William Collins, an 85-year-old man from Cincinnati, Ohio, was a patient at Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital when his life became part of a much larger series of killings carried out inside hospitals and care facilities by orderly Donald Harvey. On October 30, 1986, Collins was given orange juice containing dissolved cyanide. The poisoning was intentional and later attributed directly to Harvey, who admitted that he had placed the cyanide in Collins’s drink. Collins died that day, but at the time his death did not immediately expose what had happened. Like many of Harvey’s victims, he was an older hospital patient whose death could initially pass without the suspicion that someone responsible for his care had deliberately killed him.
Collins’s death occurred during an especially active period in Harvey’s killings at Drake Hospital. Harvey had access to vulnerable patients and used several methods to cause deaths or serious illness, including cyanide, arsenic and other poisons. In the months surrounding Collins’s death, Harvey poisoned a succession of patients, often administering toxic substances through drinks, food or feeding tubes. Because many of the victims were already seriously ill, their deaths did not initially produce the kind of obvious evidence that would normally lead police to suspect homicide. Collins’s cyanide poisoning therefore remained undiscovered as part of a murder investigation for months.
The case against Harvey began to unravel in March 1987 after another Drake patient, John W. Powell, died unexpectedly. Powell had been hospitalized after a motorcycle accident, and an autopsy revealed a significant amount of cyanide in his body. The discovery transformed what appeared to be a hospital death into a homicide investigation. Investigators began examining people who had access to Powell and focused on Harvey. Authorities also learned troubling information about Harvey’s earlier employment history, including that he had previously been forced to leave a Cincinnati Veterans Administration hospital after being caught stealing human remains.
Cincinnati police arrested Harvey on April 6, 1987, initially charging him in connection with Powell’s murder. Once questioned and represented by public defender William Whalen, Harvey began admitting that Powell was far from his only victim. The investigation rapidly expanded into the deaths of numerous patients. Harvey eventually described years of killings in Ohio and Kentucky and gave authorities details about methods that investigators often would have had little chance of reconstructing independently, especially in cases involving patients who had already been buried or embalmed. Among the deaths he acknowledged was Collins’s, telling investigators that he had killed him by dissolving cyanide in orange juice.
Prosecutors faced unusual difficulties in building individual forensic cases for many of the deaths. Cyanide and other poisons could be difficult to confirm long after burial, and a number of victims had suffered from serious medical conditions before they died. Harvey’s detailed confessions therefore became crucial. His attorney entered negotiations with Hamilton County prosecutors under which Harvey would disclose his killings and plead guilty in return for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty. Authorities accepted the agreement in part because Harvey’s cooperation offered the possibility of identifying victims and resolving deaths that otherwise might never have been recognized as murders.
On August 18, 1987, Harvey appeared in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court in Cincinnati and pleaded guilty to 24 counts of aggravated murder, along with four counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of felonious assault. As the charges were presented before Judge William Mathews, Harvey entered guilty pleas rather than going to trial. The pleas covered a large group of killings connected primarily to Drake Hospital and other Cincinnati-area victims. Collins was among the patients whose death had been incorporated into the broader investigation of Harvey’s admitted murders.
Harvey initially received three consecutive life sentences, structured so that he would remain imprisoned for decades before becoming eligible for parole. Additional admissions and criminal proceedings followed. A further Ohio murder plea increased the effective punishment, and Harvey later pleaded guilty in Kentucky to killings he had committed while working at Marymount Hospital during the 1970s. Ohio prison records ultimately reflected numerous aggravated-murder convictions, attempted aggravated-murder convictions and a felonious-assault conviction arising from the investigation. Harvey entered the Ohio prison system in October 1987 under a sentence that effectively ensured he would spend the remainder of his usable life incarcerated.
There is no indication in the available online accounts that another person was arrested, charged or prosecuted for Collins’s killing. Donald Harvey was the identified perpetrator, and the evidence concerning Collins came from the wider investigation and Harvey’s own admissions about poisoning patients. The circumstances of Collins’s death fit Harvey’s established pattern at Drake Hospital: he had direct access to a vulnerable patient, selected a poison that could make the death appear connected to existing illness, introduced that poison into something the patient was consuming and allowed the resulting death to pass initially without a homicide investigation.
Collins’s murder might have remained hidden indefinitely had the cyanide in Powell’s body not been detected several months later. What appeared in October 1986 to be the death of an elderly hospital patient was ultimately recognized as one episode in one of the most extensive hospital serial-murder investigations in the United States. Harvey’s arrest in 1987 brought Collins’s death into that investigation, and Harvey’s guilty pleas provided the legal resolution that had been absent when Collins died. Harvey remained imprisoned for the crimes until 2017, when he was fatally beaten by another inmate in an Ohio prison.
