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Donald Harvey, Who Pleaded Guilty to 37 Hospital Killings, Dies After Prison Beating

The former nurse's aide was found beaten in his Toledo cell and died two days later. Another inmate was suspected.

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Donald Harvey in a later Ohio prison identification photo, gray-haired, in a blue prison shirt

Donald Harvey had been locked up since 1987 when he was found beaten in his cell at the state prison in Toledo on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 28, 2017. He was 64. He never came back from it. He died on the morning of Thursday, March 30. An autopsy completed the next day by the Lucas County Coroner found several skull fractures and brain injuries, and no sign that any weapon had been used. The State Highway Patrol said another inmate was suspected but that no charges had been filed, and troopers were still interviewing witnesses.

In 1987 Harvey had pleaded guilty to killing 37 people, most of them patients in the hospitals where he worked as a nurse's aide in Cincinnati and in Kentucky through the 1970s and 1980s. He poisoned and suffocated sick and injured patients, called the killings mercy and said he had killed others he could not count. The deaths went unnoticed until a medical examiner doing the autopsy of a patient at Cincinnati's Drake Hospital caught the smell of cyanide. Harvey pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty and was serving multiple life sentences.

Clayborn Kendrick was one of the Drake patients, recovering from a head injury when Harvey put cyanide in his gastric tube on September 20, 1986. "He left a journal and he explained that he murdered my dad to help my mother," his daughter, Kathy Young, told Cincinnati's Local 12. Harvey had even put off the killing, she said, so her mother could take a vacation she had planned in Hawaii. Asked whether she was glad he was gone, she said not really. "My dad is gone. The other people are gone," she said. "This is going to bring up a lot of anger for some. Sadness for some. They have to go through all this again."

Joe Deters, the Hamilton County prosecutor, had been an assistant prosecutor on the case in 1987. "This Angel of Death nonsense is just total bull," he said. "He was a very evil person. I don't have any compassion that he was beaten to death." He had said it back then, he added, and he said it again: if Harvey had ever got out, he would have kept killing. "I mean he just enjoyed doing it."

What this story covers. The death, the beating, the autopsy findings and the Highway Patrol's statement that an inmate was suspected come from the Associated Press's running report of March 30 and 31, 2017, and the AP's report of the attack. Kathy Young's and Joe Deters's words and the account of Clayborn Kendrick's death come from Local 12 (WKRC) in Cincinnati, March 30, 2017. Harvey's guilty pleas covered 37 killings in Ohio and Kentucky; he claimed many more, and that larger number has never been established. No one had been charged with his death when this story was reported.

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