“Mother was too dumb to know anything good to teach me,” he said years later, “there was little love lost. I first liked her and respected her. My feelings gradually turned from that to distrust, dislike, disgust and from there it was very simple for my feelings to turn to into positive hatred towards her.”
He knew nothing else in his brief life except suffering, beatings and torture. His youthful mind dwelt on things most children his age knew little of. “I fully decided when I left there just how I would live my life. I made up my mind that I would rob, burn, destroy and kill everywhere I went and everybody I could as long as I lived, “ he wrote years later. By the age of 14, Carl was relegated to working the fields on his mother’s farm. Envisioning a dismal future of backbreaking labour with no reward, he convinced his mother to send him to another school. There, he soon became involved in a dispute with a teacher who beat him on several occasions with a whip. Carl managed to get a handgun and brought it to school so he could kill the teacher in front of the class. But the plot failed when, during a hand-to-hand struggle, the weapon fell out of his pants and onto the floor of the classroom. He was thrown out of school and returned to the farm. Two weeks later, he hopped a freight train and left the Minnesota farm forever.
Shortly after, Carl rode a freight train heading west out of Montana. He came upon four men who were camping in a lumber car. They said they could buy him nice clothes and give him a warm place to sleep. “But first they wanted me to do a little something for them,” Panzram wrote years later. He was gang-raped by all four men. “I cried, begged and pleaded for mercy, pity and sympathy, but nothing I could say or do could sway them from their purpose!”
He escaped with his life but the incident may have destroyed whatever feelings of compassion he had left.
