Donald Harvey was a prolific American serial killer and orderly who claimed to have murdered 87 people, though official estimates are between 37 and 57 victims. He was able to accomplish this during his time as an orderly. Harvey said he started out killing to "ease the pain" of patients by smothering them with their pillows. He mostly killed cardiac patients. As time progressed, he began to enjoy it more and more and became a self-described "angel of death". Harvey was serving 28 life sentences at the Toledo Correctional Institution in Toledo, Ohio, having pleaded guilty to murder charges to avoid the death penalty.
History
Donald Harvey, a self-proclaimed "Old Plymouth Boy," was born in Butler County, Ohio, near Cincinnati, in 1952. He dropped out of school in ninth grade, and began working in hospitals at the age of 18. His first medical job was as an orderly at the Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. He later confessed that during the ten-month period he worked at the hospital, he killed at least a dozen patients. His second victim was killed in the room with Danny George, a twelve year old child. Harvey was insistent that he killed purely out of a sense of empathy for the sufferings of those who were terminally ill. He also admitted that many of the killings he committed were due to anger at the victim. The full extent of his crimes may never be known since so many were undetected for so long. Harvey used many methods to kill his victims, such as: arsenic, cyanide, insulin, suffocation, miscellaneous poisons, morphine, turning off ventilators, administration of fluid tainted with hepatitis B and/or HIV, and insertion of a coat hanger into a catheter, causing an abdominal puncture and subsequent peritonitis. Cyanide and arsenic were his most used methods, with Harvey administering them via food or injections. The majority of Harvey's crimes took place at the Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, the Cincinnati V.A. Medical Hospital, and Cincinnati's Drake Memorial Hospital. At various times, he worked as an orderly or an autopsy assistant. Harvey did not limit his victims to helpless hospital patients. When he suspected his lover and roommate Carl Hoeweler of infidelity, he poisoned Hoeweler's food with arsenic so he would be too ill to leave their apartment. He poisoned two of his neighbors, sickening one, Diane Alexander, by putting hepatitis serum in her drink, and killing the other, Helen Metzger, by putting arsenic in her pie. He also killed Hoeweler's father Henry with arsenic.
Investigation
Harvey kept his crimes from being discovered for 17 years. The beginning of the end came in March 1987. An autopsy on John Powell, who had died abruptly after spending several months on life support due to a motorcycle accident, revealed large amounts of cyanide in his system. Harvey became a person of interest when investigators learned he'd been forced to resign from the Cincinnati VA hospital after he was caught stealing body parts for occult rituals. At the time, most hospitals did not vet orderlies as closely as doctors or nurses. When they brought Harvey in for questioning, he confessed to Powell's murder, claiming he'd euthanized Powell with cyanide. When Pat Minarcin, then an anchor at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, delved into Harvey's history, he doubted that this was a "one-off" case. He found it hard to believe that someone who had spent almost two decades caring for patients could suddenly kill one without having killed before. During his report on the night of Harvey's arrest, Minarcin asked on-air if there had been any other deaths. It turned out that several nurses at Drake had noticed a spike in deaths for at least seven months. They'd raised concerns with administrators, but had been ordered to keep quiet. Not wanting to chance that Harvey would be acquitted, they reached out to Minarcin for help, telling him that there was evidence Harvey killed at least ten more people. Over the next months, Minarcin delved into the suspicious deaths. He amassed enough evidence to air a half-hour special report detailing evidence that linked Harvey to at least 24 murders in a four-year period. He had been able to stay under the radar in part because he worked in an area of Drake where patients were not expected to survive. When Harvey's court-appointed lawyer, Bill Whalen, was briefed in advance about Minarcin's findings, he immediately asked Harvey if he'd killed anyone else. Harvey replied that by his "estimate," he'd killed as many as 70 people. Whalen knew that if prosecutors could link Harvey to more than one murder, Harvey could get the death penalty. In a bid to save his client's life, he offered prosecutors a deal–if the death penalty were taken off the table, Harvey would accept a sentence of life imprisonment and confess to all of his murders. The prosecutors agreed. In a marathon session with prosecutors, Harvey admitted to killing 24 people. In August 1987, Harvey pled guilty to 24 counts of first-degree murder. In accordance with the plea agreement, he was sentenced to three concurrent terms of life in prison. The plea agreement allowed prosecutors to seek the death penalty if more murders came to light. With this in mind, that November Harvey pled guilty in Laurel County, Kentucky, circuit court to killing nine patients at Marymount in the 1970s. He was sentenced to life plus 20 years, to run concurrently with the Ohio sentence. Ultimately, Harvey pled guilty to 37 murders. However, he confessed to killing as many as 50 people. Harvey was incarcerated in Toledo Correctional Institution, where he had been admitted on October 26, 1987.
Death
On March 28, 2017, authorities reported that Harvey had been found in his cell severely beaten. He died on March 30, 2017. On May 3, 2019, fellow inmate James Elliott was charged with aggravated murder and other charges related to the death of Donald Harvey.
