Harvey Williams, an 82-year-old man, died on July 12, 1970, while he was a patient at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. His death occurred during the earliest period of what would eventually be exposed as the long series of suspicious patient deaths connected to hospital orderly Donald Harvey. Williams had reportedly been experiencing chest pain and was supposed to receive oxygen.
According to later accounts of the case, the oxygen equipment provided to him did not supply the oxygen he needed. The tank or its valve indicated that oxygen was available when it was actually empty or otherwise defective. Williams went into cardiac arrest and died.
At the time, Williams's death did not lead to a homicide investigation or an arrest. The circumstances were regarded as an accident involving the oxygen equipment, and Donald Harvey was not publicly identified as responsible. Harvey himself later characterized Williams's death as accidental, saying he had connected the patient to a faulty or empty oxygen tank rather than deliberately setting out to kill him. Nevertheless, Williams's death became associated with Harvey after the former orderly began confessing years later to numerous deaths that had occurred while patients were under or near his care. Later compilations of Harvey's victims identify Williams as one of the early Marymount Hospital deaths attributed to him, while distinguishing the incident from killings Harvey acknowledged committing intentionally.
Williams died only two days after another Marymount patient, Eugene McQueen, whose death was also later attributed to Donald Harvey. By this point in 1970, Harvey was an 18-year-old orderly working at the London hospital and had already begun a pattern of patient deaths involving suffocation, interference with oxygen supplies and other methods. Harvey would later admit responsibility for numerous deaths at Marymount during 1970 and 1971. The Williams incident stood apart in Harvey's account because he maintained that it resulted from an error with the oxygen tank rather than a deliberate act of murder. Even so, the death became part of the broader reconstruction of Harvey's activities at the hospital once investigators learned the scale of his conduct.
There was no immediate arrest connected to Williams's death. Donald Harvey continued working in health-care settings for years afterward, and the full scope of his crimes remained undiscovered until 1987. The case that finally brought investigators to Harvey began in Ohio after the death of patient John Powell. An autopsy revealed a large amount of cyanide in Powell's body, leading authorities to investigate how the poison had been administered and who had access to him. Harvey became a suspect and was taken into custody in April 1987. What initially appeared to be an investigation of a single poisoning rapidly widened when Harvey began admitting responsibility for other patient deaths.
As investigators and prosecutors examined his history, Harvey disclosed killings stretching back to his employment at Marymount Hospital in London. His admissions prompted Kentucky authorities to revisit deaths from the early 1970s, including patients who had originally appeared to have died from natural causes, complications of serious illnesses or medical accidents. Williams's death was consequently reconsidered in the context of Harvey's presence and Harvey's own account of the defective oxygen tank. Available online accounts continue to describe Williams's death as an accidental killing attributed to Harvey rather than as one of Harvey's clearly premeditated murders.
Harvey eventually entered extensive plea agreements rather than face trials on every individual death. In Ohio in August 1987, he pleaded guilty to 24 aggravated murders, along with attempted aggravated murders and a felonious assault, and received multiple life sentences. The investigation then returned to Kentucky. Later in 1987, Harvey pleaded guilty in Laurel County to eight counts of murder and one count of manslaughter involving nine patients from Marymount Hospital. He received an additional sentence of life imprisonment plus 20 years, arranged to run with his Ohio punishment. Online sources differ in how they count the total number of Marymount deaths Harvey confessed to or was suspected of causing, but the Kentucky criminal case itself resulted in convictions involving nine hospital patients.
No second suspect has been identified in available online accounts as participating in Williams's death. The person associated with the fatal oxygen incident was Donald Harvey, and there is no indication that anyone was arrested in 1970 specifically for what happened to Williams. The significance of Williams's death emerged only after Harvey's arrest approximately seventeen years later exposed a much larger pattern of patient deaths. Harvey's later statements portrayed the oxygen failure as an accidental killing, but investigators' discoveries concerning his intentional murders transformed what had once seemed to be an isolated hospital mishap into one episode in the history of one of the country's most prolific hospital serial killers.
