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Donald Harvey, who killed dozens of patients, had died after a prison attack. Picture: YouTube
A US serial killer known as the “Angel of Death” after he admitted killing three dozen hospital patients in Ohio and Kentucky has died, two days after investigators said he was attacked in prison, Ohio’s prisons department said.
Donald Harvey, who was serving 28 life sentences, was found beaten in his cell on Tuesday afternoon at the state’s prison in Toledo, state officials said.
He died this 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 pleaded guilty in 1987 to killing 37 people, mostly while he worked as a nurse’s aide at hospitals in Cincinnati and London, Kentucky.
He later claimed he was responsible for killing 18 others while working at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati.
Donald Harvey, who killed dozens of patients until he was found guilty in 1987. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied
He told his former lawyer the killings began in 1970 when was at Marymount Hospital in Kentucky. By the time he was found guilty in August 1987, he had confessed to killing 87 people, although that number is impossibly to substantiate.
Many of his victims were chronically ill patients and he claimed he was trying to end their suffering.
Harvey used arsenic and cyanide to poison most of his victims, often putting it in the hospital food he served them, prosecutors said. Some of the patients were suffocated when he let their oxygen tanks run out.
Twenty-one of the people Harvey killed were patients at the former Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, where he worked as a nurse’s assistant.
Donald Harvey, who killed dozens of patients, had died after a prison attack. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied
His crimes weren’t solely in the hospital though. He tried to poison his hairdresser boyfriend, Carl Hoeweler, and killed his partner’s father with arsenic. Three of his neighbours were also killed.
He was caught after a medical examiner smelled cyanide while performing an autopsy on a victim.
Harvey told a newspaper after he pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty that he liked the control of determining who lived and died.
Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Arthur Ney Jr. who prosecuted the cases in Cincinnati said Harvey was not a mercy killer.
“He killed because he liked to kill,” Ney said.