The ANGEL Of DEATH - Nobody Notices A Body In A Hospital – Donald Harvey

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for 50 off and three free gifts when you check out after you purchase it will ask you where you heard about them and please support our show and tell them our show sent you evening buyers remorse buy a new car i'll be moving in let's get started sorry i think there's been a mistake i bought it from carvana you what yeah great price i even have seven days to love it or return it so there's no no no buyers remorse more like buyers rejoice i guess i'll let myself out congratulations i mean it buyers rejoice buy your car today on carvana limitations and exclusions may apply see our seven-day return policy at carvana.com every town has a dark side there's a version of a serial killer that everybody knows the van the crawl space that freezer in the garage the guy who has to work at it has to hunt and lie and dig and lie again and spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder at what he buried well donald harvey he wasn't that well donald harvey wore a name tag with pride and in front of everybody he pushed the meal cart changed bedpans he remembered which patients like their juice cold and he'd chat with their family members in the hallway so they could feel comfortable knowing that their loved one was in great hands and when his shift would end he'd drive home and somewhere behind him in a room where he'd be able to see his family members and he'd be able to see his family members and he'd be able to see his family members and he'd be able to see his family members home he'd walked out of an hour earlier well somebody was dying it wouldn't even be strange because people die in hospitals and that's just what happens see donald harvey's whole trick was that there was no trick at all and he openly killed dozens of people and he did it all out in the open with a big bright smile hey guys it's andrew and welcome to every town where today we have a unique story of a prolific serial killer who got away with way too much in a place that's supposed to save lives but he was collecting them like stamps so let's head over to ohio right now and dig into the twisted mind of donald harvey aka the angel of death so in august of 1986 44 year old john powell got into a terrible motorcycle accident the crash didn't kill him right away but it left him with severe brain damage and he was rushed to drake memorial hospital in cincinnati for emergency care his injuries were so extreme he fell into a coma and was monitored closely the doctors well they did everything they could every time they thought he might be turning a corner well something would happen he'd get ill his body would then fight back and they would stabilize him this sort of up and down continued for the next eight months until one day his illness got severe the doctors they weren't really sure what was going on something to do with his lungs and it seemed nobody could quite pin down what was happening anymore until finally on a march morning in 1987 well john passed away the doctors figured it was the crash finally catching up with him complications stacking up until his body and just gave out but ohio law required a post-mortem exam for anyone who died as the result of a motorcycle accident no matter how obvious the cause looked on paper and so john's body went to medical examiner dr lee lehman and that's when something odd turned up the autopsy started normal enough right up until dr lehman cut into john's stomach and stopped it was not because of what he saw it was because of what he smelled almonds faint but there a lehman knew that smell cyanide can carry a note of bitter almond though a good chunk of people are genetically incapable of picking it up at all which meant it was just a matter of time before he could be cured of the disease he was in the hospital and he was just pure luck that lehman could the toxicology report backed him up cyanide and plenty of it sitting in john's blood it hadn't been the crash that had killed him it was poison and since john had spent nearly a year confined to that hospital bed unable to even eat on his own and fed entirely through a tube that ran straight into his stomach though there was no version of this where he got it out the next day it was a version where some outside visitor could have slipped it in to a line only hospital staff had access to that meant somebody on his own care team had put it there dr lehman ruled it a homicide now the question was who did it and why well police started with the obvious angle looking into each person who had access to that feeding tube and that meant the doctors and nurses assigned to his ward a small team devoted to his care while he was in the hospital and he was in the hospital and he was in the hospital and he was in the hospital that hospital bed they were all suspects and as they worked their way through that list one name kept standing out among the others and 34 year old nurse's aide donald harvey donald was born in hamilton ohio though he grew up in a little appalachian town called boonville kentucky and from early on the people who worked alongside him they didn't care too much for him he had a bit of a reputation as a jerk an annoying presence on the ward and someone who made uncomfortable comments and cracked inappropriate jokes at the worst possible moments it wasn't that he didn't realize they were inappropriate now that was the point he liked the discomfort he caused he liked he liked watching people squirm a nurse's aide is supposed to be kind or at the very least fake it convincingly and donald he didn't really bother faking it all that much and sure he had his kinder moments he was a smaller guy meek mousy almost he could chat with visitors and he did his job well enough that it didn't raise any issues but then he'd take that dig at someone or at some patient it was a balancing act between showing his caring nurse side and the darker side of him showing up in brief moments that didn't linger but when police started digging deeper into who he was from his co-workers well that's when something genuinely unsettling came up and many of them who had worked with him for a while well they said they avoided him when they could but there was something else too and something they all seemed to agree with him without ever quite saying it out loud donald he was bad luck in a hospital that means one thing patients on his watch well they died even the ones who looked like they were turning a corner bouncing back and getting better well they'd suddenly take a turn just like our boy john recovering from that motorcycle crash right up until he wasn't it happened so often in fact the people started giving him a nickname behind his back the angel of death well that was enough for police to get a warrant for his apartment and what they found inside told them everything multiple jars of cyanide the same poison that had killed john plus arsenic and a diary donald had been keeping one for years and it laid out exactly how and when he'd killed john powell and john wasn't the only name in that story the only thing that was left was the name of the man who had been killed in the hospital Now remember, Donald was 34 years old when this was happening, and he got his first hospital job at 18. So that's 16 solid years, and it's interesting, too, how he became what he was. You'd think he went to school and met all the requirements to become a nurse, but Donald was just a kid off the street who kind of fell into it. It happened after his mother asked him to check on his sick grandfather at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. He ended up hired as an orderly there, changing bedpans, inserting catheters, handing out meds. He had no college, no medical training, but back in 1970, that wasn't a requirement. He just showed up and did his work and ultimately gained his life. He didn't gain people's trust enough. But within just weeks on that job, as it turns out, he killed for the first time. His victim was a very easy target. Logan Evans, who was 88 years old, a stroke patient, and largely helpless. In May of 1970, after a confused Evans smeared feces on him, while Harvey was so pissed off he held a pillow over the old man's face until he stopped breathing, after that, he calmly walked out and reported the death himself, like he had nothing to do with it. And because of the patient's condition and age, well, nobody batted an eye. And just three weeks later, he killed again. Donald was caring for a cancer patient named Elizabeth Wyatt, a 42-year-old woman who needed to stay hooked up to oxygen just to breathe. As she had told him herself, she didn't want to live any longer, and so he turned her oxygen tank down low. And ultimately, she didn't get enough to stay alive. She slowly suffocated, none the wiser, and he wrote it down in his diary as a mercy kill. But the reality was that Donald himself, he was just a natural-born killer. He just happened to fall into a profession where he could get his rocks off and cover it up pretty seamlessly. And once nobody caught on to those problems, he died. He was first to, well, he just kept going. By his own rough count, Harvey killed at least a dozen patients in his 10-month stretch at Marymount alone. There was 15 deaths when I was 18. There's already been 15? No, when I went to work in the hospital, the year between I was 18 to I was 19, there was 15 deaths. And unlike most serial killers, he never settled into one signature method. And you mentioned one time the pillowcase. What are the other methods? I started using morphine. I started using morphine because it wasn't controlled that much in Kentucky, especially in small hospitals in the 1970s. And I did unplug a couple of ventilators. I used cyanide, I used arsenic, I used adhesive cleaner, a plastic bag, too. Were you experimenting, or was it just whatever was the best? I wanted the quickest method of death. Whatever was the closest, really. Whatever was the easiest, he liked to experiment, and he loved getting away with it in front of everybody. He liked to experiment, and he loved getting away with it in front of everybody. In one case, a patient named Ben Gilbert, who was 81 years old, didn't care for Donald all that much. He could probably sense what was off with them, and they got into an argument. Got heated enough, and Ben ended up knocking him out cold with a bedpan or urinal, something big and heavy, after accusing Donald of trying to kill him. Well, Harvey had the last say in the matter. And that night, he snuck into the man's room, and inserted an oversized catheter into him, so he could shove a straightened coat hanger up in it. The result was a punctured bladder, which got infected and killed Ben just a few days later. Donald didn't care who his victims were. There was no specific type. They spanned every age, gender, and background you can think of. Really, there was only one thing tying most of them together. Well, they were cardiac patients. Already worn down and easy targets. And because of that, as mentioned, their deaths inside the hospital never raised a single eyebrow. That means no autopsies were ever performed on most of his patients, so really, there's no way of knowing how many of those deaths under his watch were actually natural, and how many were done by Donald. On March 31st, 1971, a drunken Donald broke into a neighbor's home to rob them. He walked out with several valuables and left a fire burning behind him. He was caught for this, and it landed him in prison. That's the only thing that stopped him from killing more, which may sound like a good thing, except this pause, it was only temporary. Had he continued on, maybe he would have got caught quicker. Instead, his life took a temporary turn, which broke the pattern. After he served his time, he enlisted in the Air Force, and that lasted all of nine months before he was discharged, following two unaliving attempts. It was also around this time that Donald came to terms with being gay, during a time where that wasn't really something you could say loud and proudly. By 1975, the itch, it was back. He wiggled his way back into a hospital. And this time, it was the VA Medical Center, working nights as a nursing assistant and eventually as an autopsy assistant, too. Which meant that on occasion, he had an actual hand in covering his own tracks. And a lot of covering he did, because over the next 10 years there, working nights with almost no supervision, he killed at least 15 more patients. In his methods, well, they always kept evolving. And this is when arsenic and cyanide became his weapon of choice. Flipped into foods, drinks, IV lines, feeding bags, whatever he could reach. It really was so simple for him. And every single time, he made sure to write it down in that diary. With so many hospital kills under his belt, he felt like testing out his skills in the real world, a little bit. When Harvey suspected his boyfriend, Carl Howler, was cheating, well, he started slipping him small, non-lethal doses of arsenic. Just enough to keep him too sick to leave the apartment. He poisoned two of his neighbors as well. One survived after he laced her drink with hepatitis-tainted serum. And the other, Carl's mother, Helen Metzger, died after he put arsenic in her pie following an argument. And he decided she was interfering too much in the relationship. He also poisoned Carl's father, too. And by this point, killing was just something he did with people who annoyed him. And then on July 18th of 1985, security at the VA hospital stopped him one night on his way out the door and searched a bag he was carrying. See, samples had been going missing from the hospital, and Donald, he'd been acting strange. Inside, they found a loaded gun, needles, cocaine, and books on the occult. But no samples, so no big deal, I guess. He got fined just 50 bucks for the gun and was let go quietly instead of fired outright. Nothing went into his file. It was like it never happened, and so now he just needed to find a new place to work. Seven months later, February 1986, Donald began working at Drake Memorial, and he wasted basically no time getting back into it. Over the next 13 months, he killed roughly 23 more people there, disconnecting life support, injecting air into IV lines, and poisoning food and juice and feeding tubes. Now that's basically a person every two weeks for over a year, which is an insane number of lives when you think about it. He put cyanide in a one man's feeding bag and poisoned somebody's orange juice, cranberry juice too, and in one detail that still gets people, he cut off a lock of that victim's hair afterwards and kept it. 61-year-old Donald Barney got cyanide through his own feeding tube and then got injected with more on top of it, like Harvey wanted to make absolutely sure. 85-year-old Milton Cantor got his through a nasal tube, and then got injected with more on top of it, like Harvey wanted to make absolutely sure. When rat poison happened to be what was closest at hand, he used that instead, mixed right into a man's pudding. And March 7th, 1987 turned out to be a two victim day. John Powell, the guy who got into that motorcycle crash, got cyanide through his gastric feeding tube. And meanwhile, an 82-year-old woman named Hilda Leitz on the same ward got poisoned with a caustic cleaning fluid the very same day. day. And the whole time, the people working right alongside Harvey might not have liked him, but they had no idea he was a killer. One woman named Juana Kinnard, whose father spent eight months comatose on Harvey's ward, described him later as personable, kind, always offering food off the meal card and flashing a big smile. Her family visited nearly every single day, and they liked him. He got away with all of it for 17 years for reasons that feel way too simple. He worked wards where death was already expected and patients passing away weren't treated as suspicious. Donald also never repeated a method often enough for any one doctor to notice a pattern on any single chart. By now, police had the poison from his apartment and, of course, that diary. Once word got out that Harvey was in custody, former co-workers started coming forward in droves, each with a story about a patient whose death had never sat quite right with them. Investigators exhumed ten of his former patients for autopsy, and sure enough, arsenic turned up in several of their systems. There was no more question. Donald was the one who had done all this. His court-appointed lawyer, William Whalen, sat him down and asked point-blank if there was more to it. Harvey's answer, by his own rough estimate, was that he might have killed as many as 70 people. Whalen understood immediately what a number like that meant for his client, and I mean literally. Ohio law let prosecutors go for the death penalty if Harvey could be tied to more than one murder, and he'd just admitted, off the record, to dozens. So Whalen made his only move. He went right to the prosecutor, Art Ney, with a deal. He said take execution off the table and Harvey will confess to everything, in full detail, no trial even needed. Ney agreed, but with one condition attached. If more victims ever turned up beyond what Harvey admitted to right now, the death penalty was back on the table. The court-appointed lawyer, William Whalen, said he would have killed as many as 70 people if Harvey could be tied to more than one murder, and he'd just admitted to everything, no trial even needed. He said take execution off the table and Harvey would confess to everything, in full detail, no trial even needed. Thank you.