Mose Thompson was a 65-year-old patient at Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati when he died on November 22, 1986. He was born September 1, 1921, in Logan, West Virginia, and was later buried at Vine Street Hill Cemetery in Cincinnati. Hospital records and later prosecutorial filings attribute his death to cyanide introduced through his gastric feeding tube while he was under care at Drake.

Thompson’s death was one of a series of suspicious patient deaths that went unexplained at the time because many victims were seriously ill. The pattern remained hidden until an autopsy in March 1987 found cyanide in another patient, John Powell, which led investigators to orderly Donald Harvey. Harvey admitted poisoning multiple patients, and on August 18, 1987, he pleaded guilty in Hamilton County to 24 counts of aggravated murder that expressly included Thompson’s killing. No other person has been identified as arrested or charged in Thompson’s death.

Did anyone who knew Mose Thompson or worked at Drake Memorial Hospital in the mid 1980s notice anything unusual about his care or the hospital’s patterns of patient deaths?