Milton Rudolph Canter, an 85-year-old man from Cincinnati, Ohio, was a patient at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital when he died on August 29, 1986. His death occurred during a period in which hospital orderly Donald Harvey was secretly killing patients under his care. Canter was later identified as one of Harvey's victims, with investigators concluding that cyanide had been introduced through Canter's feeding tube. Contemporary reporting listed Canter among the Drake Hospital patients Harvey admitted deliberately poisoning.
At the time Canter died, there was apparently no immediate criminal investigation identifying his death as a homicide. Harvey continued working at Drake, where other patients subsequently died under suspicious circumstances. The investigation that ultimately exposed him began months later with the March 1987 death of another Drake patient, John Powell. A routine autopsy on Powell detected cyanide, an unexpected finding that transformed what might otherwise have appeared to be a hospital death into a murder investigation. Police focused on Harvey, questioned him, and he admitted poisoning Powell. Cincinnati police charged Harvey with Powell's murder on April 6, 1987.
Powell's death opened a much broader inquiry into unexplained deaths associated with Harvey. Investigators began reviewing other patients who had died while he was working at Drake, and Harvey eventually admitted responsibility for numerous killings. Canter's death became part of that expanding investigation. Records of Harvey's victims describe Canter's killing as intentional and involving cyanide delivered through a tube while he was hospitalized. Although accounts differ on whether the tube was specifically described as nasal or gastric, they consistently identify cyanide poisoning as the method and Donald Harvey as the killer.
The case against Harvey ultimately went far beyond a single arrest. On August 18, 1987, he pleaded guilty in Cincinnati to 24 counts of aggravated murder, four counts of attempted aggravated murder, and one count of felonious assault. Milton Canter was included among the murder victims covered by those proceedings. Rather than face separate trials for each of the deaths, Harvey entered the sweeping guilty pleas as part of an agreement that resolved the Ohio cases and avoided the possibility of a death sentence under the terms then negotiated by prosecutors and his defense.
Harvey received three consecutive life sentences, leaving him ineligible for parole for at least 60 years. The investigation did not end with the Ohio convictions: additional killings attributed to him were uncovered in Kentucky, where he later pleaded guilty to further homicides committed while working in health-care settings. His admissions ultimately established him as one of the most prolific known health-care serial killers in the United States. In Canter's case, there is no indication in the available online reporting that another suspect was arrested or charged. The criminal responsibility for his death was placed on Donald Harvey, whose own admissions and guilty pleas linked Canter's fatal poisoning to the much larger series of patient murders that remained hidden until the cyanide discovery in 1987 exposed what had been happening inside Drake Hospital.
