Donald Harvey (April 15, 1952 – March 30, 2017) was an American serial killer who claimed to have murdered 87 people, though he has 37 confirmed victims.

[3] He was raised in the tiny Appalachian town of Booneville, Kentucky,[2][4] where his parents were struggling tobacco farmers and members of the local Baptist church.

[5] From the ages of five to eighteen, Harvey was sexually molested by both an uncle and a neighbor, but he told no one except his sister, and only after the abuse ended.

[7] After an arrest for burglary in March 1971, Harvey enlisted in the United States Air Force, but was discharged after nine months due to two suicide attempts;[8] after these nervous breakdowns, he came to terms with his homosexuality.

He did not use any particular modus operandi and 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), and insertion of a coat hanger into a catheter, causing an abdominal puncture and subsequent peritonitis.

An autopsy on John Powell, who had died abruptly after spending several months on life support following a motorcycle accident, revealed large amounts of cyanide in his system.

Harvey became a person of interest when investigators learned he had been forced to resign from the Cincinnati VA hospital after he was caught stealing body parts for occult rituals.

It was soon revealed that several nurses at Drake had raised concerns with administrators upon noticing a spike in deaths while Harvey was employed there, but they had been ordered to keep quiet.

Not wanting to chance that he would be acquitted, the nurses contacted Minarcin and told him that there was evidence Harvey killed at least ten more people.

Whalen knew that if prosecutors could link Harvey to more than one murder, Ohio law allowed them to seek the death penalty.

[12] With this in mind, that November Harvey pled guilty in Laurel County Circuit Court to killing nine patients at Marymount Hospital in the 1970s.