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In total, he is suspected of having killed 18 women. He is one of those serial killers that in addition to acting cruel, looks very much intimidating as well. His name is Harvey Lewis-Karrignan, known to the media as Hov the Hammer. This podcast has in excess of 7 million downloads in total, but both my Patreon page and my Facebook page are only visited by a few thousand.
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So please take a moment of your valuable time and go to patreon.com slash the Serial Killer Podcast and consider making a donation. Any donation, no matter how small, is greatly appreciated. Imagine if you will, the listener. Anchorage, Alaska, United States of America, in the year of 1949.
It's summertime, the 31st of July. The apocalyptic Second World War is fresh in your memory as it ended only 4 years earlier. Anchorage was then, as it is now, not a very large city, and its location on the cold northern state of Alaska gives it a distinct frontier feeling. A young man, very large and muscular and rough looking, was on leave from his station at Fort Richardson in Anchorage.
His name is Harvey-Louis Karignan, and he is in the process of raping a mother and grandmother. Her name was Laura Schowatler, and she is 57 years old, as Karignan forces himself on her, violently penetrating her vagina, causing extreme trauma and pain. And finally, starts furiously beating that defenseless woman on the face, again and again and again, causing her to lose consciousness before internal bleeding and shock results in her death. Her face had been virtually destroyed from chin to forehead, bone and tissue crushed to a pulp under the merciless battering.
According to the investigating police officer, the killer had been extremely strong, and I quote, with one punch he blasted a hole through her skull like a rocket slamming into a tank. Less than two months later, Karignan attempted to rape Dorcas Callan, but she escaped. It had been early in the day, only 11 a.m., but Karignan was very drunk, and Dorcas noticed him as he stumbled out of a nearby tavern on Anchorage Street. He saw that she was looking at a man confronted her, asking her with a smirk, if she wanted to take a ride with him.
She refused, and started to turn away from him. He shouted at her that he thought he knew her from earlier, at which she asked him to please go away, and that he did not know her. Young Dorcas was by now very frightened, as the memory of the woman who had been raped and killed in this very neighborhood only a few weeks earlier, now sprang to mind. Karignan was by now getting really angry, and he was blocking her way, not letting her leave.
Before she could do anything, he grabbed her, and started to drag her away from the street. They both fell into a ditch by the roadside, and he was on top of her, tearing into her clothes, and she felt his hands clutching at her breasts, her vagina, her face. In moments, she was sure he was going to rape her. Dorcas was not as frail as show-at-ler had been, and she summoned all her strength, grabbing the soft dirt walls of the ditch as she screamed her lungs out for escape.
The man on top of her was so very strong, almost inhuman, and he was by now beating her. But, as he stopped briefly in order to remove his underpants, she managed to kick free and sprang to her feet and ran across the street to the tavern. Karignan did not follow, and he fled the scene. Once in hospital, she relived the terror of the attacking detail, through a mask of bruised and blooded facial skin.
But she gave the police an excellent description of her attacker. It was so good that Karignan was picked up by police the very same day. Naturally, police confronted Karignan about the murder of show-at-ler. The police officer interrogating him made a fatal flaw.
In the interrogation, he promised Karignan that if he confessed, he would not face the death penalty. Knowing that he had left plenty of evidence, Karignan was only happy to confess the murder if it meant he would not have to be killed by the state. His first trial stood in 1915 in the District Court for the Territory of Alaska. Third Division, Justice George W.
Fulton presiding. Karignan was quickly found guilty, and to his anger and surprise, the judge wasted no time sentencing him to hang by his neck until dead. However, at the subsequent appeal in the Supreme Court of the United States, the death penalty was overruled, as his interrogation was deemed amisable as evidence. Harvey escaped the hangman's nukes, but forfeited his freedom with a 15-year sentence.
Prisoner number 2272 was transferred from the Sea Ward Jail in Alaska to the U.S. Penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington State. Less than two years later, in 1952, he was transferred to the world's most infamous prison, Alcatraz. There he served eight more years, and on the 2nd of April, 1960, he was enrolled.
But who was this hulking violent killer? Harvey Louis Karignan was born on the 18th of May, 1927, in Fargo, North Dakota. His 20-year-old mother was not married. When he was three or four, his mother married and had a second son.
At the age of six, he was undersized and had a twitch in his face. He was also a chronic bedwetter and had an imaginary friend he called Paul. When Karignan was eight, he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Cavalier, North Dakota, which lasted a short time and he was sent back home. When he turned ten, he was sent to live with his grandmother in Williams, North Dakota, then sent to live with another aunt before going back home to his mother.
He was still suffering from bedwetting and started stealing. At age eleven, he was sent to reform school in Mandan, North Dakota for seven years. During this time, he was diagnosed with childhood Korea, a nervous disorder marked by a muscular switching of arms, legs and face. Karignan claimed female employees sexually abused him.
He wrote a letter to an author dated the 12th of June, 1993, where he says, and I quote, I had a teacher who used to sit at my desk and we would write dirty notes back and forth. I was either thirteen or fourteen at a time and just showed me a fourteen-year-old boy anywhere who wouldn't willingly and happily sit in a school room and exchange porno notes with his teacher. I never got to lay a hand on her without getting slapped, but she would keep me after school and make me stand before her while she masturbated and called me names and told me what she was going to make me do. None of those threats she ever kept am it, the bitch wouldn't even let me masturbate with her and took my penis out and she beat a living shit out of me.
She had enormously large breasts. She was truly a cruel woman. End quote. After his parole on the 4th of August, 1960, he was arrested for a third-degree burglary and assault with intent to commit rape.
Fortunately for him, the rape charge was dropped through a lack of evidence. If it had stuck, he would have been returned to prison to never be released again. However, as a parole violator, he was sentenced to two thousand and eighty-six days in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. On the 2nd of March, 1964, less than a year after John F.
Kennedy had been shot in the head and killed, Catechnann registered as parole convict number C5073. Later that same year, on the 22nd of November, he was yet again arrested. This time not for rape, but traffic vagrancy and 2nd degree burglary. His sentence was tricked, fifteen years in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla.
However, although not the best at hiding his crimes, Catechnann was not a stupid man. He applied himself while at Walla Walla and 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.
His tutors were thoroughly impressed with his efforts and his apparent improvement as a citizen. However, when Harvey was alone with other prisoners, it was apparent that his psychological dark underbelly was still very much present. He talked of how he fantasized about new-bye young girls, and he had developed a fixation on young flesh. In 1968, he was paroled.
A year later he married Sheila Moran and moved in with her and her daughter. That same year, he was arrested for parole violation and suspicion of robbery. He was sent back to Walla Walla for another year, and his new wife promptly divorced him. And so it was.
But a year after the summer of love in 1969, Harvey Lewis Catechnann was again a free man. Harvey was by now middle-aged, but he still had his rugged muscular physique, and on the 14th of April 1972, he married Alice Johnson. She was a plain woman, very naive, and she fell for what she thought was a hard-working, decent man. She had a son named Billy who was 11 years old, and a pretty daughter called Georgia, who was only 14.
Harvey, having spent the last several years in prison, fantasizing about new-bye young underage girls, was soon lusting after her. By now, Catechnann had managed to lease a save-more gas station from the Time Oil Company. It soon came to Alice's attention that her husband always had a string of young teenage girls working for him at the station, manning the pumps. The girls would never stay long and left or disappeared soon after having started, only to be replaced by a new girl just as young and pretty as the last one.
Alice quickly got wise about Catechnann being obsessed with very young teenage girls. He often approached girls he saw with obscene suggestions and remarks. Alice's daughter, Georgia, experienced Harvey's lurid attention, and when Alice confronted him about it, he flew into a violent rage. He would scream in her face and often take out his anger on young Billy, beating him.
Unsurprisingly, the marriage fell apart soon afterwards. The collapse of his second marriage seems to be the catalyst to Harvey Catechnann's frenzy. On the 27th of July, 1972, Virginia Piper disappeared. I despeculated that Catechnann had kidnapped her.
The 15th of October, 1972, 19-year-old Leslie Laura Brock of Bellingham, Washington, was found dead. She died from several blows to the head. Witnesses later claimed that they saw her getting into Catechnann's silver truck. On the 1st of May, 1973, Kathy Sue Miller, age 15, answered Catechnann's want-add for employees at a service station that he was leasing.
She was a very attractive girl with long blonde hair and the faintest suggestion of freckles sprinkling over her fair skin. Catechnann was by now 46 years old, but he looked older due to his ragged looks, receding hairline and a large scar across his eye. He met her in his car and offered to drive her to the office in order to fill out an application. Instead of driving her to the office, he took her to the hills, where he savagely raped her.
Her body was found months later by two boys, hiking on the Indian Reservation north of Everett, Washington. She was naked, bundled in a sheet of plastic, and had been beaten with a hammer which left nickel-sized holes in her skull. On the 28th of June, 1973, 47-year-old Mary Townsend was attacked by Catechnann at a bus stop. He attacked her from behind, knocking her unconscious.
When she awoke, she was in his vehicle and he began to command sexual favors, but she managed to leap from the vehicle and escape. By May of 1974, Catechnann had given up on Alice and started dating and living with Eileen Hunley, whom he picked up hitchhiking after moving to Minnesota. In August, Eileen broke off her relationship with him. She disappeared on the 10th of August, 1974.
Her rotting corpse was found five weeks later in Shelbourne County. Her skull was imploded by the force of savage hammer blows, and she had been raped with a tree branch. This murder seems to have set off another frenzied bloodlust in Catechnann with three attacks on six girls in under one month. On the 8th of September 1974, Catechnann picked up 17-year-old June Lynch and 16-year-old Lisa King, who were hitching rides in Minneapolis.
Once they reached the outskirts of town, he stopped a car and started beating June into head and face with a hammer. Lisa escaped. While she was running for help, Catechnann sped off, leaving June on the roadside for dead. Not satisfied with the unfinished attack on the two teenagers, the next day he picked up Jerry Billings, a 13-year-old hitchhiker.
What follows is the police report on her attack, and I quote, The said victim was hitchhiking in Minneapolis when the defendant, driving a truck, camper, stopped, engaged in conversation as to where she was going and stated that he would take her to her destination directly. He then forced her to commit oral sodomy upon him, with the threat of hitting her with a hammer, which he picked up from a compartment between the seats of his truck. He compelled her to remove her clothing by threatening to, quote, put a hammer through your head. The defendant then attempted to shove the handle of the hammer up into her vagina.
Struck her several times in the area of her buttocks with said hammer when she assisted the advances of the defendant. Again, he compelled her to commit oral sodomy on him, drove to a cornfield, where he compelled her to lie on her stomach, where he attempted to have intercourse with her through the rectum. Then, for the third time, he compelled her to commit oral sodomy on him, then he permitted the victim to get dressed and drove her home. End quote.
If you are wondering, Delizna, what is meant by oral sodomy, it is the act of licking the swintzer the anus. Only six days after his brutal attack on jerry billings, Kärägnän picked up Gwen Button from a Sears parking lot. He ripped her clothing, choked her into semi-end consciousness, and sexually assaulted her with a hammer. He dumped her body in a nearby field, but she was survived and was able to crawl to the roadside for help.
Four days after, he picked up Versoy and Diane Flynn. He forced them to perform oral sex and would beat them if they didn't follow his commands. The two girls were able to escape when Kärägnän stopped for fuel. Two days later, Cathy Schulz did not show up at her classes.
Her body was found the next day by hunters in a cornfield 40 miles from Minneapolis. As in the other cases, Cathy's skull had been destroyed by crushing hammer blows. By this time, police in Minneapolis were talking to their counterparts in Washington, and within days, survivors started picking Kärägnän out of lineups, as the man who had abducted and assaulted them throughout the past two years. A search of his possessions turned up some maps with 181 red circles, drawn in isolated areas of the United States and Canada.
Some of the circles indicated places where he had applied for jobs or purchased vehicles, but others seemed to link him with a string of unsold homicides and other crimes involving women. One circle marked the place where Laura Brock had disappeared near Küpville, Washington, another at Madora, North Dakota, coincided with the discovery of a murdered girl in April of 1973. Yet another had been drawn around a very intersection in Vancouver, where Mary Townsend had been waiting for the city bus, and had been assaulted from behind and beaten with a hammer. In February of 1975, Kärägnän was tried on the attempted murder and aggravated sodomy in Gwen Burton's case.
He pled not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming that God told him to kill those women. The jury was not convinced by the insanity plea and found him guilty. He was sentenced to 150 years imprisonment, with the possibility of parole after 40 years. Kärägnän has not been granted parole, and turned 91 years old on the 18th of May, 2018.
He is still serving time at the Minnesota Correctional Facility, Faribolt. And so ends the tale of Harv the Hammer. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, and I couldn't have done it without my loyal listeners. This podcast has been able to bring serial killer stories to life, especially thanks to those of you that support me, the Apatrion.
You can do so at the serialkillerpodcast.com.com. Or patreon.com.com.com. The Serial Killer Podcast. There are especially a few patrons that have stayed loyal for a long time.
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So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. As always, thank you, dare listen. For listening, and feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app, Facebook or website. And please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it.
Thank you. Good night and good luck.