Lethal Doses: Police probe 34 deaths

When 44-year-old John Powell died at Cincinnati’s Drake Memorial Hospital last | March, doctors were not surprised. Powell had suffered severe head injuries in a motorcycle accident and had been comatose for eight months. But an autopsy revealed that Powell had actually died from a lethal dose of cyanide received shortly before his death. After a brief investigation, Donald Harvey, a 35- year-old orderly at Drake, confessed to the killing.

At first Powell’s murder appeared to be an isolated incident. But soon afterward, several workers at Drake called local station WCPO-TV to say there had been an unusually high number of unexplained deaths on the wards where Harvey had worked. The station’s investigative report on the subject in June prompted a grand jury probe. The bodies of ten people were exhumed by the Hamilton County coroner, and traces of arsenic were discovered in several. Last week WCPO reported that Harvey admitted to police he killed 34 people: 23 patients at Drake, five at a local Veterans Administration hospital where he used to work, and six others. Most were described as elderly and ailing. His methods, according to the report, ranged from cyanide, arsenic, rat poison or cleaning fluid to suffocation with a plastic bag or pillow. Police have refused to comment on the case, pending completion of the grand jury investigation.

A quiet man, Harvey had been given generally good marks by his hospital supervisors for his caring attitude toward patients. He had, however, come under suspicion at the VA hospital in 1985, when some tissue samples were stolen from the hospital’s labs. Harvey resigned, and was then hired as an orderly by Drake, which was not told of his troubles at the VA because of federal privacy laws.

Harvey faces only one murder charge so far, but several more are expected to be handed up this week. At his arraignment for Powell’s murder, Harvey pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. Since then, court-appointed psychologists have turned up no strong evidence of mental illness, and his lawyer says he will probably abandon the insanity defense. The attorney is reportedly trying to strike a deal with prosecutors that will spare Harvey the death penalty. “My son has always been a good boy,” Harvey’s mother Goldie Harvey McKinney told the Cincinnati Post. “He’s still a good boy. He’s just sick, terribly sick. And he needs a good doctor.”