After 165 years as a hospital, UC Health plans to close the doors of the Daniel Drake Center on W. Galbraith Road in Hartwell for good on Sept. 30.
What no one can ever close the doors on entirely is the story of Donald Harvey, a nurse’s aide in the 1980s at what was then known as the Drake Hospital, back when it was owned and operated by Hamilton County, long before UC Health was involved.
Harvey was a serial killer; he claimed the name of “the Angel of Death” after ultimately being convicted of murdering 37 mostly elderly patients at hospitals in Kentucky and Ohio — at least 21 of them at Drake Hospital.
In those days, Drake Hospital was essentially a county-operated warehouse for elderly people without the means to find private nursing care.
I was one of the reporters at the Enquirer who covered what was one of the deadliest string of serial killings in the nation’s history. My good friend, the late David Wells, was the lead reporter; and the one who ended up doing a jailhouse interview with an unrepentant Harvey.
“Some of those [patients] might have lasted a few more hours or a few more days, but they were all going to die,” he told Wells. “I know you think I played God, and I did.”
Harvey told his lawyer, the late Bill Whalen, that he had killed at least 70 people in the three hospitals where he worked in the 1970s and 1980s — a London, Kentucky hospital where he worked as a teenaged orderly, from 1975 to 1985 at the VA Medical Center in Cincinnati, and finally, in 1986 and 1987 at Drake Hospital.
His victims, for the most part, were elderly people, many of them close to death.
Whalen, who died in 2012, was appointed in 1987 to represent Harvey after he was charged in one of the killings — a patient at Drake Hospital who was poisoned with cyanide. That murder was discovered only after a pathologist smelled cyanide during an autopsy.
Injecting cyanide into patients’ bloodstreams was Harvey’s murder weapon of choice. Or simply shutting off their oxygen tanks.
Whalen told the Enquirer that in 1987, while Harvey was in jail waiting for trial, a reporter from WCPO-TV told Whalen that the station was going to broadcast a story saying Harvey was responsible for other deaths,
The lawyer went straight to the jail to talk to his client.
“I asked him straight out, ‘Donald, did you kill anybody else?’ ” Whalen told The Enquirer in 2003.
That’s when Harvey told his lawyer that he wasn’t sure, but that he may have committed as many as 70 murders.
“When I heard him say the word ‘estimate,’ I knew I was in trouble,” Whalen said.
Joe Deters, later the county prosecutor and now an Ohio Supreme Court justice, was an assistant county prosecutor assigned to the Donald Harvey case.
“It was so horrendous, we simply didn’t believe him, at first,” Deters told the Enquirer in 2003. Deters worked as an assistant prosecutor on the case. “None of us had ever heard of anything like this.”
WCPO ran the story in June 1987; and shortly after that, Harvey recorded a 12-hour confession with detectives. One of the things he told the detectives is that he kept a list of his victims behind a bathroom mirror at his home in Middletown.
Art Ney, then Hamilton County prosecutor, said at Harvey’s sentencing that he told investigators the details “like he would tell you that he had gone out to get a sandwich for lunch.”
Harvey maintained all along that he had committed “mercy killings.” He said he was only putting suffering patients out of their misery.
Prosecutors said that was nonsense.
“He killed because he liked killing,’’ Ney said.
Harvey didn't fight the charges. He entered guilty pleas to 36 counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. He was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences, avoiding the death penalty because of his confession.
He could not avoid paying for what he did with his life.
In March 2017, the then-64-year-old Harvey was found beaten to death in his cell at Toledo Correction Institution. Two years later, a fellow inmate was charged with Harvey’s murder. The inmate, James Elliot, told investigators he knew the Kentucky family of one of Harvey’s victims.
Harvey’s death was not mourned by those who prosecuted the serial killer.
"I learned that Donald Harvey died this morning after being beaten in prison. Harvey caused a lot of pain in our community," Deters told the Enquirer in a written statement.
"I am sure that some of the victim’s family members are feeling some closure with his death. It may sound harsh but the reality is that I do not have any compassion for Donald Harvey."
In the end, there was no mercy left for the self-proclaimed “mercy killer.”
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