Viola Reid Wyan, a 63-year-old woman, died in London, Kentucky, on November 4, 1970, while she was a patient at Marymount Hospital in Laurel County. Online historical and cemetery records identify her surname as Wyan and her middle or maiden name as Reid, rather than “Wyran.” She had been born in Kentucky on November 19, 1906, and was suffering from leukemia when she entered the hospital. What appeared at the time to be the death of a seriously ill patient would not be publicly connected to a homicide investigation for many years.
The man ultimately held responsible was Donald Harvey, an orderly at Marymount Hospital who had begun working there in May 1970. Harvey was only eighteen when he started caring for patients at the hospital, and during his relatively brief employment there he began deliberately causing patient deaths. One of the methods available to him involved defective oxygen equipment. After a faulty oxygen valve was implicated in an earlier patient's death, Harvey reportedly kept defective valves because they could be placed on oxygen equipment and make it appear that oxygen was flowing. The equipment could produce the normal sounds of operation while failing to deliver the oxygen a patient needed.
According to accounts reconstructing Harvey's crimes, Wyan became one of the patients targeted with this method. Harvey reportedly first attempted to suffocate her with a pillow and a plastic bag but was interrupted before he could complete the attack. He later returned to a less conspicuous method, connecting her to oxygen equipment fitted with a defective valve. Because Wyan was already gravely ill with leukemia, a sudden decline in a hospital setting did not immediately expose what Harvey had done. She died on November 4, 1970, and her death passed without Harvey being arrested or charged in connection with it at the time.
Wyan's death occurred during a series of killings Harvey later admitted committing at Marymount. Other patients were killed through deprivation of oxygen, suffocation, deliberate mishandling of medical treatment, or other forms of abuse. Harvey exploited the vulnerability of seriously ill patients and the expectation that deaths in a hospital would often have natural medical explanations. He left Marymount in 1971 without being prosecuted for the patient deaths. Although he was arrested that year for an unrelated break-in and theft, that arrest did not expose his role in Wyan's death or the other hospital killings.
Harvey continued working in health-care facilities after leaving London and eventually committed numerous killings in Ohio. His crimes finally began unraveling in 1987 after the death of hospital patient John Powell in Cincinnati. An autopsy revealed cyanide, creating evidence that could not readily be explained as a natural hospital death. Investigators focused on Harvey, and he was apprehended in April 1987. Once confronted, he began admitting to a much larger series of killings committed during his years working around vulnerable patients.
The investigation eventually reached back to Marymount Hospital and the unexplained deaths from 1970 and 1971. Kentucky authorities charged Harvey with eight counts of murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter involving nine Marymount patients. Wyan was among the patients whose deaths were attributed to him. Harvey acknowledged even more killings in London than prosecutors were able to formally charge, admitting responsibility for thirteen deaths connected with his time there, while investigators could not conclusively establish all of the victims from the surviving records.
In early November 1987, seventeen years after Wyan's death, Harvey appeared in Laurel County Circuit Court and pleaded guilty to killing nine patients at Marymount. He received eight life sentences plus an additional twenty-year sentence. The Kentucky punishment was arranged to run concurrently with the sentences he was already facing in Ohio, where he had pleaded guilty to numerous additional murders and attacks. Across the two states, Harvey was ultimately convicted in connection with dozens of killings, making him one of the most prolific convicted serial killers in American medical settings.
There is no indication in the available online accounts that investigators identified another suspect in Wyan's killing or arrested anyone else for causing her death. The case was ultimately treated as one of Donald Harvey's Marymount Hospital murders. What had gone unrecognized in November 1970 as the death of a leukemia patient was reconstructed years later through Harvey's admissions and the wider investigation into his hospital killings: he had attempted a direct suffocation, then used defective oxygen equipment to covertly deprive Wyan of oxygen, allowing her death to blend into the ordinary losses occurring inside a hospital until his crimes were finally uncovered in 1987.
