"I would not reform if the front gate was opened right now and if I was given a million dollars when I stepped out," wrote Carl Panzram from Death Row in 1930. "I have no desire to do good or to be good."

Panzram was an early prototype of America's most predominant dark folk hero, the modern serial killer. Calling himself a piker for only killing 21 people, he was the specter that haunted everyone's worst nightmares: an unstoppable psychopathic monster, deadly and menacing, unrepentant to the very end.

Yet paradoxically Panzram remains a source of wonderment and fascination, if only for the outrageous extent to which he took his campaign to "reform people who try to reform me."