The frantic search for a hospital serial killer...
- We suspect he's stealing body parts out of our morgue
and using them for satanic rituals.
- They said that he was poisoned.
I was in shock.
- He was using arsenic on his boyfriend.
He had lovers outside of his relationship that he killed.
He was just killing everything.
- 50 or 60 or maybe even more people died
while he was working there.
- A medical staff terrified...
- The nurses, they'd been threatened.
They're scared out of their wits.
- And the reporter who tried to take him down.
- Tonight, a special report
on a 21/2 month Channel 9 investigation.
We needed to know everything.
- Can't understand how you could take somebody's life
like it was nothing.
- There's a monster going from room to room
sowing death.
[dramatic music]
- As a doctor and certified expert
for the California Medical Board,
I know firsthand that most medical professionals
will go to any length to help their patients.
But in some cases,
there are those with a deranged mind
and a license to kill.
[police radio chatter]
[solemn music]
Drake Memorial was once a well-respected hospital
in Cincinnati, Ohio,
but in 1986, that all changed after a horrifying discovery
threw the medical staff into a panic.
It's a story that's so disturbing,
it still haunts the city
and victims like the Powell family
more than 30 years later.
[soft piano music]
♪ ♪
- I met John at Parents Without Partners.
We were both divorced, raising children.
Right away, I loved his smile.
You know, that's what I saw at first.
And apparently, he felt the same about me...
[laughs] So...
- I was very young when I met him.
I was four.
For me, it was important to have a father figure around.
My situation before that didn't have one around.
And so, you know,
Dad provided for our family.
He was a stable force in the family.
- But it was quite an adjustment
for the kids, you know?
My girls and his son,
we did a lot of things together
to try to, you know, keep that bond.
- One of my earliest memories of him is,
I believe he had a Harley when I met him,
and, uh-- and that was pretty cool.
[soft rock music]
I remember sitting on his lap one time,
and Heather and I were joking about
when he was gonna marry Mom.
You know, he just gave this smile,
and you just-- you knew he wasn't gonna answer you.
You knew the smile was the answer.
And then they were married.
We were a typical American blended family:
all the joy and struggle
and fun and silliness that that brings.
[soft piano music]
♪ ♪
- I was at work, and I got the phone call.
They said John had a motorcycle accident,
and they wanted me to come to Drake Hospital.
I was directed to a room.
[sighs] It was a shock,
because it didn't even look like him.
He was in a coma.
[disquieting music]
- What I remember was that there was brain damage,
there was lung damage, there had been eye damage.
I know that he had terrible road rash
from the asphalt.
The fact that he was even still with us was remarkable.
[light percussive music]
We felt complete support
from the staff at Drake at the time.
You know, you get to know people well
when you're there every day.
They're caring for your loved one.
There's an implicit trust there.
- One nurse's aide we knew always said, you know,
"John, maybe he could hear. You should talk to him."
We just kept hoping and, um...encouraged him,
and, like, "Come on, you gotta wake up."
And every time we saw a sign of some movement,
we'd get all excited,
but then we were told that could just be a reflex.
♪ ♪
Four months, he was in a coma.
When he came out, we were elated.
We were excited.
And I walked in the door,
and John smiled.
He had a trach, and he wouldn't be able to talk,
but we were able to have some sort of communication
with nodding his head yes or no
or blinking his eyes.
I thought, "Oh, my goodness, he's got a chance."
[uplifting music]
[soft solemn music]
♪ ♪
- There aren't a lot of success stories
at those kinds of places.
They quickly deemed Dad their miracle patient.
- After a while, he was getting therapy.
He was really coming along.
Seeing him in the wheelchair,
wheeling himself down the hall,
was really tremendous.
His mind was sharp. He understood everything.
We were really told, at some point,
he could have the trach taken out
and would be able to talk and eat,
you know, and everything,
and that gave us hope too.
[dynamic percussive music]
- One time, Mom and I had visited him.
His eye contact was very sporadic.
We kept guessing through things,
"Are you hungry, thirsty?
Do you want your hair brushed?"
He was very agitated we couldn't satisfy his concerns.
But we felt like he was trying to tell us something,
and, um, we said,
"We're so sorry. We can't understand."
We ended up leaving, telling him we love him,
and we'd see him tomorrow.
[dark synth chords]
[line trilling]
You don't get calls at Saturday morning
at 8:00 a.m. that are good.
Think everyone of us in the house knew
what that phone call was.
We could hear Mom talking quietly.
And when she walked to my doorway...
[poignant music]
She said, "Dad's gone."
♪ ♪
[somber piano music]
And so I think we all hugged and cried
and tried to process
what we couldn't understand.
You know, I had just been there with him that night before.
- I wasn't expecting it. That's not what I wanted.
I had planned on us growing old together,
so it was difficult.
It just broke my heart.
♪ ♪
[light synth music]
- When the autopsy was performed
on John Powell's body,
the coroner noticed something disturbing.
- The assistant medical examiner
who performed the autopsy
smelled a very strong odor.
Powell reeked of it.
And it turned out to be cyanide.
[dramatic tone]
- Cyanide in the body, it's unusual.
Wasn't anything that, in the hospital,
that might have caused him to have
a cyanide level in his body, so we alerted the police.
- The coroner's office called me about
the death at Drake Hospital
and asked us to investigate to find out what's going on.
When you find out it's cyanide and who the victim is,
then you try to figure out,
"Well, how did the cyanide get in his system?"
We found out that the victim, John Powell,
was being fed through the gastric tube
straight into his stomach.
And we asked the hospital itself to start checking
to see if there's any other illnesses or death
that occurred using the same food supply.
Once we eliminated all those possibilities,
then we knew that somebody put it in his system.
[tense percussive music]
When we started our investigation,
we look for reasons why anybody would do this.
That's when we started then looking at
who's close to him,
who has a reason to kill him.
♪ ♪
- I was cooking dinner.
Two detectives came up to the door.
They said they wanted to go over John's medical records,
and they'd like me to come with them.
So I had to tell the kids that I'd be back
and took the ride down there,
and I didn't even realize it was the homicide department.
Then they're giving me the Miranda rights
without me really realizing that.
And then all of a sudden, they said
that he was poisoned.
♪ ♪
I was in shock. I really was in shock.
Then I realized that they were interviewing me.
They were gonna see if I killed John.
- We concentrated on Patricia Powell.
You know, she was there at the hospital almost every day.
She had access to John Powell.
- I never dreamed that I'd ever be,
you know, in that situation,
that I just said, "I can't even kill a fly."
I was just appalled.
♪ ♪
- Coming up...
- Little alarms went off in the back of my head.
"How does someone kill that many people
under the nose of nurses at the hospital?"
- We were thinking then, it's like a mercy killing.
- The patients, they often knew what was happening to them.
- It's kind of like realizing that the Boogeyman is real.
- John Powell died under
mysterious circumstances
at Drake Hospital.
The autopsy showed he was poisoned with cyanide,
something that would never be administered
at any medical facility,
so John's wife became a prime suspect.
[disquieting music]
♪ ♪
- We concentrated right on Patricia Powell.
We were thinking it's like a mercy killing
or it's some hardship thing
because there was a big financial drain.
Insurance was running out.
- The last two people to see John alive
was myself and my daughter, Holly.
[soft solemn music]
And I thought, "They don't even know who I am.
I could never, ever do anything like that."
You know, I loved my husband,
no matter what his condition.
They were trying to make me feel like
I would do it like a mercy thing.
I was innocent,
so I stood my ground.
- She was a little angry
that we were even thinking about her,
but she did take a polygraph.
[tense percussive music]
And, um, we just felt
that she was no part of causing the death,
so we ruled her out.
[dark synth music]
Then we started looking at anybody
that had access to John Powell,
you know, anyone in the hospital.
We're looking at the nursing staff.
We had almost 35 interviews that we had conducted
in a matter of just a couple of days.
We had one nurse that believed in euthanasia,
so we concentrated on her quite a bit,
made sure we did a thorough interview
and investigation of her,
but she was very truthful with us
on everything that was going on.
- An orderly named Donald Harvey
caught investigators' interest.
Digging into his background,
they discovered he had previously worked
at a VA hospital.
- We talked to a security guard there,
and he told me, "Donald Harvey used to work here,
"and we let him go
"because he's stealing body parts out of our morgue
and using them for satanic rituals."
[dramatic tones]
And they fired him for that reason.
Another nurse made the comment that Harvey,
who had bathed the patients, feed 'em,
cleaned up after 'em, he told her
he had been through a death investigation before.
And we just said, "Well, let's make sure
"we get him in for a polygraph
and interviews as soon as we could."
- As crazy as it sounds,
charges were never filed for stealing body parts.
Additionally, back in the '80s,
there wasn't an easy way to look up employment histories.
Because Harvey was an orderly,
the hospital didn't vet him as thoroughly
as a nurse or a doctor.
In light of this new information,
detectives insisted Harvey come down to the station.
- I assigned Detectives Ron Camden and Jim Lawson
to do the questioning.
Investigator Jim Lawson is the kind of guy
that gets very friendly.
Ron Camden is very straightforward.
It wasn't planned good cop-bad cop.
It's just the way these guys operated.
And then you just start talking to him
about what he does at Drake,
did he know John Powell,
to, "What do you think of him?"
Harvey said he felt sorry for John Powell.
He felt sorry for the family.
Even made a comment about the expenses
and he wasn't going to get any better.
We had him more than three hours in there
in the interview.
Donald Harvey, he wasn't crying,
wasn't upset, wasn't angry.
And then, out of nowhere,
he confessed to killing John Powell.
He told us, "I gave him enough cyanide
to kill a horse."
[tense music]
Investigator Lawson asked Harvey,
he said, "Donald, did you ever do this before?"
And he said, "Well, Jim, I don't know.
Sometimes I think I'm two people."
We're thinking the guy's really weird,
and we thought, "We have a confession,
"we got a case,
and we don't wanna set up some kind of insanity plea."
We didn't want him to go in
like he's, um, schizophrenic,
so we terminated the interview at that point
and charged him with first-degree murder.
- First, Harvey claimed John's murder was a mercy killing,
but then he changed his story.
Was he playing games and laying a foundation
for an insanity defense?
- Well, I asked, "Had the police given any thought
to whether there had been other killings?"
And they say that they don't think there were,
that they'd asked him,
that this was a mercy killing,
this was a one-off kind of thing.
And here are some of the things
that didn't hang together right:
first of all, this was a 36-year-old orderly
who had spent his whole career caring for people
and suddenly he kills one?
Something's not right, and I had a lot of questions.
[tense music]
- Even though Donald Harvey admitted
to murdering John Powell,
police were left with a lot of unanswered questions.
Was Harvey's motive really to ease the pain of his patients?
And more importantly,
was it possible that there were other victims as well?
♪ ♪
- We had a few more nurses to interview
to place Donald Harvey in that room
the same time that John Powell had died.
So we're just putting all that together
to turn over to the prosecutor.
- I had a very strong feeling that he had done it before
and done it much more than John Powell.
And I told my boss, I said, "I'll find one more.
We'll start exhuming bodies and find it."
- He claimed that John Powell's killing
was his first,
but it just didn't make any sense
that a professional, orderly or other,
would take it upon himself to kill someone
to alleviate their suffering
when his whole adult life had been spent
caring for them and helping them improve.
The logic is not there.
[dynamic music]
- The shocking fact that an orderly
murdered a patient at Drake Hospital
dominated the news in Cincinnati that night.
- The Harvey story was breaking
that the police department was announcing
that, um, they arrested someone
for what they said appeared to be
a mercy killing at Drake Hospital.
- When the news came out,
it's a shocking, appalling thing that happened.
It's a person I spoke with, I regularly saw,
that was charged with the care of my dad
and had taken his life.
It was...unfathomable.
- When I knew that it was Donald Harvey,
it was so hard to think
that someone we knew
could do something like that.
- Tonight, a special report
on a 21/2 month Channel 9 investigation
into the cause of a number of patient deaths at Drake.
- During the newscast, anchor Pat Minarcin
also raised the possibility
that Donald Harvey could've killed more people.
[line trilling]
- The next day, the phone rings,
and she said, "I can't tell you my name,
"but I work at Drake Hospital.
"I'm calling about the John Powell story.
"The orderly,
"who we believe killed the patient at Drake,
"it's not the first one.
We think there were others."
I said, "Who's we?"
"Oh, I work at Drake."
"What do you do?"
She said, "I'd rather not say, but you need to dig.
Do your job."
And I said, "But I'm trying to do my job,
and I need you."
And after several back-and-forth,
I said, "Look, here's my unlisted home phone number.
"Think about it and call me
"and I promise you, I will do whatever I can
to get to the bottom of it."
I remember thinking,
"It's about to explode." [laughs]
♪ ♪
About 5:00 o'clock, the phone rings
and it's her again
and she has a number of coworkers
now on the phone with her.
They gave me the names of people
that they suspected had been killed by Harvey,
at least eight, nine, ten.
But I can't navigate my way through the hospital
without their help,
and I need to know things like, uh, you know,
who their supervisor was,
what they said to their supervisor,
what Donald Harvey had said to the supervisor,
what Donald Harvey had said to them,
which police officers they'd talked to,
all kinds of questions.
I mean, I'm scribbling like crazy.
[dark music]
And then, all of a sudden, out of the blue,
they decided that they weren't gonna talk anymore.
And I'm stricken because I need them,
and now they call and say, "Uh-uh.
You're on your own."
Finally, in desperation, I say,
"Look, what if I just drop everything right now
"and come to you?
Would you please talk to me?"
And I can hear in the background,
the nurse cover the phone,
and I can hear... [mimics chatter]
and I'm praying that it works.
She comes back on the phone.
She says, "Okay, we'll see you."
My boss walks into my office at that point.
I said, "I gotta go." He said, "What do you mean?
The news is...28 minutes away."
You can just see the color rising in his face.
And he's angry.
I just looked at him, and I said,
"Look, do you want the story or not?
I mean, it's down to this."
[laughs] I liked doing the stories that nobody else could.
They were the biggest challenges.
And so, reluctantly, he said, "All right, go."
And I didn't even know
if I was gonna have a job when I got back.
But I had to go.
[dynamic music]
Pull into their driveway.
The one nursed lived near the hospital.
And there were not just four or five--
I think there were eight in all, nurses, orderlies,
sitting around her dining room table.
All eight of them said the same thing:
"We've been trying to tell the head nurse on the ward
"for seven months, eight months,
"that too many people are dying.
"Donald is always there.
"Donald seems to know, in many cases beforehand,
"that someone is going to die.
"We're not, um, statistical experts,
but what are the odds of that?"
The list of names of people
that they suspected had been killed by Harvey
that I'd assembled from that first conversation
on Saturday night rose to 13.
My head's spinning.
How does someone kill that many people
under the nose of other people
who are monitoring lives?
[tense synth music]
♪ ♪
What they told me was that the head nurse on the ward
treated Harvey like he was a favorite.
He ingratiated himself with her.
He was always available for extra shifts.
The nurses, they'd been threatened repeatedly
with their jobs.
The head nurse had made it clear
that if they didn't stop talking about Donald
that she was gonna see them fired
and see their licenses revoked,
even though Donald would sit at the back of the room
by himself in those meetings and smirk,
'cause he knew she was covering
and he'd been successful in manipulating her.
And they're beside themselves
because they know that while he's been arrested,
what if he's acquitted?
What if he walks? What if he comes back?
They're scared out of their wits,
and somehow I gotta help.
[dramatic music]
- Doctors and nurses
sometimes fear consequences
for speaking out against colleagues in their profession,
so when the staff at Drake Hospital
suspected there was a serial killer in their midst,
instead of alerting the administration,
they began leaking evidence to reporter Pat Minarcin.
The goal?
To bring Donald Harvey to justice.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- I needed to prove
that Donald Harvey was a serial killer
in ways that were completely outside the circle of nurses.
And the way I did it was,
I built a network of sources in the hospital,
some who were employees, some who were patients.
This army of sources began to produce documents.
This one individual was a quadriplegic,
and he got word to me through a nurse
that he had a document pickup ready
and that I should meet him at a supermarket
that was just a few blocks from the hospital.
I have to do everything I can to disguise my appearance.
I put on the ugliest glasses I had,
and I'm skulking into the grocery store.
And sure enough, there he is,
quadriplegic in a wheelchair,
and he says, "I'm sitting on it. Reach under me."
And I say, "You want me to, like, lift you up?"
He's like, "I'm a quadriplegic, man.
Come on."
And I said, "But I don't--
I don't wanna get into your personal space there."
And he said, "It's the only way to get him.
Reach in there and get it."
So I lift his legs up, lift him up,
and pull this envelope,
big manila envelope full of documents, out from under him.
Stuff like that was happening all the time.
We needed to know everything.
♪ ♪
Finally, after assembling all of this paperwork,
I had to put Harvey with all of the patients who died.
The nurses provided me with his work schedule,
and if I knew that someone had died on a particular day,
I could pull the death certificates from Drake
for that particular day,
and I get a match.
I remember surprising myself,
thinking, "There's another one.
"There's another one.
Oh, my word, there's another one."
And, um, by the end of that afternoon,
I knew that he'd done it.
[ominous tones]
- In order to confirm his suspicions,
Pat Minarcin checked in with the police department
to see if they would share any information with him
about the case, but he was met with resistance.
- Was I a cowboy? They thought so.
I didn't think so. I knew myself.
I thought I was exercising due diligence
at every step along the way,
doing everything I could to
get the story, get it right,
stop an horrid injustice from occurring.
I mean, I did what journalists are supposed to do.
- Pat Minarcin said, "What are you doing?
Are you looking at more deaths?" And I said, "No."
[tense music]
I lied to him, because we didn't know
if there were some other people involved in this.
We didn't know if Harvey was acting alone
or there could be other nurses,
but the investigation was still going on,
still interviewing.
Then we're doing a lot of background on Donald Harvey
and trying to find his many other victims.
- At this point in the investigation,
police were still working on the theory
that there may have been other victims.
[soft atmospheric music]
♪ ♪
- My maternal grandma was Margaret Kuckro.
She was deaf, so she read lips,
and she was always humming.
But most of my memories of my grandma
are of visiting her at Drake Hospital.
She had an aneurism,
and that resulted in a stroke, which affected her brain,
and she ended up at Drake for eight years.
She was very low-functioning.
She was bedridden.
She had to have people feed her.
We visited all the time.
We would hug her, and she would hug us back.
My grandpa was there at least twice a day
to visit Grandma.
He adored her.
Brought her flowers.
He ended up moving into an apartment building
right across the street from Drake
because his whole life was going to Drake Hospital.
The most important thing to him was taking care of her
and making sure that the nurses knew he was there and watching.
But my mom always said it was
important to go to the hospital
to make sure the staff knew that we cared about her,
because it would make them care about her more
and take care of her better.
[soft piano music]
♪ ♪
A few months later, I remember my mom saying
that Grandma had died.
♪ ♪
And it was the first funeral I ever went to.
♪ ♪
My grandpa used to have a best friend to hang out with
all the time, all day long.
They just depended on each other for everything,
so losing her was just really devastating.
But it's normal to lose a grandparent.
We thought that she died naturally,
and that was okay with us.
But it wasn't traumatic
until we found out how she died
and how many other people he'd killed.
He was just a terrible person.
[dramatic percussions]
- While police continued
their covert investigation,
journalist Pat Minarcin interviewed
Donald Harvey's coworkers for a story that would
implicate him in multiple murders.
- The nurses wanted their anonymity,
and who can blame them?
They're taking on a man they think is a killer
whom they have worked alongside.
And I'm saying to them,
"Trust me, they're not gonna recognize who you are.
"We'll obscure your face.
We'll obscure your voice."
- After 21/2 months of
never-ending investigative work,
Pat now had enough information
to run a 30-minute special on the news.
- The station invited in a number of authorities.
The county commissioners were invited,
the DA was invited,
and they set up a viewing area for them.
And I was anxious to know what their reaction was afterward,
but, uh, once it was out there, it was out there.
Tonight, a special report
on a 21/2 month Channel 9 investigation
into the cause of a number of patient deaths at Drake.
I wasn't coming in with a verdict.
I was coming in with questions.
That's a journalist's job.
Wasn't my job to convict.
You'll hear the name of a former Drake orderly,
Donald Harvey, often during our report.
He's already in jail awaiting trial
on charges of killing one patient in his care
by giving him cyanide.
Our investigation reveals that staff members at Drake
begin raising questions of their own about Harvey
and what they believed were unusual deaths
at least seven months before his arrest
but that their concerns apparently were ignored.
People were stunned.
Drake Hospital had been a central focus
of charities for years.
Nobody could get their arms around the possibility
that somebody had been killing patients.
Our sources say the ward's death rate was up.
Within the year and one week
between Harvey's arrival on the ward and his arrest,
29 people died there.
- I remember calling my boss and saying,
"Art, Channel 9 just ran a story
"alleging that Donald Harvey had killed a lot of people
at Drake Hospital."
- The news report comes out.
The prosecuting attorney's office
immediately starts questioning,
you know, "Is this possible, is it a bunch of BS,
or is there something here that we can use?"
- We had one murder. We had John Powell.
He confessed to that.
If we have a second murder,
I can seek the death penalty against him.
- The news report put Harvey's defense attorney,
Bill Whalen, on notice
that it was only a matter of time
before police might find another victim
and would then seek the death penalty.
In an act of desperation,
Harvey's attorney offered a plea deal.
- Eventually, Bill told me that he had sat Harvey down in jail
and said, "As I see things,
"my mission is to try to keep you alive
"'cause they're gonna wanna put you in the electric chair.
"I've told them that we will tell them everything
in exchange for life in prison."
- So we had this big meeting.
The coroner's office was there.
The police chief and his assistants were all there.
Went around the room and said, "Would you take the plea?
"He's gonna go to jail for life.
Will you take it?"
And everybody's like, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes."
- In the end, Donald Harvey would plead guilty
to everything he did to avoid the death penalty.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- Do you, Donald Harvey, swear to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you, God? - Yes, sir.
- We started at, like, 7:30 in the morning,
and he went and confessed to all these murders,
and we ended up maybe 9:00 o'clock at night.
It was-- it was unbelievable.
Can you recall the symptoms
that you immediately observed in this patient
when you administered this poison to him?
- Shallow breathing, then they get real ashy-looking,
and just...done.
'Cause I was surprised that--
that the rat poison had worked so fast on him.
And-- but he turned blue within five or ten minutes.
He was already gone.
- We had hospital records for 50 or 60
or maybe even more people died while he was working there.
Law enforcement went through that list
in a chronological order.
- What struck me was his memory of the names
and what he used.
- Do you remember the location of James Wood,
what unit he was in?
- B-100, room 103, bed 3.
Watson was in room 7, bed 4.
Bed 2. Room 1.
He was a little short black guy.
101, bed 4, I believe.
- And with no remorse that you could see.
I don't think he was sorry about any of it.
- You're a smart individual, Donald.
- Right.
- Okay, you'll agree to that, right?
- I think I am. - Okay.
But at the same time,
you have to admit you're killing patients, right?
- Right.
- The reason he got away with it for so long was,
he worked in an area of Drake Hospital
where people went basically to die.
He got his hands on some cyanide,
and he would just take a little vial,
mix it with water, and dump it into the gastric tube,
and you die immediately.
[ominous music]
- When someone is given cyanide,
the poison quickly enters the bloodstream
and prevents the body from producing ATP,
a form of energy needed for muscle function.
Without ATP,
major muscles like the heart and lungs shut down,
causing cardiac failure and respiratory arrest.
Death usually occurs within five minutes,
which can feel like a lifetime for the conscious victim.
[tense music swells]
- You're positive this time it was cyanide?
- Yes, I'm-- - Okay, now why?
- The deaths were faster.
He died within, I'd say approximately five minutes.
He had respiratory shutdown.
- Harvey said the patients,
they often knew what was happening to them.
He'd tell them.
He told John Powell,
as he was killing him, that he was doing it,
and Powell had no place to hide.
[ominous tone]
[soft solemn music]
♪ ♪
- It's hard looking back
knowing how agitated Dad was that night,
knowing that
he might've known his time was coming.
It's a shocking, appalling thing that happened.
Um, there's times that it raids your mind
in ways you don't want it to.
♪ ♪
- I hope my grandma didn't know what was happening to her
when he was doing it.
I hope she didn't have a horribly painful
and violent death, but I think she probably did.
- Later in the investigation,
Harvey dropped another bomb.
It wasn't just patients he went after.
The killer revealed there were far worse atrocities
outside the hospital.
- Donald Harvey's diabolical
nature was unfathomable.
In a terrifying twist,
during his plea deal confession,
he revealed that his torturous methods
continued outside the hospital as well.
- The magnitude of it was so disturbing.
He was gay and his boyfriend ran a hair salon
and they would have dinner parties
and Harvey was jealous of, like,
the girls that worked in the salon
and he'd poison them.
He didn't kill them,
but he had different types of things.
I think he had an HIV virus he dumped on a salad.
[tense music]
He had lovers outside of his relationship
that he killed.
He was using arsenic on his boyfriend.
So Harvey would give him a little bit of arsenic
and Carl would get sick.
They couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with him.
Carl's lucky he's not dead.
He was just an evil guy.
He was just killing everything.
It was just so extraordinary in terms of the numbers.
You wanna not believe it, you know?
You just wanna think, "He's full of crap.
You know, there's no way he did this."
But he did.
- It turns out, from a lot of research I've done,
that serial killers generally keep lists of their victims.
Harvey did too.
- He hid it behind a picture frame in his apartment.
- This is the list that was pulled out,
and the names on here are the same names
that he mentioned during the confession,
and, uh, there's 27 names on here.
- At the time that I was listening to him,
it didn't affect me nearly as much as it did
like the next day.
And, uh,
I was very emotional about it.
I shook it off and went to the office,
but when I really thought about it,
it bothered me.
It still does.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- My dad is a judge,
and he got a call from
the prosecutor at the time,
and the prosecutor said,
"We just wanna let you know
"that your mother-in-law is on a list of people
"who may have been killed
by this nurse at Drake Hospital."
And then I remember a few days later
my dad pulling me into our little TV room,
and he said,
"I need to tell you something about Grandma,
"that there was a bad man at the hospital with your grandma
"and he put poison in your grandma's orange juice
and she drank it and he killed her."
And I said, "Why would he do that?"
And my dad said,
"Because some people are just bad, evil people."
It takes away some of your innocence as a child.
It's kind of like
realizing that the Boogeyman is real.
♪ ♪
Maybe that's why I ended up being a magistrate.
It probably makes me better at my job.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- There was a large sign in the courtroom
that had all the names of everyone that he had killed.
That was the first time I had seen all those names together,
and, um,
it was overwhelming.
♪ ♪
I can't understand how you could do something like that,
take somebody's life, just like it was nothing.
He certainly didn't have any remorse.
That was obvious.
- Harvey pleaded guilty to 24 counts of murder
at Drake Hospital
and was given three consecutive life sentences.
- What the psychiatrist said was
that he had no conscience,
and that explains to me why he was blasé,
'cause it just didn't affect him.
He was bothered as much about killing a person
as he would be a fly landing on him.
It just didn't bother him.
- I interviewed him in prison.
- And I said, "You know, didn't it ever occur to you
that someday you'd be caught?"
And he said, "Oh, yeah, but I never thought
"it would be a journalist who'd do it.
"I was always thought it would be
"the guys who drive the cars with the blue lights on top.
"I'd get pulled over one day,
"and they'd say, 'It's time. Come with us.'
"Never thought it would be--
never thought it would be somebody like you."
"So when it all came down on you, what did you think
when you were sitting in jail?"
He said, "Well, I had plans for getting even.
"I was gonna kill you.
"Oh, I was gonna take you out in the desert
"and tie you down like the Indians used to do
"and pour honey all over you
"and watch the ants eat you very slowly
and laugh and laugh."
- According to the plea deal,
if investigators ever found another victim
they could link back to Harvey,
prosecutors could then seek the death penalty.
Fearing the possibility,
Harvey continued to add more names to his list.
Sometimes, justice comes from the most unlikely of places.
In 2017, after serving 30 years,
another inmate attacked Harvey in his prison cell.
He died from his injuries two days later.
- When I saw on the news
that he had been attacked by another inmate,
and he was in the ICU,
of course, my first reaction was,
"Now he's gonna get a taste of his own medicine."
And then the way he died was definitely miserable,
and I'm definitely fine with that.
- Well, none of us have a guarantee of tomorrow, do we?
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- For more on "License to Kill," go to oxygen.com.