Donald Harvey: The Hospital Serial Killer Known as the "Angel of Death"
Donald Harvey was an American serial killer who used his employment in hospitals and medical facilities to murder vulnerable patients. His crimes continued for approximately seventeen years, beginning in Kentucky in 1970 and ending in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1987. Because many of his victims were already seriously ill, their deaths initially appeared natural and often received little additional investigation.
Harvey pleaded guilty to thirty-seven killings in Ohio and Kentucky. He gave investigators several different estimates of his actual victim count, sometimes claiming that he had killed more than seventy people and, on other occasions, suggesting that the total may have been as high as eighty-seven. The exact number will probably never be known.
Harvey used numerous methods, including suffocation, interruption of oxygen supplies, deliberate medication overdoses, arsenic, cyanide, rat poison and other toxic substances. He also tampered with feeding tubes, intravenous equipment, catheters and respiratory equipment. Many of these acts were concealed within ordinary medical routines.
Early Life
Donald Harvey was born on April 15, 1952, in Hamilton, Ohio. He was raised near Booneville, Kentucky, in a financially struggling rural household. Harvey later described a troubled childhood that included sexual abuse by people close to him. Although these experiences formed part of his personal history, they do not excuse or adequately explain the deliberate violence he later committed.
Harvey left school during the ninth grade but later obtained a high-school equivalency diploma through a correspondence program. In May 1970, when he was eighteen years old and had little formal medical training, he began working as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky.
The Beginning of the Murders at Marymount Hospital
Marymount Hospital gave Harvey direct access to elderly, disabled and critically ill patients. His duties included cleaning rooms, assisting patients and handling equipment. The position placed him near people who were frequently unable to speak, resist or report mistreatment.
Harvey later identified Logan Evans, an eighty-eight-year-old stroke patient, as his first deliberate murder victim. Evans died on May 31, 1970. Harvey admitted smothering him with a pillow and a plastic covering after becoming angry during an incident involving the patient's incontinence.
That first killing established a pattern. Harvey learned that a medically fragile patient could be killed without automatically creating suspicion. Staff members and physicians often expected such patients to die, and autopsies were not routinely performed. Harvey subsequently interfered with oxygen equipment, administered excessive medication, suffocated patients and deliberately mishandled medical devices.
Harvey sometimes described the murders as acts of mercy, claiming that he wanted to end suffering. His own accounts, however, repeatedly contradicted that explanation. Some victims were killed because they irritated him, resisted him or caused him additional work. Other killings appear to have been committed for excitement, revenge, control or experimentation.
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