Milton Bryant Sasser, a 91-year-old man, died on March 14, 1971, while a patient at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. Online accounts identifying Sasser as one of serial killer Donald Harvey’s victims describe his death as an intentional killing carried out inside the hospital, where Harvey was employed as an orderly. No reliable online source located for this synopsis establishes Sasser’s race or ethnicity, so that information is not included.
Harvey had begun working at Marymount Hospital in May 1970, when he was 18 years old. During the roughly ten months he worked there, he secretly attacked a succession of patients, many of whom were already seriously ill. Because the victims were hospitalized and their deaths could appear consistent with existing medical problems, the killings went undetected at the time. Harvey later acknowledged killing numerous patients at Marymount through methods that included suffocation, interference with oxygen supplies and deliberate drug overdoses.
According to accounts of Harvey’s victims, Sasser was deliberately given an overdose of morphine. One detailed chronology states that Harvey obtained the morphine from medication kept at the nurses’ station and administered the excessive dose to Sasser. The death was not recognized as a homicide in 1971, and there was no immediate arrest of Harvey for killing Sasser. Sasser’s death came near the end of Harvey’s period of employment at Marymount and was among the Kentucky hospital deaths that would not be connected to him until many years later.
Harvey left the hospital in 1971 without authorities realizing that a series of patients had been murdered. His crimes continued for years in medical facilities in Ohio, where he worked in positions that gave him access to vulnerable patients and medications. The investigation that finally exposed him began in Cincinnati in 1987 after the suspicious death of another hospital patient led investigators toward Harvey. He was apprehended in April 1987, approximately sixteen years after Sasser’s death.
Once under investigation, Harvey began admitting to a large number of killings. His confessions prompted Kentucky authorities to reopen questions surrounding deaths at Marymount Hospital. Prosecutors in Laurel County investigated his claims that he had murdered patients there during 1970 and 1971. Harvey was subsequently indicted in Kentucky in connection with the Marymount killings and admitted responsibility for multiple deaths committed while he was an orderly at the London hospital.
In November 1987, Harvey entered guilty pleas in Laurel County Circuit Court to eight counts of murder and one count of manslaughter involving nine Marymount Hospital patients. He received eight life sentences plus an additional twenty-year sentence. These Kentucky convictions followed his guilty pleas in Ohio to numerous other murders. Across the two states, Harvey ultimately pleaded guilty to 37 killings, although he claimed responsibility for substantially more deaths.
The available online accounts identify Donald Harvey as the person responsible for Sasser’s death and do not identify any additional suspect in Sasser’s killing. There is also no indication that anyone was arrested in connection with Sasser’s death when it occurred in 1971. Instead, the circumstances surrounding his death remained hidden until Harvey’s confessions during the much broader serial-murder investigation in 1987. What had originally passed as the death of an elderly hospital patient was eventually recognized as one episode in a prolonged series of killings committed by a hospital employee who was able to operate for years before authorities uncovered the extent of his crimes.
