A True crime Podcast
The Chart Said Natural Causes. The Autopsy Did Not.
In 1987 a medical examiner in Cincinnati opened a body that was supposed to be routine. The patient had died in a hospital. The paperwork said natural causes. The autopsy did not agree, and the trail led to a nurse’s aide named Donald Harvey. Alexander Lawson follows the seventeen years Harvey spent on hospital wards in Kentucky and Ohio, the list of names he kept at home, and the guilty pleas that convicted him of killing thirty-seven patients. He claimed the number was far higher. He called it mercy. Prosecutors called it control. He died in a Toledo prison cell in 2017, thirty years into a stack of life sentences, and the families were left with a narrower question than the headline: which deaths the hospital had signed off as ordinary.
