Harvey Louis Carignan was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on May 18, 1927, into an unstable household and was in institutions from his teens. In 1949, serving in the Army in Anchorage, he raped and beat to death Laura Showalter, a fifty-seven-year-old woman, and was convicted and sentenced to hang. The conviction was overturned on the ground that his confession had been improperly obtained, he was acquitted at retrial, and he served time for a separate assault instead. He was released in 1960.
He was convicted again in Washington in 1960 for burglary and served most of the decade. By 1972 he was in Minneapolis, married, and running a filling station.
He killed Kathy Sue Miller, fifteen, in Seattle in 1973, having answered her reply to a want advertisement he had placed for a station attendant. In 1974 he killed Eileen Hunley, Jerri Billings and two teenagers, Mary Peters and Kathy Schultz, in Minnesota, beating them with a hammer, which gave the newspapers Harv the Hammer. He was caught when a young woman he attacked in September 1974 escaped and gave police the registration of his car. Laura Showalter, fifty-eight, and Leslie Laura Brock, nineteen, are also named in the record.
He was convicted in 1975 of two murders and a series of rapes and given sentences amounting to well over a century. He never admitted anything and blamed God, whom he said had instructed him. He died at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Oak Park Heights on March 2, 2023, aged ninety-five, having spent almost his entire adult life in custody. The eleven years he was out in the 1960s, after the Alaska conviction was overturned, are the whole of the argument about his case.