Maggie P. Rawlings, an 84-year-old woman, was a patient at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, when she became one of the patients later identified as victims of hospital orderly Donald Harvey. Rawlings had reportedly been admitted after suffering a serious burn to her arm when she fell onto an open grate. While she was in the hospital, Harvey had access to her as part of his work caring for patients. Accounts of Harvey’s known victims place Rawlings’ death on January 15, 1971, during the period in which he was secretly killing patients at Marymount.
Rawlings’ death did not initially expose what was happening inside the hospital. Harvey later admitted that he suffocated her with a pillow. One account says he placed a plastic bag between her face and the pillow, apparently attempting to prevent pillow fibers from being found in her airway if her death were examined closely. The killing fit a broader pattern Harvey used at Marymount: some patients were suffocated, others were deprived of oxygen or connected to faulty oxygen equipment, and still others were subjected to drugs or deliberately harmful medical treatment. At the time, however, these deaths occurred among hospitalized and often seriously ill patients, allowing Harvey’s actions to go undetected.
Rawlings was part of a cluster of deaths at Marymount during Harvey’s relatively brief employment there beginning in 1970. Years later, investigators learned that he had deliberately caused numerous patient deaths in London. Harvey claimed that some killings were motivated by a desire to end suffering, but he also acknowledged killing people he disliked, and later accounts of his crimes described an increasing attraction to the power and control involved in deciding whether patients lived or died. Rawlings’ killing was described as an intentional suffocation rather than an accidental medical death.
There was no murder arrest in connection with Rawlings’ death in 1971. Harvey left Marymount not long after the Kentucky killings. In March 1971 he was arrested for an unrelated break-in at a neighbor’s apartment, where he stole property and also reportedly started a small fire. He was not charged with arson and pleaded guilty to petty theft, received a $50 fine, and was referred for outpatient mental-health counseling. Nothing from that arrest exposed his role in the deaths at Marymount, and the suspected hospital murders remained hidden for roughly another sixteen years.
Harvey was finally exposed in 1987 after the suspicious death of hospital patient John Powell in Cincinnati. During Powell’s autopsy, a medical examiner detected evidence pointing to cyanide poisoning, and investigators traced the death back to Harvey. After his arrest, additional suspicions emerged from nurses and other hospital personnel, and an investigation found that suspicious patient deaths repeatedly coincided with Harvey’s work. Faced with mounting evidence, Harvey began confessing to numerous killings rather than limiting his admissions to the Cincinnati case that had first brought him under investigation.
The investigation eventually returned to London and the deaths at Marymount Hospital, including Rawlings’. In November 1987, Harvey entered guilty pleas in Laurel County Circuit Court in connection with nine Marymount patients killed during 1970 and 1971. Kentucky authorities indicted him on eight counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. He received eight life sentences plus an additional 20 years, with the Kentucky punishment arranged to run concurrently with the lengthy sentences he was already receiving for his Ohio murders. Although Harvey admitted killing even more people during his time in London than prosecutors could definitively connect to him, the Kentucky prosecution formally established that the Marymount deaths had been part of a deliberate series of killings rather than an unexplained succession of natural hospital deaths.
No separate unidentified suspect emerged in Rawlings’ killing. Donald Harvey was the person ultimately identified as responsible, and his admissions provided the explanation for a death that had passed without a homicide investigation when it occurred. His eventual prosecution came only after his later crimes in Ohio exposed the scope of his conduct and prompted authorities to reexamine his earlier years as a hospital orderly. By then, more than a decade and a half had passed since Rawlings died in her hospital bed, making her case one chapter of a much larger series of patient killings that Harvey had managed to conceal for years.
