Leo Parker was a 47-year-old Black patient at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati when he was killed on January 10, 1987. Parker was receiving nutrition through a feeding system when hospital orderly Donald Harvey deliberately introduced cyanide into his feeding bag, so the poison entered via equipment that was supposed to sustain him. An initial autopsy did not identify cyanide, and his death was not immediately treated as a homicide.

Parker’s death came during a period when Harvey worked as a nurse’s aide or orderly on wards with seriously ill patients, allowing several killings to be concealed as natural deaths. After a later patient’s autopsy in March 1987 showed cyanide, investigators focused on Harvey; he confessed over the summer to multiple killings, including Parker’s. Harvey was charged and ultimately pleaded guilty to numerous aggravated murder counts in August 1987, with Parker named among the victims.

Did anyone who knew Leo, his care at Daniel Drake, or his medical equipment notice anything unusual around January 1987?