Eugene McQueen, a 43-year-old man, died on July 10, 1970, while he was a patient at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. Online records place his birth on February 4, 1927, in Jackson County, Kentucky, and his death in London in Laurel County. Available sources do not reliably identify his race or ethnicity, so no such description can be established from the online record.
McQueen was seriously, and according to some accounts terminally, ill when he came under the care of Donald Harvey, an 18-year-old hospital orderly who had begun working at Marymount earlier that year. Harvey would later become one of the most prolific convicted serial killers in the United States, but in the summer of 1970 his killings were still going unnoticed inside the hospital. McQueen became one of the early patients whose death was eventually attributed to him.
Accounts of McQueen's death describe Harvey deliberately repositioning the critically ill patient despite knowing that doing so was dangerous. Harvey turned McQueen onto his stomach or face, leaving him in a position in which accumulated bodily fluids obstructed his breathing. McQueen subsequently drowned or suffocated in his own fluids. Sources describing Harvey's victims characterize the act as intentional, though the criminal charge ultimately brought in McQueen's case was voluntary manslaughter rather than murder.
Nothing resembling a homicide investigation followed immediately after McQueen died. Contemporary hospital personnel treated the death as an accident or as a consequence of his grave medical condition, and Harvey remained employed at Marymount. McQueen's death therefore passed without an arrest, a murder charge, or a publicly identified suspect in 1970. Harvey continued working around vulnerable patients and later admitted responsibility for numerous additional deaths in Kentucky and Ohio.
The circumstances surrounding McQueen did not come back under criminal scrutiny until Harvey's crimes unraveled seventeen years later. In 1987, investigators in Ohio began examining Harvey after cyanide was discovered during the autopsy of another hospital patient, John Powell. Harvey confessed to that killing and then began admitting to a much larger series of patient deaths extending back to his employment at Marymount Hospital. Those confessions led Kentucky authorities to investigate deaths that had long been considered natural, accidental, or medically explainable.
McQueen's case became part of the Kentucky prosecution. A Laurel County grand jury returned indictments against Harvey in connection with nine Marymount patients. Eight of the deaths resulted in murder charges, while Eugene McQueen's death resulted in a voluntary manslaughter indictment. The distinction reflected the circumstances Harvey described concerning McQueen, but it did not change the central allegation: prosecutors considered Harvey criminally responsible for deliberately placing McQueen in the position that caused his death.
Donald Harvey was the only identified suspect in McQueen's death in the available online accounts. He was already in custody because of the broader serial-murder investigation when the Kentucky charges proceeded. On November 2, 1987, in Laurel County Circuit Court in London, Harvey pleaded guilty to all nine Kentucky charges—eight murders and the voluntary manslaughter of McQueen. There was consequently no trial in which a jury had to decide whether Harvey was responsible for McQueen's death; his guilty plea resolved the criminal case.
Circuit Judge Lewis Hopper sentenced Harvey to life imprisonment for the Kentucky murder convictions and an additional twenty-year term for the manslaughter conviction associated with McQueen's death. The Kentucky sentences were arranged in relation to the life sentences Harvey had already received for killings prosecuted in Ohio. By then, the death that had appeared to be an accident inside Marymount Hospital in July 1970 had become one part of a much larger pattern of hospital killings extending across seventeen years. Harvey ultimately pleaded guilty to dozens of killings, with McQueen recognized as one of his earliest known victims.
