Harvey Carignan
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| “ | Crime certainly exists and should be punished, but most crimes were created by Congress and state legislatures at the behest of the criminal justice system to grow and become more powerful. | „ |
| ~ Harvey Carignan |
Harvey Louis Carignan (May 18, 1927 – March 6, 2023) was an American serial killer who was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of two women in the early 1970s. He had been previously convicted of a 1949 rape and murder he committed while stationed in the U.S. Army, in Anchorage, Alaska. He was imprisoned at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Faribault until his death in 2023.
History edit
Harvey married after his probation, but their relationship was doomed from the start. Carignan frequently got up at night and drove long distances, "to be alone and to think." When she refused to share her thoughts or name her destinations on the long night tours, the marriage fell apart.
Upon remarrying another widow in 1972, Carignan showed no improvement. His lustful attentions to a teenage stepdaughter eventually forced the girl to flee her home, and she faced another failed marriage in the spring of 1973.
That May, young Kathy Miller responded to Harvey's ad for employees at a gas station she rented. The girl disappeared for a month before two boys discovered her remains while they were walking on an Indian reservation north of Everett, Washington. Naked and wrapped in plastic sheeting, Kathy had been beaten with a hammer, punching five-cent-size holes in her skull.
Detectives in Seattle knew Harvey's record, and harassed him so intensely that he left his city shortly after Kathy Miller's body was recovered.
A speeding ticket from Solano County, California, on June 20 placed Carignan nearby, where half a dozen women had been killed in the past two years, but there was nothing solid that connected him to the crimes, and was on the way. -country, seeking refuge in their former family dens in Minneapolis.
On June 28, Marlys Townsend was assaulted at a bus stop in that city, beaten from behind. She woke up in Harvey's car, still stunned by the blow, but when he tried to force her to jerk him off, she found enough strength to save herself by jumping out of the vehicle.
Police made no connection to the human time bomb in their midst. On September 9, Thirteen-year-old Jewry Billings was traveling in Minneapolis to get to her boyfriend's house, when Carignan stopped and offered her a ride.
Inside the car, he threatened Jewry with a hammer, jerking her off with the hammer handle in and out of her vagina. When he was done with her, Carignan released her battered captive, but the incident was so humiliating that the girl kept it as a well-kept secret for several months.
A year would pass before detectives witnessed Harvey's work again.
On September 8, 1974, he picked up Lisa King and June Lynch, both sixteen, while traveling in Minneapolis. He offered money if the girls helped him find another car that had been stranded in a rural area.
However, once out of town, Harvey stopped the car and started hitting June over the head and face. When Lisa ran for help, he quickly pulled away and left his latest victim bleeding on the road.
A month earlier, on August 10, another romance had collapsed for Harvey, ending no less tragically for his intention. Eileen Hunley was a woman of the church, she looked for the good in the others. She had looked for good in Harvey Carignan when they started dating, but failed. He had informed his friends of his intention to end the relationship, but Eileen Hunley disappeared on August 10. When she was found in Sherbourne County five weeks later, it would be a rotting corpse, her skull imploded from the force of hammer blows.
Of the 150 years in prison, the murderer will have to legally fulfill no more than 40, in case of presenting "good behavior".
Carignan died at Minnesota Correctional Facility – Oak Park Heights on March 6, 2023, at the age of 95.