Kathy Miller was just a teenager, trying to help her boyfriend find a job. She reviewed the classified ads in the Seattle Times, because that’s how you found a job in 1973, by looking through the newspaper, and when she saw a simple ad — Service Station, Help Wanted — she called.
Her mother, Mary Miller, overheard her conversation from th e next room, and was alarmed to hear her sixteen year-old daughter give her full name, phone number, and address to the person on the other end. Although she had called to find a job for her boyfriend, the gas station’s proprietor seemed most interested in interviewing Kathy.
When she got off the phone, Kathy was bubbling over with excitement. The man on the phone wanted to pick her up in front of a nearby department store and take her to the service station so she could fill out an application. It didn’t sound right to Mary and she asked her daughter not to go.
“If you’re going to apply for a job, you should go to the business and apply. You shouldn’t just get into a car with a strange man,” she said.
[Introduction]
Kathy promised not to go and mother and daughter rode the bus together that morning, as they went off to work and school respectively. Despite the promise from her daughter, Mary Miller called police and recounted the odd job listing and strange circumstances of Kathy’s phone call with the man who ran the service station. The Detective she spoke with agreed that the situation was peculiar and urged Mary to make sure Kathy did not get in a car with a stranger, and told her to call again if anything else should come up.
When Mary got home from work that afternoon, Kathy was not home. By 6:30, Mary began making phone calls. She was able to confirm Kathy had been at school that day. She called the number from the classified ad and the man who answered said Kathy had been scheduled to meet for an interview at 2:45 but hadn’t showed up. At 8:00 Mary called 911 to report her daughter missing, and by 9:00 police officers had arrived at the Miller home.
Circumstances were not on Mary Miller’s side in the early hours of her daughter’s disappearance. In 1973, a phone number couldn’t be immediately looked-up in a computer database. The number from the classified ad couldn’t be traced until the phone company opened the next day. Mary talked to Kathy’s boyfriend, Mark, and he confirmed she had scheduled an appointment to meet with the owner of the service station anyway, against her mother’s wishes and the man had been scheduled to pick her up in a purple car. Mary was told she would need to speak with detectives in the Juvenile Unit, and they would not be on duty until the next morning.
Detectives chased down numerous leads, interviewed multiple subjects including the gas station owner and his employees, but nothing immediately led to Kathy Miller.
About a week after she disappeared, her school books were found in a parking lot in Everett, Washington, nearly 30 miles from where she had last been seen.
Kathy Miller’s body was found after a month and a day, in the first week of June, 1973, outside Everett. She was nude, wrapped in black plastic, and multiple skull fractures revealed her head had been bashed in.
The man who allegedly killed Kathy Miller would never be brought to justice for her murder, and most tragically, her death could have been prevented. You see, this beast had once been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of another woman. If not for a legal technicality and a mistake by a local sheriff, he would have hanged more than two decades before he ever had th e opportunity to lure Kathy to her death. It was a miscarriage of justice that would cost many more women their lives.
The Perpetrator: Harvey Carignan
The alleged perpetrator’s name was Harvey Carignan and records indicate he was born in Fargo, North Dakota on May 18, 1927 to a single, unwed mother. A strong indicator of the relationship (or lack thereof) that Carignan had with his mother is the fact that even he was unsure of his exact birthdate. His mother married a man when Harvey was three or four years old, gave birth to another son, and Harvey was shuffled off to live with relatives. As detailed by renowned true crime author Ann Rule in her book “The Want Ad Killer,” Harvey was a chronic bedwetter, suffered from a nervous twitch in his face, and had an imaginary friend named Paul. He was passed around his mother’s family, from Fargo to Cavalier, North Dakota for a time, back to Fargo, then to Williams, North Dakota, before he finally landed in a Mandan, North Dakota reform school. He grew to adulthood in the custody of that reform school, little more than a human warehouse where the concept of love was alien. By the time he reached 18, he was a tall, hulking man, and with few family ties, he went straight into the military from reform school. It took barely 3 years for him to get in serious trouble.
Carignan was stationed at Fort Richardson, the Army base in Anchorage, Alaska. On July 31st, 1949, a 57 year old local woman named Lau ra Showalter was raped and murdered. The authorities said it appeared the perpetrator had beaten her to death with his bare hands, and although there were several eyewitnesses who saw the killer, nobody could put a name to the tall man’s description.
In September, another area-woman, Dorcas Callen, was attacked, but she was able to escape and describe her attacker to police — he was a soldier, tall, and inhumanly strong, she said. Together with another eyewitness, Callen identified Harvey Carignan in a photo lineup and he was taken into custody and locked in the Anchorage City jail.
The modus operandi in the Callen attack was so similar to the Laura Showalter murder, Carignan immediately became the prime suspect. He was taken from the city jail to the US Marshal’s office where, for three days, he was prodded for a confession to the Showalter murder. He seemed to be stepping slowly toward offering a confession, then, he would retreat. Alaska was a territory then, not yet a state, and hanging was the default method of execution. Carignan feared hanging.
US Marshall Herring allowed Carignan to meet with a priest, and eventually promised Carignan he would not receive the death penalty if he confessed. Hesitantly, Carignan offered his confession, and in 1950, he was tried and convicted for the murder of Laura Showalter. He was sentenced to death… by hanging.
If the sentence had been carried out, that is where this story would end. A burgeoning psychopath, caught and executed with a body count tragically numbered one. But the sentence would not be carried out due to a s eries of missteps by the authorities in a time when post-arrest procedures were not as cut and dried as they are today.
The McNabb Rule
At risk of going deep in the weeds on 1950s arrest and prosecution protocol, appeals courts had a number of objections to Carignan’s arrest and subsequent interrogation and confession.
In 1950, law enforcement was still trying to break itself of long-held procedures based on the honor system. Prisoners were supposed to be promptly brought before a judge for arraignment, but that didn’t always happen, and confessions could not be coerced, but still, it happened more than it should. Further, the long standing practice of arresting a suspect for a minor crime so they could be questioned about a more serious one had become a problem. Prisoners were sometimes held for days without appearing before a judge, interrogated, occasionally even beaten, and a confession, true or not, was often the result.
By the time Carignan was arrested, courts had begun adhering to the McNabb rule, a legal precedent based on a murder case from 1940 which involved the murder of tax agents by suspected bootleggers in Tennessee. The McNabb rule established that suspects had to be quickly arraigned, and that their confessions were inadmissible if they hadn’t been brought before a judge on the charges they faced. Miranda warnings were not yet a thing in 1950.
Carignan had been arraigned for the attack on Ms. Callen but not the rape and murder of Laura Showalter when he had been questioned, and the appeals court ruled his confession inadmissible. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and became a precedent for cases that came later. Carignan’s death sentence for the Showalter murder was overturned and he was sentenced to just 15 years for the Callen attack. He went to prison, first in Alaska, then Washington State, and finally to Alcatraz, in 1952. In 1960, Carignan was paroled from The Rock, and a psychopath who escaped the hangman’s noose was free to prey on women once again.
A Killer At Large
If you need any more evidence of the depth of this monster’s depravity, you’ll find it in the frequency of his incarceration and his utter lack of control over his own sick inclinations. After parole in 1960, Carignan made it as a free man for only four months before he was again arrested for burglary, assault, and attempted rape, this time in Duluth, Minnesota. He was a parole violator and that got him a 5 ½ year sentence in Leavenworth. He was again paroled in 1964 at which time he moved to Seattle. He was free for less than a year when he was arrested again for burglary and sentenced to 15 years, and again he was freed after 4 years.
Carignan made an attempt to live something resembling a normal life for a time, tried marriage, but could never shake his propensity for violence and abuse. He married a Seattle widow who found his long drives in the middle of the night, to destinations he would not name, suspicious, and they divorced. He married another widow in 1972 but his leering gaze fell upon her teenage daughter and that marriage quickly disintegrated, too. He found himself in trouble with the law again and again, and he was suspected of perpetrating attacks, rapes, and murders all around the Pacific Northwest… including Calif ornia, where a speeding ticket placed him in the same vicinity as half a dozen women who had been murdered in the previous two years.
And then, there was the case of Kathy Miller. She had answered that classified ad placed by Harvey Carignan, and when she went to apply for the job, it was the last time she had been seen alive. Carignan had placed the ad and the phone number in the ad had been unlisted… it took some time for the police to track it down, but when they did, they sent detectives Billy Baughman and Duane Homan to question him. The man the patrol officers saw as a normal businessman, married, seemed like a quite likely perpetrator to the seasoned homicide detectives. And he owned a purple car.
They spoke to his parole officer who said Carignan seemed like he had gone straight, but that he had periods of extreme violence, that his ex-wife was terrified of him, and that he once beat up a prison guard and it took six guards to control him. The Detectives staked out Carignan’s house, but he laid low, rarely came outside except to go to work, and gave them nothing to work with.
As I told you at the beginning of this podcast, someone found Kathy Miller’s books about a week after she disappeared. They had been found in the parking lot of a local company in Everett, Washington, and the man who discovered them placed no significance on the find. A group of students had toured his facility and he thought one of them had forgotten their books. It was no help for the detectives. They searched the area but found nothing. They questioned other women who had worked for Carignan and several of them said he had propositioned them or made them feel uncomfortable. And eventually they questioned Carignan himself. He was nervous but had an answer for everything. He claimed Kathy Miller had never shown up for her interview. The detectives asked him to take a polygraph and he agreed, only to back out later.
The police turned up the pressure on the killer. They patrolled his neighborhood, driving by his house multiple times per day. The detectives believed Carignan might return to the scene where he had dumped Kathy Miller’s body, and they once resorted to following him in Seattle’s Police Helicopter. When the chopper had to set down for mechanical troubles, he escaped their surveillance.
Carignan was an especially slippery suspect.
Mary Miller didn’t understand why the Detectives couldn’t search his home, forcibly bring him in for interrogation. Probable cause has no meaning to a mother whose daughter is missing, and even though police pressure was unrelenting, his in-laws had started asking questions, and his wife Alice had left him and gone into hiding, Carignan did not crack. He continued to go to work and behave like an innocent man.
And as I told you before, Kathy Miller’s body was found after a month and a day, by two boys who had stopped to pick salmonberries in the wilderness north of Everett, Washington. The killer had been very careful to wrap the body in plastic to avoid leaving blood in his vehicle. Kathy had been beaten, the holes in her skull were about the size of the head of a hammer.
The police by this time were certain that Carignan had killed Kathy Miller and had become fairly certain he had also killed Laura Brock, a hitchhiker, in 1972. The police had a mountain of circumstantial evidence, but not a shred of actual physical evidence that directly connected Carignan to the murder of Kathy Miller. To start all over again, Harvey Carignan just had to disappear, and that’s what he did. And the worst of his crimes were still to come.
A New Hunting Ground
In June of 1973, Carignan was back at it, this time in Minnesota. In Minneapolis, he ambushed Marlys Townsend as she waited for a bus. He attacked her with a hammer and she later awoke in his car where he tried to assault her. She escaped when the monster tried to grab her by her hair, but it came off in his hand. She had been wearing a wig. She tumbled onto the pavement a nd took off running with a description of his vehicle in her mind. A pickup truck with a silver topper.
On September 9th of 1973, a thirteen year old hitchhiker, a runaway, reported being picked up by a big man in a pickup with a silver topper. He drove her into the country, used a hammer to beat her and violate her, but inexplicably let her go with a warning. “Don’t tell anyone… ever.” The girl told nobody for more than a month.
It was, really, the last lucky break Harevy Carignan would ever get. His sickness was ramping up and he was getting careless.
In 1974 Carignan started dating a woman he met in Minneapolis. When she broke up with him, she disappeared and her corpse was found five week later in Sherburne County. She had been murdered with hammer blows to h er head and had been violated with a tree branch. Carignan had made the mistake of murdering someone close to him… not a stranger, and suspicions mounted.
In September, he attempted to abduct two teen hi tchhikers at the same time, and while he assaulted one, the other escaped and ran for help. He fled and left the survivors on the side of the road.
His compulsion to rape and murder returned quickly.
A week later, posing as a helpful passerby, Carignan offered to help a woman get her car started in a Sears parking lot. He beat her, choked her, and assaulted her with a hammer, but she was able to escape.
He could not resist the urge to try again.
Only four days later, he again attempted to abduct two teen girls at once… this time with a ruse about helping him retrieve a car from another town. He physically assaulted them, but before he could attempt to have his way with them, he stopped to get gas and they were able to escape.
His sick appetite was becoming impossible to resist. His life was disintegrating and he was mad with rage and hate for women. For authority.
Only two days later, Kathy Schultz did not come home after a class at the Work Opportunity School where she was learning keypunch operation. She was found the next day in Isanti County, north of Minneapolis. Blunt force trauma to her head had killed her… hammer blows.
Carignan had left too many witnesses alive in Minnesota to get away with his crimes any longer, and there was too much evidence… descriptions of his vehicles, the pickup and a green Chevy Caprice, tire tracks, and physical descriptions of the perpetrator himself.
On September 24th, 1974, Carignan’s luck ran out. Two policemen observed a man who matched the description of the man who had attacked so many young girls in the Minneapolis area. They watched him from a distance to see what vehicle he might be driving… it was a green Chevy Caprice.
Carignan was arrested, and the times had changed. He was read his Miranda rights, identified in photo lineups by one victim after another, and brought to trial. There would be no technicalities to set him free this time. Despite an insanity defense, he was convicted of attempted murder for the attack o n the woman he met in a Sears parking lot, and again for the 13 year old hitchiker he assaulted in September of 1973. The monster got 40 years, a sentence which has since been extended due to his status as a dangerous offender. As of 2019, Carignan is 92 and still alive, imprisoned in the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Faribault, with no release date.
Questions Unanswered
There are many questions regarding the crimes of Harvey Carignan and his ability to elude justice for so many years. To stop future monsters from visiting their horrors on the innocent, we need to understand those who came before. What made the man a psychopath? It’s a question that’s been asked a thousand times and will be asked a thousand more. The question of nature versus nurture. Are killers born or made? There’s no doubt Carignan’s childhood played a strong role in his development as a sociopath narcissist with little empathy for others and no concept of love.
What have we learned from Carignan’s case and his ability to continuously offend? We learned to do it by the book. Law enforcement today knows to bring offenders before a judge for a speedy arraignment, and to question suspects only after they’ve been advised of their rights. A surprising number of them choose to talk anyway, and put themselves behind bars with their own words and their inability to control their own mouths.
Perhaps the hardest question to answer is, how many people did Harvey Carignan kill? Depending on who you ask, the accepted answer is somewhere between 5 and 10 based on what is likely and what can be proven. But there were a lot of occasions where Carignan’s presence and the death of young women corresponded. Unsolved murders in California. British Columbia. Kansas. Minnesota. Washington State.
181 Scarlet Circles
And then there were the maps. In the course of investigating Harvey Carignan, the authorities recovered multiple maps on which the murderer had circled locations in scarlet ink. 181 locations. Many of the circles designated remote areas for which the authorities could find no significance. Did some of them designate burial sites? One circle marked the very intersection where Carignan had attacked Marlys Townsend as she waited for a bus… another seemed to correlate with the spot where the body of Lora Jean Dugan was found in Medora, North Dakota in 1972. She had been last seen hitchiking from her home in Montana, along an Interstate Carignan frequently drove in his travels from the Pacific Northwest to Minnesota. Her murder was never solved.
181 scarlet circles. The implications are frightening.
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For further reading on the crimes of Harvey Carignan, read The Want Ad Killer by the late Ann Rule.
Other source material includes the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Seattle Times.
[feature photo] Chait Goli via Pexels.com
[music] Road to Hell, Dark Standoff, Echoes of Time, Symmetry, I can Feel It Coming, Devastation and Revenge, and Sovereign Quarter by Kevin McCleaod, Incompetech.com, Creative Commons License via FilmMusic.io
