"In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all of these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don't believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damn human race including myself."
Carl Panzram, who called himself the "world's worst murderer," wrote these words in a full autobiography and confession he prepared for the one friend in his life-a young prison guard named Henry Lesser. PANZRAM: A JOURNAL OF MURDER, combines these brutally forthright memoirs with the commentary of authors Gaddis and Long, into a compelling chronicle of the forces that engender hate. The authors provide a historical and sociological framework for Panzram's own words, using this uniquely detailed self-analysis by a mass murderer to depict what happens when an intelligent and unbreakable personality that has been interminably and unmercifully abused strikes back in vengeance.
PANZRAM arrives as a gripping warning from America's recent past to our newly repressive era of prison-industrial complex, death penalty abuse, and unprecedentedly high rates of incarceration from a man who walked the halls of Death Row with a blindingly clear vision.
Introduction by Harold Schechter, author of Deranged and Deviant.
