Ernst C. Frey, an 85-year-old man from Cincinnati, Ohio, was a patient at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital when he became one of the victims of hospital orderly Donald Harvey, a serial killer who secretly murdered patients under his care. Frey died on August 16, 1986. Contemporary reporting on Harvey's guilty pleas identified Frey as a Drake Hospital patient and stated that cyanide had been introduced directly into his gastric tube. His death occurred during a period in which Harvey was repeatedly poisoning seriously ill patients at the Cincinnati facility, often exploiting feeding tubes, intravenous lines, beverages, medications, and other ordinary aspects of hospital care to conceal what he was doing.
At the time Frey died, there was apparently no immediate public recognition that he had been murdered. Harvey was working in an environment where many patients were seriously debilitated and deaths were not necessarily unexpected, allowing poisonings to blend into the normal course of illness. Frey's death was part of a succession of suspicious fatalities at Drake during 1986 and early 1987. Other patients died after being given cyanide, arsenic, rat poison, or other toxic substances, while one patient was suffocated. The pattern remained concealed until the death of another Drake patient, John Powell, in March 1987. An autopsy revealed cyanide in Powell's body, giving investigators evidence that his death had not resulted simply from his existing medical condition.
The investigation soon centered on Donald Harvey, then a 35-year-old hospital orderly. Cincinnati police charged Harvey with Powell's murder on April 6, 1987. Investigators and journalists subsequently began examining other deaths associated with Harvey, and information from Drake employees helped expose a much wider pattern. Harvey eventually admitted that Powell was far from his only victim. The inquiry expanded through deaths at Drake Memorial Hospital and other killings Harvey said he had committed during earlier hospital employment, transforming what began as a single poisoning investigation into one of the most extensive serial-murder cases involving an American health-care worker.
Frey's death was ultimately included among the murders for which Harvey accepted criminal responsibility. 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. Contemporary accounts specifically listed Frey among the aggravated-murder victims and described his fatal poisoning through his gastric tube. Rather than proceeding through a conventional murder trial, prosecutors reached a plea agreement with Harvey that removed the immediate possibility of a death sentence in exchange for guilty pleas covering numerous killings. Harvey received three consecutive life sentences at that stage, requiring him to serve at least 60 years before becoming eligible for parole. Additional Ohio charges later increased the effective sentence reflected in state prison records to 80 years to life.
Harvey also admitted killings outside the group that included Frey, particularly murders committed years earlier while he worked at Marymount Hospital in Kentucky. His admissions and subsequent prosecutions eventually established dozens of victims in Ohio and Kentucky, although Harvey claimed responsibility for still more deaths than authorities were able to prove. There was no separate unidentified suspect reported in Frey's killing: Donald Harvey was the accused killer, confessed as part of the broader investigation, pleaded guilty rather than facing a jury trial on Frey's murder, and spent the remainder of his life imprisoned for the series of killings.
