The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  The murders had started, he said, with Joanna Messina, the woman he had met in a town called Seward. She was living in a tent in the woods with her dog, waiting for a job in a cannery. Hansen had got into conversation with her and taken her out to dinner. Afterwards, they went back to her tent, near a gravel pit, where Hansen hoped she would be prepared to let him stay the night. When they were in bed, she told him she needed money. His natural meanness affronted, he called her a whore and shot her with a .22 pistol; then shot her dog, destroyed the camp, and dumped her body into the gravel pit.

  According to Hansen, he was violently sick after the murder. Not long afterwards, he picked up a prostitute and asked her if she would fellate him. She agreed, and they drove out along the Eklutna Road. Then, according to Hansen, she became nervous and ran away; when he gave chase, she drew a knife. He took it from her and stabbed her to death. That was how the unidentified corpse known as ‘Eklutna Annie’ came to lie in a shallow grave, to be dug up by a hungry bear.

  This time, Hansen did not feel nauseated. In fact, he said, when he looked back on the murder, he experienced an odd pleasure. Then he began to fantasise about how enjoyable it would be to hunt down a woman like an animal . . . Like so many other serial killers, Hansen had discovered that murder is addictive.

  Over the next three years he drove about sixty prostitutes out into the wilderness and demanded oral sex. If they complied satisfactorily, he drove them back to Anchorage. If not, he forced them to strip at gunpoint, then to flee into the woods. When the hunt was over and the girl lay dead, he buried the body, and made a mark on a map – he even tried to guide officers back to some of the murder sites, but had usually forgotten exactly where they were. Once, when they were hovering over Grouse Lake in a helicopter, he pointed down. ‘There’s a blonde down there. And over there there’s a redhead with the biggest tits you ever saw.’

  When Robert Hansen was tried in Anchorage, the death sentence had been abolished in Alaska, but it had still been in existence thirty-four years earlier, when another sadistic killer had been tried there for murder. The case of Harvey Carignan provides some interesting parallels with that of Robert Hansen. On Sunday 31 July 1949, stationed in Anchorage, he went on a drinking spree, and picked up a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Laura Showalter. They walked to a nearby park, but when the soldier tried to remove her underwear in broad daylight, she fought him off. The soldier went into a frenzy, and beat her violently with his fists – so violently that her face was virtually obliterated. Then he tried to rape her. At that moment, a man walked towards them. The soldier looked up and snarled: ‘Move on.’ The man, assuming that they were engaged in lovemaking, hurried away. The next morning he went past the same spot, and found the woman still lying there. The rape had not been completed.

  Six weeks later, on 16 September a soldier tried to rape a girl on a deserted Anchorage street at eleven o’clock in the morning; she succeeded in fighting him off. She described him as tall, and as strong as an ape. Later, the police picked up a man answering to her description – a soldier named Harvey Louis Carignan, born in 1927. Carignan eventually confessed to the murder of Laura Showalter, and was sentenced to death. However, the police had omitted a vital step in the legal proceedings – to charge him with the murder before taking him before a marshal for interrogation – and on appeal, the sentence was overturned. Harvey Carignan might have gone free but for the second rape attempt; for this he was sentenced to fifteen years.

  He was paroled in 1960, but his freedom did not last long. Four months later he was arrested for burglary and attempted rape; for this he received five and a half years. Paroled in 1964, he was soon sentenced to another fifteen years for burglary. Good conduct earned him so much remission that he was back on the streets by 1969. This time he made a determined attempt to adjust to ‘life on the outside’, and found himself a wife in Seattle. The marriage soon failed, and Carignan narrowly avoided another life sentence – he was waiting for his wife with a hammer, but it was his stepdaughter who came down to the basement. He packed up and left. A second marriage in 1972 was slightly more successful; he leased a gas station in Seattle and settled into his wife’s home. But after almost twenty years in jail, his sexual daydreams were all of teenage girls. On 1 May 1972 he placed an advertisement in the want-ads column of the Seattle Times, offering a job at the Sav Mor Garage. It was answered by a fifteen-year-old girl named Kathy Sue Miller, who wanted a job for the summer vacation. The next day, she went off to meet the owner of the station. It was the last time she was seen alive by her family. Her schoolbooks were found in Everett, twenty-six miles from her home. Harvey Carignan was questioned by police – he had been away for several hours on that day – but he continued to deny meeting Kathy. Her violated body was found on 3 June 1972 among dense undergrowth north of Everett. She had been killed by a tremendous blow from some blunt instrument. There was still no proof that Harvey Carignan had ever met Kathy Miller.

  When he became tired of being questioned by the police, Carignan decided to leave town. He drove south to California. Between February 1972 and December 1973, eleven girls were murdered in the Sonoma County area, near San Francisco. Most had been battered to death, one with a crushing blow to the back of the skull, and seven had been raped. Carignan has never been accused of any of these crimes, but they are consistent with his method. Early in 1974 he moved back to his former home, Minneapolis. On 28 June a woman waiting at a bus stop was knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head. When she woke up, she was in a pick-up truck with a scowling, bald-headed man. When he tried to place her hand on his flies, she made a grab for the door handle. He seized her by the hair, but it proved to be a wig; the woman fled, leaving it in his hand.

  On 9 September 1973 a thirteen-year-old runaway named Jerri Billings was hitchhiking in north-eastern Minneapolis. The pick-up truck that stopped for her was driven by a huge man with a bald head and a receding, ape-like chin. When they had driven a short distance, he unzipped his fly, then grabbed her by the back of the neck and forced her head down to his penis; she was made to perform fellatio on him. Then, still driving fast, he order her to remove her jeans and panties. She thought it was a preliminary to rape, but was mistaken. What he did was to force a hammer handle into her vagina, and move it up and down as though it were a penis. After that he made her fellate him again. When she tried to raise her head, he hit her a blow with the hammer. Soon after this he stopped in a cornfield, and made an attempt to sodomise her. Unable to penetrate, he made her fellate him again, then – amazingly – allowed her to dress and drove her to the nearest town. He ordered her to tell no-one what had happened. She kept her secret for nearly two months, then went to the police. They had no leads on the rapist, and the investigation lost momentum.

  In January 1974 Carignan offered help to three Jehovah’s Witnesses whose car had broken down. One of them was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old named Eileen Hunley. In May of that year, they began to see a great deal of one another, but by July, she was disillusioned; he drank too much and had a hair-trigger temper. She told him she did not want to see him any more. On 10 August 1974 Eileen Hunley vanished.

  A month later, on 8 September two teenage girls, June Lynch and Lisa King, were hitchhiking in Minneapolis when a big middle-aged man stopped to offer them a lift, and offered them money if they would help him bring down a truck from Mora. He turned off into some woods and asked June Lynch to go with him. Lisa King heard her friend scream and ran to see what was the matter. June was lying on the ground, bleeding from the head, and the man had gone. In hospital, it was established that June had been hit on the head with a hammer seven times and was suffering severe concussion.

  On 14 September the big man driving a green Chevrolet picked up a nineteen-year-old girl named Gwen Burton, whose car had broken down, and offered to drive home to get tools. When they were outside town, he grabbed her by the neck and forced her to fellate him. After this he ripped off her jeans and underwear, the
n throttled her. She recovered consciousness to find herself lying on a blanket in a field. The man forced her to commit oral sodomy, then inserted a hammer handle into her vagina, tearing the hymen. After that he punched her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her, and battered her with the hammer.

  When Gwen Burton woke up again, she succeeded in crawling to a road, where a tractor stopped for her. In hospital, her life was saved by immediate surgery – there were fragments of bone in the brain tissue. She recovered eventually, but her health was permanently impaired.

  On 18 September 1974 the body of a woman was found in Sherburne County, north of Minneapolis; she had been killed with hammer blows, and her vagina had been lacerated by some hard object, probably a hammer handle. She was eventually identified as Eileen Hunley, missing since August.

  A few days later, the man in the green Chevrolet picked up two girls, and offered them twenty-five dollars to help him recover a car. On a lonely road he began to talk about rape, and when one of the girls asked how far they still had to go, he hit her in the mouth. Their abductor had to stop for gas, and the girls managed to escape.

  On 20 September an eighteen-year-old girl named Kathy Schultz disappeared from Minneapolis; the following day, her violated body was found by two hunters forty miles north of Minneapolis; she had been killed with hammer blows.

  Now, at least, the police had several good descriptions of the man they sought: middle-aged, balding and very big, and driving a green Chevrolet. On 24 September 1974 two policeman on patrol saw a man who answered that description, and watched as he approached a green Chevrolet. When they pulled up behind the car, it drove off at speed; they eventually forced it to move over. The driver identified himself as Harvey Carignan. When four of the attacker’s victims unhesitatingly picked him out in a line-up, Harvey Carignan’s career of rape and murder was at an end.

  On 14 February 1975 Harvey Carignan was tried on charges relating to Gwen Burton, the girl who had been sodomised and left for dead.

  The line taken by Carignan’s defence was that he was guilty but insane. Carignan himself told the jury that he had picked up Gwen Burton because God had told him to. In fact, he insisted that he frequently held conversations with God, and that it was God who told him to kill. The jurors chose to disbelieve that he was insane, and found him guilty on all counts. Before sentencing, he was tried for the attack on the thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, Jerri Billings. This time, Carignan simply denied that he had ever seen her. Again the jury disbelieved him, and found him guilty. Harvey Carignan was sentenced to sixty years in prison. Even with one third remission for good conduct, this meant that he would serve forty years.

  In the following year, Carignan saved the taxpayers the expense of a trial when he pleaded guilty to murdering Kathy Schultz. He unexpectedly pleaded not guilty to murdering Eileen Hunley. Again, the evidence was against him, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  After the Gwen Burton trial, Harvey Carignan was sent to St Peter State Hospital for a psychiatric examination. The story he told made it clear that here was yet another classic case of the serial killer syndrome. He had been an illegitimate child and the father – a young doctor – declined to stand by the girl he had made pregnant. Harvey was an undersized, lonely child who wet the bed far beyond the usual age. His mother had been only seventeen at the time of his birth, and she showed little affection for the child who had disrupted her life. ‘She was pretty mean,’ Carignan told psychiatrists. His mother married when he was four, and bore a second son. Harvey’s life became even more lonely and loveless. As the bedwetting became worse, he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. They soon tired of him and sent him back. When he also began to steal, he was sent to a reform school in Mandan, North Dakota. He was only just twelve years old, and he stayed there until he was eighteen, old enough to join the army.

  In order to escape from a life that he found intolerable, Harvey Carignan became an obsessive reader and daydreamer. He was, in fact, highly intelligent, and in different circumstances, would probably have done well. In spite of his almost permanent scowl, he possessed a great deal of charm; in jail he was a model prisoner, and one of his warders described him as ‘a perfect gentleman’.

  Perhaps the strangest part of Carignan’s account of his childhood is his insistence that he was sexually assaulted by several older women; this, he insisted, was what made him feel defensive and hostile towards women, so that any sign of rejection turned to uncontrollable rage. The psychiatrists were inclined to doubt the truth of the story; but there can be little doubt that Carignan believed it happened. It was his rage at being rejected by an older woman in Anchorage, Alaska, that led to his first murder, and to the death sentence that almost ended his career of murder three decades earlier.

  In her book on the case, The Want-Ad Killer, Ann Rule comments: ‘There is, today, no known treatment that is effective in changing the structure of the antisocial personality. The defect is believed to originate in early childhood, usually before the age of five, and once the child is so damaged, his complete lack of compassion for others only becomes more solidly entrenched as he grows to manhood.’

  In Carignan’s case, as in that of Cameron Hooker, Robert Poulin, Harvey Glatman, and other killers discussed in this chapter, the frustrated craving for affection turned into a craving for power over the women who denied it. This seems to explain why, although normally sexually potent, Carignan preferred to violate his victims with a hammer handle. Rape with a penis would have seemed close to an act of love-making, and Carignan had no intention of expressing love: only rage, and the desire to obliterate.

  While a psychologist would undoubtedly classify Folk, Hansen and Carignan as ‘degenerates’, none could be described as a psychotic: that is, as clinically insane.

  Reinhardt comments: ‘While I do not attempt here to draw fine distinctions between “degeneracy” and various forms of psychoses, there is no question in my mind that many sadists, as well as other sexually perverted types, suffer marked psychoses’ – in other words, are technically insane. Reinhardt is discussing a sadistic pervert named Albert Fish, who was executed in Sing Sing in January 1936. Fish remains the classic example of the psychotic serial killer.

  On 28 May 1928 a mild-looking old man called on the family of a doorman named Albert Budd in a basement in Manhattan. He explained he had come in answer to a job advertisement placed in a New York newspaper by Budd’s eighteen-year-old son Edward. His name, he said, was Frank Howard, and he owned a farm on Long Island. The old man so charmed the Budds that the following day they allowed him to take their ten-year-old daughter Grace to a party; she left in a white confirmation dress, holding Howard’s hand. The Budds never saw Grace again; the address at which the party was supposed to be held proved fictitious, and no farmer by the name of Frank Howard could be traced on Long Island. The kidnap received wide publicity, and the police investigated hundreds of tips. Detective Will King of the Missing Persons Bureau became particularly obsessed with the crime and travelled thousands of miles in search of ‘Frank Howard’.

  Six years later, the Budds received an unsigned letter that was clearly from the kidnapper. He stated that he had taken Grace Budd to an empty house in Westchester, then left her picking flowers while he went inside and stripped off his clothes; then he leaned out of the upstairs window and called her in. Confronted by this skinny naked man, Grace began to cry and tried to run away; he seized her and strangled her. Then he cut her in half, and took the body back home, where he ate parts of it. ‘How sweet her little ass was, roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished.’ (In fact, Fish was to admit to his attorney that this was untrue.) Finally, he took the bones back to the cottage and buried them in the garden.

  With a brilliant piece of detective work, Will King traced the writer – the letter had arrived in an envelope with the inked-out logo of a chauffeurs’ benevolent association on the flap. One of the cha
uffeurs finally admitted that he had taken some of the association’s stationery and left it in a room he used to rent on East 52nd Street. This now proved to be rented by a tenant who called himself A.H.Fish, and his handwriting in the boarding house register was identical with that of the letter writer. King kept watch on the room for three weeks before Albert Fish – the mild little old man – returned. He agreed unhesitatingly to go to headquarters for questioning, but at the street door, suddenly lunged at King with a razor in each hand. King disarmed and handcuffed him. Back at police headquarters, Fish made no attempt to deny the murder of Grace Budd. He had gone to her home, he explained, with the intention of killing her brother Edward, but when Grace had sat on his knee during dinner, had decided that he wanted to eat her.

  He took the police to the cottage in Westchester, where they unearthed the bones of Grace Budd. Later, under intensive questioning, he admitted to killing about four hundred children since 1910. (The figure has never been confirmed, and a judge involved in the case placed the true figure at sixteen.)

  Soon after his arrest, Fish was visited by a psychiatrist named Fredrick Wertham, who would appear for the defence. ‘He looked’, wrote Wertham, ‘like a meek and innocuous little old man, gentle and benevolent, friendly and polite. If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose.’ When Fish realised that Wertham really wanted to understand him, he became completely open and forthcoming.