08/08/2024
By all accounts, Donald Harvey was a kind, compassionate, and competent hospital employee. Always friendly, always punctual, always helpful, sometimes deadly. Harvey was an orderly with an appetite for death. While working at Marymount Hospital in Kentucky and the Cincinnati Drake Memorial Hospital in Ohio, Donald Harvey murdered at least 37 people, though by his count it were closer to 87. Harvey was regularly placed in a caregiving role for sick patients; a majority of which were infirm and defenseless. After each shift, Harvey would write several names on a sheet of paper to take home. Once home, he conducted rituals to contact an entity he called Duncan, who he believed would tell him the next patient “whose suffering he would ease.” His favorite methods of ex*****on were arsenic and cyanide, the latter of which being what led to his eventual arrest and subsequent convictions. However, he had been known to suffocate patients with plastic bags, or in one brutal case, a stiffened piece of wire forcibly jammed up a catheter.
I first heard of Donald Harvey when I was older, mostly because he and I are from the same small town, Booneville, Kentucky. In fact, though he was significantly older than myself, we even grew up in the same area. Myself in a community named Island City, and Harvey just across the ridge in an area called Sexton. He even attended the same school as my stepdad, although Harvey was a few years older. Throughout my life, I have countlessly passed by his childhood home where so much pain and hate were inflicted. I was totally oblivious to any of it. Such a dark heart beating so close to home. Not only that, but there’s another connection I have to Harvey that chilled me to my core: He’s potentially a distant relative.
A quote in this book disturbed me even further. It came from one of the nuns that was an administrator at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. The sisters, who were responsible for Marymount, were suspicious of Harvey’s murderous activities yet covered them up for fear of litigation and scandal. When asked about Harvey’s fifteen count murder spree while at Marymount, an unnamed nun said, “Patients die, one way or another. We just don’t talk about it.”
Would you all like to hear more about “The Angel of Death,” Donald Harvey? Do you think it’s worth a video or two?
