31 March 2017 :

Donald Harvey, a serial killer convicted of killing 37 men and women in the 1970s and 1980s died today at a local hospital after he was beaten by another prison inmate, authorities said. Harvey became known as the "Angel of Death" after pleading guilty in 1987 to 37 murders. He later said he had killed as many as 50 more. Harvey, 64, White, died from injuries suffered after an unidentified inmate at the Toledo Correctional Institution attacked him in his cell two days earlier, according to JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. He committed the murders while working as a hospital aide, using a variety of methods, including turning off ventilators, giving patients fluid infected with hepatitis B, and suffocation. But many of the killings involved his favourite poisons, arsenic and cyanide, which he would administer in food, using injections, or through an IV. Harvey had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of his uncle and a neighbour between the ages of 4 and 20, and was raped by his male roommate in 1970, when he was 18. Many of Harvey’s victims were elderly and infirm patients at hospitals in Cincinnati and London, Kentucky, where he worked as a nurse’s aide, while others were ex-lovers and acquaintances, according to court records. In 1987, Harvey told the Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper in an interview that he was doing the right thing by easing his patients’ suffering. Harvey, serving multiple life sentences and eligible for parole in 2043, murdered his victims, beginning in 1987, using various methods, including arsenic and cyanide, according to court records. After being caught, he agreed to a plea deal that allowed him to avoid the death penalty and was instead serving 15 life sentences. He would have been eligible for parole in 2043 at 91 years old.