Donald Harvey spent most of his working life in hospitals, first as a teenage orderly in London, Kentucky, and later as a morgue attendant and nurse's aide in Cincinnati. For 17 years, by his own account, he killed people in his care. He pleaded guilty in Ohio and Kentucky in 1987 and 1988, and news reports since then have given his total as 37 killings, most of them patients who were old or chronically ill. He told his lawyer the real figure might be as high as 70, and in later years he spoke of more.
The case came to light because of one autopsy. In March 1987 a pathologist at the Hamilton County Coroner's Office examining the body of John Powell, a 44-year-old patient at Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, detected cyanide. Harvey was charged with that single death. Nurses on his ward then went to a Cincinnati television anchor with their suspicions about other deaths, his report led to a grand jury inquiry, and Harvey, facing the possibility of a death sentence, confessed in exchange for life terms. He was beaten to death in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution in March 2017, aged 64, and the inmate who attacked him pleaded guilty to aggravated murder.
Harvey was born on April 15, 1952, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. He grew up in Booneville, a small town in eastern Kentucky. After his arrest, the principal of the elementary school he attended for eight years, Martha Turner, told reporters she could not imagine how such a thing could happen to "such a sweet boy." She said she believed his mind had snapped, and that when she had seen him about six months earlier his face had looked drawn.
His mother, Goldie McKinney, still lived in Booneville in 1987. She told the Cincinnati Post that her son had always been a good boy. "He's just sick, terribly sick," she said, "and he needs a good doctor."
His lawyer, William Whalen, later wrote that Harvey had been molested as a child, was shunned by schoolmates, and was gay at a time when that was not accepted, and that he had felt powerless all his life. Police said he had worked in health care since he was 18.
Harvey's first hospital job was as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in London, Laurel County, Kentucky, where he worked in 1970 and 1971. He was still a teenager. He later told Whalen that the killing had begun there, and in 1987 Whalen said Harvey admitted killing eight people while working at Marymount. Harvey's own account, as Whalen gave it to the Cincinnati Enquirer, was that it began when he connected a patient to an oxygen tank that was nearly empty, and that it soon became deliberate.
A Laurel County investigation followed in 1987, and investigators reviewed the files of the patients who had died at Marymount while he worked there. The hospital itself has since been demolished.
After Marymount he worked briefly at other hospitals. Records showed a short stint at St. Luke Hospital in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and he worked at two hospitals in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1973 and 1974, for less than seven months in all. Whalen told Lexington authorities in 1987 that no deaths had occurred there.
From 1975 to 1985 Harvey worked at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati, much of that time as a morgue attendant and autopsy assistant. In 1985 he came under suspicion there after tissue samples were stolen from the hospital's labs, and he was being investigated for theft of tissue samples and sabotage.
In July 1985 VA police stopped him and searched his gym bag. A former VA security officer, John Berter, told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1987 that the search turned up a loaded .38-caliber revolver, hospital supplies and books on the occult. Berter said that the search had been illegal because there was no probable cause, so the evidence could not be used, and that the hospital had allowed Harvey to resign rather than pursue the case. "They moved too fast and lost the chance to find out what was really going on with Harvey," Berter said. He also said the hospital's police chief had told him to lie if the case went further. The VA had fired Berter that February, citing abuse of sick leave; Berter said he was dismissed for reporting allegations of brutality by the chief and others.
Because of federal privacy rules, Harvey's next employer was not told why he had left the VA.
In 1987 Harvey reportedly told investigators he had killed five patients at the VA hospital. After his convictions he claimed responsibility for 18 deaths there, according to the Associated Press, and the Enquirer reported that he was investigated for 17 killings he claimed at the VA. No charge was reported for any of those claims.
By 1987 Harvey lived in Middletown, Ohio. His victims were not all patients. In the August 1987 plea, prosecutors listed people from his private life.
C.H. had been Harvey's roommate for six years. Harvey gave him arsenic from time to time, and he became very ill in 1986. Hamilton County Prosecutor Arthur Ney Jr. said Harvey had testified that he did not want to kill C.H., only to cause him "pain and suffering." Harvey pleaded guilty to felonious assault for what he did to C.H., and to attempted aggravated murder for giving arsenic from 1983 to 1985 to C.H.'s mother, M.H. Both survived.
Others did not. Henry Hoeweler, C.H.'s 82-year-old father, died on May 1, 1983. Helen Metzger, a neighbor, died on April 10, 1983. James Peluso, an acquaintance, died on November 10, 1984. Prosecutors said each had been given arsenic in food, and Harvey pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in each death.
He also pleaded guilty to the attempted aggravated murder of a friend, D.A., who developed hepatitis after he put hepatitis serum in her iced tea in January 1984, according to the plea list.
In February 1986 Harvey went to work as a nurse's aide at Drake Memorial Hospital, in the Hartwell neighborhood of Cincinnati. Drake was then owned and run by Hamilton County, and in the words of Howard Wilkinson, one of the Enquirer reporters who covered the case, it was in effect a county facility for older people who could not afford private nursing care. His supervisors there gave him generally good marks for his caring attitude toward patients, Time reported.
He worked at Drake from February 1986 until his arrest in April 1987, a little over a year. In that time, prosecutors later established, he killed 21 patients on the wards where he worked. Whalen's account, drawn from figures gathered by the television anchor Pat Minarcin, is that Ward C-300 recorded 34 deaths between April 1986 and April 1987, against 7 to 14 on comparison wards, and 13 on C-300 in the previous 12 months.
The Drake patients named in the August 1987 plea were men and women from the Cincinnati area, most of them elderly; the youngest named, Leo Parker, was 47. Little about most of them as people was reported beyond their names, their ages and the dates of their deaths, as listed by prosecutors and reported by United Press International.
They were Leon Nelson, 64, who died on April 12, 1986; Virgil Weddle, 81, April 19; Edward Schreibeis, June 20; Robert Crockett, 80, June 29; Donald Barney, 61, July 7; James Woods, July 25; Ernst Frey, August 16; Milton Canter, 85, August 29; Roger Evans, 74, September 17; Claborn Kendrick, 69, September 20; Albert Buehlmann, October 29; William Collins, 85, October 30; Mose Thompson, 65, November 22; Cleo Fish, 67, and Odas Day, 72, both December 10; Leo Parker, 47, January 10, 1987; Margaret Kuckro, February 15; Joseph Pike, March 6; Hilda Leitz, 82, and John Powell, 44, both March 7; and Stella Lemon, 87, who died on March 16, 1987, weeks after she was poisoned.
Two more Drake patients, Harold White and John Oldendick, were given arsenic in the summer of 1986 and later died at another hospital. Harvey pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated murder in both cases.
Their families were present through the case. Sandra Nelson, whose husband Leon was among the first Drake patients on the list, publicly criticized the plea agreement that spared Harvey's life. Betty Kissel, whose father was among the patients killed with a cleaning fluid, told WCPO in 1987: "I think he deserves worse than the death penalty."
John Powell had been at Drake since a motorcycle accident the previous summer left him with severe brain injuries. He had been comatose for eight months, Time reported, and when he died in March 1987 his doctors were not surprised.
His body went to the Hamilton County Coroner's Office for a routine autopsy. The forensic pathologist, Dr. Lee D. Lehman, noticed the smell of cyanide. "I could smell cyanide," he later told FOX19. Tests showed that Powell had received a lethal dose shortly before he died, and Lehman ruled the death a homicide. Deaths at Drake had been ruled accidental until then, FOX19 reported.
Cincinnati police questioned Harvey, and he admitted poisoning Powell. They charged him with Powell's murder on April 6, 1987. The Enquirer ran the story on its front page that day beside its coverage of the Cincinnati Reds' Opening Day. William Whalen was appointed as his public defender.
At his arraignment Harvey pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Court-appointed psychologists found no strong evidence of mental illness, and Whalen said he would probably drop the defense, Time reported in August. Harvey also refused to pursue an insanity plea himself, according to Whalen's account. Joe Deters, then an assistant prosecutor, later recalled a forensic psychiatrist's conclusion: "He ain't crazy."
Police had also asked Harvey whether he had killed anyone else. According to Whalen, Officer Jim Lawson put the question but dropped it when Harvey hesitated. Lawson said years later that Harvey's answers seemed to be building toward a claim of mental incompetence, and that he steered away from the subject to protect the case on Powell's death.
That might have been the end of it. Pat Minarcin, the evening news anchor at WCPO-TV, Channel 9, had spent ten years with the Associated Press. On the April 6 broadcast he asked his reporter whether police were looking at other deaths at Drake. She said police considered it futile, because cyanide could not be detected once a body had been embalmed.
About four days later, according to Whalen's account, an anonymous Drake nurse called Minarcin with a list of 13 patients she suspected Harvey had killed. A second nurse added three more names the next night. Minarcin obtained the 16 death certificates; none showed an unnatural death. The following night five more staff members called with names, dates and accounts of being turned away by supervisors, and the list grew to 33. A Drake nurse told WCPO in 1987 that months before the arrest she had suspected Harvey was a "mercy killer." Nurses said they had filed complaints and were told by supervisors to keep quiet.
Drake's management took a different line. The day after the arrest, the hospital's chief administrator, Jan Taylor, told staff on Ward C that internal and police investigations had found no evidence of other killings, and ordered them not to talk to reporters, according to Whalen. Hospital officials described Minarcin at staff meetings as a sensationalist.
Minarcin spent months gathering records and interviews. On June 23, 1987, WCPO aired a half-hour special report that set out the case for other killings, using interviews with staff members whose faces and voices were disguised. "We think there were others, and we need you to do something," one nurse told him, according to FOX19's 2019 account.
Whalen had been warned what the report would say. After a WCPO reporter told him the station would link Harvey to other deaths, he visited Harvey at the Hamilton County jail and asked whether he had killed anyone else. "Yes," Harvey said. Asked how many, he began to estimate, and he settled on 70 as the upper limit. "When I heard him say the word 'estimate,' I knew I was in trouble," Whalen told the Enquirer in 2003.
Under Ohio law, two or more killings made a defendant eligible for the death penalty. Whalen told Harvey that a mercy-killing claim would not work for multiple deaths. Harvey said he did not want to die. Whalen's plan was to offer prosecutors a full confession in return for a guarantee that they would not seek a death sentence. Before going ahead he talked it over with his wife and their two children, who agreed that he should stay on the case.
The broadcast had immediate effect. The next day's Enquirer carried a headline calling for a review of the Drake deaths, and the Hamilton County commissioners planned a closed-door discussion. A special Hamilton County grand jury took up the deaths. The county coroner exhumed the bodies of ten people, and traces of arsenic were found in several, Time reported. Jan Taylor, the Drake administrator, was scheduled as the grand jury's final witness in August.
Prosecutor Arthur Ney considered subpoenaing Minarcin to identify his sources. Minarcin said he would refuse and would go to jail if he had to.
In August, Ney accepted Whalen's proposal. Harvey would describe every killing, and the state would not seek death. Harvey gave detectives a confession that lasted about 12 hours, according to the Enquirer; Deters, in a 2019 interview, recalled spending 15 hours with him. Harvey told them that he kept a list of his victims behind a bathroom mirror at his home in Middletown. "It was so horrendous, we simply didn't believe him, at first," Deters told the Enquirer in 2003.
Before the plea, WCPO reported that Harvey had confessed to 34 killings: 23 at Drake, five at the VA hospital and six others. Police said they had not verified the figure.
On August 18, 1987, Harvey, then 35, pleaded guilty in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court before Judge William S. Mathews to 24 counts of aggravated murder, four counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of felonious assault. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms, which UPI reported would make him ineligible for parole for at least 60 years. Twenty-one of the 24 murder victims were Drake patients; the other three were Helen Metzger, Henry Hoeweler and James Peluso.
Ney said Harvey had confessed to 29 murders and five attempted murders, but that the grand jury had found too little evidence to indict him on five of the killings. He described Harvey as a compulsive killer who was sane and competent, and said the motive was not mercy. He also pointed out that cyanide would be hard to detect at autopsy once a body had been embalmed. Whalen told reporters that Harvey claimed 54 victims in all, without giving details, and that he would notify authorities in Kentucky, where Harvey said eight of the deaths had taken place.
The prison record shows the Ohio sentences taking effect on October 26, 1987, the day Harvey was admitted to the state prison system. At his formal sentencing that fall, Ney said Harvey had described the killings as casually "like he would tell you that he had gone out to get a sandwich for lunch," and called him unrepentant.
Within days of the plea, Harvey gave WCPO his first public interview since his arrest. He declined to discuss the 24 killings in detail or the others he claimed. He said he had killed to end patients' suffering and that he hoped someone would do the same for him if he were ill. He said he felt remorse for the families, and that he had had "two months to do my own crying in private." Of Powell, he said he had not gone to the room intending to kill him.
To the Enquirer's David Wells, in another 1987 interview, he gave a different emphasis. "Some of those might have lasted a few more hours or a few more days, but they were all going to die," he said. "I know you think I played God, and I did." He told a newspaper that he liked controlling who lived and who died, and he was quoted as saying, "I felt what I was doing was right."
Prosecutors did not accept the mercy explanation. Several of the people he killed were not patients at all, and Ney said years later that Harvey had never been a mercy killer. "He killed because he liked to kill," Ney told the Associated Press. Whalen's own conclusion, in his book, was similar: "Bottom line was, Donald Harvey liked to kill."
In late August 1987, Kentucky authorities met Hamilton County investigators to check Harvey's claim of eight killings at Marymount. Tom Handy, the commonwealth's attorney for Laurel and Knox counties, said he would not discuss a plea until his own investigation had run its course, and that it would be hard to prove anything from bodies 16 or 17 years old. Whalen said Harvey had given him some names of Kentucky victims but would not release them until the authorities agreed to negotiate.
Handy described the Kentucky investigation in 2017. It was carried out by his office with Laurel County Sheriff Floyd Brummett and London Police Chief Bill Smith before any statement was taken from Harvey. "Ninety-something people died at the hospital during the time Harvey was there," Handy said. Their medical files were sent to the state forensic laboratory, where the medical examiner identified 15 deaths that could have been homicides. Harvey admitted killing 13 of those 15 patients, and the commonwealth had enough evidence to convict him on nine. Handy said the defense had come to him offering a confession if the commonwealth would not seek death, which was no obstacle, because the death penalty had been unconstitutional in Kentucky when the killings took place. He recalled that Harvey described family members who had been in the patients' rooms, which made Handy think he had dwelt on the killings afterward.
On November 2, 1987, in Laurel Circuit Court in London, Harvey pleaded guilty to eight counts of murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter, covering nine Marymount patients who died in 1970 and 1971. Circuit Judge Lewis Hopper sentenced him to eight life sentences plus 20 years. The names of the nine patients were not reported.
The Ohio cases were not finished. In February 1988 UPI reported that Harvey had been indicted for more hospital deaths. The Ohio prison record lists, under a separate Hamilton County case with sentences effective February 19, 1988, three more counts of aggravated murder and three of attempted aggravated murder, all before Judge Mathews. The record also lists one further aggravated murder count, on its own docket, with a sentence effective in October 1987.
With those pleas, the prison record lists 28 counts of aggravated murder, each carrying 20 years to life, together with the attempted aggravated murder and felonious assault counts. It gives his net sentence as 80 years to life and his first parole eligibility in 2043, when, UPI noted in 2017, he would have been 91. The figure news organizations have used since 1987 is 37 killings, mostly patients in Cincinnati and London.
The case raised questions about how a man under suspicion at one hospital could move to another. The VA had let Harvey resign in 1985 with an investigation pending, and federal privacy guidelines kept Drake from learning why he had left. At Drake, nurses had raised concerns before his arrest and been told to keep quiet. Police Chief Lawrence Whalen said in 1987 that the hospital had no record of any such suspicions.
Prosecutors defended their own work. Ney said his office had "left no stone unturned" in looking for further victims.
The families of Cincinnati victims sued. WCPO reported in 2017 that at least 18 lawsuits were brought by families of Cincinnati victims, totaling more than 2 million dollars. Individual settlements or judgments were not reported.
Drake itself changed hands. In 1989 it became an independent nonprofit rehabilitation and long-term care center affiliated with the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. In June 2025, WVXU reported that UC Health planned to close the Daniel Drake Center on September 30, 2025, after 165 years as a hospital.
Harvey served his sentences in the Ohio prison system. In 2005 he was held at the Warren Correctional Institution in Lebanon, Ohio, and still described the killings as mercy killings, Whalen wrote. Whalen also recalled that Harvey once asked to see the Guinness Book of World Records and was disappointed not to find his name in it. From 2008 he was held at the Toledo Correctional Institution in Lucas County, where by 2017 he was in a protective custody unit.
Whalen died in 2012. Harvey later told Minarcin, in prison, "Oh I was gonna kill you," FOX19 reported.
On the afternoon of March 28, 2017, Harvey was found beaten in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution. A State Highway Patrol report said an unnamed person had entered the cell and assaulted him. He was taken to Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center in critical condition and placed on life support. He died on the morning of March 30, 2017. He was 64.
The Lucas County Coroner's Office found that he had died of massive head trauma, with several skull fractures and brain injuries, and found no sign that a weapon had been used. Lieutenant Robert Sellers of the State Highway Patrol said a fellow inmate was suspected, but no charges were filed then and the suspect was not named.
Reaction in Cincinnati and London was brief. "I learned that Donald Harvey died this morning after being beaten in prison," said Deters, by then the Hamilton County prosecutor. "Harvey caused a lot of pain in our community. I do not have any compassion for Donald Harvey." Tom Handy, the former Kentucky prosecutor, told the Toledo Blade that Harvey "went by the same method by which he killed scores of other people while they were helplessly lying in bed."
The suspect was James D. Elliott, 44 when prosecutors named him in 2019, a fellow prisoner from the Knox and Whitley County area of Kentucky, near London. He had been serving a sentence for a series of burglaries since 2006. The guards' union said he and Harvey were in the same protective custody unit.
In 2018 Elliott wrote to newspapers in Toledo and Kentucky admitting the killing. He said he had grown up near relatives of Harvey's victims. "Hopefully, everyone from our area will take some solace in the fact that one of their own gave Harvey the punishment," he wrote. He also wrote that he had planned the attack for at least a week and meant it to draw officials' attention to inmates' complaints about food. His mother said he did not know any of Harvey's victims, and that he had been angered by Harvey bragging about what he had done to old people. "We were always raised not to mistreat the elderly," she said.
In March 2019 Michael Loisel, chief of the criminal division in the Lucas County Prosecutor's Office, said the case would go to a grand jury, and that investigators had checked whether anyone else was involved. In May 2019 a Lucas County grand jury indicted Elliott on charges of aggravated murder and felonious assault, each with a repeat violent offender specification, tampering with evidence and possession of a deadly weapon while under detention.
In September 2019 Elliott pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in Lucas County Common Pleas Court in Toledo. The other charges and specifications were dismissed. Judge Myron Duhart sentenced him at once to life in prison with parole eligibility after 25 years. "No matter how bad a person is, that does not give you the right to be the judge, jury, and executioner," the judge told him. Elliott's lawyer, Ronnie Wingate, said his client wanted to put this part of his life behind him. At the plea hearing the sentence was ordered to run consecutively to the 24 years Elliott had left to serve; in October 2019 the Blade reported that he had been sentenced to concurrent prison terms.
As of October 21, 2026, the Ohio prison record lists Elliott's aggravated murder conviction (Lucas County, sentence effective September 25, 2019; 25 years to life), shows him held at the Ohio State Penitentiary, and gives his parole eligibility date as June 6, 2046. It also lists a felonious assault conviction from Scioto County in 2021.
The Harvey case is remembered in Cincinnati as much for how it was uncovered as for its scale. Without the nurses who went to WCPO and Minarcin's months of work, police had one death and a confession to it. The cyanide that Lehman detected was found only because the body went to autopsy; as the reporter told Minarcin on the first night, poison would have been undetectable once a body had been embalmed.
Whalen and the writer Bruce Martin told the defense lawyer's side of the case in the book Defending Donald Harvey (Emmis Books, 2005). Howard Wilkinson of WVXU, one of the Enquirer reporters who covered the case, wrote about it again in 2025 when the Drake Center's closure was announced.
Proven by final judgment: in Ohio, 28 counts of aggravated murder, 7 of attempted aggravated murder and 1 of felonious assault (prison record; the August 1987 counts are listed by name in the plea record reported by UPI); in Kentucky, 8 counts of murder and 1 of voluntary manslaughter (AP; CNHI News). The reported total is 37.
Admitted but never charged: the five Ohio killings Harvey confessed to in 1987 that the grand jury did not indict; the four Marymount deaths he admitted beyond the nine charged; and the deaths he claimed at the Cincinnati VA hospital.
Totals that vary: WCPO and Cincinnati Magazine have given 36 convictions rather than 37; WCPO's 2017 retrospective said he was charged with ten killings in Laurel County, against nine in the AP and CNHI reports. His claimed totals ranged from 34 (WCPO, August 1987) and 54 (Whalen, August 1987) through "as many as 70" (to Whalen), 57 (Whalen, as reported by FOX19) and 59 (Cincinnati Magazine, 2005) to 87 (UPI, 2017). AP reported in 2017 that how many people he killed will never be known.
Other differences between sources: WCPO's 2017 retrospective dates his arrest to March 1987; the charge was filed on April 6, 1987. A 2019 WCPO report said Harvey died the day after the beating; the AP, the prison system and the coroner's findings put his death two days later. Accounts of the first calls to Minarcin differ: Whalen's book has one nurse with 13 names, then 16, then 33; FOX19's 2019 account has a nurse naming seven or eight patients, then a list of 13. Accounts of the length of the 1987 confession differ (12 hours in the Enquirer; 15 hours in Deters's 2019 recollection). Headlines such as FOX19's 2019 "convicted of 37 murders" overstate slightly: in Kentucky one of the nine counts was voluntary manslaughter.
April 15, 1952: Donald Harvey is born; he grows up in Booneville, Kentucky.
1970 to 1971: works as an orderly at Marymount Hospital, London, Kentucky; nine patient deaths there are later the subject of his Kentucky plea.
1973 to 1974: works for less than seven months at two hospitals in Lexington, Kentucky.
1975 to 1985: works at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati, much of the time as a morgue attendant.
April 10, 1983: Helen Metzger dies; May 1, 1983: Henry Hoeweler dies.
November 10, 1984: James Peluso dies.
July 1985: allowed to resign from the VA after a search of his bag.
February 1986: begins work as a nurse's aide at Drake Memorial Hospital, Cincinnati.
April 12, 1986, to March 16, 1987: deaths of the 21 Drake patients named in the August 1987 plea.
March 7, 1987: John Powell dies; Dr. Lee Lehman detects cyanide at autopsy.
April 6, 1987: Harvey is charged with Powell's murder.
Spring 1987: tells his lawyer he has killed others, perhaps as many as 70.
June 23, 1987: WCPO airs Pat Minarcin's half-hour report; a special grand jury investigates.
August 18, 1987: pleads guilty in Hamilton County to 24 counts of aggravated murder, 4 of attempted aggravated murder and 1 of felonious assault; three consecutive life terms.
October 26, 1987: admitted to the Ohio prison system.
November 2, 1987: pleads guilty in Laurel Circuit Court to 8 counts of murder and 1 of voluntary manslaughter; eight life sentences plus 20 years.
February 1988: indicted again in Hamilton County; sentences on three more aggravated murder counts and three attempted aggravated murder counts take effect February 19, 1988.
1989: Drake becomes an independent nonprofit affiliated with the University of Cincinnati.
2005: held at Warren Correctional Institution; Whalen's book is published.
2008: moved to Toledo Correctional Institution.
March 28, 2017: found beaten in his cell.
March 30, 2017: dies at Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center, aged 64.
May 2019: James D. Elliott is indicted on charges including aggravated murder.
September 2019: Elliott pleads guilty to aggravated murder; life with parole eligibility after 25 years.
October 2019: the Blade reports Elliott's prison terms made concurrent.
June 2025: UC Health announces it will close the Drake Center.
October 21, 2026: Ohio prison records list Harvey as "Released - Death" and Elliott as incarcerated, parole eligibility June 6, 2046.