Katherine Schultz, 18, a white female, vanished on September 20, 1974, in Minnesota and was found the next day in a cornfield, beaten to death with a hammer. Accounts describe catastrophic head injuries—her skull imploded from the blows. Born and raised in Minneapolis, she had been juggling school and work in the city before she disappeared.
Her killing unfolded amid a short, frenzied stretch of violence in the Twin Cities that September.
In the days before her death, a young woman abducted from a Sears parking lot survived a brutal assault, and two teenage girls escaped an attack at a gas station. Then, on September 20, Schultz disappeared; her body surfaced a day later in a rural field. The pattern of attacks, the use of a hammer, and the compressed timeline all pointed investigators to a single offender operating in and around Minneapolis.
Police arrested 47-year-old Harvey Louis Carignan on September 24, 1974. The following year he was convicted of a series of violent offenses connected to that stretch of crimes. Prosecutors later brought murder charges in two homicides from the spree, including Schultz’s. Carignan ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for killing her and received a 40-year sentence; he was separately convicted of first-degree murder for the death of Eileen Hunley and given life in prison.
Carignan—dubbed “the Want-Ad Killer” for his habit of exploiting help-wanted notices and similar lures—remained a focus of true-crime reporting for decades and died in a Minnesota prison in 2023. His admissions and convictions closed the question of who killed Schultz; there were no additional suspects.
