Donald Harvey was born in Butler County, Ohio on April 15, 1952 and raised in Kentucky. He took a job as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky in 1970, at eighteen, and by his own account killed his first patient within weeks, smothering an elderly man with a pillow. He killed a dozen or more there in about a year before leaving.
After a spell in the Air Force and a psychiatric admission he came back to hospital work, and from 1975 to 1985 was employed at the Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, latterly as an autopsy assistant.
He used whatever came to hand: arsenic, cyanide in feeding tubes and orange juice, insulin, morphine, rat poison, disconnected oxygen supplies, a coat hanger pushed into a catheter, a pillow. He poisoned a neighbour and the father of his lover with arsenic in food, and used hepatitis-infected serum on another man. He kept a diary.
He was caught by a smell. On the morning of April 7, 1987 a Hamilton County coroner opening the body of a patient called John Powell noticed the odour of bitter almonds, which is cyanide. Harvey had been on the ward.
Seventeen years, two states, several hospitals, and what ended it was one pathologist's nose.
Confronted, he began to talk and did not stop, giving investigators an itemised account across two states. He pleaded guilty in Ohio in August 1987 to twenty-four murders and later to further counts in Kentucky, thirty-seven convictions in all, and received multiple life sentences under an agreement that avoided the electric chair.
His own count was eighty-seven. Investigators regard the real figure as unknowable, partly because hospital deaths were not routinely investigated and partly because he was, by then, an enthusiastic confessor.
He said at first that he had been easing the suffering of the dying, and the press gave him the name Angel of Death. He said later that this had been true of some of them and not of others, that some had simply annoyed him, and that he had come to enjoy it.
He was beaten by another inmate at the Toledo Correctional Institution and died of his injuries on March 30, 2017, aged sixty-four.