Helen Metzger was a 63-year-old woman living in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area when she became one of the non-hospital victims of Donald Harvey, the hospital orderly who would later become known as the “Angel of Death.” Online accounts identify Metzger as Harvey's neighbor. She died on April 10, 1983, after Harvey deliberately poisoned food she consumed with arsenic.
Her ethnicity is not reliably identified in the available online sources.
Metzger's death did not initially emerge publicly as part of a serial-murder investigation. Harvey was able to move between his hospital work and his personal life while using poisons against people in both settings. In Metzger's case, investigators later learned that he had placed arsenic in a pie. Accounts of Harvey's crimes describe the poisoning as intentional and premeditated, and some sources report that the attack followed an argument between Harvey and Metzger. The arsenic produced devastating physical effects, and later summaries of the case describe Metzger suffering paralysis and hemorrhaging before her death. She was buried at Vine Street Hill Cemetery in Cincinnati.
The poisoning of Metzger was significant because it demonstrated that Harvey was not limiting his violence to seriously ill patients under his care. Around the same period, he was also using arsenic against people connected to his personal life. Henry Hoeweler, the father of Harvey's roommate and lover Carl Hoeweler, died in 1983 after Harvey put arsenic in his food. Harvey also poisoned Carl Hoeweler himself and targeted another acquaintance, Diane Alexander, by contaminating a drink with hepatitis serum. Metzger, however, was one of the people whose poisoning resulted in death.
For several years after Metzger died, Harvey continued working in medical settings in the Cincinnati area. The broader investigation that eventually exposed him began in 1987 after the death of John Powell, a patient at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital. Powell had suffered severe brain injuries and was not expected to recover, but a routine autopsy detected a lethal concentration of cyanide. The finding transformed what might otherwise have been viewed as an expected hospital death into a homicide investigation. Police focused on Harvey, who had access to Powell and had previously attracted suspicion while working at the Cincinnati Veterans Administration hospital.
Cincinnati police charged Harvey on April 6, 1987, with Powell's murder. At first, authorities were dealing with what appeared to be a single homicide. Harvey confessed to poisoning Powell, but as police, prosecutors and reporters began examining other unexplained deaths, the investigation expanded dramatically. Questions were raised about unusually frequent deaths around Harvey at Drake Hospital, and investigators began reviewing cases extending beyond the hospital. Harvey ultimately started admitting that Powell was only one victim in a much larger series of killings.
Metzger's death was eventually included among the murders Harvey admitted committing. Prosecutors determined that she had been killed after Harvey put arsenic in her pie, and her case became one of the aggravated-murder counts forming the Ohio prosecution against him. She stood apart from most of the victims in that case because she was Harvey's neighbor rather than one of his hospital patients. Her killing helped reveal that his explanations about ending the suffering of terminally ill patients could not account for the full range of his crimes.
By August 1987, Harvey was in custody and facing an extraordinary number of homicide allegations. His bond, originally set when he was charged in connection with one murder, was revoked as prosecutors prepared additional charges. On August 18, 1987, Harvey pleaded guilty in Cincinnati to 24 counts of aggravated murder, four counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of felonious assault. Metzger was specifically listed among the aggravated-murder victims, with authorities identifying arsenic placed in her pie as the means by which she was killed.
The guilty pleas meant there was no separate jury trial over Metzger's murder. Harvey accepted responsibility as part of a negotiated resolution intended to remove the immediate possibility of a death sentence while ensuring that he would spend the rest of his meaningful life in prison. He initially received three consecutive life sentences, leaving him ineligible for parole for at least 60 years. Additional proceedings increased his punishment, and he ultimately received four consecutive life terms in Ohio. Separate investigations in Kentucky uncovered more killings from Harvey's earlier employment at Marymount Hospital, producing additional murder admissions and convictions.
Harvey ultimately admitted responsibility for dozens of deaths, though the number he claimed changed during the investigation and was larger than the number authorities could conclusively prove. He pleaded guilty to 37 murders in Ohio and Kentucky, while making claims suggesting the actual number could have been considerably higher. His methods included arsenic, cyanide, rat poison, other toxic substances and suffocation. Although he sometimes portrayed himself as carrying out mercy killings, cases such as Helen Metzger's contradicted that explanation because she was a neighbor deliberately poisoned in a personal setting rather than a terminal hospital patient whose suffering he claimed to be ending.
No second suspect has been identified in the available accounts as participating in Metzger's murder. The evidence and Harvey's own admissions placed responsibility on Donald Harvey alone. He was arrested as part of the 1987 investigation, admitted Metzger's killing along with numerous others, pleaded guilty to the aggravated-murder charges and spent the remainder of his life incarcerated. Harvey remained imprisoned until March 2017, when he was fatally beaten at the Toledo Correctional Institution. His death closed the life of the man responsible for Metzger's poisoning more than three decades after she died, but her case remains an important part of the record because it showed that Harvey's victims were not confined to the hospitals where he worked.
