Dorcas fought frantically to find a handhold in the soft dirt walls of the ditch.

He was very strong, almost inhumanly strong. Screaming, she managed to clamber out of the ditch and ran across the street to the tavern where she phoned

the police.

In hospital, she relived the terror of the attack in detail through a bloody mask

of bruised and bloodied facial skin. ‘He turned into something from Hell. His

fury came out of nowhere, like he was suddenly switched on with evil,’ she said

through swollen lips.

It was her description of her attacker that led to the arrest of Carignan later the

same day. He stood trial for the first-degree murder of Laura Showalter in 1950

in the District Court for the Territory of Alaska, Third Division, Justice George

W Folta presiding. The prosecution held as their ace card, a confession to

murder given to Marshal Herring. Harvey Carignan was found guilty and

sentenced to hang. At the subsequent appeal in the Supreme Court of the United

States, Justices Reed, Douglas, Black and Frankfurter agreed that Harvey

Carignan’s conviction had come about because of a breach of the McNabb Rule.

This held that confessions should be excluded if obtained during an illegal

detention due to failure to carry a prisoner promptly before a committing

magistrate. Because this rule had been violated, the Justices ruled Carignan’s

confession as inadmissible. Thus Harvey escaped the hangman’s noose but

forfeited his freedom with a 15-year sentence. Prisoner #22072 was transferred

from the Seward Jail in Alaska to the US Penitentiary at McNeil Island,

Washington State.

During his interview with the author, Carignan stated, ‘Laura Showalter …

Dorcas Callen? Those names mean nothin’ to me.’

*

Carignan was transferred to US Prison Alcatraz, California, on 13 September

1951, where he spent the next nine years. On 2 April 1960, at the age of 32, he

was paroled. Except for his few years in the Army, he had not been at liberty

since he was a child of 11.

After landing at San Francisco’s waterfront jetty wearing a cheap prison-issue

suit, with his bag of belongings at his feet, he watched as the small prison launch

chugged its way back across the bay to ‘The Rock’, as Alacatraz is universally

known, then he boarded a train for Duluth, Minnesota. There he moved in with

one of his three half-brothers but, on 4 August 1960, just four months after his

release, he was arrested for third-degree burglary and assault with intent to

commit rape.

Fortunately for Carignan, the rape charge was dropped through lack of

evidence. If the rape charge had been proven, he would have returned to prison,

never to be released again. However, as a parole violator, he was sentenced to

2,086 days in the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, Kansas.

Carignan was back in the community in 1964, and moved swiftly to Seattle,

where, on 2 March, he registered as a parole convict C-5073. On 22 November

that year, he was arrested by the Sheriff of King County for traffic vagrancy and

second-degree burglary.

20 April 1965 saw him in the dock once again when he was sentenced to 15

years in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, one of the tri-state

cities comprising of Richland and Kennewick, on the south-east border of

Washington and Oregon.

Now locked up in one of the oldest and most notorious prisons in the United

States, Carignan applied his mind to making up for his earlier lack of education.

He obtained a high school diploma, took many college courses in sociology and

psychology, and submitted papers on sexual psychopathy, the paranoid

personality, and the well-adjusted individual. He read constantly, gained top

marks, and studied journalism – all of which impressed his tutors. But there was

a darker side that surfaced when he was alone. When talking with his fellow

inmates, Harvey fantasised about nubile, young girls and he had a fixation about

young flesh. He has often stated, and maintains even today, that young girls have

to be his ultimate choice, which for a man now aged 74, is a very unhealthy

desire indeed.

*

Middle-aged, and an ex-convict with unappealing physical characteristics,

Harvey’s chances of dating a teenager following his release from prison were

remote, so he met and married Sheila Moran, a divorcee with three children. She

had her own house in Ballard, the Scandinavian district of Seattle, where they

made a home together. Coming from a decent upbringing, Sheila was soon left

under no illusions about the personality of her new husband who hung around

with a bunch of villains. He was always out until the late hours, tearing around

in his car at breakneck speeds. Then, following Carignan’s vicious assault on her

aged uncle, she decided to pack up her things and take her children. She would

simply run away. For his part, Harvey decided to kill her, and waited in vain for

an entire night with a hammer clutched in his hand, but, fortunately, Sheila did not return home.

Harvey married again on 14 April 1972. Alice Johnson, a somewhat dim-

witted, plain woman in her 30s fell for him, and this naïve and gullible cleaning

woman with few friends thought she’d met a hard-working, decent man. Alice

had been married before and had a son, Billy, aged 11, and a pretty daughter,

Georgia, aged 14, whom Harvey was soon lusting after.

By this time, Carignan had managed to lease a Sav-Mor gas station from the

Time Oil Company, and it came to Alice’s attention that he always had a string

of young girls working the pumps. But no sooner had one started, she left, to be

replaced by another girl just as young and pretty. While this behaviour aroused

her suspicions, gossip led her to the confirmation that her husband was totally

obsessed by teenage girls. He would approach any girl he saw, with obscene

suggestions and remarks, and when Alice confronted him with reprimands, he

screamed and shouted at her, beat her son, and skulked away throwing lurid

glances at Georgia, which made his stepdaughter feel decidedly uncomfortable.

Not surprisingly, the marriage collapsed soon afterwards.

On 15 October 1972, Carignan raped and killed a teenager called Laura

Brock, near Mount Vernon, Washington State.