William Bowling, a 58-year-old man from the London, Kentucky, area, died on August 30, 1970, after arriving at Marymount Hospital in serious respiratory distress. Online accounts of the case describe Bowling as having difficulty breathing when he was brought into the hospital's emergency department. Hospital orderly Donald Harvey reportedly placed him in a wheelchair and took him into the emergency room, where a nurse instructed Harvey to provide Bowling with oxygen before leaving to attend to
another emergency. Bowling's race or ethnicity is not reliably identified in the available sources.
According to later accounts of Harvey's crimes, Harvey fitted Bowling with an oxygen cannula but deliberately failed to turn on the oxygen supply. Bowling, already struggling to breathe, subsequently suffered a massive heart attack and died. At the time, his death apparently did not trigger a homicide investigation, and there was no immediate arrest. The circumstances surrounding the lack of oxygen remained undiscovered for years, allowing the death to appear consistent with the severe medical problems Bowling was experiencing when he entered the hospital.
The truth emerged only after Donald Harvey became the focus of a major serial-murder investigation nearly seventeen years later. Harvey, who had worked as an orderly at Marymount Hospital beginning in 1970, eventually became associated with numerous suspicious patient deaths in Kentucky and Ohio. His crimes came to the attention of authorities in 1987 after the death of another hospital patient in Ohio led investigators to evidence of cyanide poisoning. Harvey was arrested in Ohio in April 1987, and the investigation quickly widened as he began admitting responsibility for additional deaths.
During the resulting investigation and plea negotiations, Harvey acknowledged killings dating back to his employment at Marymount Hospital. Bowling was identified as one of the Kentucky victims. Harvey admitted intentionally withholding Bowling's oxygen, effectively confirming that what had been regarded as a medically explainable heart attack was the result of a deliberate act. Accounts that catalogue Harvey's victims describe Bowling's killing as intentional and identify the deprivation of oxygen as the act that precipitated his fatal cardiac event.
By August 1987, Harvey had pleaded guilty in Ohio to 24 aggravated murders, along with attempted murders and another assault, as part of proceedings involving deaths committed primarily at hospitals in the Cincinnati area. His admissions also led investigators back to Kentucky. Authorities in Laurel County examined deaths that had occurred while Harvey worked at Marymount, including Bowling's death, and Harvey was returned to Kentucky to face additional criminal charges.
On November 2, 1987, Harvey pleaded guilty in Laurel County Circuit Court in London to eight murder charges and one voluntary manslaughter charge involving nine Marymount Hospital patients. The Kentucky cases encompassed killings committed during his employment there in 1970 and 1971, and Bowling was among the documented victims connected to those proceedings. Harvey received eight life sentences plus an additional 20-year sentence. Those sentences were imposed in addition to the extensive prison terms he already faced for his Ohio murders.
There was no separate unknown suspect in Bowling's death once Harvey confessed. The case became part of the larger reconstruction of Harvey's years of killing hospital patients, many of whose deaths had initially appeared natural because they were already seriously ill. Harvey used various methods against different victims, including suffocation, poisoning, medication overdoses, tampering with medical equipment and interfering with oxygen delivery. Bowling's death fit a pattern seen among several Marymount patients in which Harvey manipulated or withheld oxygen while occupying a position that gave him direct access to vulnerable patients.
Harvey ultimately admitted involvement in far more deaths than prosecutors could independently prove, and he became one of the most prolific convicted serial killers in the United States. His admissions and guilty pleas meant Bowling's case did not proceed through a separate jury trial in which prosecutors had to prove the killing independently. Instead, Harvey's responsibility was resolved through the broader criminal proceedings and guilty pleas arising from the Marymount deaths. He remained imprisoned for the remainder of his life and died in 2017 after being beaten by another inmate at an Ohio correctional institution. For Bowling's family and the other Marymount victims, the criminal proceedings in 1987 finally established that deaths which had passed for years as consequences of illness had, in fact, included deliberate killings carried out by the hospital orderly assigned to help care for them.
