SERIAL KILLER: Carl Panzram Pt. 2

In the 1920s, Carl Panzram murdered at least twenty-one people across the United States and Africa... and then wrote it all down. Captured in Washington, DC in 1928, he gave police his real name, confessed unprompted, and at his sentencing told the court the death penalty suited him fine. A single dollar from a young jail guard named Henry Lesser prompted Panzram to produce a 20,000-word confession that became one of the most chilling first-person accounts in American criminal history. 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?

  When most people get caught breaking the law, they do whatever they can to save themselves. They lie, they hire a lawyer, they tell the judge they're sorry. Self-preservation is about the most basic instinct a human being has. Carl Panzram didn't seem to have it. When the police finally caught up with him for good, he gave them his real name for the first time in years. He confessed to murders no one had asked him about. And when a judge sentenced him to hang, he said the sentence suited him fine and told the people trying to save his life to stay out of it. But before he died, Carl did the one thing nobody expected from a man like him. He sat in a cell and wrote it all down,

• 1:26Vanessa Richardson?

  everything he'd done and exactly why he had done it. He wanted the world to know what it had made.

• 1:51Vanessa 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.

• 2:06Tristin 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.

• 2:16Vanessa 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 sexual violence, including against children, torture in custody, and an execution. So please listen with care. Today, we conclude our deep dive into Carl Panzram, a serial rapist and murderer who spent the 1920s strangling sailors,

• 3:01Vanessa Richardson?

  killing children, and beating men to death. And then he 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.

• 3:17Tristin Engels?

  As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like why Carl, after two decades of aliases, suddenly gave police his real name? How a single dollar from a jail guard broke through a lifetime of hatred? And what Carl's demand to be hanged tells us about his mindset?

• 3:36Vanessa Richardson?

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

• 3:44Vanessa Richardson?

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• 4:29Vanessa Richardson?

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• 5:02Speaker 03

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• 5:34Vanessa Richardson?

  When Carl Panzram stepped off a ship in New York in the summer of 1922, he was 31 years old. And by his own count, he had murdered 17 people. None of those killings had been connected to him, or at least not to his real name. Oregon still wanted a burglar named Jefferson Baldwin. Nobody anywhere was looking for Carl Panzram. His first stop back in the States was Salem, Massachusetts. On July 18, 1922, two women saw a man there walking along a road with a 12-year-old boy named Henry McMahon. Carl took the boy into the woods, raped him, and beat him to death with a rock. By the time Henry's body was found, Carl was gone.

• 6:18Vanessa Richardson?

  But Carl had bigger ideas now. He'd come back from Africa with the Luger he'd used at Libido Bay, and he decided the gun wasn't deadly enough. As he put it later, what he wanted was to get into the murder business on a wholesale scale. That winter, working nights as a watchman at a mill in Yonkers, New York, he boxed up the pistol and mailed it to the Maxim Silent Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut, under the name Captain John O'Leary. He asked them to sell him a silencer. They did. It didn't work the way he'd hoped, so he went back to what he knew: boats.

• 6:56Tristin Engels?

  We left off in episode one discussing how Carl had become more versatile criminally. And we are starting off right where we left off. Except now, Carl is seeking efficiency. Because he's not seeking to buy this silencer because he's retaliating against someone specific or there was a precipitating event of some kind. He's stepping into this goal of burning, destroying, and killing everywhere he went, which, if you recall, he vowed to do when he left Red Wing when he was 14 years old. So being a wholesale murderer certainly fits with that goal. And then there is Henry. He's 12 years old. He had just killed six grown men and, according to him, had essentially bragged about how easy that was. But yet, the first thing he does

• 7:41Tristin Engels?

  when he returns back to the States is target a vulnerable young boy. So this tells me a few things. First, we know he prefers situations where the power imbalance is in his favor. And when we think back to his childhood from episode one, being the biggest and strongest in the room meant you had the power. So targeting a child likely made him feel more powerful in more ways than one. Two, he sexually assaults young boys. So targeting them satisfies a sexual and domination component to his offending behavior. And lastly, the identification with the aggressor concept that we discussed in episode one becomes relevant again. Carl was once the vulnerable boy, being sexually overpowered by adult men. Now, he repeatedly occupies the position

• 8:25Tristin Engels?

  of being the physically dominant adult with vulnerable boys. And it could be that he's seeking that role reversal. That said, not all children who have been abused go on to abuse. And I want to make that very clear because that is a very common myth. Carl has a lot of factors that elevated his risk for violence that millions of maltreated children do not have.

• 8:50Vanessa Richardson?

  It was interesting. Carl's confession moves between children and grown sailors as victims. Is that randomness unusual for a serial offender? I don't think we've heard that much. And what does it suggest about what drove him?

• 9:03Tristin Engels?

  No, it's actually not unusual. Most people think that serial offenders have a specific victim type, and they stick to it. And the reality is, they choose based on availability, desirability, and opportunity. And we have definitely been seeing that with Carl. His victims vary quite a bit, but the power dynamic really doesn't. With the sailors, Carl had created a situation where he had the advantage. They were isolated, he was armed, and he could take them one at a time. With young boys, that imbalance already exists. They're physically smaller, easy to manipulate, easy for him to overpower. He seems to prefer access and control. And realistically, there's actually a lot more consistency there than it initially appears.

• 9:47Tristin Engels?

  And I would say that he is a highly opportunistic offender, and it's driven by a mix of traits and psychological factors, but from his lifestyle and his survival needs, too.

• 10:00Vanessa Richardson?

  In the spring of 1923, Carl took a job as a watchman at a yacht club in New Haven, Connecticut. He robbed one of the boats the very next night, which turned out to belong to a police commissioner, and among the loot was a .38 caliber revolver. A few weeks later, in Providence, Rhode Island, he stole a yacht and sailed it south to New York. He was headed back for Yonkers. Back in January, while working nights at the mill there, Carl had met a local boy named George Wallison, who was 14 or 15, and had been sexually abusing him for months. Now, he picked George up, promised him work on the boat, and sailed up the Hudson River to Kingston, New York.

• 10:41Vanessa Richardson?

  At Kingston, Carl repainted the yacht, changed her name, and swapped in the registration numbers from his old papers for the Akeeta. On paper, she was his. Now, he just had to sell her. He found a buyer, or a man who said he was one. Carl rode him out to where the yacht sat at anchor. Once they were aboard and alone, the man pulled a gun. He'd figured Carl for an easy mark. He was wrong. Carl had been watching him the whole time. He drew the .38 he'd stolen in New Haven and shot the man twice. Then he tied a heavy chunk of lead to the body and dropped it, along with the man's gun, into the river. As far as anyone knows, he's still there.

• 11:26Vanessa Richardson?

  George saw all of it. Carl sailed on down the Hudson, robbing as he went. And by the time they reached Newburgh, the boy was terrified. He begged to go home. And Carl let him. George got off the boat, went back to Yonkers, and straight to the police. He didn't know much about the man he'd been sailing with, not even his real name, but he knew enough. A few days later, police caught up with Carl and his stolen yacht at Nyack, New York. They took him, the boat, and everything on it back to Yonkers and charged him with sodomy, burglary, and robbery. When he tried to break out of the jail, they added that to the list. Carl needed a lawyer.

• 12:10Vanessa Richardson?

  He found one named Cashin, and he made him an offer: Get me out on bail, and the yacht is yours. Carl said it was worth $5,000 or $10,000. He didn't mention that it wasn't his. Cashin got him out, and Carl handed over the boat and the papers. When the lawyer went to register her, the real owner from Providence showed up and took her home. By then, Carl was gone.

• 12:35Tristin Engels?

  Carl finally gets caught, and his immediate response is to figure out how to manipulate his way out of it. But that's what he does. When Carl can't exercise power directly, he finds another way to get it. And this sort of goes back to what I was saying before. Carl clearly can control his behavior when it benefits him. He can plan, he can wait, deceive, manipulate, change identities, and even not kill someone he has victimized who is a witness to his crimes. He's not impulsive. He's just learned how to manipulate the consequences by making sure they cannot be connected to his true identity and by keeping moving. And so far, it has largely worked for him.

• 13:18Tristin Engels?

  And that may have given him the belief that there is always a way out of something he does.

• 13:24Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl let George go at Newburgh, knowing, I guess, he would or he at least could talk. Was that carelessness, do you think, or something else?

• 13:33Tristin Engels?

  Yeah, letting George go was actually really surprising as well. I was pretty surprised by that. But again, we don't necessarily know that he knew he would talk. If anything, this decision was either an overconfident one in that he miscalculated his ability to control George through fear and intimidation, or his ability to not get caught because George didn't know his actual name and identity, or he underestimated George's willingness to risk actually going to the police. George was with him for months. He abused him for months. George witnessed what he could do. So he may genuinely have believed that he was safe from any consequence, and that George's fear and intimidation from Carl was enough to keep him quiet.

• 14:16Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, out on bail, Carl went back to Connecticut. A few days later, on a road outside New Haven, he came across a young boy begging for money. Carl took him into the woods. By his own account, he raped the boy, strangled him with the boy's own belt, and left the body behind some bushes. Carl would later call this "the murder he enjoyed most." The boy has never been identified. Then Carl hopped a freight to Manhattan and got a job as a bathroom steward on the US Grant, an Army transport bound for China. He was fired before the ship left the dock for getting drunk and fighting with the crew. The next night, August 26, 1923, he got off a train in Larchmont, New York.

• 15:01Vanessa Richardson?

  It's a wealthy village on Long Island Sound. He was broke, hungry, and looking for someone to rob. Instead, he found the railroad depot. He picked up an axe from outside, smashed a window, and crawled into the baggage room, where dozens of suitcases sat waiting for the morning trains. A Larchmont patrolman named Richard Groob, making his early morning rounds, saw the broken window and looked inside. There was Carl, kneeling in front of the stove with an open trunk in front of him. Groob drew his gun and pointed it at him. Carl came at him anyway, axe in hand. The two men fought in the dark until Groob managed to wrestle the axe away and get the cuffs on. Once again, Carl was behind bars.

• 15:46Vanessa Richardson?

  And once again, he gave a false name, one of his old standbys, John O'Leary. But then he did something strange. Sitting in the county jail, Carl volunteered that he was also Jefferson Baldwin, the man who'd escaped from the Oregon State Penitentiary five years earlier, and that since he had supplied the information himself, he would like to collect the $500 reward Oregon was offering for his own capture. Oregon did not pay him, but it did put a hold on him so that when New York was done with him, Oregon could have him back for the years he still owed. Carl made a deal with the prosecutor anyway: plead guilty, spare the county a trial, get a light sentence.

• 16:31Vanessa Richardson?

  Once again, the judge gave him the maximum instead: five years for third-degree burglary. If he served every day he owed in New York and then in Oregon, Carl Panzram would be 50 years old the next time he walked free.

• 16:47Tristin Engels?

  Confessing he is Jefferson Baldwin and then asking for the reward money is very arrogant, and it allows him to position himself as the person with the power or the person controlling the information. It's like saying, "You didn't figure out who I am, I told you." And even then, it's not really who he is. And then he wants to be rewarded for it. He may also be getting some gratification from this, too, because he gets to feel superior in the moment. And it goes back to what we were discussing again with his tendency for bravado. And then the plea bargains create another problem, because he's pleading guilty again, expecting to get a lesser sentence again, but continues to be given the maximum sentence.

• 17:28Tristin Engels?

  And I don't think a lot of people realize this, but accepting a plea agreement that's been negotiated doesn't necessarily mean the judge is bound by the sentence that the prosecution and defense have agreed upon. So depending on the type of plea and the jurisdiction, the court may still have discretion at sentencing. And in this case, that was absolutely a good thing. But psychologically, Carl is going to struggle with that. This is someone who has been building a grievance against institutions since he was a child. So every time he believes he's made a deal, but it ended in the worst possible outcome, that's a betrayal to him, and it reinforces that grievance.

• 18:08Tristin Engels?

  And he's using that to justify his offending behavior, and he's been doing that since his time in Red Wing.

• 18:16Vanessa Richardson?

  In the fall of 1923, Carl Panzram was marched through the gates of the notorious Sing Sing prison. He was 32 years old. He'd just spent five years free, the longest stretch of freedom in his life since he was 12. By his own count, he had used it to murder 20 people. Sing Sing would not hold him for long, and Carl would be on the hunt for more victims.

• 18:45Vanessa Richardson?

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• 19:30Vanessa Richardson?

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• 20:50Vanessa Richardson?

  Sing Sing in 1923 was not what Carl Panzram expected. Its warden, Louis Laws, was a reformer. Unarmed guards, yard time and honor system, even a nightly silent movie in the mess hall. Carl was quarantined like every new arrival and put to work on the coal pile. Nobody bothered him. It lasted about a month. Before the end of October, officials reviewed Carl's record and decided he belonged somewhere else. He and a dozen other men were chained together, loaded into a special railroad coach and shipped 10 hours north into the Adirondacks, to a village less than 20 miles from the Canadian border. The sign on the station read, "Danamora."

• 21:33Vanessa Richardson?

  Clinton Prison at Danamora was where New York sent the men it had given up on. Inmates had called it the Siberia of America. The oldest cell block had gone up in 1845 and almost nothing about it had changed. No plumbing, no running water, a bucket in the corner and a single dim bulb on a cord. Carl's cell in North Hall was too small to do anything in but sit or lie down. The mattress was straw and it was full of bedbugs. The rules were simple. Silence at all times. A prisoner who wanted to speak to an officer had to stop six paces away, take off his cap and fold his arms across his chest. If that sounds bad, it could get even worse.

• 22:17Vanessa Richardson?

  Men who tried to escape were taken to a small stone building at the end of the yard that the prisoners called "The Box" and left there, cuffed and beaten, until they begged to go back to their cells. But that didn't stop Carl. He'd been there only a few months when he built a crude time bomb and tried to burn down the prison shops. The guards found the device and blamed two other men who went to The Box in his place. Carl was locked up for a few more months, then put to work in the worst shop in the prison. Eight hours a day, six days a week, at a cent and a half a day. The work wasn't hard, but it was monotonous and it was meant to be.

• 22:59Vanessa Richardson?

  After six months of it, Carl decided he wasn't going to serve five years at Danamora. He was going over the wall.

• 23:08Tristin Engels?

  We've seen this before. Remember Hooker? The inmate Carl described as simple-minded? Carl involved him in his own behavior and Carl wasn't concerned about fairness or about a vulnerable person dying because of him. And now he's done it again, but on a much more extreme scale and once again showing his criminal versatility and sophistication because he builds a bomb. And he does it in a very restricted environment. So I would love to know how he was able to do this. But once again, other prisoners are punished for it and he lets them take the fall. And this is the thing about Carl. He doesn't care when injustices happen to others, just when they happen to him.

• 23:49Tristin Engels?

  It's okay for them to house others in these deplorable conditions and inhumanly beat other incarcerated individuals or throw them in the cruel conditions of The Box, but not him.

• 24:00Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl says the guards never touched him for the bomb. They didn't know it was him. Does getting away with something in a place like that teach the same lesson as getting caught?

• 24:10Tristin Engels?

  Yeah, I think no matter what happens, reinforcement occurs for Carl. If he's caught and he's brutally punished, it validates his grievance and his resentment even more. It also reinforces that belief that the world is operating through force and the most powerful is the one who gets to harm others and the least powerful is the one who is harmed. And if he's not caught, then he's taught that he can beat people who have power over him and take the power back from people who control him. And also start to believe he's untouchable. So punishment doesn't change his worldview and getting away with it doesn't challenge it either. It's really, sadly, a win-win for him, which is truly unnerving.

• 24:52Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl's escape attempt did not get far. Somewhere on his way over the wall, he fell about 30 feet onto a concrete walkway. He broke both of his ankles and both legs, fractured his spine and ruptured himself internally. The guards carried him into the prison hospital where he lay for five days, basically untreated. Then they carried him back to a cell and left him on the floor. No one set the bones, no one put his legs in a cast, the doctor never came. For eight months, he lay there while the bones knit crooked on their own. Then a few months on crutches, a few more on a cane.

• 25:33Vanessa Richardson?

  14 months after the fall, he was finally taken to the hospital to be operated on for the rupture. Five days after the surgery, Carl was caught sexually assaulting another prisoner in the hospital ward. They threw him out and dumped him back in a cell. He spent the last two years and four months of his sentence in isolation. His mail was held back or destroyed. When state inspectors came through, the guards told them Carl was a degenerate with delusions and not to believe a word he said. He crawled around his cell, in his own words, "like a snake with a broken back and he hated everyone he saw."

• 26:14Tristin Engels?

  Now Carl has a physical reminder of this experience. He doesn't just remember, you know, what happened, what they did to him. He gets to see it on his own body and the extent of his injuries are pretty significant. He's enduring this without any pain management, too. And chronic pain is extremely emotionally distressing as well, which intensifies everything. It's going to intensify those beliefs. And despite what we know about Carl and the atrocities that he's committed and continues to commit, he has been mistreated here. He has experienced brutality and he absolutely is being denied adequate medical care. And even though he's injured because he chose to try and escape, and even though the lack

• 26:55Tristin Engels?

  of care gives him something tangible to add to the grievance he's already been building, he did still sexually assault a prisoner. This is more evidence to him, despite all of this, that the world really is as cruel as he believes it is and it's another way for him to justify his actions and whatever he does in response to it. And yes, he's escaped before, but this is the first time we've seen him attempt to escape an institution this secure and restrictive and did not succeed. He didn't regain the power. They had the power. And to him, they dangled it over him for two years while he suffered, two years and some months? So he's more vulnerable than he's ever been in a very long time.

• 27:40Tristin Engels?

  And that is just going to magnify the resentment, anger and hatred that he's been harboring for his entire life.

• 27:47Vanessa Richardson?

  The guards told inspectors Carl was delusional and insane. So from what you've heard so far, was he those things?

• 27:54Tristin Engels?

  No, I don't see that. That may surprise some people because there is a misconception that if someone is capable of the depravity that Carl is, they have to be insane. But the reality is, that's a legal term. It's not a clinical one. And as far as delusions are concerned, I do not see evidence of that either. Carl certainly has a very incredibly hostile view of the world and he believes people are cruel and institutions are corrupt, but those aren't necessarily delusions. In fact, as we've been discussing, some of those beliefs are reality-based and they resulted from things that actually did happen to him. Where Carl becomes distorted is in how he's broadly applying these experiences and how

• 28:39Tristin Engels?

  he uses them to justify his offending behavior. But from everything we've heard so far, he is reality-based. He plans, he problem solves, he understands consequences well enough to try and avoid them. He uses aliases, destroys evidence, manipulates, escapes custody and changes his behavior depending on what the situation is. And none of that rules out mental illness. I'm not saying he doesn't have a mental illness, but there's nothing here to suggest that he's experiencing a loss of reality. He's not entirely disoriented or out of touch of reality at all.

• 29:18Vanessa Richardson?

  With nothing to do but lie in the dark, Carl planned. He dreamed up a railroad tunnel in Pennsylvania where he would wreck an express train with a bomb, fill the tunnel with poison gas, and walk through the cars in a gas mask, robbing the dead. He planned to sink a British battleship in the Hudson and start a war between England and the US. After betting on the stock market first, he planned to blow up a lock on the Panama Canal. And he planned for the town of Dannemora itself. He would poison a few hogs with arsenic, drain the poison from their bodies, seal it in clay pots, and sink the pots in the creek that fed the reservoir, supplying the village and the prison. Men, women, children, the cats and the dogs,

• 30:03Vanessa Richardson?

  poison all of them. None of it happened. Carl never had to break out of Dannemora because in July of 1928, his five years were up, and the state of New York opened the door. Oregon was supposed to be waiting, but when Carl asked to have the Oregon hold lifted, it was reportedly because the state couldn't afford to send a deputy to Dannemora to collect him. So Carl Panzram, 37 years old and walking with a permanent limp, was simply let go. He was free for one month and six days. According to him, he committed a dozen burglaries in that time and one murder. A man in Baltimore he never named and no one ever identified.

• 30:47Vanessa Richardson?

  He said he was working toward a goal: enough money for dynamite and a ticket to that tunnel in Pennsylvania.

• 30:54Tristin Engels?

  All right, let's pause for a moment. We know that Carl is capable of doing atrocious things. But I'm actually starting to wonder how much of these fantasies are about what Carl genuinely intends to do and how much they're actually doing something for Carl psychologically. Because I think a lot of this is that same bravado that we've seen show up. He has this need to be the person who is stronger, smarter, more dangerous, and the person who ultimately comes out on top. And after what he just went through, it makes sense why these fantasies are so enormous and so industrial-focused. After being more vulnerable than he has been since he was

• 31:38Tristin Engels?

  a child, perhaps when he was at Red Wing, where he did the exact same fantasy thinking and generalized grieving, he's been immobile and in pain for a year and a half. He's now someone who can destroy trains. He can sink battleships. He can poison an entire town, and he has power over everyone. Not just an institution or over some specific person or after a specific encounter. This is an overcompensation. He gets out, he commits burglaries, and he tells himself they are financing his larger plan. But really, there's a gap between what he's doing and what he tells himself he's doing. And that seems to be serving him psychologically.

• 32:20Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl said he would have carried these plans out if his luck had held. Do you believe him? Do you think he would have done it?

• 32:26Tristin Engels?

  I don't really think it matters. I think he's verbalizing that he intends to cause serious harm to people on a large scale, and he has a documented pattern of violence and murder. He has a high risk for future violence. He's certainly shown us throughout these episodes that he's capable of extreme violence and, more importantly, that he's willing to act on it. So even if I thought realistically that pulling something off like this was highly unlikely, it would be dangerous not to take him seriously if he were to tell me he intended to do it. If he verbalizes to me or anyone other than himself, it should absolutely be taken seriously. He's a documented, well-known risk to the public.

• 33:09Vanessa Richardson?

  On August 16, 1928, Washington DC police made an arrest that looked routine. A young man caught pawning a stolen radio had given them an address, a rundown rooming house where the man he'd gotten it from was staying. Detectives staked out the building through a hot afternoon rain, then pushed into one of the rooms. They found a revolver, heavy burglary tools, and a huge bear-like man with a black mustache and a limp. When the handcuffs clicked shut, an officer asked his name. For the first time in years, he gave the real one. Carl Panzram, 37 years old. Occupation? Thief. He admitted stealing the radio and called the charge a joke.

• 33:54Vanessa Richardson?

  When the officer asked why, Carl told him he had killed too many people to worry about a housebreaking charge. The detectives wrote that down and dismissed it. They figured Carl for what they called a chisler, a man who claims crimes in other states, hoping to be extradited somewhere softer. They booked him into the district jail and put him in a four-man cell on the second tier of the south wing. That tier, on the early evening shift, belonged to a guard named Henry Lesser, 25, shy, nearsighted behind thick glasses, and seven months into the job. The first time he walked past Carl's cell on August 20, 1928, something about the big man stopped him.

• 34:38Vanessa Richardson?

  Decades later, he would still struggle to explain it. Lesser asked when his court date was. Carl said November. Lesser asked what his racket was. Carl studied him. "What I do," he said, "is reform people." Lesser walked away uneasy and thought he heard laughter behind him. Two days later, at the weekly showers, Lesser got a look at him. A body covered in old scars and welts, a strange, prancing limp, and across his chest, a double eagle framing the words "liberty" and "justice." It was weeks before Lesser worked up the nerve to ask Carl how exactly he went about reforming people.

• 35:20Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl grinned and told him. He said the only way to reform people was to kill them.

• 35:28Tristin Engels?

  So the detectives, assuming he wasn't serious about the murders, is likely due to a few things. For starters, they assumed it was manipulative, that he was saying that for secondary gain, to get a transfer to a better location. And having worked in correctional settings myself, this is a relatively common behavior. Many incarcerated individuals will say and do things that, on the surface, may sound or appear alarming, but in these settings can be manipulative in nature. But that's also why it's important, when you're working in these types of settings, that you evaluate each case individually, because not every situation is the same.

• 36:10Tristin Engels?

  But at the same time, this could be another side of his bravado and his arrogance. Imagine somebody you've arrested for burglary suddenly starts suggesting that he's actually a prolific murderer. Without corroboration, that can sound like somebody trying to make themselves appear much more dangerous than the crime that you're investigating would suggest. And that arrogance and superiority is showing itself with Henry Lesser and those conversations. Saying that killing people is reforming them is really an interesting characterization, because Carl is the one who was sent away for reform to Red Wing. Those institutions are intended to correct or reform behavior and turn people into pro-social members of society.

• 36:53Tristin Engels?

  But he's deciding that he's reforming innocent people and children and justifying it with that language. And he gave his actual name, likely because anonymity may have lost its value now. He's got a physical impairment now, a permanent limp, and maybe even chronic pain that could be slowing him down. And he may be thinking, you know, what's the point of spending his entire life hiding what he's done and how powerful he believes he is if nobody knows he did these things? But also, he now has a physical vulnerability, one that he would otherwise identify as exploitative in someone else.

• 37:35Tristin Engels?

  And I think that is something he also recognizes in himself now.

• 37:39Vanessa Richardson?

  Why do you think Carl seems to want this one specific young guard's attention?

• 37:44Tristin Engels?

  He's an interested audience, but also Henry is still relatively young. He's 25. But as you described him, he's shy, nearsighted with big, thick glasses, and he's green, as in he's fresh on the job. Seven months is still very new, and these are all characteristics that Carl may perceive as vulnerabilities. Henry has less life experience, less experience as a guard, and in some ways, he may remind Carl of Hooker and others that he has identified as easily manipulated or vulnerable. So now Carl has someone who is technically in a position of authority over him, but who may actually make Carl feel like the stronger, more powerful,

• 38:23Tristin Engels?

  or more interesting person between them, and one he could actually manipulate for things. And unfortunately, Henry's interest in Carl is reinforcing that. He risks becoming over-familiar with Carl and giving him opportunities to exploit that relationship if Henry continues showing that level of interest. Meanwhile, Carl gets to continue feeling superior and powerful, but now he also gets to feel recognized. And considering that he just gave his real name for the first time, that seems like something new that he might actually be seeking.

• 38:59Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, Carl did not intend to stay in the district jail. Night after night, while his cellmates pretended to sleep, he worked on one of the bars at the back of the cell with his hands, slowly loosening the concrete it was set in. But he never got the chance to escape. In early October, the jail superintendent, W.L. Peak, got word from other states that his prisoner was a dangerous man with a long record, including five years at Dannemora. Peak ordered a shakedown of the tier. A guard tapped each bar in Carl's cell with an iron rod. One of them rang dull. Carl was cuffed and taken to segregation. That evening, four guards took him down to the basement, backed him against a wooden post, handcuffed his wrists behind it,

• 39:44Vanessa Richardson?

  and hoisted him by a rope through the cuffs until only his toes touched the floor. They left him there for about 12 hours. The jail doctor came by through the night to listen to his heart, nod, and leave. Carl screamed. He cursed everyone in the room and swore he would kill them. He cursed his own mother for bringing him into the world. At dawn, trustees dragged him upstairs and locked him in an isolation cell. That is where Henry Lesser found him a few hours later, lying on the floor. Both wrists were torn open from the handcuffs. There was dried blood on his mouth and bruises all over his arms. Lesser asked if there was anything he could do.

• 40:28Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl swore at him. That afternoon, Carl called one of the guards who'd strung him up a name. The guard wrote it up. That night, four guards came for him again, knocked him unconscious with a blackjack, and put him back on the post for the whole night. Sometime after midnight, prisoners across the jail heard howling from the basement. Superintendent Peak was seen hurrying downstairs. And by morning, word had gone through the jail, Carl Panzram had spent the night confessing to the murders of three boys near Boston, in New Haven, and in Philadelphia. He described strangling a boy with his own belt. He said he had enjoyed it. Carl had told detectives the same things weeks earlier,

• 41:13Vanessa Richardson?

  and they had laughed. But a confession forced out of a man under torture was a different thing. Peak called the press.

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• 43:42Vanessa Richardson?

  On October 28, 1928, The Washington Post reported that a prisoner in the district jail named Carl Panzram had confessed to killing a 14-year-old newsboy in Philadelphia that summer and a 12-year-old boy in Salem. He'd hinted there were many more. Reporters came to the jail to hear the rest. Carl refused to see them. The morning after that second night on The Post, Henry Lesser came to work sick over what had been done. Remembering how Carl had cursed him, he didn't go to the cell. Instead, he handed someone a dollar and told him to pass it to Panzram. In jail, a dollar bought cigarettes, candy, and extra sandwich, the small things that made the days bearable.

• 44:26Vanessa Richardson?

  When Lesser's colleague told Carl where the dollar had come from, Carl assumed it was a joke. When he understood it wasn't, he cried. Later, when Lesser came down the tier, Carl limped to the bars, smiled, and thanked him. He said no guard had ever done him a favor before. And then he made Lesser an offer. "Give me a pencil and paper, and I'll give you the story of my life, all of it." The next day, Lesser smuggled a writing tablet and pencils into the jail under his uniform jacket. Carl hid them under his mattress and told Lesser to come by every night after midnight. There would be pages waiting. It was 2:00 in the morning

• 45:09Vanessa Richardson?

  before Lesser could slip into isolation for the first batch. Then he carried the pages up to the jail barber shop, turned on the light, sat down in the big wooden chair, and started to read. The handwriting was slow and even. Each page neatly numbered. Lesser read about the farm, and Red Wing, and the paint shop, and the boxcar. By the time he finished, he had decided one thing. Whatever else happened, these pages were going to survive. Henry Lesser was, at that moment, about the only person on Earth who wanted to understand Carl Panzram.

• 45:49Tristin Engels?

  It's not surprising to me that Carl reacted this way to Henry after he gave him the dollar, because Henry was someone who worked within an institution that represented something very specific to Carl, and he wasn't fitting within that system because he was showing him kindness. Henry didn't want anything in return. He wasn't trying to overpower Carl. He wasn't manipulating him. And that is the opposite of what Carl expects and has grown to know. It seemed to move Carl. I mean, he cried. But he also responds to it transactionally. Henry gives him something, and Carl gives him something in return. He thinks that's how it should be. And he chooses to write a story, which, if we're being honest,

• 46:33Tristin Engels?

  that benefits Carl more than it does Henry, because he's already reportedly confessed to three murders, so the cat's out of the bag. But this way, now he can tell his version of his life in his words, framed how he wants it, and he can now give it to someone he views as relatively trustworthy. Henry is also remaining dependable and reliable to Carl. He continues to listen, and he's treating Carl like a human being, which is ironic, because today, a correctional employee sneaking around or smuggling these items into the institution to facilitate this kind of relationship, one that makes an inmate feel humanized, would be fired and then ostracized by their own peers for that.

• 47:18Tristin Engels?

  And we don't know the true motives for Carl's behavior right now. He can be genuinely affected by Henry's kindness, but he could also still be manipulating him, too, especially given his history.

• 47:32Vanessa Richardson?

  With his housebreaking trial less than three weeks away, federal authorities were fielding extradition requests from three states. In Massachusetts, Salem Police said the murder Carl described matched a cold case from 1922: 12-year-old Henry McMahon, beaten to death with a rock. On November 1st, two women who had seen a man walking down a road with Henry that day picked Carl out of a seven-man lineup. In Philadelphia, a grand jury indicted him for the unsolved murder of a 14-year-old newsboy, Alexander Lusick, on the strength of details only the killer could have known. And in New Haven, the police chief reported that a boy found dead on the road to Bridgeport

• 48:14Vanessa Richardson?

  in August of 1923, strangled with a belt, was almost certainly the murder Carl had called "the one he enjoyed most." In the end, federal prosecutors decided not to hand Carl over to anyone. They would try him first in Washington for housebreaking. A district police lieutenant told reporters the murder confessions were a ruse. Panzram was a chiseler, and you couldn't believe a word he said. The trial opened on November 12th, 1928. Carl told the judge he would be his own lawyer. He didn't cross-examine a single witness. When the informant who had pawned his stolen radio took the stand, Carl drew a finger

• 48:56Vanessa Richardson?

  slowly across his own throat. Then Carl took the stand himself. He told the jury he was guilty. He had broken in, he had stolen, and if the owner had walked in, he would have killed him. Then he told them something else. While they'd been trying him, he had been trying them. He had found them guilty. Some of them he had executed already. If he lived, he would execute more. He hated the whole human race. And he wasn't playing crazy. He knew right from wrong, and he had no delusions. When he was done, he told the jurors, "They understood him well enough, and to go vote."

• 49:39Vanessa Richardson?

  The jury was out for one minute. They sentenced Carl to 25 years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. Carl's face broke into a grin. He looked the judge in the eye, drew his finger across his throat again, and said, "Visit me." The judge went pale and adjourned the court. By then, Carl had already handed Henry Lesser the account of his 21 murders, dated November 4th, 1928, and written, he said at the top of the first page, "of his own free will."

• 50:14Tristin Engels?

  These courtroom antics aren't surprising. I mean, Carl's being judged literally. That means people quite literally have power over his life and are making decisions on what to do with his life, where he effectively has very few decisions. And with the few he does have, he chooses to demonstrate power again by representing himself, making threats, removing feelings of vulnerability, and that he is entitled to retaliate against the cruelty of the world. And then he makes a point of saying that he's, you know, quote, "not playing crazy." But based on everything we've seen so far, and as I've outlined before, I agree with him. That doesn't mean Carl is psychologically healthy.

• 50:58Tristin Engels?

  It doesn't mean there isn't significant pathology there. But insanity, again, is a legal concept, and psychosis, it's a clinical one, and we haven't seen Carl describing hallucinations or delusions. We haven't seen evidence that he doesn't understand what he's doing, or that he's disconnected from reality. And even here, he rationally understands that people might interpret his behavior as insane, and why he specifically makes a point to reject that in front of the jury. And what he actually is doing is essentially telling a courtroom that they don't get to judge him, because he's judged them first.

• 51:36Vanessa Richardson?

  On January 30th, 1929, Carl was shackled into a line of 32 federal prisoners and put on a train for Kansas. Two days later, it pulled up under the wall at Leavenworth. Superintendent Peake had come along personally to warn the warden about his prisoner and urged them to put Carl in isolation from day one. They didn't. Carl was processed like everyone else, issued number 31614, and marched to the deputy warden's office for the standard lecture on what was expected of him. They assigned him to the laundry. Carl listened, shrugged, and told him matter-of-factly that he would kill the first man who bothered him.

• 52:19Vanessa Richardson?

  The deputy warden, who heard tough talk all day, told him to get out and get to work. The laundry was in a basement across the prison street from the isolation building. Its foreman was a civilian named Robert Warnke, short, stout, moon-faced, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a worn notepad he carried everywhere. Inmates called men like him "pencil artists," a foreman who wrote you up for everything. Within weeks, Carl started laundering extra handkerchiefs to sell for pocket money. Warnke found out. Carl was written up, dropped to third grade, and sent to the hole. The custom at Leavenworth was not to send a man back to the supervisor who had reported him.

• 53:01Vanessa Richardson?

  For whatever reason, Carl was. He asked for a transfer. Warnke refused to approve it. Carl started telling the other men in the laundry to stay away from Warnke, because Warnke was gonna get hurt. They thought he was joking, but Carl didn't joke. On June 20th, 1929, Warnke walked down the laundry aisle, making his usual check, notebook in hand. When he turned around, Carl was standing behind him with a 10-pound iron bar. Carl brought it down on his head, and then again, and again, as Warnke fell. The other prisoners scattered.

• 53:42Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl walked out into the prison street, his face and uniform splattered red. He limped 20 yards to the isolation building and into the deputy warden's office, still carrying the bar, but the chair was empty. Instead, Carl swung at the clerks in the back room and missed, chased a convict runner as far as the dining hall, and came back. Then he stood at the steel door of isolation and told the guard on the other side, "I just killed Warnke. Let me in." The guard said he would never let him in, holding that bar. Carl looked at it, said it was his lucky day, threw it away, and walked into the nearest cell.

• 54:23Vanessa Richardson?

  Robert Warnke had five deep wounds in his face and head. The prison doctor testified that any three of them would have killed him. Carl went on trial for murder in federal court in Topeka on April 15th, 1930. This time, the judge wouldn't let him be his own lawyer, so he sat silent and offered no defense. The jury took 45 minutes. The next morning, the judge sentenced Carl Panzram to hang. Kansas had long since abolished the death penalty, but this was a federal court, and the federal government still had a gallows. When the judge announced the 90-day window for an appeal, Carl cut off his own attorney before he could speak.

• 55:08Vanessa Richardson?

  He said he didn't want any appeal. The next day, he wrote to Henry Lesser to tell him the sentence suited him perfectly.

• 55:17Tristin Engels?

  Carl told them he would kill the first person who bothered him. They once again chose to write him off as a chiseler and underestimate him. And if you underestimate someone who has something to prove, in this case, proof of being the most powerful, then he's going to do exactly as he said he would. And that's why I said earlier that it doesn't matter if you believe him. It matters that you take his verbalization seriously. But I also don't necessarily think Warnke was the entirety of his grievance, like the same was true of the preacher. Because if this were solely about retaliation against him for writing him up, why go looking for someone else afterward, particularly someone higher in the institution?

• 56:00Tristin Engels?

  And we don't know if he went there to harm the deputy warden, but when the deputy warden wasn't there, he started violently swinging at his clerks, and then he chased someone else. It's only when he's given entry into isolation, what he asked for, that he drops the bar, which, again, that shows us that he can control his violence. His violence is volitional. And I have seen behavior like this, time and again, with individuals who are highly institutionalized, or are career offenders, for example. At a certain stage of life, too, if they're aging offenders, or they have no family support, no money, no realistic way of obtaining or maintaining gainful employment on the outside,

• 56:41Tristin Engels?

  and they're struggling to meet their basic needs, sometimes incarceration can begin providing things that they no longer reliably can, even in antisocial ways. That's the same with the military, and that's what Carl joined when he was desperate. Prison gives them food, shelter, structure, medical care, and predictability. And I think that explains, at least in part, why Carl had this confessional shift. Because he said who he really was, he started leaking crimes that he'd done, he started writing it all out, and then there's these courtroom theatrics. He may have wanted to be there, for whatever reason, which is ironic because of how much he hates institutions. But once incarcerated, some individuals also learn how to manipulate that environment

• 57:26Tristin Engels?

  to their advantage to get what they want, whatever that is. And the institution becomes another system to learn and navigate, and Carl is an expert at that.

• 57:36Vanessa Richardson?

  Carl told a sanity commission he had no desire to live, and that hanging would end his troubles. Is what we're looking at here best understood as, is it suicidality?

• 57:47Tristin Engels?

  I think yes, because he's verbalizing that he has a death wish. And the behavior of bringing a weapon into the deputy warden's office is also suggestive of that when you know correctional settings. That would be considered an imminent threat to staff. I don't know how institutional operations were back then, but today, a live round would be justified. And in this instance, he's coming into his office covered in blood. He just committed a murder, and that raises concern of suicidal thinking here, too, if he knew on any level he could have been killed by officers for that, so death by cop, for example. And it would make sense for someone like Carl to choose death over life in an institution,

• 58:29Tristin Engels?

  especially when freedom was no longer possible or sustainable for him.

• 58:35Vanessa Richardson?

  Over the summer, groups opposed to the death penalty petitioned to spare Carl's life. Carl wrote to them himself and told them to stop. He said the only thanks they would ever get from him was that he wished they all had one neck and he had his hands on it. At 6 o'clock on the morning of September 5, 1930, the warden came for him with a procession of guards and reporters. Carl spotted two clergymen at the back and demanded they be removed. He said he didn't mind being hanged, but he didn't need any hypocrites around while it happened. When the hangman fumbled with the straps, Carl snapped at him to hurry up. He said he could hang a dozen men in the time this one was taking. He all but ran to

• 59:19Vanessa Richardson?

  the scaffold. At the foot of the stairs, he stopped, looked around at the spectators, and spat twice. Then he went up the 13 steps. The trap fell at 6:01. Carl Panzram was pronounced dead at 6:18. He was 39 years old. No one claimed the body. After an autopsy, it was buried at government expense on a slope west of the prison, in a graveyard the inmates called Peckerwood Hill, under a standard concrete marker inscribed with a number 31614.

• 59:58Tristin Engels?

  True to Carl, he maintains his posture up until the very end. His entire explanation for why he is even there on that scaffolding is that other people made him this way. And if we're being honest, there is some truth to that. Carl was exposed to violence and instability very early in life. And then he entered institutions that were designed to reform him, but they humiliated, and abused, and tormented him even more. And those experiences absolutely can shape development. They can affect attachment, emotion regulation, threat response, and his beliefs that he can develop about himself and other people. The last

• 1:00:40Tristin Engels?

  being especially relevant, he developed a lot of beliefs about power, some of which started before his time at Red Wing with what his mother taught him. But from the violence he was exposed to, he learned that power was what protects you and vulnerability is dangerous. Violence is effective. If you can't overpower someone, you can manipulate them. And if someone hurts you, retaliation is justified and rationalized. But at the same time, he abused and victimized innocent people and children. His exposure to violence, his abusive experiences in reform schools are not isolated to Carl. Millions of children

• 1:01:21Tristin Engels?

  and adolescents have been in similar positions and did not go on to rape and murder people or children. So I think Carl's explanation of himself contains both truth and self-interest. His environment helped shape him, that is true. Those institutions repeatedly reinforced some of the ugliest beliefs he had already had about power and violence. But he has traits there that we've been tracking throughout his entire life, which are disregard for rules, criminal versatility, manipulation, deception, callousness, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, exploitation of others, repeated violence, and this willingness to violate

• 1:02:01Tristin Engels?

  virtually any boundary when doing so serves him. So he also had severe antisocial pathology. So putting his actions all on others is just an externalization of blame. He's still responsible for his own choices at the end of the day.

• 1:02:19Vanessa Richardson?

  Is there a version of Carl's life where someone could have reached him in time? Where would that have had to happen? Because is it even possible that he could have been changed or saved?

• 1:02:30Tristin Engels?

  I think there was likely a window in his childhood in which protective relationships or treatment, a stable structure, and non-abusive behavioral intervention could have changed his developmental path in some degree. I can't estimate whether or not severe antisocial pathology would still have emerged in his adulthood. But in thinking back to his childhood and his early adolescence, he had no support. He had no protective adult relationships. And the only intervention was punishment. And it was extreme. So I do wonder if that would have altered things for him in some way.

• 1:03:10Vanessa Richardson?

  Henry Lesser kept the pages Carl had written. It would be 40 years before anyone published them. They finally appeared in 1970 in a book called Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long. Carl's confession runs to some 20,000 words. In it, he laid out the 21 murders he claimed with dates and places, and dared anyone to check. A handful were confirmed by police. The rest, rest on his word alone. But the confession is more than a list. It's Carl's case against the country that raised him. He wrote that he'd been beaten, raped, and tortured in the institutions that were supposed

• 1:03:53Vanessa Richardson?

  to reform him, and that they had made him exactly what he was. He had 11 felony convictions and 20 years behind bars, and he was not, he wrote, "the least bit sorry for any of it." He also wrote this: "He preyed on the weak, the harmless, and the unsuspecting, because that was the lesson he had been taught. Might makes right. Men made him what he was. And if they didn't like what they had made, they could put the blame where it belonged." Robert Warnke, Henry McMahon, Alexander Lusick, a boy on a road outside New Haven whose name no one ever learned, 10 sailors at the bottom of Long Island Sound, seven people

• 1:04:38Vanessa Richardson?

  in Angola whose names Carl never bothered to ask. That is what Carl Panzram made.

• 1:04:54Tristin Engels?

  Before we get out of here, it's time for The Engels Angle, where I'll tell you three pieces of advice I'd give our subject if they were my patient. This is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This is general psychological commentary. It's not therapy, treatment, diagnosis, or individualized mental health advice, and it does not establish a psychologist-patient relationship. With those ethical disclaimers out of the way, here's what I'd tell Carl Panzram if he came into my office. Number one, there is power in letting go, too. You've spent your life treating every relationship encounter or situation as though someone has to be on top and the other underneath. And being underneath

• 1:05:37Tristin Engels?

  to you means vulnerable and unsafe. So you decided never to be there. But power isn't the same as safety. The power you were chasing meant putting yourself in unsafe situations. But there was power in letting go, too. There's power in letting yourself be equal. There's power in leading a pro-social life and working hard, rewarding yourself with a life that is non-threatening. You had the power to ensure your safety physically and emotionally all along. Number two, what happened to you was wrong, and it explains your anger, but it doesn't give you permission to harm. You were failed. You were abused. You were subjected

• 1:06:20Tristin Engels?

  to treatment that no child should have experienced, particularly by institutions that claimed they were there to reform you and help you. You are valid in your anger about that. But the people you have hurt did not do those things to you. At some point, your grievance became permission to harm virtually anyone, innocent children included. And every time you use your own victimization to justify victimizing someone else, you are repeating the exact system you claim to hate. You become no better than them. In fact, those systems did not ruthlessly kill anyone in your story. Only you did. Number three, pay attention

• 1:07:01Tristin Engels?

  to what happened when you were shown humanity. If your reaction to Henry Lasser was genuine, then that interaction tells us something. Henry showed you unconditional kindness, and you cried. And I want to know why. Because you responded to something other than power. And that's why I wonder if someone like Henry was around when you were a child, where would you have been in 1930? Would you still be standing on scaffolding, sentenced to death? Or would your life have been different? And this is the place I would start if you came into my office. And that's it for The Engels Angle, and we'll see you in the comments over on Instagram.

• 1:07:50Vanessa Richardson?

  Thanks so much for listening to our series on Carl Panzram. Come back next time for a deep dive into the mind of another murderer.

• 1:07:58Tristin 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. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Serial Killers and Murderous Minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference.

• 1:08:21Vanessa 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.

• 1:08:47Vanessa 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.

• 1:09:22Speaker 07

  Retire Path Virginia is a convenient way for Virginians to save for retirement, giving employees an easy option to help build long-term financial security. State law requires certain Virginia employers to register and facilitate the program if they meet eligibility criteria, and recent changes mean more businesses are now included. Retire Path is simple to administer, integrates with most existing payroll processes, and has no employer fees, making it an efficient way to meet state requirements. Take the employer eligibility quiz and register at retirepathva.com.

• 1:09:52Vanessa Richardson?

  Lately, I've been thinking about skincare a little differently. Instead of chasing every new trend or using products that leave my skin feeling stressed, I've been focusing on supporting my skin's long-term health. That's why I've been loving Primally Pure's Plumping Collection. It's designed to deeply hydrate, support your skin barrier, and help your skin look naturally firm and radiant, all while using thoughtful, non-toxic ingredients. One product I've been reaching for every day is the Plumping Serum. It uses bacuchio, a botanical alternative to retinol, along with nourishing oils and astaxanthin to deeply hydrate while helping improve the look of firmness, elasticity, and overall skin tone.

• 1:10:35Vanessa Richardson?

  I love that my skin just feels healthier. It's hydrated, glowy, and supported, without feeling like I'm using harsh products to get results. If you're looking for skincare that helps your skin age beautifully while supporting long-term skin health, definitely check out Primally Pure's Plumping Collection. If you're looking for your next podcast, check out 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. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.