James Peluso, a 65-year-old man from the Cincinnati, Ohio, area, became one of the victims linked to serial killer Donald Harvey during a years-long series of poisonings and killings in Ohio and Kentucky. Contemporary reporting identifies Peluso’s death as occurring on November 10, 1984, rather than November 9. Later case summaries describe Peluso as a former romantic partner of Harvey, while news coverage published when Harvey’s crimes became public referred to Peluso more generally as an
acquaintance. No reliable online source located for this synopsis established Peluso’s race or ethnicity.
Peluso’s death did not initially become publicly known as a homicide. According to reporting that emerged after Harvey’s arrest, Harvey killed Peluso by putting arsenic in pudding that Peluso consumed. The poisoning was later included among the intentional killings attributed to Harvey. Some later compilations describe the poisoning as premeditated and list cardiac arrest as the immediate result, but the clearest contemporary account states that Peluso died after Harvey placed arsenic in his pudding.
For more than two years after Peluso’s death, Harvey remained unidentified publicly as the person responsible. His broader killing spree began to unravel in 1987 following the death of another victim, John Powell. An autopsy found a large amount of cyanide in Powell’s body, prompting an investigation that eventually focused on Harvey, who had worked in medical facilities in the Cincinnati area. Harvey was arrested in April 1987 in connection with Powell’s killing, and the investigation rapidly expanded as authorities began examining other suspicious deaths and questioning Harvey about his past.
As investigators dug deeper, Harvey began admitting responsibility for numerous deaths. Prosecutors ultimately presented a large group of Ohio cases against him, including Peluso’s. On August 18, 1987, Harvey pleaded guilty in Cincinnati to the aggravated murders of 24 people, along with attempted aggravated murder charges involving four other victims and a felonious-assault charge. Peluso was specifically identified among the aggravated-murder victims in contemporary reporting of that plea. Prosecutors said Harvey had also confessed to additional killings for which a grand jury believed there was insufficient evidence to obtain indictments.
The case against Harvey was resolved largely through negotiated guilty pleas rather than a trial in which the individual circumstances of Peluso’s killing were litigated before a jury. Harvey’s lawyer sought an agreement that would spare him from execution in exchange for admissions to multiple murders and guilty pleas. Harvey consequently received life prison sentences for the Ohio killings. He later pleaded guilty to additional murders in Kentucky connected to his earlier work at Marymount Hospital, expanding the number of legally acknowledged victims well beyond the cases included in the initial Cincinnati proceedings.
Peluso’s death therefore became part of a much larger criminal investigation rather than a stand-alone murder prosecution. Donald Harvey was the identified suspect, the arrested offender, and ultimately the convicted killer connected to Peluso. The evidence publicly described in surviving online reports centers on Harvey’s own admissions and the later reconstruction of his poisoning campaign. In Peluso’s case, the method was arsenic concealed in food, a technique Harvey also used against other people outside the hospital patients who made up many of his victims. Harvey’s guilty plea meant there was no separate murder trial devoted solely to Peluso’s death, but the killing was formally incorporated into the group of aggravated murders for which Harvey accepted criminal responsibility in 1987.
