Cleo Fish, a 67-year-old woman, was a patient at Cincinnati’s Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital when she died on December 10, 1986. Her death would eventually become part of one of the most notorious hospital serial-murder investigations in American history. Fish was killed by cyanide poisoning while under the care of hospital orderly and nurse’s aide Donald Harvey.
Contemporary reporting identified her as one of the Drake patients whose food or drink had been deliberately contaminated; accounts differ on whether the cyanide was placed in orange juice or cranberry juice, but they agree that she was given a lethal dose of cyanide. Later accounts of Harvey’s crimes also state that after Fish died, he cut a lock of hair from her body and burned it as part of an occult ritual.
At the time Fish died, there was no immediate arrest connected to her death. Harvey had been working at Drake amid an unusual succession of patient deaths, but the larger pattern remained undiscovered. Staff members later said that concerns had been raised about the number of deaths on the ward, particularly because some patients who were not considered near death were suddenly dying. Fish’s killing occurred late in 1986, only months before the death that finally exposed Harvey. On March 7, 1987, Drake patient John Powell died after cyanide was introduced into his feeding tube. During Powell’s autopsy, the medical examiner detected evidence of cyanide, and laboratory testing confirmed lethal poisoning. That finding transformed what had appeared to be another hospital death into a homicide investigation.
Investigators focused on Donald Harvey, who had access to Powell and other patients and whose employment history drew additional scrutiny. Harvey was questioned and ultimately confessed to poisoning Powell. He was arrested in April 1987 and initially faced an aggravated-murder charge in Powell’s death. As police, prosecutors and journalists examined other deaths at Drake, however, the investigation rapidly expanded. Detectives began reviewing patients who had died during Harvey’s shifts and interviewing hospital personnel, while information surfaced suggesting that suspicions about him had existed before his arrest. Harvey eventually admitted responsibility for numerous killings, including Fish’s poisoning.
By August 1987, prosecutors had assembled a sweeping case covering a series of murders and attempted murders committed by Harvey in and around Cincinnati. Fish was formally included among the Drake Hospital victims attributed to him. On August 18, 1987, Harvey pleaded guilty to 24 counts of aggravated murder, four counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of felonious assault. Twenty-one of the people he admitted murdering in that proceeding were Drake patients. Fish was among those victims, and prosecutors described cyanide as the method used to kill her. Harvey employed a variety of methods against different people, including cyanide, arsenic, rat poison, cleaning chemicals, suffocation and other forms of poisoning.
Harvey’s guilty pleas were part of an agreement that spared him from a possible death sentence. He received three consecutive life sentences, requiring him to serve at least 60 years before becoming eligible for parole under the terms reported at the time. There was therefore no trial in Fish’s individual killing: Harvey admitted the murder as part of the larger negotiated resolution of the Cincinnati cases. The plea established Harvey, rather than an unknown or uncharged suspect, as the person legally responsible for Fish’s death.
The Cincinnati case did not end with those pleas. Harvey continued to confess to killings committed at other hospitals, including earlier murders in Kentucky, and later pleaded guilty there to additional homicide charges. Authorities ultimately connected him to dozens of deaths committed over many years while he worked in health-care settings. Published totals vary depending on whether they count convictions, admitted killings or suspected victims, but Harvey was convicted in connection with more than three dozen murders and claimed responsibility for still more. His victims were frequently ill or incapacitated patients, giving him opportunities to poison or suffocate them while their deaths initially appeared consistent with serious medical problems.
Fish’s death stands out as part of the concentrated series of killings at Drake during 1986 and early 1987. She died only one day after another patient, Odas Day, was poisoned, and she was followed by additional victims during the months before Harvey was exposed. What had initially passed as the death of a hospital patient was later reconstructed as a deliberate homicide carried out by an employee who had access to both vulnerable patients and lethal substances. Harvey’s arrest in 1987, his confession and his subsequent guilty pleas finally established what had happened to Fish and brought criminal accountability for her killing as part of the broader Drake Hospital murder case.
