James Harvey Tyree, a 69-year-old man, died on May 31, 1970, while he was a patient at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. Online records identify his full name as James Harvey Tyree and place his death in London, in Laurel County. He was born on April 13, 1901. His race or ethnicity could not be reliably established from the available online sources, so it is not included.
Tyree’s death occurred at the very beginning of a series of patient deaths later connected to hospital orderly Donald Harvey. Harvey was only 18 years old when he began working at Marymount Hospital in May 1970. The day before Tyree died, Harvey had caused the death of another patient, Logan Evans. At the time, however, hospital personnel and authorities did not recognize that a series of killings was underway, and Tyree’s death did not result in an immediate homicide investigation or arrest.
Accounts of Tyree’s death describe it as beginning with Harvey using an improperly sized catheter on him. Harvey later acknowledged causing Tyree’s death, and some sources characterize the initial mistake with the catheter as accidental rather than a planned attempt to kill him. The episode nevertheless reportedly became violent and fatal. After the catheter caused serious injury, Harvey held Tyree down as his condition deteriorated. Tyree began vomiting blood and died. Later compilations of Harvey’s victims identified Tyree as one of the earliest people whose deaths Harvey caused at Marymount, immediately following the beginning of Harvey’s killing activity there.
Nothing in the available material indicates that another person was suspected of causing Tyree’s death. Donald Harvey is the only individual identified in connection with it. Because the death passed without being recognized as a crime in 1970, Harvey was not arrested or charged at the time. He remained at Marymount for months afterward, during which he later admitted causing numerous additional patient deaths through such methods as suffocation, interference with oxygen supplies and drug overdoses. His conduct in Kentucky remained undiscovered for approximately sixteen years.
Harvey finally came under criminal scrutiny in Ohio in 1987 after authorities investigated the cyanide poisoning death of a patient at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, where he was then employed. He was indicted on a murder charge in April 1987 and held in custody. As investigators examined other suspicious deaths associated with him, the case expanded dramatically. Harvey ultimately confessed to numerous killings committed over many years, including deaths dating back to his employment at Marymount Hospital. His admissions brought investigators back to Kentucky and revealed what had happened to patients whose deaths had raised no criminal alarm in 1970 and 1971.
During this later investigation, Harvey confessed to causing Tyree’s death. Available information indicates, however, that Tyree’s case was not one of the individual Kentucky homicide charges ultimately filed against Harvey. This distinction is important because Harvey admitted responsibility for more deaths at Marymount than prosecutors incorporated into the formal Kentucky case. Thus, although Tyree became a documented victim connected to Harvey through Harvey’s confession and later investigations, there does not appear to have been a separate murder prosecution, trial or conviction specifically for Tyree’s death.
Harvey nevertheless faced extensive prosecution for other killings. In Ohio in August 1987, he pleaded guilty to 24 aggravated murders, four attempted aggravated murders and a felonious assault as part of an agreement that spared him from a possible death sentence. He received multiple life sentences. Investigators from other jurisdictions were then given opportunities to question him about additional deaths, including those in Kentucky.
Later in 1987, Harvey faced prosecution in Laurel County for killings committed while he worked at Marymount Hospital. He pleaded guilty to eight murder charges and one voluntary manslaughter charge involving nine former Marymount patients and received an additional sentence of life imprisonment plus 20 years. Those Kentucky sentences were imposed in addition to his Ohio punishment, although the available sources describing Tyree specifically state that his death was not among the charges filed against Harvey.
As a result, there was no separate arrest made for James Tyree’s death in 1970 and no evidence of multiple suspects. The case became known only after Donald Harvey was arrested for a different killing many years later and began admitting responsibility for deaths stretching back to his first hospital job. Tyree’s death, originally occurring without an apparent criminal case, was retrospectively identified as one of the earliest fatal incidents associated with Harvey’s seventeen-year history of killing hospital patients and others. Harvey’s confession supplied the principal link between him and Tyree, but Tyree’s death itself never produced a separate conviction against Harvey.
