Margaret Harrison, a 91-year-old woman, was a patient at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, during the period when hospital orderly Donald Harvey was secretly killing patients under his care. Online records conflict slightly on the precise date of her death: some compiled accounts place the killing on December 6, 1970, while memorial and several other case records give December 7, 1970. Harrison had reportedly been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack and had deteriorated to the point that she was being fed from a baby bottle. According to later accounts based on Harvey’s admissions, seeing Harrison in that condition affected him, and he claimed that he decided to end what he regarded as her suffering.
Harvey obtained Demerol, codeine and morphine that had reportedly been intended for another patient and administered an overdose of the drugs to Harrison. Rather than leaving immediately afterward, he remained with her and monitored her heartbeat as the medications took effect. Accounts of his confession state that he watched her pulse fall until it reached zero and she stopped breathing. At the time, there was no public homicide investigation identifying Harrison as a murder victim, and Harvey was not arrested for killing her. Her death occurred in a hospital population filled with seriously ill and elderly patients, an environment in which deaths could occur without immediately suggesting criminal interference.
Harrison's death was part of a much larger series of killings that Harvey later admitted committing while employed at Marymount Hospital. Harvey had begun working there in 1970 at only 18 years old. Investigators eventually learned that he used numerous methods against patients, including withholding oxygen, using defective oxygen equipment, suffocation, physical injury and drug overdoses. He later portrayed many of the deaths as mercy killings, although he also acknowledged killing some people out of anger or malice. Harrison's killing has been described as intentional and non-premeditated, with the lethal overdose selected after Harvey decided that her condition represented suffering he wanted to end.
Nothing in the available online material indicates that another suspect was identified in Harrison's death. Harvey also escaped criminal accountability for the killing for many years. Shortly after his period at Marymount, however, he did have an encounter with law enforcement unrelated to the hospital deaths. In March 1971, he was arrested after breaking into a neighbor's apartment and stealing coins, clothing and jewelry. He pleaded guilty to petty theft, paid a $50 fine and was referred for outpatient mental-health counseling. That arrest did not uncover the murders at Marymount, and Harvey soon left the area.
Harvey's homicide investigation did not fully emerge until 1987, after the death of another patient, John Powell, in Cincinnati. Powell had been hospitalized following a motorcycle accident, and an autopsy revealed an unusually large amount of cyanide in his body. Suspicion turned toward Harvey, who was then working in the medical system in Ohio. Investigators questioned him, and he admitted killing Powell. The investigation rapidly widened as authorities began examining other suspicious deaths connected to Harvey's years in hospitals. His attorneys ultimately negotiated with prosecutors as Harvey offered to disclose additional killings in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
In Ohio, Harvey pleaded guilty in August 1987 to murdering 24 people, along with additional counts involving attempted killings and assault. He received multiple life sentences. His confessions then brought investigators back to London and the deaths that had occurred at Marymount Hospital nearly seventeen years earlier. Kentucky authorities investigated his admissions, and Harvey acknowledged killing numerous patients there during 1970 and 1971. Harrison's death became one of the killings attributed to him through those later confessions rather than through an arrest or prosecution initiated when she died.
In November 1987, Harvey appeared in Laurel County Circuit Court and pleaded guilty to eight counts of murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter involving nine Marymount Hospital patients. Judge Lewis Hopper sentenced him to eight life terms plus an additional 20 years, with the Kentucky punishment arranged to run concurrently with his Ohio sentences. Harvey reportedly admitted responsibility for even more deaths in London than prosecutors formally charged, saying that he had killed 13 people while associated with Marymount. Authorities were unable to conclusively connect every claimed victim to him, partly because so much time had passed and because many of the deaths originally appeared medically explainable.
The investigation therefore transformed Harrison's death from what had passed without a murder arrest in 1970 into part of a documented pattern of hospital killings confessed to years later by Donald Harvey. Available online accounts identify Harvey as the person responsible for deliberately administering the fatal combination of narcotics to her and do not identify any competing suspect. His eventual prosecution did not result from evidence discovered immediately after Harrison died; it came only after another suspicious hospital death in another state exposed Harvey and prompted authorities to reconstruct a killing career that had begun at Marymount. Harvey ultimately accumulated convictions for dozens of killings in Kentucky and Ohio, while the precise total number of people he killed remained uncertain because his own claims exceeded the number of deaths prosecutors could prove.
