Like so many nurses who kill patients, Donald got the nickname “the angel of death” in the press because his lawyer said he killed out of mercy. The prosecution questioned this characterization, pointing out that he also killed a couple people outside the hospital who weren’t suffering from anything, and in court, when he saw the names of all his victims, he started laughing. He’d later admit he enjoyed the feeling of control, and of deceiving doctors who were always acting like they were better than him.
At Cincinnati’s Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital where he worked, Donald had a different but similar nickname: “the Kiss of Death.” That’s because patients kept dying under his watch. Everyone knew it, but no one did anything about it. “Whoops, I got another one today,” he’d say, and then his coworkers would all laugh.
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Sometimes, Donald suffocated patients with pillows. Sometimes, he emptied their oxygen tanks. Usually, he poisoned them by putting cyanide or arsenic in their meals; this is the true origin of all those jokes about terrible hospital food. These murders went undetected because no one has to do a post-mortem when a patient dies in a hospital. Not in Ohio anyway, not unless anyone has a special reason to suspect foul play. Then Donald made a mistake. He murdered a motorcyclist.
When someone dies following a motorcycle crash, Ohio law says the coroner’s office must perform an autopsy—not out of some pro-bike/anti-bike bias but because any motor vehicle fatality potentially means liability on someone’s part. When the medical examiner sliced open the stomach, he smelled cyanide.
As any good fan of mysteries knows, cyanide smells like bitter almonds. But some people are genetically incapable of smelling it, and to smell it at this level of concentration apparently required a special mutation from the medical examiner. This biker having fresh poison in his stomach months after being admitted to the hospital made zero sense without a killer on the premises, so this discovery launched an investigation, one that quickly fixated on the Kiss of Death.
“Nothing at all. He died under Don’s watch. Happens to someone every day.”
A court found Harvey guilty in 1987. Twenty years later—before he had completed serving even one of his many consecutive life sentences—another inmate beat him to death. Apparently, this inmate (his name was James Elliot) grew jealous because Donald got all those tasty kosher meals.
Elliot otherwise said he killed Harvey as a punishment, claiming to have lived near some relatives of Harvey’s victims, but no one was able to confirm those details. Elliot’s own mother insisted that he acted out of a sense of justice. But then, even Harvey’s mother said “he’s still a good boy” after her son was convicted of murdering dozens. That’s moms for you. Always maintaining faith in their children and always, always being proven wrong.
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Top image: Jeffrey Beall, qimono/Pixabay