CRIME HUNTER: Want Ad Killer believed God wanted him to kill 'whores and harlots'
· Toronto Sun
Harvey Carignan was like the baseball player who toils outside the limelight of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.
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Stellar numbers, all-star game and World Series appearances cannot bring the same recognition a star player gets in the media capitals of America.
Of course, in his own way, Carignan had a chillingly successful career in serial murder where he killed in Alaska, Washington state, Minnesota and who knows where else.
Chronic bed wetter
Born in 1927 in Fargo, North Dakota to a single mother, there were problems from the get-go. Carignan was small and plagued with a facial twitch.
According to true crime author Ann Rule , he was also a chronic bed wetter with an imaginary friend named Paul.
His mother eventually married and had another boy. Problem child Carignan was shipped to live with grandma, then with an aunt and uncle, and finally back home with mom at age 11. He was still bed-wetting and started stealing.
Carignan’s next stop when he was a seven-year jolt in reform school in 1938.
When he left at 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. And from there, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Stationed at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on July 31, 1949, what was surely in the cards became reality. Carignan raped and killed 57-year-old nurse Laura Showatler. She died from several blows to the head.
Not two months later he attempted to rape another woman, but she escaped.
He was arrested and in 1950, then convicted and sentenced to hang. The problem was a detective told him he wouldn’t swing if he confessed.
The death penalty was overturned and Carignan was sent to Alcatraz for eight years. He sailed off the rock on April 2, 1960.
Harv the Hammer hated women
After being sprung, he moved to Seattle. More crimes followed, burglary, assault and other low-rent stuff. Eventually, he was pinched and sentenced to another 15 years – but a merciful system let him loose after just five years.
He married two different women in Seattle, with both marriages ending in divorce. By 1970, Harvey Carignan hated the world and hated women most of all.
More disturbing, he believed he was on a mission from God to eradicate the planet’s Jezebels.
His lawyer Joseph Friedberg later told a jury: “We will show he believed that God commissioned Harvey Carignan to seek out and degrade and kill certain women.
Called women ‘whores and harlots’
“Harvey Carignan believes to this day as he sits here before you that he has failed the Lord. He deliberately attempted to kill that young lady and he blames where he is right now on the fact that a woman would not die.”
The killer said at his trial God told him to murder “whores and harlots.
Before that there was more petty crimes, sometimes aided and abetted by his brother Clinton in Minneapolis. It was back and forth from the Pacific Northwest to the Twin Cities for restless Carignan. His driving force was sex.
Cops had investigated him in October 1972 for the slaying of 19-year-old Leslie Laura Brock who as found dead in Washington, murdered by several blows to the head.
Mystery murders in California
Sometime in 1973, Carignan seemed to have hit on the idea of using want ads to lure his victims. In May of that year, Kathy Miller answered a help wanted ad for his gas station – and then she disappeared.
Two hikers found her nude body wrapped in plastic, bludgeoned by a hammer that knocked holes the size of nickels in her skull.
Seattle homicide detectives knew all about Carignan and they hounded him until he left town.
During that time, he was pinched for speeding in California. It placed him in a killing field where six women had been mysteriously murdered over the previous two years, but nothing stuck to Carignan and he fled to the familiar surroundings of the Twin Cities.
There were two sex assaults in Minneapolis, but the terrified victims were discrete and Carignan was not touched.
Back in Seattle, he began a relationship with church lady Eileen Hunley, 29, in the summer of 1974. Hunley was a do-gooder and mistakenly thought she could change sour, old Carignan.
She was reported missing and her corpse was later discovered. She had been raped and bludgeoned to death by repeated blows to the head.
Found in a cornfield
There were other attempted rapes and murders.
Katherine Schultz, 18, of Minneapolis, would be the Want Ad Killer’s final known victim.
On September 24, 1974, she didn’t return home from her college classes. Her body was found in a cornfield the next day. Her skull had been pulverized by hammer blows.
Cops in Washington and Minneapolis were talking. Survivors picked the maniac out of lineups as the man who attacked them.
When he was arrested, detectives found maps with 181 red circles in Canada and the U.S. Some meant nothing. Others were the scenes of homicides eerily similar to the Carignan murders.
Besides the Schultz murder, he was also charged with attempted murder and aggravated sodomy for the rapes of two young teenagers in the Twin Cities.
He went on trial in February 1976 and used an insanity defence that the jury didn’t buy. Carignan was convicted in the Schultz murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
The serial killer died in March 2023 at the Minnesota Correctional Facility after nearly 50 years behind bars. He was 95.
At his 1976 sentencing, the judge told him: “Your crimes are so gross that there is no point in commenting on them.”
Harv’ the Hammer replied: “Don’t comment on them, then.”