Two Killers, One Profiler: John Douglas Interviews Joseph Kondro and Donald Harvey, Mindhunter, 2008
In prison interviews for MSNBC, Joseph Kondro told John Douglas how he used his friends' trust to take their daughters, and Donald Harvey insisted he killed his hospital patients out of mercy.
- Recorded
- about 2008
- Runtime
- 42:37
Content warning: Concerns the abduction, rape and murder of two girls aged 8 and 12, described by their killer in his own words, and the killing of hospital patients by poisoning and smothering; includes references to child sexual abuse and cruelty to animals.
The Interviews
In this MSNBC documentary, John Douglas, who spent 25 years in the FBI and ran its criminal profiling programme in the Behavioral Science Unit, sets two serial killers side by side. In the first half he interviews Joseph Kondro at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla; in the second, Donald Harvey at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Douglas presents Kondro as what profilers call a "disorganized" killer and Harvey as an "organized" one. Both men had pleaded guilty in exchange for being spared the death penalty. The programme also hears from Rima Traxler's mother, Kondro's daughter, the Cowlitz County prosecutor, and Harvey's former defence attorney, William Whalen, and plays a short excerpt of the audio of Harvey's 1987 confession.
Historical Context
Joseph Kondro, born in Marquette, Michigan, in 1959, lived in Longview, Washington. On May 15, 1985, Rima Traxler, 8, disappeared on her way home from school. On November 21, 1996, Kara Rudd, 12, disappeared on her way to Monticello Middle School; her body was found on Mount Solo on January 4, 1997. Kondro was a friend of both girls' families. Facing a possible death sentence for Kara's murder, he confessed to both murders under a plea agreement and was sentenced in 1999 to 55 years. He was also suspected, but never charged, in the 1982 death of another child. He died in prison in 2012.
Donald Harvey worked as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, in 1970 and 1971, at the Cincinnati Veterans Administration Medical Center from about 1975 to 1985, and as a nurse's aide at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati from 1986. After the cyanide death of a Drake patient, John Powell, in March 1987, he was charged with murder. Under a plea bargain that removed the death penalty, he pleaded guilty in Ohio and Kentucky in 1987 and 1988 to 37 killings in all. He died on March 30, 2017, after being beaten in his cell at Toledo Correctional Institution.
Circumstances of the Interviews
The programme was broadcast on MSNBC in late November 2008; the dates of the two interviews are not stated. Douglas says that after Harvey's arrest he was called in to coach the FBI agents who interrogated him, so he had seen Harvey talk about his crimes before. The upload is a third-party copy of the programme without its advertisement breaks or end credits.
What the Interview Covers
Kondro describes how he picked up Kara Rudd at her school, and how he used the password Rima Traxler's family had given her, which he says her stepfather told him, to get her into his truck. He says he chose children he knew because they trusted him and a stranger would "fight back", describes fantasies that he says began by seventh grade and an attempted assault when he was 12 or 13, and calls killing "second nature". He refuses to answer whether he killed others but says there were molestations that were never reported. He says he has "no regrets" and that he should have been given the death penalty; asked what he would have done differently, he says he would have taken Kara "to a different spot".
Harvey says many of his patients were comatose or near death and that he made the choice for them, calling himself "a judge and a jury and executioner". He describes how the cyanide in John Powell's feeding tube was detected, his methods, and the first killing, at 18, which he attributes to his anger at a patient. Whalen and Douglas describe a killing that was revenge for an assault on Harvey. Harvey also talks about abuse in his childhood, killing animals, poisoning his partner Carl with arsenic, infecting a woman he says told stories about him with hepatitis, and the deaths of his neighbour Helen Metzger and his friend James Peluso. He says he does not think about his crimes and would not kill again.
What Makes the Recording Significant
The programme records a senior FBI profiler questioning two killers whose crimes and methods could hardly be more different, and testing their own explanations: Kondro's claim that he should have been executed, and Harvey's claim that his killings were acts of mercy. For Kondro, who gave few interviews, it is one of the few known recordings of him describing the murders of Rima Traxler and Kara Rudd in his own words. For Harvey, it is a later and longer conversation than his 1989 interview with Geraldo Rivera.
Archival Importance
Both men have since died in prison, Kondro in 2012 and Harvey in 2017. Douglas later wrote about Kondro in The Killer Across the Table (2019, with Mark Olshaker). The programme preserves both men's accounts, the voices of a victim's mother and of the attorney who negotiated Harvey's plea, and a short excerpt of Harvey's 1987 confession audio.
Important Caveats
Everything Kondro and Harvey say about their motives, their victims, their childhoods and their feelings is their own claim. Harvey's portrayal of his killings as mercy is contradicted in the programme itself, including by his own account of killing patients who had angered him. The programme gives Harvey's total as "34 patients" in one place and "37 people" in another; he pleaded guilty to 37 murders. Harvey's estimate of 70 (as reported by Whalen) and Whalen's own estimate of 68 are not established figures; at other times Harvey claimed as many as 87. The narration's statement that Harvey would not be eligible for parole until 2043 was overtaken by his death in 2017. A police report figure of "maybe 70 victims", put to Kondro by Douglas, is not established, and Kondro was never charged with any other killing. The names of the on-screen interviewees other than Whalen come from the uploader's description and have not been checked against the on-screen captions. Douglas's assessments are his opinions as a former profiler.
Pull quotes (optional)
Joseph Kondro:
Donald Harvey:
Narrator: He sat face to face with killers who haunt our darkest nightmares, Manson, the Son of Sam, the BTK killer, tapping into their minds to understand what motivates them to murder. The architect of American criminal profiling takes us inside the minds of two serial killers and draws out two disturbing confessions.
John Douglas: Would you have kept going?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, I felt real comfortable about killing. I mean, killing for me is just like second nature now.
Narrator: Joseph Kondro, a cold-blooded predator with a sick obsession.
John Douglas: She had no idea that would be her last day alive on this planet.
Narrator: Donald Harvey, a hospital caregiver with a deadly secret.
John Douglas: Do you consider yourself a sociopath?
Donald Harvey: That's what most people consider me.
John Douglas: What do you think?
Donald Harvey: I have been rehabilitated. I'm ready to go back to the streets.
John Douglas: I'm John Douglas. For close to 25 years, I worked for and ran the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit.
John Douglas: As a criminal profiler, my job was to help crime investigations across the country by examining evidence for signs that could help point the way to the killer. But the only way to truly understand the criminal mind is to get inside it. I did that by going to prisons around the country, like this one, going head to head with our nation's scariest, most violent offenders. In my FBI unit, we met with people like the killer clown John Wayne Gacy, who killed dozens of teenage boys and buried them in his basement, and racist killer Joseph Paul Franklin, the violent drifter who targeted interracial couples. Every one of these guys has something to teach us, and what I've learned from them has helped put other serial killers away. ### Part 1: Joseph Kondro
Narrator: In just a few moments, you'll meet a man who embodies every parent's worst nightmare. Joseph Kondro preyed on his friends' children, easy targets, he calls them, a killer hiding in plain sight. He used his friendship to mount the ultimate betrayal.
Narrator: The story of Joseph Kondro's arrest begins the same way a lot of murder stories begin, with a mystery. Longview, Washington, May 15, 1985: eight-year-old Rima Traxler disappears on her way home from school.
Rima Traxler'S Mother: My daughter was the light of my life. She was my sunshine, she was, she was the air that I breathed. She was a beautiful, happy, loving little girl.
Narrator: Police spent years chasing leads on the missing child, but the investigation turned up nothing solid. For years, it was an open wound for the community. In time, the memory of Rima Traxler's disappearance began to fade, but residents of this quiet logging town couldn't help but think of Rima when, over a decade later, on November 21, 1996, 12-year-old Kara Rudd also disappeared in broad daylight.
News Reporter: The 12-year-old girl has been missing from Longview, Washington. Kara was last seen alive while walking to Monticello Middle School. Her disappearance officially remains a mystery.
Narrator: The last person Kara was seen with was Joseph Kondro, a friend of the family. Kondro had pulled into the parking lot to talk to Kara as she went to school that morning. A witness later saw Kara walking towards Kondro's car, and, chillingly, police heard about another time that Kondro had picked up Kara to skip school, basically a dry run for the crime. Police brought him in for questioning.
Kondro'S Daughter: Initially, I thought that Kara ran away. She, um, was a really headstrong person, and I didn't think anything. He was my dad, you know, and when everyone started pointing fingers, you know, it wasn't my dad, he couldn't have done it.
Narrator: With witness accounts and some suspicious scratches Kondro couldn't explain, they thought they had their man, but they lacked anything beyond the circumstantial.
Susan Baur: Finding her body was everything to us. I've never had a case that there was so much anticipation of being able to find her body, so that it could tell us, she could tell us what happened.
News Reporter: Some 80 police and Explorer Scouts began a search early this morning. After just a couple of hours, they made a critical find.
Sgt. Steve Rehaume: We have located what appears to be the remains of a human body on top of Mount Solo.
John Douglas: As a profiler, I believe the crime scene can tell me everything I need to ID the offender. The evidence shows we're dealing with what we call a disorganized killer. He didn't plan on killing her; he saw an opportunity and gave in to his vicious desire. Once he had a body to deal with, he just stashed it as quickly as he could, which indicates he was probably under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Narrator: But investigators already had their guy, Joseph Kondro. Kondro denied his guilt until investigators retrieved his DNA from Kara's body. As prosecutors shaped their case against Kondro, they began to think that he could be responsible for other unsolved murders. A decade-old cold case, the disappearance of Rima Traxler, seemed too similar to be mere coincidence. Once again, Kondro was friends with the parents of the missing girl.
Rima Traxler'S Mother: Well, you know, Joe Kondro and my first husband grew up together. Joe was [unclear: "kind of afraid of the family" (both machine texts) / "kind of a part of the family"]. That was my, my daughter's Uncle Joe.
Narrator: Kondro was facing the death penalty in the Kara Rudd case, but prosecutors were willing to give him a deal if he admitted to the unsolved killing of Rima Traxler. Kondro confessed to the two murders, and the deal with prosecutors spared his life but got him 55 years in prison.
John Douglas: Before any interview, my process is always the same. I study the case files and try to get to know what kind of killer I'm dealing with. From Kondro's file, I know he is fairly typical of the rapist murderer. His [unclear: "sick" / "six"] sexual fantasies lie just beneath the surface. What's unusual about Kondro is that he liked to kill people he knew, an uncommon choice for a serial killer. I want Kondro to help me understand this particular criminal type. Kondro agreed to meet with me, and I traveled to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. I asked him to tell me about his final victim, Kara Rudd.
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, I knew Kara for, for a while. We'd play cards together and stuff.
John Douglas: How would you describe her personally? I mean, as a kid.
Joseph Kondro: Uh, she was very energetic, but she was very defiant too when she believed in things. You know, you gotta admire that in anybody, you know. That morning when I woke up, I knew what I was gonna do. I was completely aware of what I wanted to do. I drove to the school and I pulled into the, to the parking lot. Kara jumped in my car.
John Douglas: What's the exchange between, uh, you and her?
Joseph Kondro: It wasn't really much of an exchange. I was just, uh, I just drove her out to the house and we talked a little bit.
John Douglas: [unclear: "What's happy, though, right?" / "What's Pappy, though, right?"] It's not, she doesn't know she's in danger.
Joseph Kondro: No, she doesn't know. She's, like, like I said, I was playing on my victim's trust. And that's a big thing, you know, when you do these kind of crimes, is the person has to trust you for you to lure them in.
John Douglas: She had no idea that would be her last day alive on this planet.
John Douglas: You certainly, you knew right from wrong, but you just couldn't control the urges.
Joseph Kondro: I knew exactly what I was getting into. Exactly. And I didn't care.
John Douglas: It's not easy to hear these guys talk about all the people they killed, but I've got to keep my anger and disgust under wraps if I want to get to the truth.
John Douglas: Why a child? I mean, what's the motive behind this?
Joseph Kondro: I think it's just the convenience of the situation, you know. Children are very trusting, and I was very close to their family members, and, uh, you know, I just, uh, I played their trust.
John Douglas: Basically, it's an easy target.
Joseph Kondro: No, it was an easy target at the time, yeah.
John Douglas: This would be one time where you could commit an act and be in control.
Joseph Kondro: But a lot of people in my life was trying to control me. I was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and I, you know, I just, I was abusing everybody around me.
John Douglas: Had you not been identified, would you have kept going? You would have kept, kept killing?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, I felt real comfortable about killing. I mean, killing for me is just like second nature now. I just kept on going.
John Douglas: I still, I don't really understand why you would go after them, people that you knew.
Joseph Kondro: You try to do this with a stranger or something like that, you know, they always fight back. I wanted everything to run perfectly, and it did.
John Douglas: Joseph Kondro wanted to be in control. It's a common theme with these guys: none of them has control, and most of them want it. Joe Kondro felt powerless in his life, a feeling he tried to drown in drugs and alcohol, and apparently his need to feel powerful took him to the violent extreme. Two little girls paid the price.
John Douglas: Joseph Kondro raped and killed two young girls 11 years apart. These weren't calculated, well-planned murders. Kondro saw an opportunity to indulge his sick fantasies, and he seized upon it. On May 15, 1985, the first time he killed, Kondro abducted Rima Traxler on her way home from school. He was friends with Rima's parents, and he exploited that friendship to ask Rima's stepfather for a family secret.
Joseph Kondro: One day we just got into this conversation, and he told me the password that they had established with Rima.
John Douglas: And what was that password?
Joseph Kondro: It was "unicorn". And, uh, one day I just seen her walking down the street as I went to the store, and when I came back, she was still walking down the street, and I pulled over. It was just an impulse. I pulled over and picked her up.
John Douglas: Did you say the password?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, yeah, I said the password, and she got in, she got into the truck with me. At that time, I was committed, you know. I've already made up my, I already made up a decision that I was gonna kill her, you know, way before she even knew it, when she got in my truck.
John Douglas: What finally was the, uh, stressor that you're going to, uh, commit a crime, and it's going to be this child, or, you know, Rima?
Joseph Kondro: Well, I zeroed in on Rima because, first of all, she trusted me, and, uh, you know, I was attracted to young girls. It was an impulsive, uh, reaction, so I just, you know, I took her down to my house, and I told her to stay in the pickup, and I went in the house, I called work and said I wouldn't be in that day, and drove her out to Germany Creek and, uh, raped and murdered her.
John Douglas: That's a little girl. I mean, you killed a little girl.
Joseph Kondro: I mean, yeah, that's what I was thinking too when I was driving back, you know. I was, I was thinking about that.
John Douglas: This is how these guys operate. They're able to commit the most despicable acts without thinking. Even now, Kondro doesn't show a shred of feeling for his victim. He told me he didn't worry about getting caught, but I think he got away with this murder because he was just plain lucky. I wanted to find out when he began to hone in on little girls. Were they his preferential victim type, or just the most readily available victims?
Joseph Kondro: You know, as older as I got, the girls would stay mostly the same age or younger than me, you know? And then they started, the separation between ages started getting wider and wider. And, uh, pretty soon I found myself, you know, molesting kids.
John Douglas: Sounds like it was an obsession, obsessive thoughts. How were you able to control these obsessive thoughts that you had, if you could at all?
Joseph Kondro: I just thought about it all the time. I thought about, you know, taking people out and raping them and killing them in seventh grade.
John Douglas: This is about as dark as it gets in my line of work. Living this close to that kind of evil takes its toll on me. But learning more about how these guys operate can make a difference in ongoing investigations.
John Douglas: So finally, at what point it really kind of tipped you over, when now you began to act out, uh, the fantasies?
Joseph Kondro: I don't know. Thirteen, maybe 12, 13 years old. One night there was this girl that was working in a local neighborhood store, and, uh, I went to the store after they shut down at 11 o'clock, and I asked her for a ride, and she said sure, and she got me into her car. And, you know, I pulled a knife on her and stuff. She cried and stuff like that, and, "Please don't do this, please don't do this." And I, I didn't do it. I didn't go through with it, no.
John Douglas: So you stopped, you felt sorry for her?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, yeah, I did.
John Douglas: You didn't expect her to cry. You didn't expect her, uh, to react that way.
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, and it was kind of a turn-off. Later, I, uh, overcame those, you know, feelings.
John Douglas: Fantasy is an important element for most serial killers, and many killers have told me their depraved sexual fantasies started at an early age and became even more graphic in their minds over time. Then one day, the urge to make the fantasy real becomes too strong to resist.
Joseph Kondro: My fantasy was just to rape and murder these, my victims. That was the whole fantasy part of it. The police department, investigations, that was part of it, but my murders, you know, they, they were like the high point.
John Douglas: The fantasy is only a motivation. There's nothing better than the act itself.
John Douglas: Joe, just describe for me the feelings that you have during the, the sexual assault, the raping and the killing.
Joseph Kondro: Power.
John Douglas: How about control?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, that's another. You know, I get really, really high on adrenaline when, you know, when you commit a murder like that.
John Douglas: When you make up your mind you're going to perpetrate this crime, or any kind of crime, it's going to be hard for you to stop in the middle of your, your action.
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty much focused. I, uh, I set out to do what I did to those victims that day, and I made the decision that I was going to kill them, actually, even prior, before they got into my vehicles. Once they got into my vehicles, it was a [unclear: "done shot" / "gunshot"] deal for me.
John Douglas: Everyone I talk to about Joe Kondro thinks he's probably responsible for other molestations and murders, and there are some unsolved cases that match his MO. But he was careful, perhaps because he knows that if he is linked to another murder, his next stop will be death row.
John Douglas: I read police reports where they thought that [unclear: "you, Joe," / "Eugene"] was good for maybe 70 victims, molestations, possibly other homicides.
Joseph Kondro: I can't answer that. No, I can't answer that.
John Douglas: You don't want to answer it, or are you just kidding?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, I don't want to answer that.
John Douglas: Still, like many of the guys I've interviewed, he was proud of himself. He couldn't resist telling me about other crimes he had gotten away with.
Joseph Kondro: Let's get one thing straight. There were victims in between these. I mean, there were molestations that were never reported, you know.
John Douglas: So, uh, so there were other cases, and many went unreported?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, there was a lot of unreported cases.
John Douglas: Kondro is the father of six children, and he says he never molested them.
John Douglas: Why wouldn't you molest your own children?
Joseph Kondro: Because they were my kids. I loved them. Yeah, my flesh and blood. I love them, you know.
John Douglas: What would you do if someone went after your child, if one of your children, molested your children?
Joseph Kondro: Kill them.
John Douglas: These guys often have a me-against-the-world mentality, and clearly Kondro sees his own kids as part of himself. But anyone else, even his friends' children, are just objects, things he could use as he pleased and throw away.
Kondro'S Daughter: He's never tried to explain to me what he did. Um, I'll ask him questions: "Why did you do this? Did you think about us? Did you think about your family?" And he never responds. I don't even know if he knows the answers.
John Douglas: Any regrets for anything you've done?
Joseph Kondro: No. I have a regret that I should have been a better father to my children. But, uh, I have no regrets, no.
John Douglas: No regrets back to 1985 with your first victim? Any regrets there?
Joseph Kondro: No.
John Douglas: About 1996? Any regrets there?
Joseph Kondro: No.
John Douglas: But Kondro tried to tell me there was one other thing he felt bad about.
Joseph Kondro: They should have gave me the death penalty. I believed that I should have died for these crimes, you know, and I don't know, I just feel there's just, my victims didn't get any justice. They're dead, I'm alive.
John Douglas: I had a hard time believing that was what Kondro really thought, so I tested him.
John Douglas: Anything you would have done differently?
Joseph Kondro: Yeah, I would have, I would have took her out to a different spot.
John Douglas: So she wouldn't have been found?
Joseph Kondro: Well, that was the idea. That was the intention.
John Douglas: That sounds more like the truth. Joseph Kondro doesn't seem to have any remorse. He's not going to cry for the two little girls he killed. I think he regrets only that he's not on the outside, where he would be free to kill again. ### Part 2: Donald Harvey
John Douglas: As we've just seen, Joseph Kondro was a brutal killer who went after the children of his closest friends. Now I'll introduce you to an entirely different type of serial killer. On the surface, Donald Harvey seems like a calm, soft-spoken gentleman. But dig a little deeper and you'll find one of America's most prolific serial murderers, a man who targeted the hospital patients he was supposed to help.
Narrator: Cincinnati, Ohio, March 7, 1987. Forty-four-year-old John Powell dies after a long hospitalization. A routine autopsy reveals he had been poisoned with cyanide. Police hone in on a mild-mannered orderly named Donald Harvey. Under questioning, he admitted poisoning Powell by pouring cyanide into his feeding tube. But Harvey calls it a mercy killing. The patient reminded him of his father. Attorney William Whalen was appointed to defend Harvey. Whalen thought he was dealing with a single mercy killing, but rumors of other murders began to circulate.
William Whalen: And I went over to the Justice Center and sat down with Donald, and I said, "Have you killed more than one person?" And I fully expected him to say no. And he answered yes. And I asked him to tell me how many people he'd killed, and he said, "I can't." And I got irritated with him, and I said, "I just told you, you've got to be honest with me." And he said, "You don't understand. I can only estimate." And I told him to, in his mind, pick a number that he knew it could not possibly go beyond. He said 70. And we talked for 45 minutes more, and, and I could never tell you what we talked about. I mean, my mind, all I could see was a red neon sign blinking the number 70.
Narrator: Whalen offered the prosecutor's office a deal: a full confession of all Harvey's murders in exchange for their taking the death penalty off the table. The gamble succeeded, and Harvey began to detail his 17-year killing spree. Prosecutors were stunned by what they heard.
Interrogator: The next patient is Virgil.
Donald Harvey: Virgil. And I gave him rat poison in his dessert.
Interrogator: What kind of dessert?
Donald Harvey: It was a green pistachio pudding. I was surprised that the rat poison had worked so fast, and that he turned blue [unclear: "within 5, 10 minutes" / "at the time"].
Interrogator: [unclear: "Why, Mister?"]
Donald Harvey: Well, he was dying, and I liked the old man. He was a nice old man.
Narrator: As Harvey described killing one patient after another, the portrait of a serial killer emerged. He was convicted of murdering 34 patients. His confession detailed a murderous life spanning nearly two decades in three different hospitals in two states. Donald Harvey developed a variety of ways to take lives. He smothered with a pillow, turned off oxygen tanks, mixed arsenic into hospital meals, but his favorite seemed to be cyanide, which found its way into gastric feeding tubes, IV drip lines, and even apple juice.
William Whalen: There are more. Donald's killed more than the people we had just talked about. Um, some of them they would not, um, charge him with because they couldn't prove he did it. But by my, um, calculation, I believe Donald Harvey has killed 68 people.
John Douglas: After Harvey's arrest, I was called in to coach FBI agents who were going to interrogate him, so I've seen him talk about his murders before, and I'm going to use that to my advantage. I expect Harvey to be telling me the truth about 90% of the time, possibly 95% of the time. But I'm going to be trying to tap into is that 5%, and I'm going to try to get to the rest of that story. To this day, Harvey still calls himself a mercy killer, but I want to know how he can justify murdering so many people and still call it compassion. I want to interview Harvey at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. I look at Harvey somewhat as a chameleon. He's able to blend into his environment very, very, uh, very, very easily. Again, I find myself hiding my real feelings and buddying up to a serial killer. But if I want to find the truth, I have to give Harvey the chance to explain himself. He starts by presenting himself as a good Samaritan.
John Douglas: So you would consider those mercy, mercy killings?
Donald Harvey: Some of them had been in comas for many, many, well, semi-comas, in and out. Didn't know nothing. What I was doing, I thought was right. And the patients that I took care of, I'd like to think, you know, I made their passing easy. They didn't give me permission, no. But some of the patients didn't have no one to give permission for them. They didn't have a choice. And sometimes there was no family there to make that choice for them, and I made it for them. I was being a judge and a jury and executioner, and then [unclear: "he got caught" / "I got caught"].
John Douglas: Then your downfall was with Powell.
Donald Harvey: Yeah.
John Douglas: I mean, that's, that's what got you here today.
Donald Harvey: My downfall was not leaving that day.
John Douglas: Yeah. Take me back to that day. What happened?
Donald Harvey: I was in a hurry, and I put it through his G-tube. I knew it was a coroner's case, and he smelled something that smelled like bitter almonds, and he started running tests.
John Douglas: How did you feel then, when they started conducting this investigation?
Donald Harvey: Well, Murphy's Law just keep pushing, you know, keep pushing. It's, put it this way: the day everything was going on, I didn't know which way to go. And, you know, Murphy's Law has a way of, um, things happen for a reason.
John Douglas: Do you consider yourself a sociopath?
Donald Harvey: Well, that's what most people consider me.
John Douglas: What do you think?
Donald Harvey: I'm just Donald Harvey. I haven't changed a bit. I have been rehabilitated. I'm ready to go back to the streets.
Narrator: Donald Harvey used his position as a hospital orderly to kill dozens of patients at three hospitals over 17 years. Over the years, he has continued to call himself a mercy killer. The way he tells it, he was doing his victims a favor.
Donald Harvey: The patients may have had a month, six months to live, and they were mostly put there just to die. The families, instead of send them to a nursing home, they put them there. Or if they had no family, the county or whatever would put them there. Those are a lot of the type patients that I, uh, terminated.
John Douglas: You didn't stay with one specific method of, uh, hastening the deaths of these patients.
Donald Harvey: I was like a MacGyver. Well, see, there's one way: you take a patient that's got heart disease, you can take the spinal fluid and drain enough of the spinal fluid to cause them to have a heart attack. But with the cyanide, that was a quick death. I was careful with my dosage. I didn't want no feedback coming towards me.
John Douglas: Harvey selected hospital patients who were expected to die, pretty convenient for someone who wants to call himself a mercy killer, but also made his murders practically invisible. He's an entirely different kind of killer from Joseph Kondro, who left his victims' bodies where they could easily be found. Harvey is what we call an organized killer. He carefully planned his murders in order to avoid detection. Harvey began killing at the age of 18, and in his first year as an orderly, he killed more people than most serial killers do in a lifetime.
Donald Harvey: There was 15 deaths when I was 18.
John Douglas: There's already been 15?
Donald Harvey: No. When I went to work in the hospital, the year between I was 18 to I was 19, it was 15.
John Douglas: Yes. And you mentioned one time the pillowcase. What are the other methods?
Donald Harvey: I started using morphine, because it wasn't controlled that much in Kentucky, especially in small hospitals in the 1970s. And I did unplug a couple of ventilators. I used cyanide. I used arsenic. I used adhesive cleaner, a plastic bag, too.
John Douglas: Were you experimenting, or was it just whatever it was?
Donald Harvey: I wanted the quickest method of death. A funeral director and I became lovers, and he showed me how to use a plastic bag, and what the marks of a pillow would leave, a certain mark, as opposed to a bag, if you held the bag down or if you put it in the mouth and nose of a comatose patient. Cyanide on a black person will not show, but it'll show on a white person if you, you know, give it by shot. If you put it in an IV, no. I used it in their feeding tubes. That's what got me busted. I was in a hurry.
John Douglas: Did you consider them victims, by the way? The patients?
Donald Harvey: No, I don't consider them. They were my patients. I never looked at it as murder till I was actually arrested. I always looked at it as mercy, you know. Today, you know, they have the hospice units, and that's assisted suicide, but it's with the person's...
John Douglas: Making a choice.
Donald Harvey: Yeah, making a choice.
John Douglas: Right. These, these people never had a choice.
Narrator: Harvey relished this ability to decide when people will die. He seemed to never have a second thought. Will Donald Harvey have nightmares?
Donald Harvey: No, because I have put it to rest. I've had months and years to live with it.
John Douglas: Serial murder is really about power, control, and domination. Donald Harvey wanted to play God, but he was still trying to convince me he is motivated by compassion.
Donald Harvey: If I was laying, okay, look at you today, and you weigh 90 pounds a year from now and you don't know nothing, do you still want to be hanging on?
John Douglas: Good question, because in 1983, on a case, I was in a coma for a week. I collapsed, and as far as they knew, I had no brainwave activity. My digestive system shut down. I felt tremendous pain. I'm pretty sure Harvey would have had no problem taking me out.
John Douglas: But what if the tables were turned? Would you like somebody treating you like yourself?
Donald Harvey: If they wanted to come, yeah, go ahead, but don't get caught. Damn, don't get caught, because, you know, them little cells and bathrooms you live in ain't all that.
John Douglas: Harvey worked pretty hard to convince me that he was a mercy killer, but there are plenty of cases where he was anything but merciful.
John Douglas: But they weren't all, um, they weren't all mercy. Now, the first death occurred at about 18 years of age with you. Can you tell me about that? How'd that happen?
Donald Harvey: Just one guy, he'd had a stroke. He had an IV in, and he'd got the IV out, and the sister told me to go and clean up the bed and change the IV, take it out because it was empty. And when I went to pull back the sheet, he covered me in stool that was in his hand, and I smothered him to death.
John Douglas: How did you do that?
Donald Harvey: With a pillow. I wasn't going to take any more. I mean, I'd had enough. And when he put the stool in my face, it was the breaking point.
John Douglas: [unclear: "You believe that?" / "You said, you believe that"]
Donald Harvey: That's what happened. It started me on the roller coaster, which I couldn't get off.
William Whalen: A gentleman had hit Donald with a urinal, and, um, Donald says he was knocked out. I don't know whether he was or not. He went to catheterize him later on that day, and then he took a wire clothes hanger and opened it up and jammed it inside the, the catheter, and it ended up rupturing, um, his stomach.
John Douglas: And so you went in there, you gave him the catheter, and then you straightened out a coat hanger. You ran that baby right through there, right into, I guess, [unclear: "two feet or someone's" / "two feet for someone's"] intestines.
Donald Harvey: [unclear: "Because it didn't cause him to have peritonitis" / "Because he didn't, caused him to have peritonitis"]
John Douglas: Peritonitis, right.
Donald Harvey: He died a couple of, a couple days later. I shouldn't have done that. I should have never been allowed around that patient again. That was poor security on the, the hospital's part. I mean, you [unclear: "beat me up" / "meet me up" / "eaten me up"] today and I'm taking care of you tomorrow? Oh, I don't think so.
John Douglas: That's called, uh, projection. So it's like, it's like projection.
Donald Harvey: Well, the hospital shouldn't have put me with this guy.
John Douglas: They probably shouldn't have done it, but, uh, but you blame more of the hospital.
Donald Harvey: I mean, I got a [unclear: "bump" / "pump"] not this big on my head. My ribs are bruised, and he poured urine on me, and he kicked me several times. He cold-cocked me with that metal urinal. I should never been allowed around the patient. No, they're not, they're not responsible for the death part. They're responsible for his security. (speaker uncertain for the last two sentences)
John Douglas: The patient is the one who's dead, but Harvey's still talking about what the patient did to him. It's a common theme with serial killers. Most of these guys are narcissists. But Harvey was unique in another way. Serial killers are predators who enjoy the hunt for a victim. Harvey, on the other hand, didn't need to hunt for his prey. Like fish in a barrel, potential victims were always within easy reach.
John Douglas: At some point in an interview with a killer, I will go back to the guy's childhood. I want to know when the homicidal urge first appeared, and more often than not, I find that these evil impulses show up very early on. Adolescence is a pretty common time for a future violent offender to start forming his sick fantasies. It also comes as no surprise that a lot of these guys had terrible childhoods. Broken homes and abusive parents are common.
John Douglas: People always ask me when I go out, is it nature and nurture? You know what I'm talking about? Is someone born bad?
Donald Harvey: So you're basically saying, is someone born a bad seed?
John Douglas: Right.
Donald Harvey: Well, no. Just think of circumstances.
John Douglas: Harvey says people close to him began molesting him at age four.
John Douglas: You remember still the specifics of that?
Donald Harvey: He said this was the thing that boys did, and not to tell Grandma. He used the orphanage. He said, "I'll kill your mommy and daddy and you'll have to go to the orphanage."
John Douglas: So you just kept quiet and held this, uh, this in. Was a lot of anger there?
Donald Harvey: There was some anger.
John Douglas: Physical or sexual abuse can have an impact on the victim for the rest of his life. But not everyone who has been abused turns into a killer. I believe that's a choice the offender makes. I wanted to find out how much Harvey felt these events changed him.
John Douglas: Would you say you were angry?
Donald Harvey: I learned how to manipulate.
John Douglas: But there was another adolescent criminal signature that Harvey shares with most other serial murderers.
John Douglas: And what about the, the business with the animals?
Donald Harvey: I killed my bird. My mom told me I had to take it back because it wouldn't survive. It was just a little tiny thing. And I refused to give it up, so I killed it with a [unclear: "hoe" / "hole"].
John Douglas: But what was the message there?
Donald Harvey: Just, I won, I didn't want it to go back, because if the hen was going to peck it to death, I might as well put it to death. And I mean, I knew how to wring its neck, so I knew the outcome would be if I just wring its neck, but I used a [unclear: "hoe" / "hole"].
John Douglas: Supposed to shock the hell out of her when you do that, right?
Donald Harvey: Well, my mom said, "Well, what did you do that for?" And that was it. Nothing was ever, I didn't get a spanking or nothing. And I also took the neighbor man's two cows later on. I was about 16. I was right before graduating high school. I took them out into the woods and slit their throat. That was the only thing I ever did to animals.
John Douglas: That was quite a bit. I mean, it's more than a lot of people do.
John Douglas: At the Behavioral Sciences Unit, we looked into violent offenders' backgrounds, and we found three childhood activities that could be seen as warning signs: cruelty to animals, setting fires, and bedwetting. We call these a homicidal triangle. In my experience, cruelty to animals is the number one predictor of future violent behavior.
John Douglas: Serial killers get off on living a double life. Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Strangler, told me he could compartmentalize his life. On the outside, he was a father, a husband, Boy Scout leader, and president of his church. But deep inside lurked a sexual psychopath. Donald Harvey hid his need to kill behind the gentle face of a caregiver.
William Whalen: He went for over 18 years getting away with it. So, I mean, there wasn't any reason to believe that he would quit, except for the fact that he was found out.
John Douglas: Like child killer Joseph Kondro, Donald Harvey enjoyed the feelings of control and domination over his victims. Avoiding detection for years on end made Harvey cocky, so cocky, in fact, that he eventually took his deadly work home with him and used his lethal art to settle personal scores. Neighbors, friends, even lovers: no one was safe.
John Douglas: All right, what about Carl, uh, your lover? What did you do to him?
Donald Harvey: I gave him arsenic for three and a half years.
John Douglas: And why, though?
Donald Harvey: [unclear: "I didn't want to kill him" / "Yeah, one killing"]. [unclear: "Just wanted to make him" / "It's the way I make him" / "This wouldn't make him"] sick enough that he'd keep his penis in his pants and stay out of the parks and stuff.
John Douglas: So you knew just enough, how much to give him, just to make him sick, not to kill him, but just to make him sick enough where he's not going to go out and, and meet anybody.
Donald Harvey: Yeah.
John Douglas: And he also took revenge on another friend. Her crime:
Donald Harvey: She always was telling stories on me.
John Douglas: What did you do to her?
Donald Harvey: I gave her [unclear: "hep serum" / "eighth serum"]. She got hepatitis.
John Douglas: Hepatitis B?
Donald Harvey: Hepatitis B.
John Douglas: She didn't get HIV, though?
Donald Harvey: No. As far as I know, she never did.
John Douglas: And she lived?
Donald Harvey: Yeah, she's alive.
John Douglas: Now, what about Helen? Helen Metzger, the neighbor?
Donald Harvey: She was a very nice lady.
Narrator: Harvey treated this nice lady to some arsenic-laced leftovers. He spiked a jar of mayonnaise in her refrigerator, even poisoned pie. Not surprisingly, she eventually succumbed to the poison. Of course, he still volunteered to be a pallbearer at her funeral.
John Douglas: And James Peluso?
Donald Harvey: He was a friend of mine I met when I was roughly 16. And he told me, he said if he ever got disabled, to go on, he would want me to take him out.
John Douglas: All of Harvey's victims, friend and stranger alike, were just playthings in a deadly game. People like Donald Harvey kill because of a deep, overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Killing is the one thing that makes this guy feel important.
Narrator: After being convicted of killing 37 people in two states, Donald Harvey was sentenced to three life terms. He won't be eligible for parole until 2043. He will be 91 years old.
John Douglas: Harvey seems to me to be surprisingly comfortable here in prison.
Donald Harvey: It's no different. This place is really no different than any... I mean, you got that barbed wire [unclear: "out there" / "thrown"], you got them guns in the tower, and you got your little, say, pedophile area, you got your little killer area, then you got your little wannabe gang area, and all this. They're all in there.
John Douglas: When, when you're in bed at nighttime, or you're alone, what kind of things do you think of? Do you ever think of the crimes that got you here? [unclear: "No, any of that?"] What kind of things do you think of?
Donald Harvey: I'm building a house, a log house, right now, and I've built it two or three different ways. I'm on four bedrooms right now, but I've only got three baths.
John Douglas: You're doing it in your mind?
Donald Harvey: Yeah. Sometimes I write down stuff, and then maybe next year it'll be [unclear: "a church" / "a different a"] or something different.
John Douglas: Harvey says he doesn't think about his crimes, but I want to know if he regrets them. Does he have any remorse for taking so many lives?
John Douglas: Would there have been any, any changes along the way, how you responded to certain events in your life? Or your primary change or concern was you would have done things differently with Powell, the, the patient that got you here.
Donald Harvey: Well, I would have never gave him the cyanide. I would have cleaned out the G-tube better. But, I mean, I know you can't go back and second-guess yourself. If I did, I'd just go, "Oh, I just got too much there." And I don't try to second-guess myself anymore.
John Douglas: If you ask me, Harvey is just like most other serial killers now behind bars. His biggest regret is that he made a mistake and got caught. One thing about these guys: most serial killers think the world revolves around them. Remorse for their victims? Forget about it.
John Douglas: If, were, something happened here, you were released, you know, earlier, uh, what do you think? You, you think, number one, you think you would, would kill again?
Donald Harvey: No. [unclear: "No, for no reason" / "Be no reason"], I won't be working in hospitals. [unclear: "I won't be knowing all that stuff" / "I want me none of that stuff"].
John Douglas: I believe Harvey would kill again. I haven't met a serial killer yet who's capable of rehabilitation. The best we can do is catch them and put them where they can't hurt anyone else ever again.
John Douglas: The thing about you, you are so, so different than other types of people I've interviewed over the years. How are you able to get away with this for such a long, long period of time? How did you do it?
Donald Harvey: You got people that sit back and just watch everything. When you go into a hospital to work, you look at the people. Okay, those people, like me, they don't have a care in the world, but they do. Those are the kind you sometimes have to watch. I mean, who's to say you're not a serial killer? I mean, you have a fascination with going to talk to them, stuff like that. You might be like Hannibal Lecter, we don't know. But I mean, it's, you don't know. ### Close
John Douglas: People always ask me, how many serial killers are there in the United States? A conservative estimate is that there are between 30 and 50 active serial killers out there at any given time. By meeting with and understanding more about guys like Donald Harvey and Joseph Kondro, I believe we have a better chance of recognizing the criminal signatures of other active serial murderers. These interviews can ultimately help investigators create better profiles to identify and capture the serial killers who are still among us. From Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, I'm John Douglas. ---