Ben Gilbert, an 81-year-old man, died on July 28, 1970, after being attacked while he was a patient at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. His death would not be publicly tied to a murderer until many years later. The person eventually identified as responsible was Donald Harvey, a young hospital orderly who had begun working at Marymount in 1970 and who would later become one of the most prolific convicted serial killers in the United States. Gilbert was one of a series of patients Harvey admitted killing during his time at the London hospital.
According to accounts developed from Harvey's later confession, the attack on Gilbert grew out of an earlier confrontation between the patient and the orderly. Gilbert reportedly struck Harvey with a urinal and knocked him unconscious, apparently believing Harvey was a burglar, and poured the contents of the urinal over him. Harvey later described what followed as retaliation rather than the supposed mercy killing explanation he sometimes gave for other patient deaths. He catheterized Gilbert with an oversized catheter, then straightened a wire coat hanger and forced it through the catheter and into Gilbert's urinary tract. The wire punctured Gilbert's bladder and bowel. Gilbert went into shock and then a coma; he remained alive for approximately four days before dying on July 28. Later accounts of Harvey's crimes characterize Gilbert's killing as deliberate and premeditated.
Nothing in the available accounts indicates that anyone was arrested for Gilbert's death in 1970. Harvey continued working at Marymount into 1971, and Gilbert's death became part of a much larger series of suspicious patient deaths that remained unresolved for years. Harvey subsequently left the hospital and eventually worked in medical facilities in Ohio, where his killing continued. He used numerous methods against patients over the years, including cyanide, arsenic, suffocation, manipulation of oxygen supplies and other forms of medical sabotage. Although Harvey later claimed that some victims were terminally ill people whose suffering he wanted to end, he also acknowledged killings motivated by anger or retaliation, making the circumstances surrounding Gilbert markedly different from Harvey's claimed euthanasia rationale.
The break in Harvey's long-hidden series of killings came in Cincinnati in 1987, not through a renewed investigation into Gilbert's death. On March 7, 1987, Drake Memorial Hospital patient John Powell died unexpectedly. An autopsy detected a lethal amount of cyanide, transforming what might otherwise have appeared to be another hospital death into a homicide investigation. Investigators focused on Harvey, who worked at the hospital and had access to Powell. Harvey was arrested in April 1987 and initially faced an aggravated-murder charge in Powell's cyanide poisoning death. He was held on $200,000 bond, and the investigation rapidly expanded as authorities examined other deaths associated with him.
As detectives and prosecutors investigated, Harvey began admitting responsibility for a staggering number of killings. In August 1987 he pleaded guilty in Ohio to murdering 24 people, most of them hospital patients, along with attempted aggravated murder and felonious assault charges. The Ohio plea arrangement spared him the death penalty and resulted in three consecutive life sentences, leaving him ineligible for parole for at least 60 years. His confessions also directed investigators back to Kentucky and Marymount Hospital, where his killing career had begun seventeen years earlier.
Kentucky authorities subsequently pursued the deaths Harvey admitted causing at Marymount. Although he said he had killed 13 people at the London hospital during 1970 and 1971, prosecutors were able to bring charges involving fewer victims. On November 2, 1987, Harvey appeared in Laurel Circuit Court and pleaded guilty to eight counts of murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter for the deaths of nine Marymount patients. Gilbert's death was among the killings attributed to Harvey as investigators reconstructed what had happened inside the hospital nearly two decades earlier. Laurel Circuit Judge Lewis Hopper imposed eight life sentences plus a 20-year term. Contemporary accounts described relatives of some victims weeping during the proceeding as Harvey admitted the hospital killings.
There is no indication from the available reporting that investigators identified another suspect in Gilbert's killing. Harvey's own admissions supplied the crucial explanation for a death that had passed without a murder arrest in 1970, and the circumstances he described were consistent with an intentional act of retaliation against a vulnerable hospitalized patient. Gilbert therefore became one of the earliest known victims in Harvey's seventeen-year series of killings, and his case was effectively resolved only after Harvey's 1987 arrest in Ohio exposed the scope of his crimes and led authorities in Kentucky to prosecute the previously unsuspected deaths at Marymount Hospital.
