March 30th 2017: Angel of Death, Donald Harvey dies after prison attack.
Born in 1952, Donald Harvey grew up in Ohio. He was the first of three children. At 6 months old his father fell asleep with him in his arms and awoke when Donald started crying having fallen and hit his head, he did not seem to be seriously injured but the soft spot on his head never closed up as he grew older. His teachers recall him being a bright boy and he performed well in class, although Harvey did seem to find the school work boring. His class mates remember him as being withdrawn and described him as a loner who would prefer to be in the company of adults rather than play games. What was unknown about Harvey at the time was that from ages 4 until about aged 11, Donald Harvey was being sexually abused by an uncle, Wayne, and a neighbour who was friends with his uncle, Dan Thomas. Thomas reportedly paid Wayne to allow him to sexually abuse the young boy. Harvey decided to drop out of school at aged 16 but received a diploma and GED via a correspondence school based out of Chicago.
In 1970 Harvey found himself 18 years old and unemployed so her decided to move closer to Marymount Hospital in Kentucky to care for his sick grandfather. He became well known throughout the hospital as he frequently visited and was known to be pleasant and very helpful in his grandfather's care. He was made such an impact on hospital staff there that he was asked to work as an orderly in the hospital. Harvey gracefully accepted the offer and almost immediately he began to work in a position that left him alone with patients. His duties included dispensing medication, inserting catheters and taking taking care of the patients other needs such as changing bed pans or adjusting pillows and making sure the patients were comfortable and cared for. Harvey excelled at his job and was very much liked by his colleagues. He was always viewed as an outsider who didn't seem to mix too much with the other staff, this would be the same with future colleagues of Harvey's also, much like his class mates in school before.
On March 31st 1971 Harvey was arrested for burglary while drunk. During police interrogation he rambled incoheriantly about the murders he committed but police couldn't make much sense of what Harvey was talking about. Not wanting to make any mistakes police did look into Harvey and could find no people in his life that appeared to have been murdered and chalked it down to the insane ramblings of a drunken fool. Harvey was ordered to pay a fine and was released from custody. After this however, Harvey decided that he needed to make some changes in his life and decided to quit his job at the hospital.He enrolled in the US Air Force but was discharged after about a year as the result of two failed suicide attempts.
Harvey decided to check himself into a VA hospital as he became completely lost and unable to help himself any further. He received 21 electric shock treatments and was released after 90 days.
In 1975 Harvey moved back to Cincinnati Ohio and took a position in the VA medical hospital there.
Harvey was battling with depression. He spent a lot of his time contemplating suicide and found it increasingly difficult to deal with his personal life. James Peluso was a partner of Harvey's who was becoming increasingly sick. They had been in a long term on and off again relationship for 15 years before Peluso died in 1984. Harvey also dated a man by the name of Vernon Midden at a later date but Midden was married with a family. He worked as an undertaker and during their conversations, Midden would tell Harvey about the embalming process and detail different types of reactions the body has to trauma. In June 1977 after discussing it Midden, Harvey developed a keen interest in the occult and different rituals. He met a spiritual guide named Duncan who he grew to have a close relationship with.
In July of 1985 after about 10 years of working at the VA hospital, Harvey was stopped by security one day as he was leaving work. The bag was said to look suspicious and when the security guards checked the contents it was found to hold a pistol, hypodermic needles, surgical scissors and gloves, a cocaine spoon, two books about the occult and another book which was the biography of Charles Sobhraj. As he had brought a weapon onto the grounds and clearly stolen the medical equipment, Harvey was forced to pay a $50 fine and also resign from his position at the hospital but the incident was never recorded on his work records.
With a supposedly squeaky clean work record Harvey was hired as a nurse's aide in Cincinnati's Drake Memorial Hospital in February of 1986. In March of the following year there was the tragic loss of a patient under the care of Donald Harvey. John Powell had tragically been in a motorcycle accident the previous summer and was still in hospital due to the severity of his brain injuries. At 44 years old unfortunately it was medically speaking, very unlikely that John Powell would ever wake up and his death was not noted as suspicious. In Ohio any death that occurs as the result of motor vehicle accident will automatically undergo a routine autopsy but as the patient has died as a result of their injuries which resulted from the crash, it is highly unusual to ever find anything out of the ordinary. Forensic State Pathologist Dr. Lee D. Lehman caught a smell of something during the autopsy, a smell that many might not even recognise, a smell that experts describe as faintly like burnt almonds. Immediately, Dr. Lee was alarmed and stepped away from the body of Powell.
Tissue samples were taken from the body and sent to labs to be tested but they only confirmed Dr. Lee's suspicions. John Powell had not died as a result of his injuries, he had died as a result of cyanide poisoning and his death was ruled a homicide. Investigators began to interview friends and family of Powell but nobody could think of who would want to harm him. Police then started to interview hospital staff, starting with those who were in direct contact with Powell and those who worked on his care. Staff were requested to undergo a lie detector test and all the staff agreed. On the morning of Donald Harvey's test he called in sick.
Police clearly took Harvey's unwillingness to participate in the lie detector test as a red flag but their suspicions were peaked when they interviewed other staff members and several of them mentioned Harvey as being an Angel of Death. This was due to the increased number of deaths that seemed to occur on days where he was working and especially if you compared the number of deaths in the year he had started working compared to the years prior. They had more than doubled during his time working there.
Police arrested Harvey in relation to the death of Powell and investigators claim to have been on the brink of giving up when Harvey all of a sudden confessed to the murder. He claimed that it was a mercy killing. Since the previous summer he had been watching John Powell in the hospital since his accident and he had no chance of pulling through, he killed him by injecting cyanide into his gastric feeding tube which caused his organs to start shutting down before he died. The media went into a frenzy as Harvey was formally charged with the murder of 44 year old John W. Powell.
Many in the media rose the question of how a man who had worked in hospitals for so long could suddenly snap and kill a patient, even if it was said to have been done out of mercy. Health care workers swear an oath to honor life and Donald Harvey had broken his vow. What was it about Powell that tugged on the heart strings of Harvey to cause him to kill? The questions began and many believed that perhaps this may not have been a once off killing.
One such person who believed there was more to this story was a journalist by the name of Pat Minarcin. As he was reporting on the story at the time he questioned police and they told him that Harvey was not being questioned in relation to any other death and they firmly believed that it was a one of a kind killing committed by Harvey. Harvey had even given a reason behind the killing, Powell reminded him of his father and he no longer wanted to see him suffering and in pain. Minarcin began to interview people who worked with Harvey and when a group of nurses came forward with a list of names, names of patients who had died unexpectedly under the care of Harvey, he chose to keep digging. The police were reluctant to look into the claims any further.
Harvey went on to explain that by his estimate, he might have killed 70 people during his time working in various hospitals. Whalen was a court appointed attorney who went from representing a murderer in a mercy killing to representing a serial killer in just a few short sentences. Harvey pleaded with him, he did not want to die in the electric chair and claimed he would much rather die by his own hand. Whalen called Minarcin back and told him that while he could not break client-attorney privilege, he should keeping digging.
I've said it over on my Instagram Account before but to me, there is something so utterly terrifying about a killer who preys on their victims when they are at their most vulnerable, sick in hospital. When they are lying in a bed in a place that should be a safe and caring place for them to get well. In terms of serial killers, Donald Harvey is one of the most notorious killers in American history.
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