Donald Harvey claims to have killed 37 people while working as a nurse’s aide in Ohio and Kentucky before he was arrested in 1987. Later he claimed that he killed 18 others in the Cincinnati VA hospital. He was sentenced to 28 life sentences as a result of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. Well, according to the Associated Press, there was one death penalty he couldn’t avoid;
Donald Harvey, who was serving multiple life sentences, was found beaten in his cell Tuesday afternoon at the state’s prison in Toledo, state officials said.
He died Thursday morning, said JoEllen Smith, spokeswoman for Ohio’s prison system. He was 64.
While details about the attack weren’t released, he was beaten when an unnamed person went into his cell, a patrol report said.
Harvey was able to hide his crimes for 17 years until an alert doctor detected the smell of cyanide on one of Harvey’s victims. According to Wiki;
Harvey used many methods to kill his victims, such as arsenic; cyanide; insulin; suffocation; miscellaneous poisons; morphine; turning off ventilators; administration of fluid tainted with hepatitis B and/or HIV (which resulted in a hepatitis infection, but no HIV infection, and illness rather than death); insertion of a coat hanger into a catheter, causing an abdominal puncture and subsequent peritonitis. Cyanide and arsenic were his most used methods, with Harvey administering them via food, injection, or IV.
I’ll bet in the last moments of his life, the government’s death penalty was looking pretty good to him.
