Killer: A Journal of Murder

4 ideas

1. A guard's dollar unlocks a killer's confession

   Guard Henry Lesser then sent him a dollar as a small, unexplained kindness, and Panzram, who said he had never been shown one before, used the pencil and paper Lesser later smuggled in to write a full account of his murders, robberies and rapes. Panzram said kindness had come too late to change him, and he was hanged at Leavenworth in 1930 after killing a prison laundry foreman; Lesser then spent about forty years trying to get the manuscript published.

2. Brutal punishment manufactures the criminal it punishes

   Panzram argues that the reform schools and prisons that held him from age eleven did not correct him. Through beatings, sexual abuse, torture devices and isolation, they taught him hatred and a code of revenge he then carried out on the world. His claim is that a system built on retribution passes its violence on to the people it confines and returns them more dangerous than when they arrived.

3. Read the hater's worldview as a learned lesson

   Panzram presents his universal hatred ('I hate the whole damned human race, including myself') as a conclusion he reached from what was done to him, not as an inborn trait. He even calls his killing a rational, reciprocal response to the treatment he received. Reading a violent person's philosophy as the output of their training moves the question from 'what is wrong with him' to 'what taught him this,' without excusing the acts.

4. The single-reader confession

   Panzram's manuscript was written for one person, the guard who treated him decently, and not for a court, a public or posterity. With a single trusted reader there was no audience to perform for and nothing to bargain for. The result is an unusually unsparing record: Panzram fought his own reprieve and asked to be executed, so the account had no role in any defense.

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