According to The New York Times, a lot of hospital orderly Donald Harvey's coworkers did, in fact, notice that a lot of people seemed to die while under his care, but because many were elderly or incredibly ill to start, those who knew him just joked about how he must have some bad vibes. By the time Harvey was convicted in 1987, it wasn't so funny: He confessed to 37 murders, although he estimated he had killed around 70.

Some of his victims were suffocated and some were neglected, while others were killed with a lethal dose of various poisons. It was the poisoning that finally got him caught, when the autopsy of a patient who died after being in a motorcycle accident was found to have suspicious levels of cyanide in his system. Harvey later explained: "I felt what I was doing was right. I was putting people out of their misery. I hope if I'm ever sick and full of tubes or on a respirator, someone will come and end it." 

Someone did, in fact, put an early end to Harvey's life. In 2019, ABC reported that fellow inmate James Elliott had been indicted for Harvey's 2017 murder. The two inmates were being held together in protective custody when Elliott attacked Harvey in his cell, administering a severe beating that led to Harvey's death. Elliott later explained that he'd been taking justice into his own hands, as he had grown up in the same area as Harvey and likely was familiar with distant relatives of some of Harvey's victims.

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