A four-part series examining the life and crimes of Harvey Carignan is now available on The Vault, Forum Communications Co.’s premier true-crime investigative podcast.
"Crafting a Killer: The Harvey Carignan Story" follows a three-part article series published on The Vault — but the podcast goes even further, examining Carignan’s childhood in North Dakota, highlighting an interview with a surviving victim, and exploring possible connections between Carignan and other cold cases.
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Carignan was a serial killer, often referred to as “The Want Ad Killer” or “Harvey the Hammer” — monikers tied to his methods of killing and his alleged use of a classified ad to lure at least one young woman.
Born and raised in North Dakota, Carignan left the state at age 19 — and quickly began a life of crime.
Three years after leaving North Dakota, he was convicted of murder in Alaska and sentenced to death by hanging in 1950. A legal technicality ultimately sent his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his conviction was vacated.
Carignan escaped death, but he was sent to Alcatraz for a sexual assault committed in Alaska. He went on to face convictions in Duluth and Seattle for robberies in the 1950s and 1960s.
By the 1970s, Carignan’s list of female victims, whom he often sexually assaulted and beat with a hammer, had grown.
His killing spree ended in Minnesota in 1974, when a 19-year-old nursing student — whom he sexually assaulted, beat with a hammer and threw into a ravine — survived. She identified him as her assailant.
Detectives were then able to connect him to the murders of two other women in Minnesota, both of whom died from blows to the back of the head, as well as another case in which a woman was brutally beaten but survived.
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However, detectives have long believed he was responsible for more.
A map found in Carignan’s car showed 180 red marks throughout the United States and British Columbia. Three of those marked areas corresponded with locations where the bodies of three young women were found. Law enforcement throughout the two countries was alerted, yet no other women were found.
The podcast series also explores other cases possibly connected to Carignan, including Lora Dugan, a 14-year-old Montana girl whose body was found in North Dakota in the spring of 1972. She was hitchhiking along a route Carignan frequently took from Seattle to Minneapolis.
Joli Truelson, a 16-year-old Minneapolis girl who died from blunt-force trauma to the back of the head in 1972, is also featured in the series. Reporting into Carignan’s story uncovered new information that raises the possibility that he could have been connected to Truelson’s unsolved murder.
Carignan died in a Minnesota prison in 2023. He was 95.
"Crafting a Killer: The Harvey Carignan Story" is available on all major podcast platforms, or clicking on the episodes below.