CINCINNATI, Ohio – For 17 years, Donald Harvey wore a hospital name tag with pride, pushing meal carts, changing bedpans, and chatting with families in hallways, all while systematically poisoning, suffocating, and injecting patients to death in plain sight. The 34-year-old nurse’s aide, now known as the Angel of Death, confessed to killing at least 37 people across Ohio and Kentucky, with estimates reaching as high as 87 victims, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. His reign of terror ended not through a suspicious death, but because a medical examiner caught a faint whiff of bitter almonds during an autopsy.
The case that unraveled everything began with a motorcycle accident. On August 1986, 44-year-old John Powell suffered severe brain damage in a crash and was rushed to Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati. He fell into a coma and was monitored closely for eight months, with doctors struggling to stabilize him as his condition fluctuated wildly.
On March 1987, Powell died, and doctors assumed the crash had finally caught up with him. But Ohio law required a post-mortem exam for accident victims, and that’s when Dr. Lee Leman made a chilling discovery.
During the autopsy, Leman cut into Powell’s stomach and smelled almonds. Cyanide, a poison that can carry a faint almond scent, was present in toxic levels in Powell’s blood. The victim had been fed entirely through a gastric tube for nearly a year, meaning only hospital staff could have administered the poison.
Leman ruled it a homicide, and police immediately began investigating everyone with access to Powell’s feeding tube. As they worked through the list, one name kept surfacing: Donald Harvey.
Harvey had a reputation among coworkers as a jerk who made inappropriate jokes and enjoyed watching people squirm. He was a small, meek man who could charm visitors but then take digs at patients. More disturbingly, nurses and aides had noticed a pattern: patients on Harvey’s watch died at an alarming rate, even those who seemed to be recovering.
They called him the Angel of Death behind his back, but no one ever reported him. Police obtained a warrant for his apartment and found jars of cyanide and arsenic, along with a detailed diary.
The diary was a chilling roadmap of murder. Harvey had documented how and when he killed Powell, and the entries went back years. He had started killing at age 18, just weeks after landing his first hospital job at Maramount Hospital in London, Kentucky.
His first victim was 88-year-old stroke patient Logan Evans, who smeared feces on Harvey. Enraged, Harvey held a pillow over Evans’ face until he stopped breathing. He reported the death himself, and no one suspected a thing.
Three weeks later, Harvey killed again. He turned down the oxygen for 42-year-old cancer patient Elizabeth Wyatt, who had told him she didn’t want to live. She slowly suffocated, and Harvey recorded it as a mercy 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁.
But the truth was far darker. Harvey was a natural-born killer who had stumbled into a profession where death was expected, and bodies raised no questions. He killed at least 12 patients in his 10 months at Maramount, using methods ranging from morphine overdoses to unplugging ventilators.
Harvey never settled on one method. He used cyanide, arsenic, adhesive cleaner, plastic bags, and even a straightened coat hanger shoved into a catheter to puncture a patient’s bladder. In one case, 81-year-old Ben Gilbert knocked Harvey out with a bedpan after accusing him of trying to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him.
That night, Harvey snuck into Gilbert’s room and inserted an oversized catheter, then shoved a coat hanger up it. Gilbert died days later from a punctured bladder infection.
There was no specific victim type. Harvey killed men, women, young and old, but most were cardiac patients already worn down, making their deaths easy to dismiss as natural. No autopsies were performed on most of his victims, so the true count will never be known.
In 1971, Harvey was arrested for burglary and arson, landing him in prison. That pause likely saved lives, but after serving his time, he enlisted in the Air Force, only to be discharged after two suicide attempts.
By 1975, Harvey was back in a hospital, this time at the VA Medical Center in Cincinnati, working nights as a nursing assistant and later as an autopsy assistant. That second role gave him access to cover his own tracks. Over the next 10 years, he killed at least 15 more patients, using arsenic and cyanide slipped into foods, drinks, IV lines, and feeding bags.
He also experimented on people outside the hospital, poisoning his boyfriend Carl Howler with small doses of arsenic to keep him too sick to leave the apartment.
Harvey poisoned two neighbors, including Carl’s mother, Helen Mezer, who died after he put arsenic in her pie following an argument. He also poisoned Carl’s father. Killing had become a reflex for anyone who annoyed him.
In July 1985, security at the VA hospital stopped Harvey leaving with a bag containing a loaded gun, needles, cocaine, and books on the occult. He was fined just $50 for the gun and let go quietly, with nothing in his file. Seven months later, he started at Drake Memorial.
At Drake, Harvey wasted no time. Over 13 months, he killed roughly 23 more people, disconnecting life support, injecting air into IV lines, and poisoning food and juice. He put cyanide into one man’s feeding bag and poisoned another’s orange juice.
He cut off a lock of one victim’s hair and kept it as a souvenir. On March 7, 1987, he killed two people on the same day: John Powell via cyanide in his feeding tube, and 82-year-old Hildites via caustic cleaning fluid.
Coworkers described Harvey as personable and kind, always offering food and flashing a big smile. One woman, Joanna Kennard, whose father spent eight months in a coma on Harvey’s ward, said her family liked him. He got away with it for 17 years because he worked wards where death was expected, and he never repeated a method often enough for any doctor to notice a pattern.
Once police had the diary and poison, former coworkers came forward with stories of deaths that never sat right.
Investigators exhumed 10 former patients and found arsenic in several. Harvey’s court-appointed lawyer, William Whan, asked him point-blank if there was more. Harvey estimated he might have killed as many as 70 people.
Ohio law allowed the death penalty for multiple murders, so Whan made a deal: take execution off the table, and Harvey would confess everything. Prosecutor Art Nay agreed, with the condition that if more victims turned up, the death penalty was back on.
On July 19, 1987, Harvey confessed to 10 murders and two attempted murders. A month later, he walked investigators through 33 murders total, spanning his entire 17-year run. He pleaded guilty in Ohio to multiple life sentences, then in Kentucky to more counts.
By the time the dust settled, he was convicted of 36 to 37 murders, but he confessed to closer to 70, and the number often cited is 87. No one will ever know the true count.
In a jailhouse interview, Harvey showed no remorse. He said, “Some of those patients might have lasted a few more hours or a few more days, but they were all going to die anyway. I know you think I played God, and I did.”
He claimed he was being a judge, jury, and executioner, but he had no medical expertise. He had no idea when these people’s time would come. His boyfriend and his parents were not even sick, proving his actions were about control, not mercy.
Harvey spent the next 30 years at the Toledo Correctional Institution with 28 life sentences. He was a nobody by prison standards, only resurfacing when true crime specials revisited his case. That changed in March 2017, when Harvey was found beaten to death in his cell at age 64.
The attacker was fellow inmate James Elliot, who claimed vigilante justice, saying he grew up where some of Harvey’s Kentucky victims lived. Elliot’s mother said he got tired of hearing Harvey brag about killing elderly people.
Elliot pleaded guilty and received 25 years to life, adjusted to run concurrently with his existing sentence. He will be eligible for parole at age 71. Harvey’s death marked the end of a case that 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 a terrifying truth: he killed openly, in a place meant to save lives, and he got away with it for nearly two decades.
The only reason he was caught was because one medical examiner could smell cyanide, a genetic trait most people lack.
The question lingers: how many others are out there, still working in hospitals, still killing, and still getting away with it because death is expected? Donald Harvey’s story is a chilling reminder that the most dangerous killers often hide in plain sight, wearing a name tag and a smile. His victims spanned decades, states, and ages, and the true number will never be known.
The Angel of Death is gone, but the legacy of his crimes will haunt the medical community forever.
