Harvey Louis Carignan spent most of his adult life in prison. In 1950 a federal court in the Territory of Alaska sentenced him to death for the killing of Laura Showalter, a 57-year-old woman in Anchorage. The case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, and the conviction did not survive: an appeals court threw it out over the handling of his confession, and the justices upheld that result on a different ground in November 1951. He stayed in federal prison on a separate assault conviction and was paroled from Alcatraz in 1960, according to Forum Communications and KFGO.
In the early 1970s he lived in the Seattle area, where, according to Forum Communications, authorities considered him the prime suspect in the deaths of two young women, one of them a 15-year-old who had answered a help-wanted advertisement. He was never charged there. In 1974, in Minnesota, he was arrested after a run of attacks on women and girls and was convicted of killing his former girlfriend, Eileen Hunley, and Katherine Schultz, a young student. Forum Communications reports that he became known as "The Want Ad Killer" and "Harv the Hammer"; the crime writer Ann Rule wrote a book about him, The Want Ad Killer, KFGO noted. He died in a Minnesota prison in March 2023, at 95.
Carignan was born on May 18, 1927, in Fargo, North Dakota, according to the Fargo radio station KFGO and the Prairie Public program Dakota Datebook. KFGO noted that he was not sure of his exact birth date. His mother was not married. As a boy he was moved between relatives, and Prairie Public lists places he lived, including Cavalier and the Fargo area. Both accounts say he ended up at the state reform school in Mandan, North Dakota. Prairie Public says his mother had tried and failed to place him in an orphanage, that he had begun stealing and lying by about age 11, and that he stayed at Mandan until he was 18.
After his release he joined the US Army. KFGO says he enlisted at 18 and was in serious trouble within about three years. By 1949 he was a soldier stationed at Fort Richardson, near Anchorage, in what was then the Territory of Alaska.
Laura Showalter was 57. Forum Communications, the North Dakota and Minnesota newspaper group, reported that she was walking home from a movie on the evening of July 31, 1949. A witness testified that he had seen a man and a woman together in Anchorage that evening, and the next morning she was found dead. She had been beaten to death. The federal appeals court that later reviewed the case described the crime charged as murder committed in the course of an attempt to commit rape.
No one was arrested for weeks. On September 14, 1949, a woman in Anchorage was assaulted by a man she did not know. Police thought the attack resembled the July killing.
The two federal opinions in the case set out the sequence. On Friday, September 16, 1949, at about 11 in the morning, Anchorage police detained Carignan in connection with the September 14 assault. The woman picked him out of a lineup, and he admitted that assault. A witness also picked him out in connection with the murder. That afternoon, at about 4 o'clock, he was arrested, taken before a magistrate on the assault charge, told of his rights and committed to the city jail. No complaint was filed against him for the Showalter killing, and he was not taken before a magistrate on that charge.
On Saturday, September 17, police brought him to the office of the US Marshal, a man named Herring, who questioned him about the events of July 31. Carignan asked for a priest and spoke with one. He told the marshal he would make a statement, and he was returned to the jail at about 5 p.m., where he was left alone over Sunday. The Supreme Court noted that he had been told he did not have to make a statement, and found no evidence of violence, persistent questioning or deprivation of food or rest.
On the Monday, the marshal took him to the grand jury room. After a second talk with the priest, he wrote a statement that said nothing definite about the murder. He then completed a further written statement, which the Supreme Court said admitted the killing. The Ninth Circuit described that confession as first recounting a night of drinking and then adding an account of the attack on Laura Showalter. KFGO, in a 2020 account, reported that he was told he would not receive the death penalty if he confessed. Neither court opinion mentions that claim.
Carignan, then 22, was indicted and tried in the District Court for the Territory of Alaska. His lawyers had been appointed by the court, and they objected to the confession. The trial judge let it in. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder, and under the Alaska statute he was sentenced to death. Forum Communications reported that he was to be the first person in Alaska's third judicial district to be hanged. KFGO dates the conviction and sentence to 1950.
The judge made a second ruling that later mattered. Carignan offered to testify, outside the jury's presence, about facts he believed showed that his confession had not been voluntary. The judge refused.
On December 8, 1950, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the conviction and sent the case back. Judge Healy, writing for the court, held that the confession should not have been admitted because Carignan had not been brought promptly before a magistrate on the murder charge. The court relied on two Supreme Court decisions, McNabb v. United States and Upshaw v. United States, and on Rule 5 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which together barred the use of confessions obtained during an unlawful delay before arraignment.
The court rejected his other arguments. It found no error in the refusal to move the trial elsewhere, and it held that the evidence was enough to show that the killing took place during an attempted rape. Judge Bone concurred only in the result and said he would have affirmed on the facts. Judge Pope dissented.
The government asked the Supreme Court to review the case. The justices heard argument on October 8, 1951, and decided it on November 13, 1951. Justice Reed wrote for the Court.
The Court disagreed with the Ninth Circuit's reasoning. It held that Carignan's detention was legal, because he had been properly arrested and committed on the assault charge, and that Rule 5 did not apply in terms to a murder charge that had not yet been brought. "We decline to extend the McNabb fixed rule of exclusion to statements to police or wardens concerning other crimes while prisoners are legally in detention on criminal charges," Reed wrote. On the facts in the record, the Court said, the confession was not barred as a matter of law, and the circumstances did not necessarily establish coercion.
The conviction still could not stand. The Court held that the trial judge had committed reversible error when he refused to let Carignan testify outside the jury's presence about how the confession was obtained. A new examination of whether the confession was voluntary was required. The Court modified the Ninth Circuit's decision and, as modified, affirmed it, which left the conviction reversed and the case open for a new trial. Justice Minton took no part.
Justice Douglas, joined by Justices Black and Frankfurter, agreed with the result but would have gone further. He criticized the practice of arresting a person on one charge so that police could investigate another, saying that it gave officers access to the prisoner day and night, and that the Court's ruling gave sanction to a police practice that made detention the means of investigation.
No second murder trial was reported. Forum Communications says only that the Showalter conviction was dropped. In law, he was never convicted of her death.
He remained in federal custody for the September 1949 assault, for which he was convicted. KFGO reported a 15-year sentence. Forum Communications reported that he was sent to Alcatraz in 1952 and remained there until he was paroled in 1960; KFGO also dates his parole from Alcatraz to 1960. Prairie Public put his time on the island at eight years.
Freedom did not last. KFGO reported that about four months after his parole he was arrested in Duluth, Minnesota, on charges that included burglary and assault, and that he was sent to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, for five and a half years. Prairie Public describes this as imprisonment for burglarizing and attacking a Minnesota woman, and says that over the next 15 years he was jailed again and again, mainly for burglary and assault.
KFGO says he was paroled in 1964 and moved to Seattle, where within a year he was arrested for burglary and sentenced to 15 years, of which he served four. Prairie Public says he had two failed marriages. By the early 1970s he was running a service station in the Seattle area, Forum Communications reported.
Laura Brock was a hitchhiker in Washington State. Forum Communications gave her name as Laura L. Brock and her age as 20, and said she had been beaten to death and that local authorities considered Carignan their prime suspect. KFGO reported that police had become fairly certain he had killed her in 1972. He was never charged.
Kathy Miller was 15, according to Forum Communications, which gave her name as Katherine Sue Miller; KFGO gave her age as 16. In May 1973 she answered a help-wanted advertisement for a service-station job. KFGO said the advertisement ran in the Seattle Times and that she was looking into the job for her boyfriend. She gave the man who answered the telephone her name, phone number and address.
Her mother was worried and told her that anyone applying for a job should go to the business in person. "If you're going to apply for a job, you should go to the business and apply," she recalled telling her daughter, in KFGO's account. Kathy promised not to go. Her mother called the police, who told her to call back if anything else happened. Kathy did not come home, and that evening her mother called 911.
About a week later her school books were found in Snohomish County, in the Everett area, about 30 miles from where she was last seen. Her body was found weeks later near Everett, according to KFGO and Forum Communications, and Forum Communications said she had died of blunt force injuries. KFGO put the discovery in the first week of June 1973.
The station operator who had placed the advertisement was Carignan. He told police that she never showed up, and KFGO reported that he backed out of a polygraph test. Witnesses had seen a gold truck with a black stripe that matched his, but they could not identify the driver. Police lacked physical evidence directly linking him to her death. Forum Communications reported that authorities were confident he was responsible and that no one else has ever been charged. Her mother believes he killed her daughter, the group reported.
He returned to Minnesota. Prairie Public and KFGO say that his second marriage, in Washington, had ended. In Minneapolis he lived with Eileen Hunley, and at the time of his 1974 arrest he was working construction in the city and driving a pale green 1968 Chevrolet Caprice, according to Forum Communications.
The attacks attributed to him in Minnesota began in 1973. KFGO reported an attack in June 1973 on a woman waiting for a bus in Minneapolis, who escaped. In September 1973, Forum Communications reported, a young girl said that Carignan had picked her up in Minneapolis and driven her to a rural area, where he attacked her. He later pleaded guilty in that case, the group reported.
Eileen Hunley was 29. She had been Carignan's girlfriend; the two had lived together after he moved to Minneapolis. She left him in the summer of 1974. She was killed in August 1974, beaten to death, and her body was found near Zimmerman, in Sherburne County, about five weeks after she disappeared, according to KFGO. Forum Communications reported that her body was found about three days after September 14, 1974.
On September 14, 1974, according to Forum Communications, Carignan picked up a young woman in Minneapolis and drove her to Carver County, where he sexually assaulted her and tried to kill her. She was found alive. She described her attacker as a man in his fifties driving a pale green car.
On September 19, according to the same account, two teenage girls who were hitchhiking were picked up by a man in his fifties in a pale green car who threatened them. They escaped. KFGO reported other attacks that month, including one on a woman in a store parking lot.
Katherine Schultz was a student at the Work Opportunity School in Minneapolis, KFGO reported. Forum Communications gave her name as Katherine Jane Schultz and her age as 17. She disappeared on September 20, 1974. Her body was found near Cambridge, in Isanti County, on September 23, 1974, and she had died of blunt force injuries, Forum Communications reported.
The descriptions given by the women who had escaped, a man in his fifties in a pale green car, led police to Carignan. On September 24, 1974, officers spotted a man who matched the descriptions driving a green Chevrolet Caprice and arrested him, KFGO reported. He was read his rights and identified by victims. Forum Communications dates his arrest on the Carver County charge to 1975. A patrolman later testified at one of his trials that he had ordered Carignan's car impounded by the homicide division.
Minneapolis police found a map in his car on which about 180 remote locations had been circled, Forum Communications reported; KFGO put the number at 181 and said they were circled in red ink. Two of the circles matched the places where Laura Brock and Kathy Miller had been found, according to Forum Communications.
One of his first trials was for the September 14 attack in Carver County, held in 1975 or 1976, according to Forum Communications. He was charged with attempted first-degree murder and aggravated sodomy, and he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Forum Communications reported that he admitted the assault and the attempt to kill her and said he had been following God's instructions.
His lawyers argued that he was mentally ill. One of them, Joseph Friedberg, argued that Carignan was mentally unfit and believed that God had commissioned him to kill certain women, according to Forum Communications. The prosecution's psychiatric evidence rebutted the defense expert.
The jury convicted him on both counts. He received the maximum 30-year sentence on the sodomy count.
On August 11, 1978, the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in State v. Carignan, 271 N.W.2d 442. The court rejected his complaint that his lawyers had not been allowed to tell the jury what would happen to him if he were found not guilty by reason of insanity, following its 1976 decision in State v. Bott. It found no prejudice from questions about his criminal record, since his own lawyer had raised his juvenile record first, and none from a newspaper article published during the trial about a similar attack on another young woman, since nothing showed the jurors had read it. The evidence, the court said, did not compel an insanity verdict, because the testimony of the defense expert had been rebutted. Justice Wahl joined a separate opinion by Justice Otis, who would have allowed juries to be told the legal effect of an insanity verdict in future cases.
A Hennepin County jury later convicted him on four sex-offense counts, including indecent liberties and two counts of aggravated sodomy, in a case brought by a woman who led police to the place she believed the crime had occurred. The court sentenced him to a maximum of 30 years on one count, to be served after the 30-year Carver County sentence.
The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed that conviction on December 8, 1978, in State v. Carignan, 272 N.W.2d 748. It found that the pretrial publicity, though considerable, had not denied him a fair trial, that the identification evidence carried no very substantial likelihood of misidentification, and that evidence of his crimes against other women had been properly admitted to show identity and a common scheme or plan. The opinion records that he testified he had been convicted of attempted homicide after his arrest.
He was then tried for the deaths of Eileen Hunley and Katherine Schultz and convicted of both, Forum Communications reported. At his trial in the Schultz case, according to the same account, he testified that he had killed her. At his sentencing, Judge Robert Bakke said the crimes were too gross to comment on. "Don't comment on them, then," Carignan answered.
The reports do not give the degree of either murder conviction or the sentences imposed for them. Prairie Public reported that his sentences in Minnesota totaled 150 years. KFGO said his sentence was later extended under Minnesota's dangerous-offender law. Radio Mankato and Forum Communications describe him at his death as convicted of two murders, and Radio Mankato adds that he was convicted in the 1970s in at least five other cases involving women and children as young as 13.
While he was awaiting sentencing in the Hennepin County jail, FBI agents visited him about the kidnapping of Virginia Piper, a case that had made headlines across the region, Forum Communications reported. The group, citing a 1975 Fergus Falls Daily Journal article, said he knew the owner of the land where she was found. He was never charged in that case, and the kidnapping remains unsolved.
Carignan spent the rest of his life in Minnesota prisons. In 2019, at 92, he was held at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Faribault, KFGO reported.
He died on March 6, 2023, at the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Oak Park Heights, according to Forum Communications. Radio Mankato reported that he died of natural causes, at 95. At his death, Forum Communications said, he was serving sentences for two murder convictions and one attempted murder.
How many people he killed is not known. Prairie Public wrote that he may have killed as many as 18 people. KFGO put the estimate at five to 10, depending on the evidence, and said there were unsolved cases in California, British Columbia, Kansas, Minnesota and Washington State that some have linked to him. None of these was ever charged.
The Washington deaths of Laura Brock and Kathy Miller are suspected, not proven. Forum Communications reported that authorities considered him the prime suspect in both, and the map found in his car matched the places where both were found, but he was never charged, and he told police that Kathy Miller never arrived for her appointment.
KFGO reported that one circle on the map matched the place where Lora Jean Dugan was found dead near Medora, North Dakota, in 1972. Her death remains unsolved, and there is no report that investigators formally named him a suspect.
FBI agents questioned him about the Virginia Piper kidnapping, but no charge was ever brought.
The Laura Showalter case ended with a reversed conviction. A jury found him guilty in 1950, but the conviction was set aside, and in law he was never convicted of her death.
His claim that God had told him to attack and kill women was put to two Minnesota juries as part of an insanity defense. Both rejected the defense, and the Minnesota Supreme Court found that the evidence did not compel an insanity verdict.
May 18, 1927: Harvey Louis Carignan is born in Fargo, North Dakota.
Childhood: lives with relatives; sent to the state reform school at Mandan, where he stays until 18.
After his release from Mandan: joins the US Army.
July 31, 1949: Laura Showalter, 57, is killed in Anchorage, Alaska.
September 14, 1949: a woman is assaulted in Anchorage.
September 16, 1949: Carignan is identified in a lineup, admits the assault and is committed on that charge.
September 17, 1949, and the following Monday: questioned by the US Marshal; writes a statement admitting the Showalter killing.
1950: convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
December 8, 1950: the Ninth Circuit reverses the conviction.
November 13, 1951: the US Supreme Court affirms the reversal on a different ground.
1952: sent to Alcatraz.
1960: paroled; arrested months later in Duluth, Minnesota; sent to Leavenworth.
1964: paroled; moves to Seattle; soon imprisoned again for burglary.
1972: Laura Brock dies in Washington State (KFGO).
May 1973: Kathy Miller, 15, answers a help-wanted advertisement and disappears; she is found dead weeks later near Everett.
September 1973: a girl is attacked after being picked up in Minneapolis; he later pleads guilty in that case.
August 1974: Eileen Hunley, 29, is killed; she is found near Zimmerman.
September 14, 1974: a young woman is attacked in Carver County and survives.
September 20, 1974: Katherine Schultz disappears; she is found near Cambridge on September 23.
September 24, 1974: Carignan is arrested in Minneapolis.
1975 or 1976: convicted in Carver County of attempted first-degree murder and aggravated sodomy.
Awaiting sentencing in Hennepin County: visited by FBI agents about the Piper kidnapping.
Before December 1978: convicted in Hennepin County of four sex-offense counts; convicted of killing Eileen Hunley and Katherine Schultz.
August 11, 1978: the Minnesota Supreme Court affirms the Carver County conviction.
December 8, 1978: the Minnesota Supreme Court affirms the Hennepin County conviction.
2019: held at Faribault, aged 92.
March 6, 2023: dies at Oak Park Heights, aged 95.