1974: Spared the Gallows, Paroled from Alcatraz, Caught at Last: the Arrest of the Want-Ad Killer
The Want Ad Killer,Harvey Carignan, was arrested in Minnesota on 24 September 1974, at the end of a ten-day rampage. A woman he had left for dead in a field survived and raised the alarm, two others escaped when he stopped for petrol, and an 18-year-old was found dead in a cornfield just four days before police caught up with him.
He should have been hanged in 1949. A soldier stationed in Alaska, he was sentenced to death for murdering a woman, but the conviction collapsed because an officer had promised he would not be executed if he confessed. With the confession thrown out, the murder charge was dismissed. He served time for a separate assault instead, part of it in Alcatraz, and was paroled in 1960.
By the early 1970s he was the prime suspect in two killings in Washington state, one of them a teenager who had answered his “help wanted” ad for a job at his service station. He was never charged, and moved on to Minnesota. After his arrest, his plea that God had ordered him to kill failed; he was convicted of two murders and died in prison in 2023, aged 95.
