FROM THE VAULT

Last Words

From Bytes September 6, 2018, updated and amplified . . . 

Yesterday during the weekly trivia competition in which our team takes part, I gently prompted team member Carol to proceed a little faster by paraphrasing the last words of Carl Panzram at his execution. Carol likes to chat. She would be able to talk for Australia and win gold if talking was an Olympic event.

Charles "Carl" Panzram (1891 – 1930) was an American serial killer, spree killer, mass murderer, rapist, child molester, arsonist, robber, thief, and burglar. In prison confessions and in his autobiography, Panzram confessed to having committed the murders of twenty-one boys and men, only five of which could be corroborated; he is suspected of having killed more than a hundred boys and men in the United States alone, and several more in Portuguese Angola. He also confessed to having committed more than a thousand acts of rape against males of all ages.

After a lifetime of crime, during which he served many prison terms and escaped from them just as much, Panzram was executed by hanging in 1930 for the murder of a prison employee at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

In response to offers from death penalty opponents and human rights activists to intervene, he wrote, "The only thanks you and your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it."

Asked by his executioner on the gallows whether he had any last words, he responded:

"Hurry up, you Hoosier bastard, I could kill ten men while you're screwing around."