Criminal Background Check - Cyanide-Laced Body was the Deadly Work of a Killer Nurse

When we go to the hospital for medical care, we expect to have our health improved. But one nurse at the Veterans Administration was doing just the opposite. While others were saving lives around him, Donald Harvey was quietly killing them. It is suspected that his killing spree may date back as early as the 1970’s when he began working as an orderly at Marymount Hospital. There couldn’t be a better example illustrating the importance of a criminal background check and employment screening in the medical field. As this story unfolds, we’ll take a deeper look into how the medical system failed its patients by allowing Donald Harvey to continue his silent patient massacres.

The first signal of trouble with Donald Harvey occurred at Marymount Hospital in Kentucky where he was employed. Several patients died under his care that should never have been close to death’s door. Harvey later admitted that he killed at least 12 patients during his employment at Marymount. After being suspected of poisoning a patient, Harvey was allowed to resign from Marymount with no charges brought against him and no permanent record of the suspicions in his personnel file. What he went on to do at other medical facilities is unfathomable.

After being apprehended in 1987, Harvey admitted to his activities and everything came to light. His methods of choice for killing his patients included suffocating them with a plastic bag or wet towel, adding rat poison granules to his patients’ desserts, contaminating their orange juice with cyanide or arsenic, or injecting arsenic through their I.V. fluids or directly into their bodies via a syringe. But his claim of being an “Angel of Death” to his patients by helping them end their suffering are unfounded when you look deeper into the revenge poisonings he also committed.

To get back at a renter who had argued with his lover about an electric bill, Harvey tainted the woman’s pie with a tiny amount of arsenic in order to make her become ill. In another self-confessed instance, Harvey suspected that his lover was having an affair so he poisoned the man’s food with arsenic so he would become too sick to go to work. The culmination of his behavior finally became more public when a coroner examined a body that had been in a major motorcycle accident. When the contents of the stomach were exposed, the sickly-sweet scent of cyanide filled the air. The poisoning was traced to 35 year old Harvey who had cared for the man at Drake Memorial Hospital. He admitted to the crime and to dozens of other killings at each of his places of employment.

It was later discovered that Harvey had been stopped by the VA police 2 years before his arrest and they had searched the contents of his gym bag. They found numerous items that would be the cause for suspicious for anyone, nonetheless a healthcare worker: a gun, needles and syringes, a cocaine spoon, occult books, and medical textbooks. Harvey was fined a small amount of money and shortly thereafter, he resigned with no criminal consequences from the state or on his employment record. For an interview in 1991 for the book “The Columbus Dispatch”, Harvey was asked why he killed. One of his responses was, “Well, people controlled me for 18 years, and then I controlled my own destiny. I controlled other people’s lives, whether they lived or died. I had the power to control.”

This case clearly demonstrates the urgent need for hospitals to clearly communicate any suspicions they have about their employees to law enforcement. Proper investigations must take place and findings must be documented so that through an employment screening and a criminal background check these killers can be stopped in their tracks.