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The Want-Ad Killer:
Harvey Carignan (1983)

Ann Rule
(as Andy Stack)

The Want-Ad Killer is the second book in Ann Rule's Andy Stack trilogy of serial killers. After his first grisly crime, Harvey Louis Carignan beat a death sentence and continued to manipulate, rape, and bludgeon women to death using want ads to lure his young female victims. His weapon of choice was a claw hammer which he used to rape and bludgeon his victims earning him the nickname of "Harv the Hammer." He described himself as: "An instrument of God, one who was acting under His personal instructions. Murder, rape and mutilation are all part of a Grand Plan. God is a figure with a large hood and you can't see his face." Under so-called orders from God, he killed at least 5 and maybe as many as 18 women.

Harvey Louis Carignan was born on May 18, 1927, in Fargo, North Dakota. His twenty-year-old mother was not married. When he was three or four his mother married and had a second son. At the age of six he was undersized and had a twitch in his face. He was also a chronic bed wetter and had an imaginary friend, Paul.

When Carignan was eight, he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Cavalier, ND, which lasted a short time and he was sent back home. When he turned ten he was sent to live with his grandmother in Williams, ND, then sent to live with another aunt before going back home to his mother. He was still suffering from bedwetting and started stealing. At age eleven, he was sent to reform school in Mandan, ND for seven years. During this time he was diagnosed with childhood Chorea, a nervous disorder marked by muscular twitching of arms, legs and face and Carignan claimed female employees sexually abused him. When he left the reform school at age eighteen he enlisted in the U.S. Army.

On July 31, 1949 while stationed at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, Carignan raped and killed 57-year-old Laura Showatler. She died from several blows to the head.  Less than two months later, Carignan attempted to rape Dorcas Callen but she escaped. She told the police she had been approached by an intoxicated soldier at around 7 a.m. Callen and another eyewitness, John Keith, identified Carignan in a line-up. On September 17, 1949, Carignan was brought to the U.S. Marshal for the murder of Laura Showatler where he provided officials with a written confession, but there was no mention of a murder. His confession to the murder was oral. In 1950 he was charged and convicted of first degree murder. He was sentenced to death by hanging. His lawyers, however, filled an appeal with the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that Carignan’s confession was unlawfully elicited by an overzealous police officer who assured Carignan that he would not be executed if he confessed. In 1951 the Supreme Court overruled his death sentence due the officers’ violations of the McNabb rule. In 1952 he was transferred to Alcatraz where he served eight more years and on April 2, 1960, he was paroled.

Four months later he was arrested in Minnesota for burglary, assault, and attempted rape. He was convicted and sentenced to two and one half years in a Minnesota State prison and another 2,086 days in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. On March 2, 1964, he was released on parole and move to Seattle where he was arrested on November 22, 1964, for second-degree burglary and sentenced to fifteen years in the Washington State prison in Walla Walla. During his stay there he obtained in his high school diploma (GED) and took some college courses. In 1968 he was paroled.

A year later he married Sheila Moran and moved in with her and her daughter. That same year he was arrested for parole violation and suspicion of robbery. He was sent back to Walla Walla for a year and his wife divorced him due to physical abuse.

On April 14, 1972, Carignan married Alice Johnson and moved in with her and her two children, Billy (11) and Georgia (14). Two months later Billy moved out to live with his real father due to the beatings he had been receiving from Carignan.

On July 27, 1972, Virginia Piper disappeared. It is speculated that Carignan had kidnapped her. On October 15, 1972, ninteen-year-old Leslie Laura Brock of Bellingham, Washington was found dead. She died from several blows to the head. Witnesses claimed that they saw her get into Carignan's silver truck.

On May 1, 1973, Kathy Sue Miller, age fifteen, answered Carignan's want ad for employees at a service station that he was leasing. When the girl showed up in response to the ad, he sexually assaulted and killed her. Her body was found months later by two boys hiking on the Indian reservation north of Everett, Washington. She was naked, bundled in a sheet of plastic, and had been beaten with a hammer which left nickel-size holes in her skull.

On June 28, 1973, forty-seven-year-old Mary Townsend was attacked by Carignan at a bus stop. He attacked her from behind knocking her unconscious. When she awoke, she was in his vehicle and he began to command sexual favors, but she managed to leap from the vehicle and escape. A few days later, he was arrested for assaulting of his wife, Alice, who decided to leave him.

On September 9, 1973, he picked up Jerri Billings, a thirteen-year-old hitchhiker. He forced her to perform sexual acts on him while he assaulted her with a hammer. After the assault, he released her. She did not mention the event until several months later.

By May of 1974, Carignan had given up on Alice, and started dating and living with Eileen Hunley, whom he picked up hitchhiking, after moving to Minnesota. In August Eileen broke off her relationship with him. She disappeared on August 10, 1974. Her rotting corpse was found five weeks later in Shelbourne County.  Her skull was imploded by the force of savage hammer blows and she had been raped with a tree branch.

On September 8, 1974, Carignan picked up seventeen-year-old June Lynch and sixteen-year-old Lisa King who were hitching rides in Minneapolis. Once they reach the outskirts of town he stopped the car and started beating June in the head and face with a hammer. Lisa escaped. While she was running for help, Carignan sped off leaving June on the road side for dead.

On September 14, 1974, Carignan picked up Gwen Burton from a Sears parking lot. He ripped her clothing, choked her into semi-consciousness and sexually assaulted her with a hammer. He dumped her body in a near by field but she survived and was able to craw to the road side for help. Four days later, he picked up Versoi and Diane Flynn. He forced them to perform oral sex and would beat them if they didn’t follow his commands. The two girls were able to escape when Carignan stopped for fuel. Two days later, Kathy Shultz did not show up at her classes. Her body was found the next day by hunters in a cornfield forty miles form Minneapolis. As in the other cases, Kathy's skull had been destroyed by crushing hammer blows.

By this time, police in Minneapolis were talking to their counterparts in Washington, and within days, survivors started picking Carignan out of lineups as the man who had abducted and assaulted them throughout the past two years. A search of his possessions turned up some maps with 181 red circles drawn in isolated areas of the United States and Canada. Some of the circles indicated places where he had applied for jobs or purchased vehicles, but others seemed to link him with a string of unsolved homicides and other crimes involving women. One circle marked the place where Laura Brock had disappeared, near Coupeville, Washington. Another, at Medora, North Dakota, coincided with discovery of a murdered girl in April 1973. Yet another had been drawn around the very intersection in Vancouver where Mary Townsend had been waiting for the city bus and had been assaulted from behind and beaten with a hammer.

In February of 1975, Carignan was tried on the attempted murder and aggravated sodomy in Gwen Burton's case. He pled not guilty by reason of insanity claiming that God told him to kill those women. The jury was not convinced by the insanity plea and found him guilty. He was sentenced to a maximum of forty years in prison. Since no criminal in Minnesota may be sentenced to a term exceeding forty years, the other trials and sentences, 30 years for the assault on Jewry Billings; 40 years for Eileen Hunley's murder; and 40 years for killing Kathy Schultz, were mere formalities.  Out of the one hundred fifty years, the convicted killer will have to serve no more than forty, with the usual time off for "good behavior."

Carignan turned eighty-one May 18, 2008 and is still serving time at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater in Bayport, Minnesota. His inmate records at this prison show the spelling of his first name as Harvy (no E) not Harvey as in information provided elsewhere.

Ann Rule's Full Length Bestsellers
with Case Background
 

• Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal(2007) - Tells the story of a Georgia dentist named Bart Corbin, and how two women, a beautiful dentistry student named Dolly Hearn, and Bart's wife, Jennifer Barber Corbin, found themselves fatally involved with Corbin over the course of two decades.

• Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer-America's Deadliest Serial Murderer (2004) - This is the extraordinary true story of the most prolific serial killer the nation had ever seen -- a case involving more than forty-nine female victims, two decades of intense investigative work...and one unrelenting killer who not only attended Ann Rule's book signings but lived less than a mile away from her home.

• Heart Full of Lies: A True Story of Desire and Death (2003) - An idyllic Hawaiian wedding held the promise of a wonderful future for handsome, athletic Chris Northon, an airline pilot, a confirmed bachelor-turned-devoted family man; and Liysa, an acclaimed surf photographer, loving mother, and aspiring Hollywood screenwriter. But few, including Chris, had seen Liysa's other side -- her controlling behavior and dark moods, her insatiable hunger for money and property. And no one anticipated the fatal outcome of a family camping trip in an Oregon forest. Liysa soon revealed herself as a victim of domestic abuse that culminated at the campsite, where she shot Chris in self-defense. But crime scene evidence led detectives to wonder if Liysa was a killer, not a victim.

• Every Breath You Take: A True Story of Obsession, Revenge, and Murder (2001) - Although happily settled securely in a loving second marriage, and a new family of quadruplets, Sheila never truly escaped the vicious enslavement of her ex-husband, multi-millionaire Allen Blackthorne, a handsome charmer -- and a violent, controlling sociopath who subjected Sheila to unthinkable abuse in their marriage, and terrorized her for a decade after their divorce. When Sheila was slain in her home, in the presence of her four toddlers, authorities raced to link the crime to Blackthorne, the man who vowed to monitor Sheila's every move in his obsessive quest for power and revenge. Shelia had said, "If anything ever happens to me... find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story."

• And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer (1999) - On a June evening in 1996, 30-year-old Anne Marie Fahey, secretary to the governor of Delaware, vanished without a trace following a restaurant rendezvous with her secret lover of more than two years: Thomas Capano. One of Wilmington's most prominent and respected figures, a millionaire attorney and former state prosecutor, "Tommy" was a charming, soft spoken family man. But in the weeks and months that followed Fahey's disappearance, investigators would gradually uncover the shocking truth: Capano was a steely manipulator driven by power and greed -- and capable of brutal murder.

• Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, A Mother's Sacrifice (1998) - Rule probes the case of Debora Green, a doctor and a loving mother. A small-town girl with a genius IQ, she achieved an enviable life: her own medical practice, a handsome physician husband, three perfect children, and an opulent home in an exclusive Kansas City suburb. But when a raging fire destroyed that home and took two lives, the trail of clues led investigators to a stunning conclusion.

• Dead By Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (1995) - When attorney Cheryl Keeton's brutally bludgeoned body was found in her van in the fast lane of an Oregon freeway, her husband, Brad Cunningham, was the likely suspect. But there was no solid evidence linking him to the crime. He married again, for the fifth time, and his stunning new wife, a physician named Sara, adopted his three sons. They all settled down to family life on a luxurious estate. But gradually, their marriage became a nightmare....

• Everything She Ever Wanted: A True Story of Obsessive Love, Murder, and Betrayal (1992) - For their wedding portrait, petite Pat Taylor and handsome Tom Allanson posed as Rhett and Scarlett.  Less than two months later, their dream exploded in terror and murder: their beautiful home mysteriously burned to the ground and Tom was convicted of the brutal slaying of his mother and father. Pat's only brother had died in a puzzling suicide, her grandparents-in-law were poisoned with arsenic, and no one -- from her wealthy employers to her own children -- was safe when Pat Allanson didn't get her way. It took Georgia lawmen more than two decades to stop her for good -- if indeed they have.

• If You Really Loved Me: A True Story of Desire and Murder (1991) - David Brown was a computer wizard and millionaire by age thirty-two. When his beautiful young wife was shot to death as she slept, Brown's fourteen-year-old daughter, Cinnamon, confessed to killing her stepmother. The California courts sentenced her harshly: twenty-four years to life. But thanks in part to two determined lawmen, the twisted private world of David Brown unfolded revealing a trail of perverse love, twisted secrets, and evil mind games. Did David Brown convince his own daughter to prove her love by killing for him?

• Small Sacrifices: A True Story of Passion and Murder (1987) - A shocking and powerful account of the destructive forces that drove Diane Downs, a beautiful young mother, to shoot her three young children in cold blood.

• The Want-Ad Killer - Written as Andy Stack (1983) - After his first grisly crime, Harvey Louis Carignan beat a death sentence and continued to manipulate, rape, and bludgeon women to death--using want ads to lure his young female victims.

• The I-5 Killer - Written as Andy Stack (1984) - As a young man, Randall Woodfield had it all--a star athlete, good looks, and an award-winning student. Working in the swinging West Coast bar scene, he had more than his share of women. But he wanted more than just sex. An appetite for unspeakable violent acts led him to cruise the I-5 highway through California to Washington, leaving a trail of victims along the way. As the list of the dead grew, the police mobilized to stop a twisted killer who had 44 known deaths to his name.

• Possession - A Novel (1983) - Joanne Lindstrom's camping trip to Washington's Cascade mountains goes terribly awry, leaving her husband dead and Joanne's only hope for survival in the hands of a twisted stranger. (This is Ann Rule's only novel. Based on a real Northwest Case.)  

• Lust Killer - Written as Andy Stack (1983) - To his neighbors, Jerry Brudos was a gentle man whose mild manner contrasted with his awesome physical strength. To his employers, Jerry was a fine worker. To his wife, he was a good husband. And to the Oregon police, Jerry Brudos was the most hideously twisted killer they had ever unmasked.

• The Stranger Beside Me - Ted Bundy: The Classic Story of Seduction & Murder (1980) - Ann Rule was a writer working on the biggest story of her life, tracking down a brutal mass-murderer. Little did she know that Ted Bundy, her close friend, was the savage slayer she was hunting.

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