Cynical murderer and incorrigible hard-case. Thirty-year-old Panzram declared, ‘I don’t believe in Man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.’

Much of his early life was spent in corrective institutions where he was brutalised by punishments. Of his term in Fort Leavenworth Prison, completed in 1910, he said ‘All the good that may have been in me had been kicked and beaten out of me long before.’

His adult life consisted of robberies shared with terms of imprisonment and gaol breaks. He also indulged in arson to get his revenge on the system, and he practised sodomy on his victims whom he variously assaulted, robbed and killed.

In 1920, Panzram carried out robberies which netted him over $45,000, and by his own admission killed ten men in the process. He kept on the move, sailing to Europe and working in Africa.

In August 1928 while in Washington awaiting trial for burglary and murder he wrote his memoirs. On receiving a sentence of 25 years to be served at Fort Leavenworth he said, ‘Ill kill the first man who bothers me.’ On 20 June 1929, Panzram killed the prison laundry foreman.

For this murder he was tried and convicted. He objected when a reform group sought to prevent his hanging; he said ‘I wish you all had one neck, and I had my hands on it,…I believe the only way to reform people is to kill them.’ He wrote to president Hoover demanding his ‘constitutional rights’ in the form of a prompt hanging. This self-confessed killer of twenty one persons and sodomizer (on his own admission) of a thousand more was hanged on 5 September 1930 at Fort Leavenworth. His autobiography was published forty years later, edited by one of his jailers.