Doris Nally, a 65-year-old White woman, died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 2, 1986, while she was a patient at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital. Her death initially passed without public recognition that she had been murdered. Donald Harvey, an orderly working at Drake, was later identified as the person responsible. Accounts of Harvey’s crimes state that he killed Nally by putting cyanide into her apple juice, making her one of a succession of vulnerable hospital patients he poisoned or
otherwise deliberately killed while employed in health-care facilities in Ohio and Kentucky.
At the time Nally died, Harvey had not been identified as a serial killer. He had been able to operate for years around seriously ill patients whose deaths could appear medically unsurprising, and he used a variety of methods that included cyanide, arsenic, other poisons and suffocation. Nally's poisoning occurred only months after Harvey began working at Drake in February 1986 and was part of an especially concentrated series of killings there. Because the people he targeted were already hospitalized and often seriously ill, many deaths did not immediately produce evidence of homicide, allowing Nally's killing to remain undiscovered as a crime until the much broader investigation of Harvey began.
The break in the case came the following year and involved another Drake patient, John Powell. Powell died in March 1987 after having suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident. During an autopsy, forensic pathologist Dr. Lee D. Lehman detected evidence that led to the discovery of cyanide in Powell's body. Investigators focused on Harvey, who admitted poisoning Powell. Cincinnati police arrested Harvey on April 6, 1987, and charged him with Powell's murder. What at first appeared to be the investigation of a single suspicious hospital death rapidly widened as authorities examined other deaths connected with Harvey's employment.
The investigation ultimately exposed Harvey as a prolific serial murderer. In August 1987, he pleaded guilty in Cincinnati to aggravated murder charges involving 24 victims, along with attempted aggravated murder and felonious assault charges. Prosecutors entered a plea arrangement that spared him from a possible death sentence while ensuring that he would spend decades, effectively the rest of his life, in prison. He received consecutive life terms. Harvey subsequently pleaded guilty in Kentucky to additional hospital killings committed earlier in his career, further expanding the known scope of his crimes.
Nally's death became the subject of a separate later round of charges. After Harvey's initial Ohio convictions, investigators continued reviewing deaths at Drake. In early 1988 he was indicted in Hamilton County for three additional aggravated murders involving Nally, Nathaniel Watson and Henry Cody, as well as attempted killings of three other patients. The additional prosecution meant that Nally was no longer simply counted among Harvey's confessed victims; her death was formally incorporated into the criminal case against him. Ohio prison records show another group of three aggravated-murder convictions carrying an effective sentence date of February 19, 1988, corresponding to this later prosecution.
There is no indication in the available online material that investigators identified a second suspect in Nally's killing. The evidence and subsequent prosecution attributed her murder to Harvey alone. His confession supplied the crucial detail of how she had been killed: cyanide placed in her apple juice. The method was consistent with numerous other murders Harvey admitted committing, in which he secretly introduced cyanide or other toxic substances into a patient's food, drinks, intravenous lines or feeding tubes.
By the time the various Ohio and Kentucky proceedings were completed, Harvey had admitted responsibility for dozens of deaths and accumulated numerous murder convictions and life sentences. Official Ohio corrections records document aggravated-murder convictions in Hamilton County along with attempted aggravated murder and felonious assault convictions, while contemporary reporting described the plea agreements that kept him incarcerated for life. Nally's murder therefore did result in the identification, arrest, charging and conviction of her killer, although those developments came nearly two years after her death and only after an unrelated victim's autopsy exposed the cyanide poisoning that finally brought Harvey under criminal investigation.
