Want Ad Killer – Another hit for Ann Rule!!

Imagine you are a mother of two – a son and a daughter. Your children are smart, fun to be around, full of life. Your daughter loves her younger brother and looks after him in quite a maternal way at times. She is intelligent, and yet naïve at a tender age of 15. There have been recent stories of savage attacks on young women in your area, and haunted by a dream you had years ago of terror striking your family, you are overly cautious to explain the cruel world to your teenager. You read to her the stories from the paper of these horrible disappearances. You give her all the motherly advice you swear these other girls must not have heard. Always stay in pairs, don’t go with a stranger anywhere, always be aware of your surroundings. You think you know your daughter like no one else. You are very close. And after you urge her not to go on an interview that seems fishy to you, and after she promises not to, you find out later that she did go and that decision might have been the last one she made willingly on her own.

From the beginning of this true life tale of murder and mayhem, Ann Rule draws you in and takes you into the life of this young girl, her mother and then slowly into the lives of several other women who all became victims of Harvey Louis Carignan. Nicknamed in prison “Harv the Hammer” but never called that to his face. This huge man of 6 feet 3 inches was said to have super human strength. He went off in rages when he self admittedly saw red and heard voices telling him to kill his victims and even his wife at one point. No one will ever know exactly how many women have fallen prey to this man. Detectives have linked him to over 6 attempted murders, and 4 deaths and suspected him in countless more. He has been tried and convicted of 3 of those acts, but in his state, the maximum sentence he will serve is only 40 years, no matter how many convictions he racks up.

Before his most recent apprehension, he was tried and convicted of raping a young woman in Alaska and actually sentenced to hang for his crime, but through a loophole in the law, he was released to continue to haunt women for many more years.

In “The Want-Ad Killer,” Ann Rule takes us into his life as a child as much as anyone can and she probes into his mind, helping us to see just how awful he really is. She writes with detail that reads like a novel. Ann weaves the story from Carignan's early years, through his institutionalized up-bringing and adult jail time. Often she takes the place of the victims and enters their minds telling us of what their thoughts must have been as this man was acting out his aggressions toward women in general. Carignan, so intelligent, so conniving, and so obviously demented, he has been accused of being the closest thing to Satan himself by the investigators who grew to know him all too well.

Harvey Carignan had an MO of picking up women through want ads, hitchhiking, or even just trying to fix their car in a parking lot, and taking them into desolate areas where they would meet their fate. He demanded them to perform oral sex on him and then he raped them with the handle of a hammer. He would take the girls into a field and bludgeon them to death with the same hammer and leave them for dead. Only by the grace of God and pure will did some of these girls survive to tell their stories. Harvey has been quoted as saying he would go back and kill them if he could just get at them. It made him mad that they didn’t die.

This book is fascinating and it is a great look into a sociopathic mind by one of the best true crime writers out there. It is definitely a fast read, only 229 with 8 pages of photos!! I would absolutely recommend this to a friend or anyone who is interested in true crime books!!

Ann Rule takes her experience as a former police officer and really helps the public get a glimpse of what these people are like. She has written over 1,000 articles and numerous books about true crime stories. She has also consulted the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program which tracks and captures violent criminals.

The only negative thing I can say about this book is that the editing was not that great in the edition I read. I don't like to mention the editing or piecework of the publisher, but in this case, in this particular edition I read, it was sometimes quite unbearable. Some words were blatantly wrongly used and the spell check was off in several pages. Occasionally words were completely omitted from the sentence and you had to go on context to figure out what the author had in place there. Overall, you know what is going on and it is only in about 20 spots that I noticed so it doesn’t hinder the quality of the writing. The writing was in fact, true to Ann Rule's style and it was impeccable, but the editor's really missed some large things in my opinion and if you read this same edition, you will notice them as well. We are all human and all prone to mistakes but it is hard for me to see a published book that must have passed through many, many hands before being printed actually come out with this many errors. That in itself was the ONLY thing that stopped me up on this book. It was very well written and I will recommend it, in any edition, to anyone who has a taste for true crime or even mystery novels. This book will satisfy even the hungriest of who-dun-it appetites.

Title - The Want Ad Killer
Author - Ann Rule
ISBN - 0-451-16688-4

Go out and read this book if you haven't all ready. It is amazing!! I am off to read some more Ann Rule as she is fast becoming another of my favorite authors!! Thanks for reading this review and until later, take care!!

~Alicia