Stella Lemon was an 87-year-old patient at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati who died on March 16, 1987, after receiving cyanide roughly three or four weeks earlier. Unlike an immediate poisoning, she survived for several weeks after the substance was introduced, which allowed her death to blend with the fatalities of seriously ill patients being treated at the hospital.

Her death became part of a much larger investigation that focused on hospital orderly Donald Harvey. Harvey admitted during questioning to putting cyanide into another patient’s feeding tube and was later connected to a pattern of suspicious deaths that matched his work schedule. Lemon’s poisoning was among the cases Harvey ultimately acknowledged as part of a comprehensive plea agreement that removed the death penalty as an option.

No unresolved suspect remains in Lemon’s death; criminal responsibility was accepted through guilty pleas in the broader series of aggravated-murder cases.