The Hammer Man /// Part 2 /// 691 | Forensic Files

under cover of night is a new kind of True Crime Tale in 1996 British expat Sue Knight is found dead in her Small
Town Texas home soon after a friend gets a phone call from a woman claiming to be
Sue and the executor of her estate claims to receive calls from the CIA and Scotland Yard Sue's house is discovered
to contain specialized Firearms hundreds of prescription bottles evidence of multiple aliases a room of advanced
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the criminal history of a one Harvey L kerrignon detectives Dwayne Homan and William Bowman of Seattle PD are
investigating this individual because he's the owner of the successful gas station where supposedly
the missing girl 15 year old Kathy Sue Miller was supposed to go to fill out paperwork to apply for a job at this gas
station our situation is this police are armed with two things suspicion about a man
that they know has a lengthy history a lengthy violent history that includes rape and murder
they also have this other item of two persons Kathy Sue Miller's mother and her boyfriend both saying that they were
aware that she was supposed to meet with that man on the night that she never came home
the problem here is Captain we don't have a body we don't have a witness saying that they saw Kathy Sue Miller get into
this man's car all we have is this guy with this lengthy criminal history telling police
I went to the location she wasn't there now police go back the detectives go back to Kathy Sue Miller's mother
and they tell her look we are every bit as concerned as you are here's our findings we talked with the
owner of the gas station we interviewed him there's nothing suggesting that we should arrest him there is nothing
suggesting that we could find any evidence to build a case against this guy however
here's what we know about him here's his background we are terribly afraid that he has done
something very bad to your daughter Mrs Miller of course agrees now she's beyond words
right inconsolable all of her suspicions how have now been verified minus physical proof minus seeing her daughter
and she tells the detectives okay so what are you going to do are you going to get a search warrant search his home
search his property search his business his cars she's hoping that they could search his
home and because we have such a short window of time that's expired that possibly they would find her
daughter maybe being held captive at his home reluctantly the detectives have to tell
the mom we're sorry there's nothing no evidence no proof here we cannot get cannot secure a search warrant at this
time we will keep watching him we will keep interviewing him we're going to continue to talk to other people
but we need to build a case against this guy at the very least to get those search warrants to try to find evidence
or perhaps find your daughter well the man that Kathy talked to last has a suspicious and deadly
past as a parent I would think that would raise the worry level up quite a bit couple days after she's missing
the mother receives a phone call from a male caller this is very strange this is
a Crossroads for this mother because on one hand you got to feel like this is horrifying right could this be
the person that took my daughter the other thing is it could be somebody calling in a ransom
right and that the daughter has been kept held against her will but is unharmed and healthy
and now they're calling in the ransom so they can collect and return the daughter
and keep in mind this is 1973. this is still years not too far removed from when ransoms were very common when
a child or youngster would go missing and was abducted and the detectives told the mother to
actually hope for a ransom caller and we do know from other cases that we've covered and
stories that we've covered here that you can get a ransom call that could be a hoax
but in a weird way Mrs Miller is hopeful when she hears the man's voice on this phone call now it turns out not what she
wants it to be but it is a breadcrumb hopefully a breadcrumb trail leading her to her daughter the caller says that
they had found some school books he's calling from a business right and in their parking lot area found and
recovered some school books and when looking through the school books they discovered the name
along with a phone number and they were simply calling to return the books The Lost Books to the rightful owner
this is her daughter's school books remember she went directly from school never came home
and was last seen waiting for the owner of the gas station to pick her up police get these school books and
they're looking through the books for a clue this is really interesting to me too because this is something I've seen
with primarily with plastics and things of that nature but I've seen it on occasion with paper as well you
talk about the JonBenet case right and there's been other Ransom notes in the the Larry Jean Bell case
they fingerprinted some paper in that case as well this case what they did was they they
tested they attempted to lift prints from the school books hey and if you're going to be a part of the True Crime
world you're going to have your moments where you're gonna really lay into law enforcement bash law
enforcement but this is one where you have to give kudos to them because what what do we have already in this case we
have a possible suspect so this guy's saying ah I've never met her never picked her up but if you can
find fingerprints on those books that match his fingerprints then you know he's not telling you the truth
yeah and even if you can't trace it back to this guy let's say you pull prints from these books and it's from somebody
that's in your system right now you have somebody else to talk to the unfortunate
situation ends up being that the only Prince they pull from the books are of the persons at this place of work that
they recovered them from and because they have such strong suspicion on Harvey kerrignon they have
no reason to suspect the persons that seem to just be a Good Samaritan trying to return these Lost Books right so it
doesn't really give them any breadcrumbs and it also doesn't really lead them or
build any evidence against their Prime Suspect who we know they will have Harvey Kerrigan's Prince on file because
he's been convicted and charged so many times prior to The Disappearance of Kathy Sue Miller
unfortunately Captain Kathy Sue Miller's body is found months later by two boys who are hiking on an Indian reservation
North of Everett Washington right she was wrapped and bundled in a sheet of visqueen plastic
and beaten with a heavy object believed to be possibly a hammer that left nickel-sized holes in her skull is this
a plastic unique the plastic is not unique so this queen some of our listeners will be familiar with this
this is the type of plastic that you would find at when like when somebody's doing a home remodeling project or
construction project that you would buy these large sheets these large rolls of this queen and you can roll it out and
unfold it and then you can use it kind of like Dexter to corn off a whole area and so you know in remodeling projects
you don't get dust and debris everywhere especially when you're when you have to
do demo and things like that this queen though is going to be a potential breadcrumb Trail
and what's so great is this will allow them officers Homan and bowmen to get that
search warrant that they were Desperately Seeking in the Kathy Sue Miller case so you have the body
the visqueen becomes important because what they end up doing is they they get a call a gentleman reaches out to the
detectives and says oh by the way I kind of know Harvey Carrigan we're kind of friends and I happen to
give him a roll of visqueen plastic prior to when this kid went missing and they say okay great do you have
any any that you used prior do you still happen to have any that use prior and luckily so I believe the way the story
goes is that he used some to lay down in in the trunk of either his wife's or daughter's car so they're able to
retrieve that now what they're hoping the detectives are hoping is that they're going to get some kind of match
to one of the cut sides or torn sides of the visqueen that they found Kathy Sue wrapped up in
and what happens is they compare the two and unfortunately it's not a match now that
doesn't mean that it didn't come from the same role right it just it just means that it wasn't
it it wasn't directly torn or cut from the sheet that they had as a sample and so this is is a bit of a Debbie Downer
for their investigation as far as building evidence against Harvey kerrignon yeah a little bit of a letdown
for old Homan and Bowman but because they get this search warrant they are granted permission to search his
property and his vehicles as well as the business itself inside his vehicle they are able to take a bunch of prints
now this is interesting too because the other part that you have here Captain is
you now have an additional crime scene the location of where her body was found and so this is the
to lip reservation where her body is located they find some witnesses at this reservation that described a truck that
they had seen driving into the woods so this would be near the body recovery site right on the same day that Kathy
Sue Miller vanished they described this vehicle as a Chevrolet camper truck yellow with black stripes and a silver
canopy that's a pretty unique description yeah that sounds like a unique creepy camper
Chevrolet camper truck yellow with black stripes and a silver canopy I think when
you go to buy the the truck camper bed combo that they make sure that you have a
criminal history or you're not allowed to buy one the thing here in this situation is that
is a spot on description of Harvey kerrignon's truck right we get three different colors
there we get we get the make we get the canopy silver canopy cover yep and all of that lines up on the day
that this kid went missing so police are like okay well we have a murder case here but now we
have the ability to check for fingerprints in this vehicle because unfortunately what you're looking for is
you're trying to put your victim in that vehicle you want to find her fingerprints what
they do is they pull a few prints they were palm prints off of the window pane the inside of the window pane and they
know that they're not Harvey Kerrigan's Prince they go back to the mother with this
information here's the problem and this happens still to this day 50 years later
but especially a problem in 1973 and we've talked more than one time here in this garage show about the identicates
that you can get from the FBI you can get them from our friends over at the Nick Meck the national Center for
missing and exploited children right these are identicates to update all of your kids information this is
fingerprints palm prints an updated picture an updated description of height and weight and eye colored hair color
and all that stuff with your child's information this is key here and look in this situation it's not going to save
Kathy Sue Miller unfortunately but what it could do is put her proof positive in
the Killer's vehicle and get this monster off of the streets before he does it again
the problem here though Captain is Kathy Sue Miller 15 years of age three weeks before her sweet 16 birthday
had never been printed had never been fingerprinted right they pull unidentified palm prints from the inside
the interior of this vehicle but they got nobody to match them to nobody in the system
and they can't even compare them to their Victim Because she was never printed and by the time she's found
she's in a state of decomposition that does not allow them to pull prints and and they took they took some great
efforts to try to to still fingerprint her after death and they were unable to put her and
place her in the car the other problem too is the people more within one person witnessing this very unique the three
different colors on this vehicle the make they had it down to every description every detail that you can
think of the problem ends up being none of these Witnesses while they saw the vehicle
on that same day they couldn't describe the driver they they all said we never saw the driver we never saw anybody get
in or out of the vehicle well we see this a lot with many serial killers especially back in the day because of
less technology but it seems like these killers that are able to kill for a longer span of time
there's a little bit of luck on their side unfortunately it's been my experience
that the killer gets lucky and the dead victim just never ends up with much luck
you have to believe it was never reported but I would I would be willing to bet here that they probably tried to
find her prince in the business or at his home or decided to not go that route once they learned that she had never
been printed you pointed it out and I second it I Echo that statement of here's these two detectives doing
everything that they can even before it's confirmed that she was abducted or missing
and she wasn't some runaway so what's the next step for these detectives the next step is trying to build a case
against this guy right you want to build a case against him for Kathy Sue Miller's abduction and murder
but if you can't they're running into dead end after dead end here the evidence is always leading them back
to Harvey Kerrigan but not giving them enough proof to make an arrest not enough proof to
charge him with anything and bring him in and and bring him before the courts I do want to point out something that I
that I failed to mention earlier when we talk about the efforts that these two detectives were making against Harvey
kerrignon even before Kathy Sue Miller's body was found they were following him when when
they had any extra time that they not working other cases they were surveilling Harvey kerrignon
one they were hoping that he might return to the body and that they that they would find her
that way and that would be their Smoking Gun oh we've we followed you to the recovery site right he never did any of
that when they were following him around and so they're trying to build this case
against him now her body's found the evidence all leads to him but it's not proof that it was exactly him that did
any of this now we end up having another situation very similar this is a month and a half later approximately
where a young woman Mary Townsend is attacked she's waiting at a bus stop he approached and attacked her from
behind knocking her unconscious she woke up and when she does she is in a vehicle with a man
this man begins commanding sexual favors and she manages to LEAP from the vehicle
now this is very unfortunate she was running away from home right and even though she's attacked
and everything this guy's saying sounds like it's going to lead to a sexual assault
she thankfully is able to escape she doesn't report this crime at the time part of it was because
she was running away from home and so this goes unreported and then during this time this is where police
are going to try to get their break they interview Harvey Kerrigan's family remember he's married to a woman that
has two children and during the course of all of this we got a whole lot of stuff that's going
on inside of the Four Walls of that home one the little boy 11 or 12 years old at
this point Billy he decides to go and live with his father why because he says that Harvey his stepfather is physically
abusing him beating him up right the daughter still lives there she is roughly the age of our victim Kathy Sue
Miller she has told I I this part of the story is a little difficult for me I don't know if she's
reporting this well after the fact or if this was known at the time but at some point she would tell others
that she didn't like the way that her stepfather looked at her she always felt uncomfortable around him but never
really reports that that he did anything to her unfortunately what we do know is
happening is he is regularly getting upset with his wife and being physical and abusing her
so his wife Alice she's in the process of trying to leave Harvey she files assault charges against him
so the detectives are at least able to pick him up on these assault charges now unfortunately they're not going to be
able to hold him for very long but they take him off the streets and they were hoping that this would be
the Crux of the future case that they could build against him maybe Alice is his wife or soon to be ex-wife knows
something about this or she can provide evidence to them but that's not going to go the way the
detectives want it to go no because at some point Harvey's going to convince her
that they should be together and that she should drop the charges now what ultimately ends up happening
is that she doesn't decide to go back with him so he Harvey Kerrigan again this is
incredibly shocking to me he ends up finding another woman to date she's 29 years old
29 years old Elaine Hundley and they strike up this relationship and they move out to Minnesota remember he
he had been in Minnesota prior to going to Seattle Washington right the detectives tell him look you shouldn't
be leaving the state we're investigating you for several different crimes one including murder
and he says you don't have a choice I have to work he decides to sell the gas station he
moves to Minnesota and it's obvious to detectives that he's trying to duck these charges
go to a place where they have no jurisdiction and they've not been able to build a case against him yet
and once in Minnesota they are living together him and Elaine Huntley are living together
at some point she decides to break off this relationship I don't know why exactly she decides to break off the
relationship but we do know that he was physically abusive to his two prior wives oh he's fugly right right you
better have a nice personality when you look like Harvey kerrignon it's hard to he's hard to look at
she breaks off the relationship and then Presto Chango poof disappears I mean he
is so fugly that he kind of hurts your eyes it's like stings a little bit I'm unsure how they narrowed down this date
I'm sure that Elaine Hundley probably told some of her friends or family what was going on in their relationship
but the report is that she left Harvey kerrignon on August 9 1974. this is after their already settled down living
in Minnesota she leaves him August 9th of 1974. it's reported that she's missing had
disappeared the next day unfortunately Elaine Hundley her body would be found a little under five weeks later
and she had been murdered her skull she was beat so badly that her skull had imploded by blows to the Head
and she had been raped with an object in a tree branch and that was rather obvious during the autopsy
of course that is going to now put Harvey kerrignon under the microscope in the state of Minnesota
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all right we are back cheers mates tall cans in the air he's back and I'm out to
lunch yeah it's been out to lunch for years this brings us to September of 1974 on our
timeline here captain when a young woman her name is Gwen Burton she's picked up from a Sears
parking lot this is because she's having car trouble and a man who she thought might be helpful a Good Samaritan
decides to stop and offer her assistance he gets out of his vehicle takes a look
at her vehicle and says look I can help you out here but I don't have the tools needed to take care and fix the problem
if you hop in the vehicle with me we can go to my house real quick pick up the tools I'll fix up your car and send you
on your way right so Gwen thinks here we got a situation where maybe someone's come to help me
and she gets in the vehicle and she realizes look this ride seems very long why would this guy why would anybody
agree to help me if if we got to go so far away to get to his home just to get these tools right
so she starts feeling uncomfortable and and says to him look could you please just return me to my
car you don't have to fix the car it was nice of you to to attempt it was nice of
you to try to help me out but you know you make excuses I'm in a hurry or any reason to get out of that vehicle at
this point because she's now getting very nervous and she doesn't feel like we're going to his house to retrieve
tools take me back to my vehicle at some point she starts telling the man or you could
just let me out here and I'll figure it out I'll I'll find my way back to my car
or to my home it is then that he refuses to let her out of the vehicle and he gets physical
with her ripping off of her ripping off her clothing and he's choking her in the vehicle
he then takes her to a field where he sexually assaults her with a hammer and then beats her with said Hammer
and flees the area unbeknownst to the man Gwen Burton survives bloodied and close to death she crawls
to help well to have the strength to keep going sometimes the will to live is stronger
than the will to die so that was September 14th now this will bring us up to September
18th four days later we have two teenage girls who are walking on the side of the
road when they are approached by a man in a vehicle and he offers them he offers to pay them 25 each and what he
is requesting is that he needs to go retrieve his son's vehicle from an a location that he may have told
to the girls I'm unclear on that but he's saying look the problem is I'm by myself I'm flying solo here I need
somebody else to Drive either my vehicle or his vehicle once I get to it I will pay you each 25 it won't take
long it his vehicle is only a couple miles down the road this seems like Easy Money a lot of money at the time for the
girls and so they say yes they get into the vehicle with this man that they do not know
and after they're driving for a while again he's he's now going out into out into the country out to the sticks
and they're starting to wonder like this seems a lot further than what he had told us and one of them questions the
man and says look where are we going this doesn't make a lot of sense this is a lot further than you had said and we
we have things to do we you know our parents are going to be looking for us at some point
and the man says to the two teenage girls would you rather be killed or would you
rather be raped and the one girl nudges the other girl and speaks up for both of them and says
we would rather be killed the other girl agrees and says we would rather be killed when the man finally
stops the vehicle he instructs the girls that one of them is to stay with his vehicle and the other is to go with him
to retrieve his son's vehicle unfortunately for the girl who agrees to go with this man I believe
she agreed to go with the man to spare her friend this trip this walking trip away from
his vehicle is going to take them into the woods which of course these are teenage girls they're not
idiots they're wondering why there's no way this guy's kids son's vehicle was in the woods no
but I believe she went with him simply to spare her friend yeah I mean I think once once he poses
the question rape would you rather be raped or killed I think they know that they're not going
anywhere I think at that point they know everything before that question was a ruse exactly and here's the weird thing
though what we would learn is it said that he didn't say that in like of like a threatening manner even though just
those words in themselves are threatening but they said that he almost posed it like a philosophical question right
a hypothetical of some some sort regardless now she's in the woods with this guy and and he does physically
attack her he he hits her with a hammer and then for unknown reasons there he decides to let her live
and he gets in his vehicle and he drives off leaving the two girls there now what
we end up having here Captain is in the course of these four days we end up having three different people three
different young ladies that come forward and go to police and they describe the vehicle
that they were in they describe the man that they had had talked to he we what we would ultimately
learn is he used a fake name on both occasions when introducing himself and talking with the the victims that were
in his vehicle but unfortunately this does not lead to an arrest fast enough because on
September 20th 1974 two days later 18 year old Catherine Schultz disappeared her body was found the very next day in
a cornfield she had been beaten to death with a hammer so badly that her skull had imploded and
they knew that she had been sexually assaulted but not in a traditional rape manner that she
had been assaulted with an object okay so we're starting a lot of these things are starting to align where you have
these victims that survive these attacks and they're describing attacks that are
very similar to the ones that we end up knowing led to the death of Catherine Schultz
and Elaine Hundley Elaine Hundley was in the relationship living with Harvey kerrignan
all of this will lead to them securing a search warrant for his vehicle in Minnesota when they search his vehicle
underneath the seat they find maps to several different states and they find like
it's all it's described almost as like a hairball or a clump of hair but but the
hair is not all belonging to the one person right and so what detectives in Minnesota
believe is that this is the hair of several different victims that found its way either under the seat or matted into
the seat but these maps are of extreme interest to the detectives because that has many locations that are circled
in different states now we already covered that Harvey Carrington lived in Alaska he lived in the state of
Washington and he's lived in Minnesota well what they find is two of the locations that are circled on
those Maps one of them they know to have been the location where 15 year old Kathy Sue
Miller's body was recovered from in the state of Washington the other thing that they noticed too
is that one of the circles on that map for the state of Washington is where they found the body
of a victim that we previously mentioned but did not go through the story and that is of Laura Leslie Brock
remember she was a woman who went missing just 70 days approximately 70 days after
Kathy Sue Miller went missing right so the story behind this Captain is on Thursday September 14 1972 the body of a
young woman 20 year old Laura Leslie Brock who was a sophomore at Western Washington State College was
found in Coupeville Washington down a dirt road about one half mile west of Oak Harbor the body was nude except for
a pair of navy blue socks she had been raped and died from severe hemorrhaging from several very brutal blows to the
head with an undetermined object the body was found on the 14th and then later identified on Tuesday September 19
1972. authorities found a note at Miss Brock's rooming house right that she was leaving for the beach and she spoke with
her grandmother prior to leaving and by all accounts her intention was to hitchhike
we can confirm this based on the fact that her grandmother told her in that conversation do not hitchhike and warned
her of the dangers of hitching right and Laura explained to her mother her grandmother that it's legal to do so and
that she was in fact going to hitchhike to the beach she was going from Bellingham Washington to the Olympic
Peninsula this is one of those cautionary tales that all parents tell children and that friends warn one
another about saying things like remember Laura Brock her first hitchhiking trip was her last
this case became political at the state level in fact this is one of the policies that was in debate for a few
years in the state of Washington we have Jim costanti running for state senator pointing out that Senator Senator
Peterson voted for what costanti's team was calling a legislative tragedy bad judgment for government is what he
called it so well just because something's legal like she was telling her grandma doesn't mean
that it's safe exactly and here's that's the exact problem so oddly enough legislation made hitchhiking legal in
the state of Washington that year the very year that she goes missing and she's later found dead with this
horrific event the goal then became two-fold for the state one any crime involving a hitchhiker to be sent to the
state police and two make hitchhiking illegal again in the state but to your point Captain listen to this
statistic Washington State Police and the Seattle Washington Police Department reported that over the course of about
15 months that once hitchhiking became legal in mid 1972 the stats are that the state of Washington averaged about 20
hitchhiking related crimes per month two of which resulted in Murder it's too many one is the Laura Brock
case that we talked about in September of 72 and the other is Catherine Mary Devine's murder in November
other crimes related to hitchhiking range from robbery to rape so not good Bob now note that Harvey was
never charged with Laura Brock's murder and in fact no one else has ever been charged in her murder either
but Harvey kerrignon all these years later 51 years later Remains the prime suspect in Laura
Brock's murder based on the fact that he received a speeding ticket in the area where her body was found right around
the time that she went missing on top of that we also have a witness who claimed
that they saw Lord get into a vehicle that when they provided the description to police matched Harvey Kerrigan's
truck but like we said sometimes these killers get unlucky but this killer is also just
dumb I mean he has a very unique paint job and color scheme of the vehicle he's using to abduct
these women yes in this situation you know he's he's getting lucky time and time again because they have a lot of
signs they being the authorities law enforcement detectives they have a lot of signs pointing directly to Harvey
Kerrigan and a lot of this but they don't have any direct evidence until they find these Maps now what they're
going to do is they're going to build a circumstantial case a mountain of circumstantial evidence against Harvey
Kerrigan in the Minnesota cases the two cases that we circled back to Kathy Sue Miller and Laura Brock's cases
they took place in Washington just a couple years prior to what would ultimately be Harvey kerrignan being
arrested and interviewed interrogated by the Minnesota police what ultimately happens here Captain is
he gets an attorney and Harvey Carrigan then tells police yeah the Minnesota crimes that you're
charging me with because he the problem he's facing here is those three living Witnesses right he
might get lucky and the murders that he caused because unfortunately he silenced those victims
and they're not there to put him away but the three living Witnesses are and he ultimately tells the detectives
I did what you say that I did his defense insanity he says God told him to kill those women
now the good thing here is that this horrible evil man will 100 percent be off of the streets
it's where do we send him to right an Institute or a prison this thing goes to trial and they were
very smart here on on a few different levels so they they charge him with attempted murder in aggravated sodomy
and he's going to have to go to trial for those charges first before he will face any of the murder charges in court
and he puts together this defense of God told me to kill the horse and these women that I assaulted were
horse and I tell you what this guy this is what strikes me about Harvey kerrignon
he comes off as this kind of oaf like this dumb oaf like and part of that is his appearance and part of that is his
delivery in the way his speech the way that he talks but unfortunately he's not an unintelligent man he he is
intelligent enough that while on the surface this God told me to do it defense sounds absolutely crazy and sounds so
backwards but Harvey takes to the stand he's going to testify at court and he does a pretty good job I've
reviewed the transcripts and in fact if you read the one ad killer book by the great and Rule
she goes through large portions of that trial he takes to the stand and he goes one on
one with the prosecutor Toe to Toe and one thing that is so bizarre but again he knows he's being locked up it's
just where are you going to send him to but he's going to play the part he should
maybe you give him the Oscar I don't know but when he's on the stand they point to uh one of the women that's
there at court who he almost killed they point to [Music] they point to Gwen Burton
the poor woman that he picked up from the Sears parking lot offered to help that he nearly Beat to Death In fact we
know captain that when he left her there in that field he believes she was already dead
she crawls to safety and later is facing him in court and you know what he says he says you
know what yeah not only did God tell me to kill her but given the chance again I would
finish the job he says that on the stand at trial in front of the jury this is meant to be a tactic to convince
the jury that God is actually telling him to kill the horse what they what they trip him up on is
all of the sexual assault that she had to experience before he attempted to kill her
he gets convicted of the attempted murder and aggravated sodomy charges and then we're going to
follow that up with early the next year 1975 when Harvey Carrigan is then found guilty on both uh sorry
then we're going to follow up that then we are going to follow that up with the following year in 1975 when he is
charged with second-degree murder and first degree murder and then found guilty on those charges based off of a
mountain of evidence and this defense of God told me to do it one tactic that I thought was really
interesting here captain and this is very mind hunter-ish this is something that the first
generation of mine Hunters would would tell you to do Harvey kerrignon did not like the two
detectives that stayed on his tail so much back in Seattle Washington Omen and Bowman Dwayne Homan and William Bowman
he did not like them the Minnesota authorities the prosecutor reached out to the two detectives and
said please reach out to the Seattle Police Department please would you send one or both of the detectives to sit at
the trial just to unnerve Harvey kerrignon just so he has to see one or both of the detectives that he
despised so much for following and tailing him all that time and basically running him out of Seattle
Washington he fled that area he makes it look like it was because of a relationship and a job opportunity but
he had a successful business in Seattle Washington sure enough they put one of the
detectives in the courtroom at trial but again the size of this man and the fear that this man instilled
into others and we've talked about this before Captain it's rare that members of
law enforcement especially seasoned detectives are afraid of a certain Criminal one of the detectives did go to the
trial but he told he told the prosecutor and the police out in Minnesota he goes I will go
because it will help you at trial and I want to see this guy put away especially
because we weren't able to put him away here for murders we know he committed but you have to promise me that I get an
aisle seat because I've seen Harvey kerrignon mad and angry and upset and if he gets that
way when he sees me I don't want anything standing between me and the door foreign
[Music] the Hammer's luck would finally run out at the age of 95 years old he would die in prison
yes unfortunately Harvey kerrignon was never sentenced to death again after getting off of that charge for killing
Showalter way back in 1949 and so he is convicted sentenced to life in prison at the age of 49. so
think about that for a minute 30-year time span roughly that this man was out and killing and we believe five
murdered victims probably more and I say that just based off of the randomness of
his crimes and the time period that he committed these crimes he's at the simplest form he's picking up a stranger
on the side of the road and then assaulting and killing them and then just leaving them out in the open he's
he's your typical disorganized killer serial killer charged and convicted of three murders definitely did five in my
humble garage opinion probably more he died in March of 2013. so 50 years after he killed 15 year old
Kathy Sue Miller he was diagnosed with he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and lived all of these years in Oak
Park Heights prison in Minnesota until passing away this year I want to thank everybody for joining us here in the
garage this week Colonel do we have any recommended reading for the beautiful listeners yes we do Captain this week
I'm very excited to recommend to all of the listeners the want ad Killer by one of the greatest and one of the legends
of True Crime storytelling the great and rule this is just one of her many shattering and thought-provoking true
crime stories make sure you check out the one ad killer and all of the other great
titles and Ann rules catalog and check out all of our recommendations by going to our recommended page on the website
truecrime garage.com and until next week be good be kind and don't litter foreign
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The Hammer Man /// Part 2 /// 691

Part 2 of 2

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1973 - Seattle, Washington; When 15 year old Katherine Miller did not return home from school, her mother notified the police. The following morning an investigation ensued. Katherine’s disappearance was immediately considered to be suspicious by seasoned detectives. The disappearance reeked of foul play. The detectives were quick to find a suspect and other cases that shared similarities to Katherine's. Was all of this the work of “The Hammer Man?” When one wants to do a thorough historical review of U.S.A. True Crime, there are those stories that must be told. This is one of them.

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Garage Grade - 3 and a half bottle caps out of 5

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Brief Summary

Harvey Kerrignon's violent history leads to the murder of Kathy Sue Miller and a complex investigation into his crimes.

Key points

The Mysterious Death of Sue Knight. Sue Knight is found dead in Texas, leading to a web of intrigue and deception.
The Search for Kathy Sue Miller. Detectives investigate a gas station owner with a violent past linked to a missing girl.
A Disturbing Phone Call. Kathy's mother receives a strange call, raising hopes of a ransom or a lead.
The Discovery of a Body. Months later, Kathy Sue's body is found, revealing a tragic end to the search.
The Unique Truck Description. Witnesses describe a yellow Chevrolet camper truck seen near the body recovery site.
Gwen Burton's Survival. After a brutal attack, Gwen Burton crawls to safety, showcasing incredible resilience.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

As a parent, I would think that would raise the worry level.

7:06WatchAug 9, 2023

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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