Donald Barney, a 61-year-old man, was a patient at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, when he died on July 7, 1986. Contemporary reporting later identified his death as one of a series of killings committed by hospital orderly Donald Harvey. According to accounts released after Harvey's crimes were uncovered, Barney was poisoned with cyanide while hospitalized. Harvey administered the poison through Barney's gastric feeding tube and also injected cyanide into his buttocks, turning what initially appeared to be the death of a seriously ill hospital patient into one episode in a much larger pattern of deliberate killings.
Barney's death did not immediately lead to an arrest. Harvey continued working around vulnerable patients and went on to kill additional people at Drake Hospital. His crimes began to unravel the following year after another patient, John Powell, died in March 1987 and an autopsy revealed cyanide. Investigators focused on Harvey, and he was arrested in April 1987. During the investigation, Harvey began admitting responsibility for numerous deaths, eventually describing years of killings carried out in hospitals in Ohio and Kentucky using cyanide, arsenic, rat poison, suffocation and other methods.
Harvey became the identified suspect in Barney's killing and was ultimately prosecuted as part of the sweeping Cincinnati case involving multiple hospital deaths. On August 18, 1987, Harvey pleaded guilty in Ohio to 24 aggravated murders, along with attempted aggravated murders and felonious assault. Barney was specifically included among the victims named in contemporary reporting about those pleas. Prosecutors had negotiated an agreement under which Harvey avoided the death penalty while accepting imprisonment and admitting responsibility for numerous murders.
The case expanded beyond Cincinnati as investigators examined Harvey's earlier employment and additional suspicious patient deaths. He later pleaded guilty in Kentucky to killings committed there as well. Across the Ohio and Kentucky prosecutions, Harvey was convicted of dozens of murders and received multiple life sentences. No second suspect has been identified in the available reporting as participating in Donald Barney's killing; the evidence and prosecution attributed Barney's poisoning to Harvey alone. Barney's July 1986 death therefore became part of the documented series of hospital murders that remained hidden until the investigation into Harvey finally exposed the scope of his crimes in 1987.
