Albert Buehlmann was an 86-year-old White male living in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area when he became one of the patients targeted by hospital orderly Donald Harvey. Although some later accounts give differing details about Buehlmann’s age and the date of his death, contemporary reporting identified him as a patient at Drake Memorial Hospital who died on October 29, 1986. His death was not initially recognized publicly as part of a serial-murder case.
Like many of the seriously ill people Harvey encountered while working in medical facilities, Buehlmann was in a setting where an unexpected decline or death might not immediately appear suspicious.
Buehlmann was killed after being given water containing cyanide. Harvey dissolved the poison in a cup of water and gave it to him to drink, causing a death that would eventually be classified as an intentional poisoning. Buehlmann’s killing occurred during an especially concentrated period of deaths associated with Harvey at Drake Memorial Hospital. During 1986 and early 1987, a succession of patients died after Harvey used cyanide and other poisons in drinks, feeding tubes, intravenous lines, and other methods that could be concealed within routine hospital care. Buehlmann died only one day before another Drake patient, William Collins, was killed with cyanide placed in orange juice.
The investigation that ultimately exposed Buehlmann’s murder began months later with the March 1987 death of another Drake patient, John Powell. Powell had been hospitalized after suffering severe injuries in a motorcycle accident. When an autopsy revealed an unusually large amount of cyanide in his body, investigators began examining the circumstances surrounding his death and focused on Harvey. Authorities learned that Harvey had a troubling employment history in hospital settings and had previously been forced to leave a Cincinnati Veterans Administration hospital after misconduct involving human remains. The discovery of cyanide in Powell’s body gave investigators evidence that they were dealing with a deliberate poisoning rather than an unexplained medical death.
Harvey was arrested in April 1987 in connection with Powell’s killing. He initially entered pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity, but the investigation rapidly expanded beyond that single death. Questions arose about the number of patients who had died while Harvey was working at Drake, and information from hospital personnel helped draw attention to other suspicious cases. Investigators and prosecutors eventually confronted Harvey with evidence concerning numerous deaths, and he began admitting that Powell had been far from his only victim. His confessions exposed a pattern of killings that stretched across many years and multiple medical facilities in Ohio and Kentucky.
Buehlmann’s death was eventually included among the murders Harvey admitted committing. On August 18, 1987, Harvey pleaded guilty in Cincinnati to the aggravated murders of 24 people, along with four counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of felonious assault. The list of admitted murder victims specifically included Buehlmann and described him as a Drake Hospital patient who died after drinking cyanide-laced water. Harvey’s guilty pleas meant that Buehlmann’s case did not proceed through a separate murder trial in which witnesses and evidence concerning his death would have been presented to a jury. Instead, his killing became one of the cases resolved through Harvey’s sweeping plea agreement with prosecutors.
The agreement was shaped by the extraordinary number of murders Harvey was admitting and the possibility that he could face the death penalty. His defense attorney negotiated with prosecutors as the scope of the killings became clearer, and Harvey agreed to confess and plead guilty to numerous murders. He was sentenced to multiple life terms in Ohio, effectively ensuring that he would spend the remainder of his life in prison. Ohio correctional records show convictions encompassing numerous aggravated-murder counts, attempted aggravated murders, and felonious assault arising from the investigation.
The case continued to grow even after the initial Cincinnati pleas. Harvey also admitted killings committed years earlier in Kentucky, where he had worked in a hospital as a young orderly, and additional Ohio cases were subsequently attributed to him. He ultimately became one of the most prolific convicted serial killers connected to American health-care facilities. He claimed responsibility for far more deaths than prosecutors were able to establish conclusively, leaving uncertainty about the complete number of people he killed.
For Buehlmann, however, investigators ultimately obtained an admission identifying both his killer and the method used. His death, which had occurred quietly inside a hospital and initially blended into a succession of deaths among seriously ill patients, was eventually revealed to have been a deliberate cyanide poisoning. Donald Harvey was the identified suspect, was arrested during the broader 1987 investigation, pleaded guilty to Buehlmann’s aggravated murder as part of the group of Cincinnati-area killings, and received life imprisonment rather than going to trial for Buehlmann’s death individually.
