2nd SERIAL KILLERS True Crime Anthology 2015 (Annual Anthology) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: RJ Parker Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2014-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11: Donald Harvey

“Angel of Death”

by Michael Newton

Each year, some 1.4 million patients die in American hospitals, an average of 3,835 deaths per day. In 1999, a report from the Institute of Medicine estimated that 98,000 of those annual deaths were preventable, caused by medical mistakes or negligence. More recently, in September 2013, an updated report raised that number to 440,000 preventable deaths per year, listing hospital medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States. Other studies place the annual toll of deaths from medical errors above 780,000.

Those numbers are enough to shake our faith in “healers,” but they do not count another threat: the menace of deliberate murders committed by serial killers on hospital staffs. No trustworthy statistics exist for that plague, but headline-grabbing cases make the killer medics’ names familiar: Orville Majors, Charles Cullen, Genene Jones, Efren Saldivar, Kristen Gilbert, Richard Angelo, Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine Wood, among others. Most prolific of them all, according to his guilty pleas and the supporting evidence, is Donald Harvey, convicted slayer of 36 victims, strongly suspected in 20 more murders spanning two states.

Harvey was born in Hamilton, Ohio, on April 15, 1952. Soon afterward, his parents moved to Booneville, Kentucky, a tiny town on the eastern slope of the Appalachian Mountains whose population was 81 souls in 2010. Mother Goldie Harvey described her only child as “a good boy,” raised in a loving environment, but Donald would not escape his parents’ home unscathed.

In October 1952, while holding Donald in his arms, Goldie’s husband dozed off and dropped the infant on his head. Donald’s parents claimed no lasting injury, although his fontanel had not yet closed, but they may have missed it as their small-town life dissolved into rounds of furious bickering. In 1957, Donald suffered a second head injury, tumbling from a truck’s running board and receiving a four-inch gash on the back of his skull.

A more significant long-running trauma began in 1956, when Goldie’s half-brother Wayne began molesting Donald during visits to his grandmother’s home. A year later, older neighbor Dan Thomas joined in the sexual abuse, both men taking turns with Donald over the next 15 years. Thomas purchased Donald’s silence with cash, while Uncle Wayne relied on threats and shame. Debate continues as to whether Harvey, gay in adult life, was “turned” by those encounters starting at the age of four. In any case, there is no doubt that molestation fueled his bleak depression from an early age, producing frequent thoughts of suicide.

Despite all that, when Harvey entered Booneville’s Sturgeon Elementary School in 1958, he seemed to be a normal, well-adjusted child. Principal Martha Turner later told the Cincinnati Post, “Donnie was a very special child to me. He was always clean and well dressed with his hair trimmed. He was a happy child, very sociable and well liked by the other children. He was a handsome boy with big brown eyes and dark curly hair. He always had a smile for me. There was never any indication of any abnormality.

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