginning to experiment with what it felt like to have more power. And if he couldn't yet be the biggest and the strongest person in the room physically in order to be in charge, like he's been taught, then maybe being the strongest with some help would make him feel that way. Especially if he was planning to venture out on his own to be a cowboy, which again speaks to where he is developmentally.

• 10:37Vanessa Richardson?

  From the outside, Red Wing looked like an ordinary campus. Stone buildings on a bluff above the Mississippi, clipped lawns, a chapel. Lovely. But inside, the discipline was merciless. Punishment happened in a room the boys called "The Paint Shop", because that's where the staff painted them black and blue. A boy would be stripped, bent over a wooden block, and whipped with a leather strap punched full of holes. 12-year-old Carl got The Paint Shop every Saturday night his first year, and often more than once during the week. And the man who ran his dorm cottage, Mr. John Moore, was later fired for what were described as immoral acts on the boys in his care. Carl was deemed too slow for the classroom,

• 11:21Vanessa Richardson?

  so they put him to work waiting tables in the officers' dining room. He got his revenge there. He urinated in their soup and coffee. He did worse to their desserts. And then he stood beside them and watched them eat. Eventually, he went further and tried to poison Mr. Moore with rat poison in his rice pudding. He was caught, and by his own account, nearly beaten to death. Then, in the summer of 1905, Carl got word that his older brother Louis had drowned in a logging accident back home. His mother asked the school to release him so he could help support her. The superintendent refused, so Carl found his own way to get even. He wrapped a long piece of cotton string around a stick,

• 12:05Vanessa Richardson?

  lit one end, and hid it in the laundry next to a pile of oil-soaked rags. On the night of July 2, 1905, a fire tore through the school. Carl always claimed he'd burned The Paint Shop to the ground. The official record called it "A Fire of Unknown Origin That Destroyed a Warehouse." Either way, no one ever pinned it on him. It was the other boys who taught Carl how to get out. "Act good, tell everyone how much you love Jesus, how you want to go home and be a good boy, maybe even a preacher." Carl did exactly that. He learned his Bible lessons, kept his head down, and told the parole board everything it wanted to hear. It worked.

• 12:49Vanessa Richardson?

  In January of 1906, the board released him to his mother. Carl was 14. He'd later say that when he walked out of Red Wing, he'd already made up his mind about how he was going to live. He would rob, burn, destroy, and kill everywhere he went for as long as he lived.

• 13:10Tristin Engels?

  Carl is 12 years old here. His brain is still developing. His understanding of relationships is still developing. And now, the people who are supposedly responsible for reforming him, for teaching him to be a pro-social member of society, are also the people hurting and humiliating him. And not only is this profoundly harmful, it sends a very confusing message. And routine violence like that is different from isolated punishment. If you know that this can happen again and again, your nervous system has to adapt to an environment in which threat is expected. So you become more vigilant to danger. You may become more reactive to perceived threats. And you can become increasingly focused

• 13:54Tristin Engels?

  on avoiding vulnerability and maintaining control. Then there is this immoral act that you mentioned. If Carl was sexually victimized at that age, which I believe that's what that was characterizing that, that greatly affects boundaries, trust, bodily autonomy, and again, his understanding of what relationships are supposed to look like, which is already compromised. And here, again, his abuser isn't a stranger. It's another authority figure. They're the people assigned to teach him right from wrong. And he's once again learning that the person with the power, the person who's supposed to be in the right, the strongest one in the room, gets to decide what's right and make the decisions.

• 14:37Tristin Engels?

  And that's why Carl finds other ways to exercise control, like urinating and drinks and the alleged poisoning. That sustained abuse in that environment is such a vulnerable and helpless position to be in. So he makes this vow when he leaves that's clearly born of anger. He's extremely angry. Could a 14-year-old, who is furious and traumatized and full of resentment, walk out of that institution thinking, "I'm going to make everybody pay"? Absolutely. Adolescents think in very absolute terms, especially when they're angry. Everything becomes an always, never, everyone, and forever. But in most cases, this leads to absolutely nothing. But it does tell us that he is forming

• 15:20Tristin Engels?

  some kind of generalized grievance.

• 15:23Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl also learned to fake remorse to get out. They told him, you know, "Just do what you're told and make them, you know, make them believe that you're going to be good." And it worked. How does that kind of performance shape the adult?

• 15:35Tristin Engels?

  He's learning that impression management, deception, and manipulation are effective and useful tools to get what he wants. And I also think this connects directly to what we've been talking about with power. Carl can't overpower the institution. He can't decide when he leaves. The parole board has that power. But he figured out how to manipulate their perception of him and exercise control within a system where he otherwise had none, where people used their control to abuse him. And now, he's learning that power doesn't necessarily require being the biggest or strongest person in the room. So if you can figure out what someone else wants to see and convince them that's who you are or who you can be,

• 16:18Tristin Engels?

  then you can control them through influence, too. And that's really dangerous.

• 16:25Vanessa Richardson?

  The boy who came home from Red Wing wasn't the boy who left. And Carl's mother wasn't waiting with open arms. The suit the school had given him was taken away the moment he walked in the door. In its place, he got a pair of overalls and a hoe. But Carl didn't want to work in the fields, so he told his family he wanted to study to be a preacher. They sent him to a German Lutheran school, where the minister taught the children in the church basement on weekdays. It worked for about two months. Then the other kids found out where he'd been and started yelling "Reform school" whenever he passed. Carl started beating them up. The parents complained, and the preacher started whipping him regularly. But Carl was a big kid now, and one day, he fought back.

• 17:10Vanessa Richardson?

  The preacher won that round. Carl decided there wouldn't be another. He got hold of a heavy old Colt revolver from another kid, hid it inside the pocket of a vest he'd taken from his brother, and went to school. At the first opportunity, he warned the preacher to leave him alone. The preacher took it as a bluff. He got out his whip and ordered Carl to the front of the room. Carl refused. When the preacher came down the aisle and started yanking him out of his seat by the collar, the vest buttons gave way, and the gun fell to the floor. Carl snatched it up, put it to the preacher's head, and pulled the trigger, but it wouldn't fire.

• 17:51Vanessa Richardson?

  After that, Carl ran home. He thought he'd be a hero. Instead, his family had already heard the preacher's version, and his older brother Albert grabbed him by the throat, choking him until he said where he'd hidden the gun. Then Albert went out the back door to find it. Meanwhile, Carl went out the front door and never planned on coming back. This was at the end of March 1906. For the next few months, 14-year-old Carl rode the rails. Compared to Red Wing, it felt like freedom. But he was a 14-year-old boy, alone on the road. And on the road, that made him prey. One night out west, Carl went looking for someone to talk to. He found four men in an open lumber car

• 18:34Vanessa Richardson?

  and told them about the warm, clean boxcar he'd just left. They were friendly. They followed him back. And once the door was shut and the train was moving, they raped him. It happened again in a small town on a Sunday afternoon. Carl was broke and hungry, and he walked into a stable where a group of local men were passing a bottle. He gave them his usual story of being an orphan on his own. But instead of offering him food, they gave him beer, then whiskey, and kept pouring until he blacked out. When he woke up, he knew what had been done to him. Carl would later say those two experiences taught him the lesson that governed the rest of his life. Force and might make right.

• 19:18Vanessa Richardson?

  If he was strong enough and clever enough to impose his will on someone else, then he was right. From then on, he looked at everyone with suspicion and hatred. And he learned to travel alone.

• 19:31Tristin Engels?

  This is a shift. For much of his life, the violence has been against him. He endured so much, and it's really quite sad. No child should ever have to endure this. And none of this is by itself a causal factor for future violence, nor is it an excuse for it. But now, he is starting to retaliate. And remember, he left Red Wing with this generalized grievance, and that followed repeated experiences of abuse, vulnerability, and humiliation. And now, he seems to be trying to overcompensate for those feelings of vulnerability. But the problem is, he's still quite vulnerable. He's a child. That makes him more susceptible to manipulation, exploitation, and being overpowered,

• 20:15Tristin Engels?

  even if he is physically larger now. And I imagine that has to be incredibly frustrating when he's going into some of these experiences thinking he has the upper hand, but he really doesn't. So this shift we are seeing isn't uncommon in chronically mistreated children, and it's called identification with the aggressor. Essentially, someone who has experienced intense powerlessness can begin adopting characteristics, behaviors, or even the worldview of the person who frightened or harmed them. Because psychologically, it can feel safer to move from the person this happens to to the person who has the power. And Carl has had glimpses of that power now. He's retaliated. He has deceived people. He's manipulated people.

• 20:59Tristin Engels?

  And he's found ways to exercise power in situations where he otherwise had very little. And he's learned that that sometimes works.

• 21:07Vanessa Richardson?

  Back in the classroom, when Carl pulled that trigger, in his mind, do you think he was shooting at that specific preacher? Or do you think he could have been thinking about every adult who'd ever beaten him?

• 21:18Tristin Engels?

  I think it could have been more than just the preacher. I think that it's very likely that this particular individual, this preacher, became the immediate target or perhaps the embodiment of that larger accumulation of grievances that we've been seeing. And we've been seeing it build in so many ways that he's even actually verbalized himself. So yeah, I think it is bigger than this one particular preacher.

• 21:42Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, things didn't get more peaceful for Carl either. That summer, the 15-year-old was caught in a small-time burglary in Butte, Montana. He spent a month or two in the county jail alongside 50 or 100 grown men. Then he was sentenced to the Montana State Reform School in Miles City. The officers there were no kinder than the ones at Red Wing. But Carl was bigger now. He'd watched a grown man go white with fear at the sight of a gun in his hand, and he decided he was done taking beatings.

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• 24:20Vanessa Richardson?

  By the time he was 15, Carl Panzram had been a thief, a runaway, and an inmate. He'd been beaten by his family, by the staff at Red Wing, and by a preacher. He'd been raped by strangers on the road, and he'd taken one lesson from all of it: the strong do what they want, and the weak take what they get. At the Montana State Reform School in Miles City, Carl worked in the shoe shop and the fields, and when he wasn't working, he was trying to escape or being punished for it. One officer, a former Boston prizefighter named Bushart, made it his personal mission to make Carl's life miserable. Carl never understood why this grown man had it out for him.

• 25:02Vanessa Richardson?

  Eventually, he stopped trying to understand, and he decided to kill. Every evening, Bushart sat perched on a front desk in the schoolroom while one of the boys polished his boots. One night, Carl came up behind him with a two-foot board of hard oak, weighted at one end with three or four pounds of iron, then brought it down on the guard's head. Bushart survived, but he was badly hurt, and he never bothered Carl again. The school wanted to send Carl to the state prison for the attack, but he was too young, so they punished him themselves. By his account, he was tied face down to a bed and given 50 blows with a paddle, then

• 25:44Vanessa Richardson?

  locked in a cell for 50 days, then 20 more blows and 20 more days. It was meant to break him. Instead, it taught him to watch and wait.

• 25:58Tristin Engels?

  I know this is the early 1900s, but of course, that didn't work. This wasn't rehabilitative at all. This was torture. And the problem with that is exactly what we're seeing happen here. It's just adding to his grievance and teaching him to become a better predator. He's a minor. He's going to be released back into society more angry, more manipulative, and more aggrieved. And we have since learned that simply making punishment increasingly more severe is not particularly effective at changing any offender behavior, which I know is somewhat ironic, given how much of our correctional system has historically been built around punishment. If you actually want rehabilitation, you have to address the factors driving the behavior,

• 26:43Tristin Engels?

  and they aren't doing that. In fact, no one in Carl's life has done that. And look at what Carl has just learned instead. He attacks Bushart badly enough to severely injure him, and it worked. It stopped the torment. Behaviorally speaking, in operant conditioning, that's rewarding the behavior. He just learned that exerting power and using violence gets results. If he becomes dangerous enough, people will stop hurting him, and violence is effective. This happened again with the preacher. And then the institution responds to his violence with even more violence and torment. But what exactly is the corrective lesson supposed to be? Because from Carl's perspective, and keep in mind, he's still a minor, every conflict

• 27:27Tristin Engels?

  is being resolved through domination and violence, and it's being modeled by people with authority. And then they put a 15-year-old alone in a cell for 50 days. That isn't teaching him how to regulate anger or how to resolve conflict. It isn't teaching him how to cope with his emotions or process past traumas. It just gives him time, and for someone who is already angry and aggrieved, that's 50 days of ruminating on those grievances, thinking about what went wrong, about who hurt him, about revenge, and how to refine, which brings us back right to what you just said, Vanessa. He learns how to watch and wait. This is unfortunately not at all uncommon for people who are incarcerated. They watch and wait because they have nothing but time and nothing constructive to occupy

• 28:12Tristin Engels?

  it with.

• 28:13Vanessa Richardson?

  50 days is a long time for an adult. And then 20 days after that, it's just... What does that kind of prolonged isolation do to an adolescent's developing brain?

• 28:23Tristin Engels?

  Quite a lot, potentially, because at 15, his brain is still developing, particularly the systems involved in emotional regulation, impulse control, decision-making, and even social functioning. An adolescent is an incredibly socially sensitive developmental period, so 50 days of isolation, followed by 20, isn't rehabilitating any of those skills. It removes the opportunity for relationships or co-regulation, conflict resolution, or corrective experiences. So instead, like we discussed, he's alone with his anger and his grievances, potentially rehearsing them rather than resolving them, and this is on top of the prolonged abuse and violence he's already endured.

• 29:05Tristin Engels?

  Chronic exposure to threat can affect the developing stress and threat response systems as well. So a child can become increasingly sensitized to detecting danger and reacting to perceived threats, and right now, he's in a controlled and highly threatening environment to him and to anyone, and that's going to put his threat response system on overdrive, too.

• 29:29Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl came out of that cell and started paying attention. He watched the guards' routines. He noticed where the fences were weak and which doors weren't locked. He had time, and he used it. Once he was back in the general population, nearly a year into his stay, he became close with a boy named Jimmy Benson. Jimmy was from Butte, and he was smart. He was also trusted by the officers, which Carl was definitely not, so the two of them built a plan around that. Jimmy would break out first. While every guard in the place was out chasing him, Carl would slip away. They picked a meeting spot about 40 miles east, the first water tank past Terry, Montana. Whoever got there first would wait. It worked exactly as planned.

• 30:14Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl reached the water tank first on the third night, cold and hungry and free. He was woken at dawn by the smell of food. A man in a blue suit and a Stetson hat was sitting with his back to him, a sack of food and clothes on one side and a pistol on the other. Carl crept up behind him with the iron bar he'd carried from the school, ready to bring it down on the stranger's head. Then the man turned around. It was Jimmy. Jimmy had robbed a homesteader's shack the day before, and he'd brought clothes for Carl, food, and a gun. He handed the gun to Carl because Carl was the bigger of the two, and, as Carl put it, probably the meaner.

• 30:56Tristin Engels?

  And given how Carl was raised to believe that the biggest and strongest gets the power, and the context in which this happened, this was likely a very significant moment for him.

• 31:06Vanessa Richardson?

  Definitely, and they fed each other's worst instincts. Jimmy taught him how to hold up a store and how to rob the poor box in a church. Carl taught Jimmy how to burn the church down afterward. For about a month, the two of them worked their way east by train, robbing and burning as they went, and sabotaging the trains for fun, boring holes in the floors of loaded wheat cars so the grain poured out onto the tracks. By the time they reached Fargo, North Dakota, each had a six shooter, a new suit, and about $150 in cash. There, they split up. Jimmy went home to Butte, Montana. Carl went home too, for a day or two. Then he headed west again.

• 31:47Vanessa Richardson?

  Three days after Christmas 1907, 16-year-old Carl climbed off a boxcar in Helena, Montana, half-frozen and starving. He wandered into a saloon with no money and stood at the edge of the crowd, listening. An army recruiter from nearby Fort Harrison was giving his pitch, promising adventure, a bed, and three meals a day. Carl stepped forward and lied about his age. By that evening, he was on a wagon full of recruits headed for the 6th Infantry Regiment. He lasted a few months. In April of 1908, Carl tried to walk off his post with two stolen army overcoats, a civilian suit, and a pocketful of gold collar buttons he planned to sell in town.

• 32:32Vanessa Richardson?

  On April 20th, a general court martial disposed of his case in minutes. Three years at hard labor in the U.S. Military Prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The court martial had been convened on orders signed by the Secretary of War, William Howard Taft. Carl would spend the rest of his life believing Taft had personally handed him those three years. He never let it go.

• 32:56Tristin Engels?

  This was a really interesting part of Carl's story because it seems, at least as far as we know, that Jimmy was the only person that he actually worked with equally, rather than worked under. And yes, they were co-offenders, and they were essentially enabling each other's offending and reinforcing deviant behavior, but there's a lot of trust that goes into that kind of dynamic, too. Trust that I don't think we've seen Carl give to anyone else yet. But when you really look at it, Jimmy was the first person in Carl's life that actually took care of him and did not take advantage of him. He stayed true to his word, and he waited for him. He brought food for him. He brought him clothes. And which I think is probably most important, he gives him the gun. And like I said earlier,

• 33:39Tristin Engels?

  giving him the gun and saying that he's the bigger one is a core belief that Carl was raised with. Feeling vulnerable is a feeling he's been trying to avoid, so that was very significant. Carl now knows for certain that he isn't dealing with somebody he has to overpower in order to get his needs met or survive. He's dealing with someone who has actually considered his needs and come back for him. And I think that's why he didn't try to harm him when he could have. But then they parted ways, and Carl found himself vulnerable again. And even though Jimmy taught him a lot, he still found himself broke and starving. And sadly, that's why I think the army became appealing to him. He was desperate.

• 34:21Tristin Engels?

  It promised to meet his basic needs. Otherwise, there was no way that I think Carl was going to voluntarily go back into another institution where people have control over him and his independence.

• 34:33Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl was discharged from Leavenworth in August of 1910 at 19. He'd spent most of his time there as a third-class prisoner, swinging a hammer in the rock quarry. For six months of it, he was shackled to a 50-pound iron ball as punishment. He slept with it, worked with it, and wheeled it three miles to the quarry and back every day in a wheelbarrow. He came out six feet tall and close to 200 pounds, built like a heavyweight. Leavenworth hadn't reformed him. It made him stronger, and it had made him meaner. On his way out, they handed him $5, a suit of clothes, and a ticket to Denver, Colorado. They told him

• 35:16Vanessa Richardson?

  to go and sin no more. Carl had other plans. For the next five years, he drifted through the West as a hobo and a burglar. He broke into churches, businesses, and homes, took what he wanted, and often set fire to the building on his way out. He claimed thousands of burglaries in those years. He also got caught more than once: a road gang in Texas, a jail in Idaho, and the state prison at Deer Lodge, Montana, where he ran into his old partner Jimmy Benson, now serving 10 years for robbery. Every time Carl got out, he went right back to it. It was the only way he knew how to live. In the spring of

• 35:56Vanessa Richardson?

  1915, two weeks out of Deer Lodge, Carl was arrested in Astoria, Oregon, for burglarizing the home of a local bank president. He gave his name as Jeff Baldwin. The district attorney offered him a deal. Show us where the loot is, plead guilty, and you'll get a light sentence. Carl kept his end of the bargain. The judge gave him the maximum anyway: seven years. In June of 1915, he arrived at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem as inmate number 7390, Jefferson Baldwin. He was 23. He swore he wouldn't serve his full sentence. The Oregon State Penitentiary was rated one of the worst prisons in the North. Its warden,

• 36:41Vanessa Richardson?

  Harry Minto, had been hired by a new governor who wanted someone who wouldn't coddle criminals. Carl spent his time there scheming to escape and egging on anyone else who might try, and he found a taker in a 21-year-old orphan named Otto Hooker, a big, tough kid Carl described as "half-simple," who did everything Carl told him to do. Carl made him ask the warden for a job on the prison farm. Hooker got it, and one foggy morning, he walked away from the farm guards and into the woods. That afternoon, in the nearby town of Jefferson, a city marshal named J.J. Denson drew his gun on Hooker at a bridge. There was a struggle.

• 37:22Vanessa Richardson?

  Denson fell, badly wounded, and Hooker ran off with the marshal's pistol. Warden Minto loaded a shotgun and joined the hunt himself. Late that night, he and a guard were waiting beside a stretch of railroad track when they heard footsteps. Minto called out a halt. A shotgun and a pistol went off at the same time, and Minto fell dead with a bullet in his brain. Hooker was found the next day hiding under a house. Two guards dragged him out, and a Portland patrolman shot him dead on the spot. The warden's death shook the entire state, and the man brought in to replace Harry Minto was his brother, John. The new warden walked into the prison and announced that every inmate would remember

• 38:07Vanessa Richardson?

  his brother's death. Whether or not he knew Carl had steered Hooker onto that farm, he singled Carl out almost immediately. And Carl gave it right back.

• 38:19Tristin Engels?

  This shows us how much more refined and versatile Carl is becoming as an offender. Because he doesn't have to be the person physically committing the act anymore. He's learned how to get someone else to do it for him. And he chooses someone that he describes as "half-simple" and will do whatever Carl tells him to do. So Carl, someone who will do almost anything to prevent being vulnerable again, recognizes a vulnerability in another person, understands that it makes him easier to influence, and intentionally exploits it. This is extremely common in correctional settings, so much so that here in California, we screen incarcerated individuals for pervasive developmental disorders or cognitive impairments,

• 39:03Tristin Engels?

  and if found, place them into a program that monitors them for exploitation and safety from other inmates. That didn't occur back then. And because of that, Hooker was preyed upon, recruited into Carl's plan, and takes all of the immediate risk. And Carl remains completely insulated from everything that happened while he stays inside the prison grounds. And that doesn't mean that Carl could have known exactly how this was going to unfold, but he also knew there were risks that Hooker may not have fully understood. But that did not seem to stop him from executing this plan either. In fact, there doesn't seem to appear to be much reflection at all about his role in creating the circumstances that put Hooker there to begin with. So the power dynamic that we've been tracking is

• 39:48Tristin Engels?

  definitely evolving for Carl. He's becoming more sophisticated.

• 39:52Vanessa Richardson?

  As far as the record shows, Carl was never charged in connection with the warden's death. Does the absence of consequences matter psychologically here, or had he already just stopped fearing consequences anyway?

• 40:05Tristin Engels?

  Oh, yes, it absolutely matters. But I also don't know that Carl has necessarily stopped fearing them. If anything, look at how much of this behavior is designed to avoid them. He escapes. He uses aliases. He learns how to manipulate people. He doesn't want to be punished. He's just getting better at figuring out how not to be. What is likely going to do here in this moment is reinforce his confidence and his feeling of power.

• 40:31Vanessa Richardson?

  The next three years were a running battle between Carl and the Oregon State Penitentiary. He set fire to the prison shops. He got a work gang drunk on stolen lemon extract and turned them loose on the guards. He was flogged, put on bread and water for 61 days, and made to walk in circles all day in a brick pen built to hold men like him. And in May of 1918, he got out. Working in the kitchen, he sawed through a bar into the basement, pulled on the white uniform of a trusty cook, spread the bars on a front window with a homemade jack, and strolled across the lawn. The wall guards opened fire. He was already

• 41:13Vanessa Richardson?

  out of range. By the fall, 27-year-old Carl had crossed the Oregon state line heading east. Wanted posters went out across the country, listing his height, his scars, his tattoos, and every name he'd used in Montana and Oregon: Jefferson Baldwin, Jeff Davis, Jeff Rhodes. What they didn't list was his real name. Nobody knew it. So Carl picked a new one: John O'Leary. It was wartime, and the country was on edge. Carl registered for the draft in Myersdale, Pennsylvania, under his new name, was placed at the top of the priority list, and decided that didn't sound good to him. So he kept moving. A few

• 41:54Vanessa Richardson?

  days of work at Sparrows Point, Maryland, then Baltimore, where he bought a gun. In Baltimore, he met a boy who knew a hotel in Frederick, Maryland, that was worth holding up. Carl checked in under his alias, John O'Leary, and at 2:00 in the morning, the two of them walked down to the lobby and robbed the place. Carl's share was more than $1,200. He never bothered to learn the boy's name. He took his cut and headed for New York. Carl's plan was to get out of the country by sea. To do that, he needed a seaman's identification card, and to get one of those, he needed papers. So he joined the YMCA and a Marine Firemen's Union as John O'Leary, and just like that, his new identity had

• 42:37Vanessa Richardson?

  a paper trail. He signed onto a grace line ship bound for Panama, and for the next year or so, Carl bounced around Central and South America: copper mines in Peru and Chile, a labor gang in Panama, an oil camp where he was fired for fighting and burned the rig on his way out. Then, back in Panama, he decided he needed a boat. He found a schooner he liked and a hard-drinking sailor willing to help him take it. The plan was simple: kill the owner, the captain, and the crew, six men, and sail away. By Carl's own account, it never got that far, at least not for him. His partner got drunk, went to the schooner

• 43:17Vanessa Richardson?

  alone, and killed all six men himself. Then, he was too drunk to sail the boat, and he was caught. Meanwhile, Carl walked away clean. He caught a ship back to the States, signed onto an oil tanker bound for Glasgow, Scotland, robbed the ship, and did a short stretch in a Scottish prison for it. When he got out, he worked his way through London, Paris, and Hamburg, spending money as fast as he could steal it. By the summer of 1920, Carl was back in New York and broke again. Five days after he landed, he took a train up to New Haven, Connecticut. He was looking for a house to rob, and it turned out to belong to his bitterest enemy.

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• 45:35Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl Panzram had spent his twenties either locked up or on the run. He hadn't seen his family in years. He didn't have a home, and he didn't want one. What he had in the summer of 1920 was a set of burglary tools and a train ticket to New Haven, Connecticut. The house he picked was a big one. Inside, he made off with about $40,000 worth of jewelry and liberty bonds, an engraved gold watch, and a .45 caliber Colt automatic pistol. By his own telling, it was only afterward that he realized who he'd robbed. The bonds were registered to a W.H. Taft. Carl had just robbed the home of former President William

• 46:16Vanessa Richardson?

  Howard Taft, the man who, as Secretary of War, had signed the orders that sent a teenage Carl Panzram to Leavenworth. He called it "very good fortune." After fencing what he could, Carl cleared about $3,000 in cash. He kept the watch, some of the jewelry, and the pistol. And with the money, he bought himself a boat, a 41-foot motor yacht called the Akeeta. Carl moored her at City Island in the Bronx. Every day or two, he'd take the train into Manhattan, walk the waterfront around South Street, and size up the sailors hanging around the bars. When he spotted a pair about his own size who seemed to have money, he'd offer them work on his yacht, easy hours, good

• 46:58Vanessa Richardson?

  pay. He'd bring them out to City Island, feed them, get them drunk, and rape them. Once they were asleep, he'd shoot them with Taft's Colt .45, and then he'd tie a rock to each body, row a mile out into Long Island Sound, and drop them over the side. Ten men, by Carl's count, in about three weeks. None of them have ever been found. Then the Akeeta was so full of stolen goods, and the people around City Island were giving him such strange looks, that he kept the next two sailors he hired alive, a pair named Delaney and Goodwin, and he put them to work. Although he planned to kill them both within a day or two, once they made it far enough. But off the coast of Atlantic City,

• 47:42Vanessa Richardson?

  New Jersey, the Akeeta wrecked and went down with everything aboard. All three men made it to shore. Carl paid off Delaney and Goodwin, and they never saw him again.

• 47:54Tristin Engels?

  There is just so much psychologically happening here to unpack. The fact that he unknowingly robbed Taft after harboring such resentment toward him and then buying a boat with that money and using Taft's pistol as his own weapon is such a reversal of power. And calling it "good fortune" suggests that he felt this was symbolic or meaningful and not a simple coincidence. And what happens on that boat is an extreme escalation of his behavior and the power dynamic that we've been discussing. And maybe it's because it is something he acquired from robbing Taft and the power and vindication he felt from it, or, and more likely, this is his first privately-owned and controlled space

• 48:39Tristin Engels?

  where he can do what he wants, control who he wants, and operate without any accountability or oversight. Look at how completely Carl controls every stage of these encounters. He chooses each victim, offers them work, controls where they go, feeds them, gets them intoxicated, sexually assaults them. Then he waits until they're asleep on his boat in his space to shoot them. Then he weighs down their bodies and disposes of them. It's its own predatory ecosystem with a built-in disposal system, too. There's almost no point in that sequence in which his victims have any advantage. Carl isn't just trying to avoid being vulnerable anymore. He's engineering situations in which somebody

• 49:21Tristin Engels?

  else is made to be vulnerable, and he controls virtually every aspect of what happens to them. And he doesn't even rely on being the biggest and strongest anymore. He uses deception, alcohol, isolation, and firearm. And having this boat was a turning point in his offending behavior.

• 49:40Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl said that that robbery was a stroke of luck. Do you believe him, or is it more likely he went to New Haven knowing exactly whose house that was?

• 49:49Tristin Engels?

  I don't know. I'm inclined not to believe him because of the grievance he had toward Taft. But I also don't know how Carl would have known where Taft lived specifically. I do know it was public knowledge that he lived in New Haven, so it's possible that he went there and targeted affluent areas hoping to get his house, but not realistically expecting to get to his house. So I can't say that he targeted him, but I also am inclined to believe that he did, on some level, target him. It's just too much of a coincidence to me.

• 50:23Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, over the next year, Carl did six months in a Bridgeport, Connecticut jail for burglary, jumped bail after a gun battle in Philadelphia, and in Norfolk, Virginia, signed onto a ship for Europe. From there, he worked his way down to the west coast of Africa to Luanda, the capital of Portuguese Angola. He found work there with the Sinclair Oil Company as a labor foreman. It didn't last. He bought two young girls from their families and raped them. Then he turned to the boy who waited tables at the company camp and raped him, too. The boy told Carl's boss, and the boss fired Carl on the spot. The men at the camp chased him out of the jungle, and he made his way back to Luanda.

• 51:06Vanessa Richardson?

  There, he went to the American consul, a Mr. Clark, and asked for help getting home. But Clark had already heard about him, and he turned Carl away. Carl left the consul's office with no money, no job, and no way out of Africa. He sat down on a bench in a park to think. And while he sat there, a boy of about 11 or 12 came up to him begging. Carl took him to a gravel pit about a quarter mile from the Sinclair Oil Camp. He raped him, and then he killed him. Then he went to town and bought a ticket on a Belgian steamer down the coast to Lobito Bay. There, he hired a canoe and six local men to take him out into the bay and the backwaters. He told them he wanted to hunt crocodiles. He brought

• 51:51Vanessa Richardson?

  a 9-millimeter Luger, not exactly built for croc hunting. Once they were deep in the backwaters, with all six men in front of him and their backs turned, he shot each of them. Then he pushed the bodies over the side and let the animals do the rest. He paddled the canoe back to town, tied up at the dock, and walked away. Carl would later say that killing those six grown men was easier than killing one boy.

• 52:20Tristin Engels?

  Carl's relationship with power continues to evolve in increasingly alarming ways. First, Carl was the vulnerable one. I'm just going to recap it because he went from being the vulnerable one to then retaliating. And then he learned that he could use deception and manipulation instead of physical strength. And eventually, he learned to identify vulnerability in other people and exploit it. And now, he's a serial sexual offender and murderer. And he routinely preyed upon people where there was an obvious power differential. And he's being run off, ostracized, and alienated for what he's done in this community. So when he later says that killing six grown men was easier than killing one boy, I don't

• 53:03Tristin Engels?

  think that's actually him saying he struggled killing boys, or that he somehow has some moral code suddenly. I think that is his bravado talking. Saying six grown men were easy makes him sound powerful and dangerous. And I think being chased off made him feel vulnerable again. But being the man who killed six grown men suddenly restores that and makes him powerful again. But also, on a practical side, it is likely easier for him in some ways because the grown men that he did kill were easier to lure. He just has to promise them work and hire them and offer them money and offer them alcohol to incapacitate them, and that's it. But with the boys, with children, he has to be

• 53:46Tristin Engels?

  much more strategic and careful in how he lures them. And he has to be very conscientious and cautious in where he takes them.

• 53:55Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl went back to Luanda and tried the consul one more time. This time, Clark set the police on him, so Carl robbed a woman in town for traveling money, and when he couldn't get out by rail or by ship, he walked 300 miles north to the Congo River. From there, he stowed away, begged, and robbed his way up the coast of West Africa. An American consul in the Canary Islands, who had never heard of him, bought him a ticket to Lisbon. The consul in Lisbon had heard of him and threw him out, so Carl stowed away on a coal ship to England and talked his way onto a ship bound for New York.

• 54:34Tristin Engels?

  This is another example of just how versatile criminally Carl has become. When he was a boy, he learned that he could figure out what someone needed to hear and give it to them. That's how he got himself out of Red Wing, and now that same skill is helping him move across countries like this. When he can't talk his way through something, he steals. When he can't bypass it, he stows away. When one strategy fails, he immediately moves to another. Manipulation isn't just something Carl uses to commit crimes anymore, it's becoming his way of functioning. He reads the obstacle in front of him, figures out what will get him around it, and he adapts.

• 55:12Vanessa Richardson?

  Two American consuls had turned Carl away because they'd heard what he'd done, and he just moved on to the next one. Is there any fear left in this man at this point?

• 55:21Tristin Engels?

  I'm sure there's fear. Carl's behavior suggests that he recognizes danger perfectly well. But what does Carl actually have to retreat to? He has no home, no family waiting for him, no stable life to return to, so at this point, moving forward is really his only option. If one person, again, turns him away, he has to find another. If there's a route that closes, he has to find another, because the alternative is stopping, and stopping means potentially being caught. I see this more as someone who has to stifle that fear, who's backed himself into a life where he has no choice but to keep moving.

• 56:00Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl Panzram landed in New York in the summer of 1922. He was 31 years old. By his own account, he'd murdered 17 people, and no one anywhere had ever charged him with a single one. He had escaped from Oregon, from Angola, from every jail that had ever held him, and somewhere on the ship home, he had come to a decision: 17 wasn't nearly enough.

• 56:42Vanessa Richardson?

  Thanks so much for listening. Come back next time for the conclusion of our deep dive on Carl Panzram.

• 56:48Tristin Engels?

  Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on all social media at @CrimeHouse. And don't forget to rate, review, and follow Serial Killers and Murderous Minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference.

• 57:12Vanessa Richardson?

  And to enhance your listening experience, join Crime House Plus and get both parts of every story dropped on the same Monday, completely ad-free. No waiting three days for part two, plus Crime House bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap "Try Free" at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds page.

• 57:36Vanessa Richardson?

  Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds team: Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Lori Marinelli, Natalie Pritzowski, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara De La Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, Sarah Tardif, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening.

• 58:10Vanessa Richardson?

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• 59:10Vanessa Richardson?

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