Maude Nichols was a 64-year-old woman whose death on August 15, 1970, at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, was eventually identified as one of the killings committed by hospital orderly Donald Harvey. Nichols had been brought to the hospital’s emergency department from a local nursing home while suffering from bedsores. At the time, there was nothing publicly recognized as a homicide investigation surrounding her death, and Harvey’s involvement remained undiscovered for years. Accounts reconstructed after Harvey’s crimes came to light describe Nichols as a vulnerable patient under hospital care when Harvey decided to kill her.
According to later accounts of Harvey’s confession and the Marymount killings, he first tried to smother Nichols with a pillow. When that attempt failed, he used a defective or deliberately compromised oxygen setup that prevented her from receiving the oxygen she needed. Harvey had access to faulty oxygen valves or tanks and used them against several patients during his time at Marymount. In Nichols’s case, the interruption of oxygen led to cardiac arrest and her death. Because she was already ill and hospitalized, the circumstances did not initially expose the killing for what it was, allowing the death to pass for years without Harvey being identified as responsible.
Harvey was only 18 when he began working as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in 1970. During roughly ten months there, he later admitted causing numerous patient deaths through methods that included suffocation, interference with oxygen supplies, drug overdoses and other forms of deliberate medical sabotage. Nichols became one of a succession of patients who died while Harvey had access to them. He later characterized some of his killings as attempts to end suffering, but his own statements also showed that his motives varied and that some attacks were driven by anger, resentment or an increasing compulsion to kill. No evidence found in the available online accounts indicates that Nichols had any personal connection with Harvey beyond being a patient at the hospital where he worked.
There was no immediate arrest following Nichols’s death. Harvey continued working in medical settings for years, including hospitals in Kentucky and later facilities in Ohio. His crimes did not unravel until 1987, after investigators in Cincinnati began examining the suspicious death of a patient at Drake Memorial Hospital who had been poisoned with cyanide. Harvey was taken into custody in April 1987 in connection with that case, initially facing a single murder charge. As investigators expanded their inquiry, additional suspicious hospital deaths emerged, and Harvey began admitting responsibility for a far larger number of killings. He ultimately claimed dozens of victims in Kentucky and Ohio, although authorities were unable to substantiate every death he described.
The investigation eventually turned back to Marymount Hospital. In August 1987, Harvey’s attorney informed authorities that Harvey claimed to have killed patients at a Kentucky hospital. Laurel County Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Handy and other Kentucky investigators began trying to corroborate the admissions despite the passage of approximately seventeen years. The age of the cases created serious evidentiary problems because toxicological or physical evidence that might have proved how individual patients died was largely unavailable. Harvey initially provided information through his attorney, and prosecutors insisted that they would not negotiate a resolution until they could independently investigate his claims. He later gave investigators detailed statements concerning the Marymount deaths, including the killing of Nichols.
Harvey was ultimately charged in connection with Nichols’s death and other patient deaths at Marymount. The Kentucky prosecution covered nine patients whose killings investigators believed could be sufficiently established. The charges consisted of eight murder counts and one voluntary manslaughter count. Nichols was among the patients named in the murder cases. Harvey did not contest the accusations at trial. Instead, in early November 1987, he appeared in Laurel Circuit Court in London and pleaded guilty to killing the nine Marymount patients. He had told prosecutors that he was responsible for even more deaths at the hospital, but authorities were not able to corroborate all of his claims well enough to prosecute them.
Laurel Circuit Judge Lewis Hopper sentenced Harvey to eight life sentences plus an additional 20 years for the Kentucky killings. Those convictions came after Harvey had already pleaded guilty in Ohio to numerous murders and received three consecutive life sentences there. His plea agreements spared him from the possibility of a death sentence while ensuring that he would remain imprisoned for decades. Thus, although no suspect was identified and no arrest was made when Nichols died in 1970, her death was eventually attributed to Donald Harvey through his confession, the reopened investigation into his years at Marymount Hospital, formal murder charges and his guilty plea seventeen years later.
