Donald Harvey: the hospital orderly, a cyanide autopsy and a TV anchor’s tip-off

• BornApril 1952, near Cincinnati, Ohio; raised in Owsley County, Kentucky
• Known asThe ‘Angel of Death’, a name the prosecutor said hospital staff used
• Convicted of37 killings by the usual count (36 murders, one manslaughter), Kentucky and Ohio, 1970–1987
• ArrestedCharged in April 1987, Cincinnati, after an autopsy found cyanide
• Pleas24 aggravated murders, Cincinnati, 18 August 1987, and one more days later; eight murders and one manslaughter, London, Kentucky, November 1987
• SentenceMultiple life terms; the death penalty was not sought
• Died30 March 2017, aged 64, after a beating in his cell at Toledo Correctional Institution; a fellow prisoner pleaded guilty to his murder in 2019

Donald Harvey worked in hospitals for most of his adult life, as an orderly, a morgue attendant and a nurse’s aide, and for long stretches of it he was killing patients. He was convicted of 37 killings, by the count most often reported, committed between 1970 and 1987: most of them patients at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, and Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, and a few of them people he knew outside work. He was caught in 1987 after a pathologist performing an autopsy on a Drake patient smelled cyanide. On 18 August that year he pleaded guilty in Cincinnati to 24 aggravated murders under a deal that spared him the death penalty, and in November he pleaded guilty in Kentucky to nine more killings. He was serving multiple life sentences when, in March 2017, he was beaten in his cell at a state prison in Toledo, Ohio. He died two days later, aged 64.

The case is notable for how long it went unnoticed and for how it was widened. Harvey moved between hospitals for 17 years; one employer let him resign under suspicion in 1985, and the next, according to Time magazine, was not told why. The police first charged him with a single death. It was a local television anchor, Pat Minarcin of WCPO-TV, acting on tips from nurses, who reported in June 1987 that many more deaths on Harvey’s ward looked suspicious, and the case grew from one count to dozens. Harvey himself claimed at different times to have killed 50, 70 or more than 80 people. Those totals were never proved, and prosecutors said they could not have proved them.

This account rests on contemporary reports by United Press International, the Associated Press and Time from 1987 and 1988, later reporting by CBS News, WCPO, the Times-Tribune of Corbin, Kentucky, Oxygen, the Toledo Blade and WVXU, and a history of the Kentucky case published by Kentucky Historic Institutions, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people Harvey killed, their families, the survivors and his own family are not named.

From Owsley County to Marymount Hospital

Harvey was born in April 1952 in south-west Ohio, outside Cincinnati – in Butler County, according to Kentucky Historic Institutions – and grew up in and around Booneville, in Owsley County in eastern Kentucky. He left school early; Oxygen says he dropped out in the ninth grade.

In 1970, at 18, he was hired as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in London, the seat of Laurel County, Kentucky. He later admitted that he began killing patients within weeks of starting there; the deaths he would plead guilty to took place in 1970 and 1971. He left the hospital in 1971. According to Kentucky Historic Institutions, he was arrested in March that year for breaking into a neighbour’s flat, pleaded guilty to petty theft and was fined $50.

When Kentucky investigators went back over the Marymount deaths in 1987, a medical examiner reviewed nearly 100 patient files from his time at Marymount and picked out 15 possible homicides, the former Commonwealth’s Attorney, Tom Handy, told the Times-Tribune in 2017. Every one of the 13 killings Harvey went on to admit there, Handy said, was on that list.

The Air Force and the VA hospital

A few months after leaving Marymount he enlisted in the US Air Force; UPI reported that he served near San Francisco in 1972. Oxygen reports that he was discharged after about nine months, when the service learned of his burglary arrest.

From 1975 to 1985 he worked at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati, for most of that time in the hospital morgue. He lived in Middletown, Ohio. In 1985 he came under suspicion at the VA – Time reported that tissue samples had gone missing from its laboratories, and Oxygen that security staff found a loaded revolver and hospital supplies in his gym bag – and he resigned. According to Time, federal privacy rules meant that his next employer was not told.

Drake Memorial Hospital

In February 1986 Harvey started work at Drake Memorial Hospital, a publicly owned long-term care hospital in Cincinnati, as an orderly and nurse’s aide. Time reported that supervisors rated him well and thought him quiet. Over the next year, by the count in his guilty plea, he killed 21 Drake patients.

Prosecutors said he used cyanide most often, pouring it into feeding tubes or adding it to food and drink, and also arsenic, rat poison and a petroleum-based cleaning fluid. Some patients were suffocated, and the AP reported that some died when he let their oxygen run out. He told detectives he preferred cyanide because it was hard to detect, WCPO reported, and the prosecutor told the court it would leave no trace once a body had been embalmed.

Harvey would describe the killings as mercy for patients who were suffering. The Hamilton County prosecutor, Arthur Ney Jr., rejected that. He told the court Harvey was sane, competent and a compulsive killer, and said years later that Harvey killed because he liked killing.

The autopsy

In March 1987 a 44-year-old patient at Drake died. He had been in a coma for months after a motorcycle accident, Time reported. During the autopsy a pathologist in the Hamilton County coroner’s office noticed the smell of cyanide, and tests showed a lethal dose taken shortly before death. The pathologist alerted the police. Questioned by detectives, Harvey confessed to that killing, and in April 1987, UPI reported, he was charged with one count of murder.

At his arraignment, according to Time, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but court-appointed psychologists found no strong evidence of mental illness. By September UPI was reporting that mental health experts had ruled him sane.

The WCPO investigation

To police and prosecutors, at first, it was one murder. What widened it was a television newsroom. Pat Minarcin, an anchor at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, followed up tips from nurses and other hospital staff, who told the station about an unusually high number of unexplained deaths on the wards where Harvey had worked. After Harvey was charged, Minarcin asked on air whether he could be responsible for other deaths, and more calls and letters came in. By comparing Harvey’s shifts with the deaths, WCPO says, the station found a pattern, and Minarcin took it to the police.

The station broadcast its investigation in June 1987, and a grand jury inquiry followed. According to Time, the Hamilton County coroner exhumed ten bodies and found traces of arsenic in several. Harvey’s court-appointed lawyer, William Whalen, asked his client whether he had killed anyone else; Harvey said he had, and put the total at around 70, according to Oxygen and to Whalen’s own later account reported by WVXU.

Harvey then gave detectives a long confession – WVXU described it as lasting 12 hours. In August WCPO reported that he had admitted killing 34 people: 23 patients at Drake, five at the VA hospital and six others. Joe Deters, then an assistant prosecutor on the case, later told WVXU that investigators at first did not believe what Harvey was telling them.

Guilty in Cincinnati, August 1987

On 18 August 1987 Harvey pleaded guilty in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court before Judge William Mathews. He admitted 24 counts of aggravated murder, four of attempted aggravated murder and one of felonious assault. Twenty-one of the dead were Drake patients. The others, UPI reported, were a neighbour, an acquaintance and the father of the man he shared a home with, and the murders in the indictment ran from April 1983 to March 1987. The attempted murders included poisoning his roommate’s mother with arsenic and lacing a woman friend’s drink with hepatitis serum taken from the VA hospital; the felonious assault count covered the repeated poisoning of the roommate himself.

The plea was a bargain. Ney agreed not to seek the death penalty, a decision UPI reported he called agonizing, in return for guilty pleas to every charge. Mathews sentenced Harvey to three consecutive life terms, which meant he would not be eligible for parole for 60 years, when he would be 95. The AP reported that he was also fined $270,000 plus court costs. Some victims’ relatives opposed the deal, and some said he deserved worse. According to UPI, Ney told the court that Harvey had confessed to 29 murders, but that a grand jury had found too little evidence to indict on five of them.

Days later Harvey pleaded guilty to one more killing in the Cincinnati area, bringing his Hamilton County total to 25.

Kentucky, November 1987

In Kentucky the Marymount deaths were investigated by the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office with the Laurel County sheriff, Floyd Brummett, and the London police chief, Bill Smith, before Harvey was ever interviewed, Handy told the Times-Tribune. Harvey’s defence offered admissions in return for the state not seeking the death penalty, according to the same report, though Handy said the penalty had not been a factor, because it had been ruled unconstitutional in Kentucky when the killings took place. Harvey admitted 13 killings at Marymount; prosecutors believed they had the evidence to convict on nine.

In early November 1987 Harvey pleaded guilty in Laurel County Circuit Court in London to eight counts of murder and one of voluntary manslaughter, for nine patients who had died at Marymount in 1970 and 1971. Circuit Judge Lewis Hopper sentenced him to eight life terms plus 20 years. Kentucky Historic Institutions says the sentence was to run concurrently with his Ohio terms.

More charges, and the count he claimed

In February 1988 a Hamilton County grand jury indicted Harvey on three more murders and three attempted murders, all of Drake patients, which he had confessed to in a prison interview the month before, UPI reported. Ney said Harvey had supplied dates, times and places that investigators checked and found accurate. Those three killings take the total to the 37 convictions most later accounts give, which WVXU in 2025 described as 36 murders and one manslaughter; the sources used here do not record when he was sentenced on them.

The number he claimed was always higher, and it kept moving. At his plea in August 1987 his lawyer said Harvey claimed 54 victims, according to UPI; the AP reported as many as 50. A month later UPI reported that he had confessed to at least 58 in Ohio and Kentucky. In 1988 Ney put Harvey’s admissions at as many as 55. Whalen later said the figure might be as high as 70, and WCPO has reported that he claimed more than 80. Many of the extra claims concerned the VA hospital, where the FBI spent months investigating his time there, UPI reported in 1988; when he died, the AP said he had claimed 18 killings at the VA.

None of those further killings was ever charged. Ney said in 1988 that prosecutors probably could not have won convictions on the other deaths because they lacked substantial evidence. The true number has never been established.

Prison and death

Harvey spent the rest of his life in Ohio prisons. In September 1987, in an interview with a California television station, he said he had been mentally disturbed in the early 1970s and would not kill again. From 2008, WCPO reported, he was held at the Toledo Correctional Institution, where he was in a protective custody unit.

On the afternoon of Tuesday 28 March 2017 he was found badly beaten in his cell. He died on Thursday 30 March, aged 64. The Lucas County coroner’s office found that he had died of blunt head trauma.

Months later a fellow prisoner, James Elliott, who according to the Blade was serving a sentence for burglary and assault, wrote to the Toledo Blade claiming responsibility. He was indicted in May 2019, and on 24 September 2019 pleaded guilty in Lucas County Common Pleas Court to aggravated murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 25 years, the Blade reported. “No matter how bad a person is, that does not give you the right to be the judge, jury, and executioner,” Judge Myron Duhart told him, according to the Blade.

Where the accounts differ

• The total: the AP (2017) and the Toledo Blade (2019) give 37 murder convictions, and WVXU (2025) 36 murders and one manslaughter; WCPO (2017) says he was convicted of 36 murders; UPI reported in February 1988 that he had pleaded guilty the previous year to 34.
• The Kentucky count: the AP (in a 2017 caption), Kentucky Historic Institutions and UPI (1988) give nine Marymount deaths, eight murders and one manslaughter; Handy told the Times-Tribune that Harvey admitted 13, with evidence to convict on nine; WCPO says he was charged with killing 10 people in Laurel County.
• The Drake count: UPI and the AP in 1987, and the AP again in 2017, say 21 of the 24 Cincinnati murders he admitted in August 1987 were Drake patients; WCPO says he admitted 24 killings at Drake.
• The VA hospital: in August 1987 the AP reported Whalen as saying Harvey claimed at least 10 killings there, and UPI that a TV report put it at five, with Whalen claiming 10 more; the AP’s 2017 obituary says 18; Oxygen says at least 15. He was not convicted of any VA death in the sources used here.
• The Kentucky plea date: an AP photo caption republished by CBS News gives 2 November 1987; Kentucky Historic Institutions says early November, illustrated with a newspaper photograph dated 3 November.
• Which plea came first: the Times-Tribune (2017) says that after his Kentucky sentencing he was sent to Ohio to plead guilty there; UPI and the AP reported the Cincinnati plea on 18 August 1987, and UPI in 1988 placed the Kentucky plea about two months after that.
• The sentences: the AP and UPI reported three consecutive life terms in Cincinnati in August 1987; the Times-Tribune says he was serving 28 life sentences when he died; WVXU (2025) says eight consecutive life sentences; Kentucky Historic Institutions says the Kentucky terms ran concurrently with Ohio’s.
• The first Marymount death: Kentucky Historic Institutions dates his first known killing to June 1970; Oxygen to May 1970.
• Who owned Drake: UPI called it county-owned in 1987 and 1988, and WVXU (2025) says Hamilton County ran it; the AP’s 1987 report called it a city hospital.
• Why Elliott attacked him: prosecutors said Elliott targeted Harvey because of the special meals he received in prison, the Blade reported; the AP said Elliott wrote that he grew up in Kentucky near relatives of Harvey’s victims; WVXU (2025) says he told investigators he knew the family of one victim; his mother told the Blade he did not know any of them.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page shows Harvey with dense curly hair, glancing sideways, against a background of blister packs of pills. An old medicine bottle labelled “Chlorodyne” stands at one side and a large syringe at the other, beside a medallion holding a poison bottle. In one corner is a map of the United States with Kentucky shaded and labelled; in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe beside the figures 37–57. The nameplate reads “Donald Harvey”, “Angel of Death” and “1970 – 1987”, with a judge’s gavel and a figure behind bars beneath it. For other case files, see Charles Cullen, Genene Jones and Harold Shipman.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Lethal Doses: Police probe 34 deathsTime, 24 August 1987
2. A hospital orderly nicknamed the ‘Angel of Death’ pleaded guiltyUnited Press International (Rick Van Sant), 18 August 1987
3. Former hospital orderly Donald Harvey pleaded guilty Tuesday to…United Press International, 19 August 1987
4. Nurse’s aide pleads guilty to killingAssociated Press (University Daily Kansan), 19 August 1987
5. Harvey says he was mentally illUnited Press International, 17 September 1987
6. Serial killer indicted for more hospital deathsUnited Press International, 12 February 1988
7. Donald Harvey, ‘Angel of Death’ serial killer, dead at 64CBS News / Associated Press, 30 March 2017
8. ‘Angel of Death’ Donald Harvey was unlike anything ever seen in Tri-StateWCPO (Marais Jacon-Duffy), 30 March 2017, updated 4 May 2019
9. Convicted ‘Angel of Death’ serial killer dies after brutal attack in Ohio prisonTimes-Tribune, Corbin, Ky. (Angela Turner, CNHI), via the Cullman Times, 31 March 2017
10. Nurse’s Aide Pleads Guilty To Murdering 37 Victims With Cyanide, Arsenic, Rat PoisonOxygen (Benjamin H. Smith), 21 July 2019
11. Elliott sentenced to life in prison for ‘Angel of Death’ beatingToledo Blade (Allison Dunn), 24 September 2019
12. Inmate sentenced in fatal ‘Angel of Death’ prison beatingAssociated Press (Local 12 WKRC), 24 September 2019
13. The Marymount Hospital ‘Serial Killer’Kentucky Historic Institutions (Shawn Logan), 4 March 2021
14. Drake Center closing, but the story of serial killer Donald Harvey will live onWVXU (Howard Wilkinson), 11 June 2025

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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