John Powell was forty-four and had been in Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati since a motorcycle crash the summer before left him with severe brain injuries. When he died on March 7, 1987, nobody was surprised. His family asked for an autopsy anyway, and when the Hamilton County forensic pathologist, Dr. Lee D. Lehman, opened the body, he caught the smell of burnt almonds. Tests confirmed a large dose of cyanide. Powell had been fed it through his gastric tube.
The police looked at who had been on the ward, and one name kept coming up: Donald Harvey, thirty-four, a nurse's aide who had joined Drake as a part-timer in February 1986. They learned that he had left his previous job, at the Cincinnati Veterans Administration hospital, under a cloud. He offered to take a polygraph, bought a book on how to beat one, and called in sick on the day it was scheduled. When detectives brought him in, he admitted putting cyanide in Powell's feeding tube and said he had done it because he felt sorry for him. On April 6, 1987, he was charged with aggravated murder. The story shared the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer with the Reds' Opening Day.
It might have stayed one charge. Pat Minarcin, the anchor of the evening news on WCPO-TV, did not believe that a man who had spent nearly two decades around sick people had killed for the first time at thirty-four. On the night of the arraignment he asked his reporter on the air whether police were looking at other deaths at Drake. She said no; they had told her it would be futile. Then nurses at Drake started calling the station anonymously. Several of them had noticed a jump in deaths on Harvey's ward and had taken it to administrators, and they had been told to keep quiet. Now they were afraid he would be acquitted. Over the following months Minarcin put together a half-hour report linking Harvey to at least two dozen deaths.
Harvey's court-appointed lawyer, Bill Whalen, was told in advance what the report would say. He asked his client whether he had killed anyone else. Harvey said that by his estimate it was about seventy. Under Ohio law, more than one murder would let prosecutors seek death. Whalen went to them with an offer: take execution off the table and Harvey would confess to everything and accept life. They agreed. In a single long session Harvey walked prosecutors through twenty-four killings in four years, and in August 1987 he pleaded guilty to them. The agreement allowed prosecutors to seek death if more came to light, and in November, in Laurel County, Kentucky, he pleaded guilty to eight murders and one manslaughter at Marymount Hospital in London in 1970 and 1971, and was sentenced to life plus twenty years, to run alongside his Ohio terms. With later Ohio counts the total came to thirty-seven; in Ohio he stood convicted of twenty-eight counts of aggravated murder, seven of attempted aggravated murder and one of felonious assault. He told investigators it was more, and later said he had killed another eighteen at the VA hospital. His lawyer later put the number he confessed to at fifty-seven, other accounts at about fifty, and his own highest figure was eighty-seven.
He was born in Hamilton, Ohio, outside Cincinnati, on April 15, 1952, the eldest of the three children of Ray and Goldie Harvey, and grew up in Booneville, a small Appalachian town in Kentucky, where his parents were struggling tobacco farmers and members of the local Baptist church. From the age of five to eighteen he was sexually abused by an uncle and by a neighbor, and he told no one but his sister, and only after it had stopped. He left school in the ninth grade and took a correspondence GED in 1968.
The killing had begun at Marymount, where he went to work as an orderly at eighteen. His first victim, by his account, was Logan Evans, eighty-eight, a stroke patient, whom Harvey smothered with a pillow and a plastic bag on May 31, 1970, after the man smeared him with feces. Over the ten months he worked there he killed a dozen or more patients: he cut off oxygen, handed patients faulty oxygen tanks, overdosed them on morphine and Demerol, and in one case forced a straightened coat hanger through a catheter into a man's bladder. The dead at Marymount, on the list later drawn from his confessions, included James Tyree, sixty-nine, given the wrong catheter the same day Evans died; Elizabeth Wyatt, forty-two, whose oxygen he cut off; Eugene McQueen, forty-three, whom he turned onto his back so that he drowned in his own fluids; Ben Gilbert, eighty-one, the man with the coat hanger, who had knocked Harvey out with a urinal and died in a coma four days later; Margaret Harrison, ninety-one; and Milton Bryant Sasser, ninety-one, the last, on March 14, 1971. They were cardiac patients from middle age up, men and women, and he said afterward that he had killed some of them out of pity and many out of anger. After an arrest for burglary in March 1971 he joined the Air Force, was discharged after nine months following two suicide attempts, and, after those breakdowns, came to terms with being gay. Then he went back to hospital work.
From 1975 to 1985 he worked at the Cincinnati VA hospital, part of that time as an autopsy assistant. He was forced out after he was caught leaving with body parts, which he said were for occult rituals, and no one told his next employer. Among the deaths he admitted from those years were Hiram Profitt, overdosed on heparin in September 1984, and Edward Wilson, who died of arsenic in March 1985. Outside the hospitals he poisoned the people around him. When he suspected his lover and roommate, Carl Hoeweler, of seeing other men, he put arsenic in his food to keep him too sick to go out. He killed Hoeweler's father, Henry, eighty-two, with arsenic in 1983, and a neighbor, Helen Metzger, sixty-three, with arsenic in a pie. He sickened another neighbor, Diane Alexander, by putting hepatitis serum in her drink, and a man named Howard Vetter died, Harvey said by accident, after drinking alcohol he had poisoned. A former lover, James Peluso, sixty-five, died of arsenic in November 1984.
At Drake he settled into a ward where patients were not expected to recover, which made each death easy to accept. In thirteen months he killed at a rate of more than one a month, most of them with cyanide or arsenic, which he stole and kept at home, some with rat poison, and two, Nathaniel Watson, sixty-five, and Leon Nelson, sixty-four, in April 1986, by smothering them with a wet plastic garbage bag liner. He put it in orange juice, cranberry juice, apple juice, soup, pudding, IV lines, and feeding tubes. Virgil Weddle, eighty-one, died of rat poison in his pudding that April. Doris Nally, sixty-five, died of cyanide in her apple juice on May 2, 1986. After Cleo Fish, sixty-seven, died of cyanide in her cranberry juice that December, he cut off a lock of her hair and burned it. Leo Parker, forty-seven, died of cyanide in his feeding bag on New Year's Day 1987, and Margaret Kuckro, eighty, of cyanide in her orange juice on February 5. On the day he killed Powell he also killed an eighty-two-year-old woman, Hilda Leitz, with a solvent called Detachol in her feeding tube and her orange juice. When police searched his apartment, they found jars of cyanide and arsenic, books on poisons and the occult, and a diary in which he had written about the killings.
He called it mercy at first, and the name the papers gave him, the Angel of Death, came from that. It did not hold. Henry Hoeweler, Helen Metzger and others were neither sick nor dying, and some of the patients, by his own admission, died because they had angered him. He told the Enquirer's David Wells in 1987 that the patients might have lasted a few more hours or a few more days but were all going to die. "I know you think I played God," he said, "and I did." Later he admitted that he had come to enjoy it and that it gave him a feeling of power.
He was admitted to the Ohio prison system on October 26, 1987. On March 28, 2017, he was found badly beaten in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution, and he died two days later, at sixty-four. A fellow inmate, James Elliott, was charged in 2019 and pleaded guilty. He said he had grown up near some of Harvey's victims in Kentucky and wanted to give their families closure. Sentencing him to twenty-five years to life, Judge Myron Duhart told him that no matter how bad a person is, that does not give anyone the right to be judge, jury and executioner. Prosecutors said Elliott had been jealous that Harvey received different meals because of his religion, and his mother said he had been angered by Harvey bragging about killing old people. The sentence, first ordered to run after his others, was later made concurrent, which leaves Elliott eligible for parole in 2046.