Donald Harvey (No Relation) Part 1 (Ep.1)

[news clip recording]

News anchor: Many people called Donald Harvey the angel of death for the dozens of murders he committed. But Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters, who worked the case, said in a statement that he had no compassion for the serial killer and later talked on WLW Radio.

Joe Deters: I don't wish anybody dead. But if you had to, he'd be at the top of the list .

News anchor: Former judge now County Recorder Norbert Nadel recalls watching Harvey's plea and sentencing in court.

Norbert Nadel: He was weird. The whole situation was weird. He looked weird. He had no remorse. He felt he was doing what was necessary. He acted like he was the judge, the jury and the executioner.

[Wicked Gay theme music]

J. Harvey: He wasn't kidding about that judge, jury and executioner bit. Donald Harvey might have looked like your average milquetoast-next-door, but he was hiding a dark secret. He was killing his patients. This is Wicked Gay, a true-crime podcast about gay people doing awful things.

[Wicked Gay theme music]

J. Harvey: Thanks for joining me. I'm your host J. Harvey. Before I begin - our theme song is called "You Won't Get Away With Murder" by a band called Gino & The Goons. You can find them on Spotify and on Facebook. Additional music is by JB who was also one of my beta listeners, as well as Sean. Cover art by Paul Chapman and sound engineering by the Other Mr. Harvey. Thanks, guys.

Speaking of the Other Mr. Harvey, I want to give a shout-out to my husband here who suggested the title of Wicked Gay for this podcast. It made sense because I'm in Boston and we always used wicked as a descriptor growing up and wicked could also mean "evil" and I'm talking about evil gay people. So you get it. He also suggested the title of Homo-cidal- sexual ...Homocidalsexual?  Which we're not going with. As well as Dicks Who Like  Dick.

We were also going to use Murder Queers at one point. Murder Queers sounded awesome to me, like really scary and violent and evil and slick, but then we really thought about it. Murder Queers. And we wrote it down and looked at it and got a clue. So Wicked Gay it is!

And I know you're like "Ugh, another True Crime podcast?" question mark. But wait. My podcast is different. It's got a hook to it. It's about gay people doing evil things like murder and robbery and cheating old people out of their pension checks. So why did I choose gay people? Well, I'm gay. It's COVID. I wanted to try podcasting. And I needed a hook.

And before I begin, this is a true-crime podcast. So mentions of murder and violence and some gross stuff like poop talk will be in this episode. Yes, this story is in three parts. Don't give me that face. There are also some mentions of child abuse. So there are some possible triggers.

This is "Donald Harvey (No Relation" Part One.

Admittedly, I thought it was a sign when I decided to do this podcast and I Googled "gay killers" and Donald Harvey's name popped up. And his last name is Harvey and my last name is Harvey.  So it felt like something akin to fate. And like the title - said there is no relation between us. We do not share DNA. I had no idea who he was before this. I swear.

Donald Harvey killed undetected for 18 years, mostly in the hospitals that employed him over the years. He worked as a ward clerk, an orderly, an autopsy assistant, a morgue attendant and, the occupation he held when he was finally caught, nurse's aide. And I should note that Donald didn't restrict his murderous activities to hospitals, but we'll get into that a little later.

When you picture a serial killer, what do you picture? I always picture Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, in court with the greasy hair and the pentagram on his hand and the rotted teeth and he's hail Satan-ing all over the courtroom. That wasn't Donald, As I mentioned in the opening, he was a slight looking guy, unassuming, normal.  He had a mustache but that doesn't mean he wasn't evil because when I had a mustache, I was evil. You just wouldn't think 'Oh violent predator.' But he was. Even the homicide detectives that he confessed to, they mentioned that they thought that he was fun and engaging and even funny. And his defense attorney once referred to him as "charming". I'm sure his victims didn't find him charming. But what did they know, the majority of them were comatose or incapacitated when he killed them.

Yes, Donald was an angel of death. He was one of the first killers really to have that title, which I guess is something you can be proud of if you're in a prison or an asylum.

So, why did this nurse's aide kill what law enforcement thinks may have been up to 80 people?

Well, when the cops and his lawyer asked Donald why he killed all those people, he claimed it was acts of mercy. He said supposedly the patients pleaded with him to put them out of their misery. This sounds like nonsense to me. I mean, how did the patients know? If there were
so many of them that he did this for, did he have like an ad up on the bulletin board in the hospital offering these services?

So yeah granting people mercy sounds like a bullshit excuse on his part. Another possible motive is the time one of his patients smeared their own feces on Donald's face. That was his first murder. Actually now, I could kind of understand the impulse of killing that person because if that happened to me, I probably take a cheese grater to my face.  But that couldn't have been his primary motive.

I should also mention that Donald was heavily into the occult and he claimed that he picked his victims with the help of a spirit guide named Duncan egging him on. But appeasing Beelzebub or whoever doesn't seem to have been his main drive for murder.

[news clip recording]

Joe Deters: I remember I brought in a forensic psychiatrist from Detroit. He did the Bundy cases and all this stuff and I said, you know this I just made an offhand comment. "This guy's got to be crazy." And he said "He isn't crazy. " Okay? He's not, he just likes to kill people, period. That's what he does.

J. Harvey: That was taken from an interview with Fox 19 in Cincinnati. It was an interview with Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters who worked on Donald's case.

What I came to realize, and what you'll probably come to realize at the end of the story, is that Donald just wanted to feel powerful and play God. Which he did, possibly up to 80 times.

And how did he get away with killing for 18 years and at at least three hospitals? Well, it was kind of a combination of poor oversight and cover-ups. I find this ironic that these places are supposed to save lives. But when there's a crazed murderer on staff, they kind of let him go around killing everyone just so their money situation isn't fucked with.

That's a total oversimplification. I get that. But in at least one of these hospitals, the nurses tried to tell their administrator that something was wrong and the people in charge didn't exactly hurtle tell the police.

Let's get into Donald.

Donald Harvey was born on April 15, 1952, twenty miles north of Cincinnati in Hamilton, Ohio to parents Goldie and Ray Harvey.

Goldie was 17 and her husband was, wait for it, 31. She met him when she was 14. Yeah. I know. Donald's childhood and early life were all mired in trauma and I'm not using that word lightly here. Throughout his life, especially in his 20s, Donald was depressed, anxious, and probably an alcoholic.  I feel you, Donald. He was also prone to suicide attempts, having tried on at least three occasions. And you know how they say trauma can be generational? That's kind of what the case is here. It sounds like trauma ran in his family.

When Goldie was only 12 years old, she was raped , beaten and left for dead in a wooded hollow. To get help, she crawled almost a mile. And if you want to know how fucked up some people have it in life, her parents thought that she was going to die so they didn't take her to get proper medical attention until two weeks later. The head injuries she sustained affected her memory and she never regained the use of her right arm.

Now these were backwards types. It was the 50s. Rape victims like Goldie either never told
anyone or they did and they were blamed for it. So let's just say that justice was never served for her. Her parents actually told people that she had polio to explain her disabilities, instead of what actually happened to her. So, she eventually dropped out of school and ended up meeting and marrying Ray Harvey. And he was much older than her. So, I'm guessing pickings were slim.

Donald was born a year after the Harveys were married and they moved to Booneville Kentucky, a tiny town in Appalachia. To this day, it remains a town with a population of less than a hundred in one of the state's poorest counties.

And like I said, his early life was a mess and almost rivaled his mom's childhood. He later said that Goldie wasn't prepared to be a mom and I quote - he said "A child should not have been raising a child." Which, I get that. He grew up very poor and his parents had knock down screaming fights that included physical abuse and the cops had to get involved on more than one occasion.

Donald did okay in school, and he was well-liked by his teachers, but he was considered a loner who liked to either be in the company of adults or by himself in the playground. The reason why is probably because, from the age of 4 on, he was sexually abused by his mom Goldie's half-brother, his Uncle Wayne. And this abuse went on for 16 years. It only stopped when Donald's grandmother, who he was very close to, found them in bed together one day and gave Donald a lecture. I've heard stories like this before, back in the olden times when kids being abused told someone that it was a family member, maybe and then they were told just to stay away from that person. The onus was on them to not get sexually assaulted. And yeah, I know "It was a different time." No, shut up. And like I said, Donald's life was mired in trauma. Because, in addition to his Uncle Wayne, he was also sexually abused by a neighbor named Dan for 15 years, beginning when he was just five years old. He later said that he enjoyed getting rewards from Dan when he abused him, so I'm cringing for him and at him and for him again.

There's literature out there that says many serial killers were abused as children. There's also literature that says that many serial killers received head trauma as kids which Donald did. As for the famous trifecta of signs that your son's going to eventually be a Netflix documentary, you know, setting fires, wetting the bed, and torturing animals, Donald had one of those.

He once received a pet check from a neighbor and Goldie said to get rid of it. He didn't want to so he hid it, but then she found it and said get rid of it. So he took it out to the front yard of their farm or whatever and he cut it in half with a hoe. A little fuzzy baby chicken. He later said that it made him feel powerful and that it served as a release from anger, tension, and frustration. So that's some foreshadowing for you. It's also the last of the science and theories you'll get from me in this podcast because I'm of middling intelligence and research is hard and very lazy.

Donald had to drop out of high school before he graduated because of this weird incident in woodshop where he owed three dollars and twenty cents for some wood that he used and he couldn't pay the fine. And his dad, who was an out-of-work construction worker couldn't pay it either. So he wasn't allowed to go back to school and what the hell?

And as a positive and in Donald's favor,  at least until he started using it to kill people, he kind of had a knack for taking care of people early on. For instance, when his beloved grandmother ,despite her blaming him for being abused, when she got sick he took care of her and that was when he was only 14 years old.  After he left high school. he moved in with some neighbors. It was a couple who were ill, the husband was ill and Donald gave him baths and took his blood pressure and temperature and he also gave the diabetic wife her insulin injections. So he really began something akin to a nurse's aide career at a very young age. He later got his GED from a correspondence school in Chicago.

And Donald, despite the horrific sexual abuse he suffered and a messy home life to boot, had a social life. As you've guessed by the title of this podcast, Donald was gay and he reportedly started the first ongoing relationship of his own accord in 1968. Granted, he was 16 and the guy was older, so it was statutory rape. But I'm just going to plow ahead. In a move that was probably indicative of the choices he had or did not have, Donald moved to Cincinnati to live with his abuser Uncle Wayne and Wayne's second wife. It was there that he began a 15 year on-and-off relationship with a man named James Peluso.

So that must have made Uncle Wayne very sad and jealous. That's awful that I said that but seriously.

James and Donald met in a convenience store parking lot and James ended up being somewhat of a sugar daddy to Donald over the years. Their relationship ended in 1983 when Donald murdered James by putting arsenic in his pudding. More on James and his other victims who weren't in hospitals in the next episode.  But let's just say you didn't want to date him or even be related to someone who was dating him if you wanted to stay out of the hospital or the morgue.

Donald's murder career, so to speak, began when he was urged by his family to go and visit his ailing grandfather at the Merrymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. Today, it goes by Saint Joseph's Hospital and I'm sure the name change had nothing to do with killer nurse's aide Donald Harvey punching a clock there at one time.

18-year-old Donald ended up being at the hospital so much that the nuns who ran the place offered him a job as an orderly, which was a huge mistake on their part, obviously. He worked at Merrymount Hospital for 10 months. His job included giving patients their medications and seeing to both their personal medical needs. The hospital had no training program for orderlies so he had to learn on the fly. The nurses also refused to catheterize the male patients. So Donald had to. Is that because they were nuns, like you can't see penis? If you're a nun? Interesting ,they can't approach penises. So they refused to get near penis altogether. So Donald would earn extra money by going in on his nights and days off when a guy needed a catheter. As side hustles go, it's not the worst one.

Donald worked the night shift and he was responsible for nine patients at a time on his ward. He later confessed to having murdered at least 15 patients during his time at Merrymount. I should point out here that the majority of his victims were very sick, elderly people who weren't likely to recover. Most of them had cognitive or movement issues and some of them couldn't even communicate to people. So, unfortunately, that made them the perfect victims for a serial killer who didn't want any pushback on his plans.

Donald's first confessed murderer was that of 88-year-old Logan Evans. Evans was an alcoholic stroke victim who was partially paralyzed and normally only semi-conscious. According to Donald, his family had reportedly abandoned him. It also reads like he had dementia and was incontinent. And, if you're sensitive to poop stories, hit the 15-second jump or whatever, and let me just say that I am notorious among family and friends for hating toilet humor. I hate it. So the fact that I have to relay this part of the story to you is basically the universe telling me to fuck off. And I need to report the facts, so I'll soldier on here.

Donald told law enforcement that on May 30, 1970,  Mr. Evans, whom he reportedly described as a "nasty old drunk," was thrashing about in his own filth. Donald, being an orderly, was trying to clean him up and, whether intentionally or not, Logan Evans smeared his own feces on Donald's face. Now, obviously, Mr. Evans didn't deserve to be brutally murdered for this action, especially if he wasn't in control of what sounds like his faculties. But I'd want a new face after that. Really. I'd look for a transplant or something.

And remember when Donald said that many of his murders were acts of mercy? Yeah, this one wasn't. He later admitted that he killed mr. Evans because he humiliated him in such a gross manner. So in response to Mr. Evans, you know with the poop, Donald used a pillow and a sheet of plastic to smother him to death. After he stopped moving, he listened to his heart rate with a stethoscope until he was sure he was dead. He then disposed of the plastic and cleaned Evans up. He later said that he had no fear of getting caught and merely notifed the nurse on duty that Evan seemed to be unresponsive.

And that was his gateway murder if you will. So many people started dying on orderly Donald's watch that the nurses started kidding him about being an angel of death and he would joke right back with them. Hardy-har-har.

Donald tried to claim that his next murder wasn't a murder at all. It was actually just gross incompetence. But it was a murder, because 69-year-old James Tyree was one of Donald's patients and Donald used the wrong size catheter on them. I'm not quite sure how that really affected James because the catheters are fairly similar in width, just not in length, a woman's is shorter or is a man's shorter? I'm not a nurse. So bear with me. If anyone's a nurse here, please let me know and tell me the truth about catheters.

Anyway, Mr. Tyree figured out that Donald had used the wrong catheter size on him. This is probably what happens when you have the 18-year-old untrained orderlies putting catheters in people.

So it was a murder because he later said that Mr. Tyree bellowed for him to take the catheter out and Donald said that he used the heel of his hand to control James until James vomited blood and died. So that was a murder right? Or at least manslaughter. I mean, I'm not a nurse or a lawyer but that sounds bad -  like a murder.

Donald's first official mercy kill was 42-year-old Elizabeth Wyatt. He claimed that she was always praying for death. And in his confession, he said that she was the first of his victims that asked him to grant it by killing her. So he did by turning her oxygen level down very low. And he was just getting started.

Here's an example of how easy it was for Donald to get away with murder at these hospitals. One of the patients he killed at Merrymount was 43-year-old Eugene McQueen. Donald intentionally turned Eugene on his stomach when he knew he wasn't supposed to and Eugene drowned in his own fluids. Donald, knowing that he had killed the man, laid the groundwork for the cover-up by telling the nurse on duty that McQueen looked bad, neglecting to tell her that he was already dead.

Nonetheless, she told him to continue his duties. So no one checked up on Eugene. Donald bathed the guy that he killed in order to avoid suspicion. And even though he probably wasn't worrying about crime scenes at age eighteen in 1970,  this did allow him to eliminate any evidence. So this incident was later covered up at the hospital. And for the rest of his time working at Merrymount, the doctors and nurses teased him about bathing a dead guy. Yuck, yuck.

The first murder that Donald premeditated was out of pure spite and it was violent and awful. Ben Gilbert, 81, had dementia, and he was Donald's arch-nemesis. Their issues began when, and my crotch is cringing in sympathy for Ben, because Donald came into his room, tripped on a tube - which was the catheter that was in Mr. Gilbert - and yanked it out of his penis. So - OW.  And then later on, when Donald was cleaning his room he broke a lightbulb.  At that point, Ben Gilbert told Donald that he was "a demon from hell."  It turns out that Ben Gilbert was pretty accurate!

So from then on,  Ben Gilbert had it in for Donald. So, one night, he waited behind his hospital room door with a metal bedpan full of his urine When Donald walked in, Ben Gilbert jumped out from behind the door, swung the bedpan, and knocked Donald the fuck out. And while Donald was lying prostrate on the ground, poured the remaining contents of the bedpan over him. So, Donald was seriously injured, at least enough to be knocked out and taken to the ER on a stretcher.

Later on, Ben Gilbert told the other nurses that he thought Donald was a burglar. And I know people with dementia sometimes hallucinate that the staff or staff of a hospital are trying to kill them or someone's breaking in, so that could have been the truth. Nonetheless, Donald Harvey was the wrong orderly to fuck with.

So, the very next day, he took his revenge.

And we're back to catheters again. Because Donald inserted the wrong sizeon into Ben Gilbert. I'm not sure if that was meant to hurt him or not. I mean it was meant to hurt him, but with what he did with it, I'm not sure. But yeah, he put the wrong size catheter in Ben Gilbert and then, and this gets worse, so it gets really gross. So you might want to hit that 15-second jump ahead thing.

He then straightened out a coat hanger, and he shoved the wire coat hanger through the catheter, about two feet, puncturing Ben Gilbert's bladder and bowel. Ben Gilbert went into instant shock. He broke into a cold sweat and then went into a coma. Donald then disposed of the wire and replaced the incorrect catheter with the correctly sized one. And Ben Gilbert died four days later.

In his later confessions to the cops. Donald tried to defend Gilbert's murder by saying that hospital management should never have let him continue caring for Ben Gilbert because he had attacked him and I totally agree about that. That's true. But most of the time when stuff like that happens to workers, people respond to stuff like that by unionizing or filing a lawsuit and not murdering the patient in question.

So it appears that Donald Harvey killed 15 people in total at Merrymount Hospital. The majority of these victims he asphyxiated by giving them faulty oxygen tanks. That was kind of his favorite thing to do at Merrymount. A few of them, though, got overdoses of medication that killed them.

He left his job at Merrymount in March of 1971 for unknown reasons. But we can guess that it was probably him trying to avoid being caught. And I'm going to pause here and give you the rundown, the list of names of his Merrymount victims. Because oft times we totally mention the killer over and over, but gloss over the people that he killed. And they were real people.

Harvey William was 82. Donald killed him with the oxygen tank.
Maude Nichols, I didn't have the age, the same kind of death, method of murder.
William Bolling was 58. Donald killed him by not turning his oxygen on which gave him a massive heart attack.
Viola Reed Wyan, 63, he also killed her with the tank.  But that's because the initial attempt to smother her with a pillow was interrupted. And I was happy to hear that at least someone at that Hell hospital was checking up on the orderlies.
Donald gave 91-year-old Margaret Harrison an overdose of Demerol, morphine and codeine. Sam Carroll, who was 80 ,got the faulty oxygen tank treatment.
Maggie Rawlins. I couldn't get the age, was smothered by Donald with a pillow.
Silas Butner was 62. He was another victim of Donald's faulty oxygen tank. And Silas Buttner fought for his life, because Donald had attempted to kill him multiple times by smothering him. But each time, he was interrupted. Unfortunately for Donald, there was an autopsy in that case, but unfortunately for the public, nothing came out of it and the true cause of death was never discovered.
John V. Combs was 68. He was also killed in the oxygen tank fashion.
And finally, Milton Canter, was 90. He was given an overdose of morphine.

And hi, can I never enter a hospital ever again?

And that sad list marks the end of Donald Harvey, the end of part 1 of "Donald Harvey (No Relation)".

But wait, there's more. So it's come to my attention that Wicked Gay, the subject matter is pretty dark, right. And I wanted to alleviate that somewhere in the episode. So, at the end of every episode of this podcast, I'll do a segment called "Wicked Good Gay," in which I talk about a heroic gay person. As opposed to the evil demon that I spoke of earlier in the episode.

You might have seen a movie called The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch. He played Alan Turing, who was a mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. And he was gay. Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis during World War two, so he was a hero, he helped win the war.

Unfortunately back then, because the world was a suck place then and sometimes now, being gay was considered a mental illness and acting on your healthy sexual urges back then in Britain was punishable by law. So, instead of being recognized as a hero, Turing ended up being arrested for something called "gross indecency". He was tried, convicted, chemically castrated, and eventually committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41. With a poison or cyanide-poisoned apple which, points for drama, Alan. That's how a real queen goes out.

So ,since the movie , even before the movie, there's been an outcry about that. And Queen Elizabeth finally siigned a pardon for Turing's conviction in December of 2013. And Alan was also paving the way for the equal rights of gays in his death. Because that pardon by the Queen caused people to complain that there were literally thousands of other gay guys in Britain who been publicly shamed and convicted like Alan was in the years before.

So in September of 2016, the British government announced they were going to expand this retroactive exoneration to other men that were convicted of similar indecency offenses and they call this the Alan Turing law. So, we have Alan Turing to thank for steps forward in our equal rights, particularly for gay people in the UK.

So that was our "Wicked Good Gay" for this episode. I hope you've enjoyed episode 1 of "Donald Harvey (No Relation)". In part 2, we'll get more into his social life and his crimes outside of the hospital settings, primarily which boyfriends he tried to kill and the one he actually did. We'll also take a look at Donald's occult practices and how they figured into his crimes.

It's important to note one's sources. So, I got most of my info from Defending Donald Harvey, a book by Donald's defense attorney William Whelan and co-author Bruce Martin. The rest of my information came from "Donald Harvey, Angel of Death", which was a report that came out of the Department of Psychology at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. I also got information from the Toledo Blade, WCPO-TV and Fox 19 News, both in Ohio and Cincinatti.com And, of course, our friends at Wikipedia.

Wicked Gay is on all the major podcast apps, including Apple. So please subscribe and leave a review if possible. We're on the big three of social media under "wickedgaypod" and our email address is "[email protected]". You've been listening to Wicked Gay, a true-crime podcast about gay people doing awful things.

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