I shall collect my funeral pyre, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of his both will speedily vanish.
I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks, light, feeling, and sense will pass away, and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images this world affords me first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die. Now it is my only consolation, polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse. Where can I find rest, but in death?
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Hi, I am Elle, and this is Quidbro Quo, your friendly neighborhood for a sick psych podcast. The Quidbro Quo podcast deals with crime, psychology, and related themes. This nerd discretion is advised.
In episode 12, I focused on the nature-nurture debate with some special attention to Karl Panzrem. Panzrem, a journal of murder by Thomas Gaddis and James Long, is the first book I have rated five stars in as long as I can remember. This episode focuses specifically on him and this book, as he is frankly one of the most fascinating figures I have ever encountered in my true crime journey. Now, I am going to digress a little bit.
Have you ever read Frankenstein? I'm not talking about the movie mind you, but the original 1818 book, Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Usually, I'm a proponent of movie makers leaving books the heck alone, but I have to say that from an entertainment standpoint, the Universal movie was better, and the Melbrooks movie best. That said, from a philosophical standpoint, the book still has its merits.
The original story is a painful verbose slog through description after description of pastoral European countryside as that was the literary fashion of the time. But crammed in between the excruciatingly long odes to mountain crags and summer grasslands are some critical moral questions. Victor Frankenstein creates his monster on a mad obsessive whim, crafting it according to his ease and needs without ever thinking of the end result. When he is faced with the reality of his creation, he rejects and abandons it, blaming the monster even though it is literally the embodiment of his own short-sighted self-absorption.
The modern movie versions focus on the horror and pathos of the situation, but barely skirt the central question of the book. What is the creator's responsibility to the created? The unthinking douchebaggy cowardly selfishness of Victor the creator is mostly lost in the modern movies. Sure, he's pretty obsessive, but I find the focus more on the hubris of playing God aspect.
The character in the book is orders of magnitude worse. I don't think it's coincidental that Shelly grew in the ripples of the post-childbirth death of her own mother, herself a well-known feminist writer, and experienced a complicated relationship with her stepmother. This is a story about parents and children. If I wanted to recreate the full textual Victor Frankenstein experience, I would time bend the story into an 80s anti-drug morality play, rebranding Victor Frankenstein in the role of the capricious drug-addicted deadbeat parent, struggling to skirt the repercussions of their bad parenting by summarily abandoning a difficult-addicted child.
If you wanted to take it even more modern and topical, Victor Frankenstein is practically a deedy-blanchard figure. By shaping his child to suit his own selfish needs and whims, he is the unwitting architect of his own destruction. Reading the Panjuram book, I was struck over and over with the parallels to Frankenstein, and I have to wonder if this was one of the many books he read in his final confinement. Right or wrong, and there are absolutely sound arguments for either position.
Never and over again, Karl Panjuram poses the same question to society in his confession and letters. Would he have turned out to be such a monster if the people responsible for shaping him hadn't treated him like one from the start? In one of his final letters he says, Before I have finished, I kill one man and I try to kill a dozen more. After doing all of these things, I walk into a cell, fully expecting to be chained up and beaten to death.
But what happens? The exact reverse of that. No one lays a hand on me, no one abuses me in any way. This is how things have been for the last three or four months.
I have been trying to figure it out and have come to the conclusion that, if in the beginning I had been treated as I am now, then there wouldn't have been quite so many people in this world that have been robbed, raped, and killed. And perhaps also very probably, I wouldn't be where I am today. Maybe I am wrong though. I am too dumb to know what might have been, but I am not so dumb that I can't see a little way into the future.
Not very far, but far enough to see the end of, Karl Panjuram, 31614, from a correspondence with Henry Lesser, Halloween 1929. In both cases, our primary source of information is an exceedingly unreliable narrator. And as far as that goes, who is to say what proportion nature or nurture was to blame for the final result? Regardless, the central message of both of these books, not to mention Quidroquo's own namesake book, The Silence of the Lambs, is that perfect or imperfect, metal-forged in the fires of abuse and neglect creates a dangerous tool, considerably more suited to turning on its creator than anything else.
Karl Panjuram was a career criminal who grew up in the pre-World War I American Midwest. The scope of his criminal career is notable in and of itself, but what particularly sets him apart is a shockingly articulate confession and series of letters he entrusted to a young guard named Henry Lesser, who is perhaps the closest thing to a friend you could attribute to Panjuram. Panjuram, a journal of murder, interweaves these original first-person writings in chronological order with the author's own commentary on the historical setting in general and the events Panjuram mentions in particular, making all attempts to verify his claims with contemporary sources, though it seems his long list of pseudonyms didn't make the job easy. These writings detail a shocking and continuous litany of inhumane treatment, both by and upon Panjuram.
It would be all too easy to dismiss Panjuram's school and prison abuse claims as self-serving deflection if it were not for the corroborating text detailing the complaints, arrest, and reforms designed to end the very treatment he highlights. Though Lesser strove continually to make them public, these writings remained unpublished from Panjuram's execution at the age of 38 in 1930 to the initial release of the book in 1970. Mind you, not remotely for lack of trying or interest. Lesser sent the text a person after person, and 40 years of psychologists, prison reformers, and publishers agreed that these writings were capital, I, important.
An anonymous case study of Panjuram was even included in the book Man Against Himself by influential psychologist Karl Meninger. Unfortunately, everyone who saw the words of Panjuram also agreed that the contents were so unbelievably shocking that there was pretty much no way to effectively distribute them. Not that I can really blame them. This is really one of the weirdest reads I have done in a long time.
There is no world that is entirely ready for the likes of Karl Panjuram, and I am personally quite thankful for that. But at least in a post-Manson Family Murder World, we have a familiar framework for acts at this level of chaos and horror. I got the sense that in a different world where he stayed out of legal trouble, Panjuram might have been a formidable intellectual adversary, but his laser-precise criticisms of the incarceration system of his time are offset by a sociopathic obsession with the full-scale annihilation of human beings. One portion of his confession swings almost directly from a nauseating litany of abuses in New York's infamously neglectful Danamur prison to a carefully laid-out series of plans for inciting war between the United States and Britain by blowing up a battleship, followed by further carefully detailed plans for poisoning entire specific towns and blowing up railroad lines.
Of his time in Danamur he says, my whole mind was bent on figuring out different ways to annoy and punish my enemies, and everybody was my enemy. I had no friends. That was my frame of mind when my five years was up and I was turned loose to go anywhere I wanted to go. My intention was to rob, rape, and kill everybody I could, anybody and everybody.
Later he says, when I was discharged I was told that I was pure as a lily, free from all sin to go and sin no more. 18 days later I committed six or eight burglaries. Two days later I committed a murder in Baltimore. And 12 days later a burglary in Washington DC.
This was a recurring theme in his confession. He is arrested. He is literally tortured for the length of his incarcerations, and then he is spit out into the world with zero oversight, as if crime and penance is a zero-sum game, and stepping out of a prison gate is some sort of magical spell which washes away all that had come before. Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not saying that the man was innocent or that prison should be a consequence free cakewalk.
But the way he was treated by officials during his incarcerations was fairly well corroborated by other sources of his time, and often more sickening than the acts which got him placed there in the first place. There was nothing about this unchecked cycle of violence which served the betterment of society. This treatment in the Reform School and penal system was predicated on brutal, expedience, and neglect, and just like Frankenstein's monster, he turns it on them, murderously. Panzrem's attitude and actions are fascinating to the end.
He never comes out and directly says it, but I think his final criminal act, and incidentally, the single murder for which he faced justice of the 21 he claims, is a pretty clear case of attempted suicide by cop. Actually, no, let me clarify. He does not claim to have a death wish beforehand, but once he is busted for the murder of 11 prison work foreman named Robert Mark, Panzrem makes it exceedingly clear that his intention from that point on is to die. This up to and including rejecting Defense Council, strenuously fighting any claims of insanity, drafting a letter to then-President Herbert Hoover demanding that he not be granted clemency, and eventually making a clumsy suicide attempt in his death-row cell.
But it's hard to say whether that was his original conscious intention. All we know for sure is that he made a couple of thwarted escape attempts, he wanted off a specific work detail under Wank, and he repeatedly threatens to kill anyone who would not leave him alone. Once he had burned through his attempts at work transfer, and it was clear that this was due to Wank's decision, it was by all accounts as if a strange peace settled over him, and on June 20th, 1929, he took the next possible opportunity to beat the offending laundry work foreman to death with an iron bar. He ran around the prison, looking for a few more prison officials to attack, but once it became clear they were not to be found he abandoned his weapon and walked calmly into an isolation cell, awaiting what he thinks will be his immediate end.
Per his Halloween letter, which I quoted earlier, we know that his stated expectation in the immediate aftermath of the murder was a quick retaliatory death by prison guards. Though I suspect he would deny it if anyone had had the presence of mind to ask, I really have to wonder if once he realized he was well and truly stuck, his death became his primary intention. When you read through his letters to Henry Lesser, there is a bone-deep weariness when he discusses his life, and a clear recognition that he is irrevocably damaged goods. When Panzram waxes philosophical about the role of the penal system in the shaping of his actions, Lesser asks what he thinks would happen if he were suddenly free of any legal and financial burden.
Would he reform? Panzram all but laughs in his face at the idea. He says, my philosophy of life is such that very few people ever get, and it is so deeply ingrained and burned into me that I don't believe I could ever change my beliefs. The things I have had done to me by others and the things I have done to them can never be forgotten or forgiven either by me or others.
I can't forget and I won't forgive. I couldn't if I wanted to. November 28, 1929. As he's pointed out many times he's been released pure as a lily free from all sin, from every single one of his fully served incarcerations.
And where had that gotten him? Though he was generally considered handsome, he openly preferred assaulting men to the romantic company of women, so his legacy lives on only in his confession and letters. But unlike other death row serial killers who have left detailed accountings of their crimes, Panzram does not come off as a narcissistic self-aggrandizing glory hound. Their contents are hardly complimentary, and even at the time he seems to care little about what was made of them once he got them off his chest.
It is a complicated and uncomfortable story. It can be all too easy to step back as an academic into the safe abstract confines as a case study, but the first person nature of this book does not allow for emotional distance. It is difficult to feel fascination, disgust, and sympathy for a person all at once, but I think these narratives are necessary. I open with some of the final words of Frankenstein's monster as he reflects upon the appending respite he feels death will bring his tortured life, and so I close with an eerily similar passage from Karl Panzram himself.
To some people my death will seem to come in a horrible form, but to me it seems a very easy way to die. I look forward to it as a pleasure and a relief. It is a far easier death than I have dealt out to some of the people I have killed. I couldn't ask for any easier way to die.
This will probably be the last I'll ever write to anyone, because in just 90 days I'll be hanged by the neck until I am dead. But I am feeling fine, and I am feeling better every day as the time grows shorter. I intend to leave this world as I have lived in it. I expect to be a rebel right up to my last moment on earth.
With my last breath I intend to curse the world and all mankind. I intend to spit in the warden's eye or whoever places the robe around my neck when I am sitting standing on the scaffold. I always did want to spit in the copper's eye and also a preacher's or priest. That will be all the thanks they'll get for me.
Karl Panzram, June 5th, 1930. If you want to weigh in on the life of Karl Panzram or if you have other questions about true crime and forensics psych, seek me out at quid, pro, quo, cast on twitter, facebook, patreon, instagram, gmail, at the.com and wherever fine internets are sold. I am currently the most active on twitter. On a couple of more administrative notes, I'd like to thank my newest patreon supporters.
The first is Maggie, who is also a twitter true crime podcast fan extraordinaire. Second is Ariel, who asked me to shout out kiva.org on her behalf. Kiva facilitates microloans with emissions to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Check out the link in the episode notes.
I'd like to thank my newest 5 star iTunes reviewers, Kitty MacTaco, Zimbellino13 and Skism Artist and my newest Facebook reviewer, Sandra. I've been seeing some serious Canadian iTunes love for the last few weeks, at one point reaching number two on the social sciences chart. This was in no small part due to Christie Lee of the fantastic Canadian True Crime Podcast. If you're not already familiar with it, I highly recommend checking it out.
Here's Christie with more info. Hi, this is Christie Lee, host of the Canadian True Crime Podcast. My podcast tells Canadian stories of cruel people who committed heinous acts and honors innocent victims who are no longer with us. I start with a deep dive into the story of Paul Benato and Paul Hamocca, with information you probably haven't heard, and then I venture into some lesser known Canadian crime stories.
You can find me on your favorite podcast app, just search for Canadian True Crime. The July's Murder of the Month pick is Anne Perry and Murder of the Century by Peter Graham. Feel free to join us at the Murder of the Month page on Facebook for more information. Quid ProCo is produced from Stem to Starn by me, Elle Stewart, and is available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play.
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