CINCINNATI — Authorities in northern Ohio said the man accused of killing Cincinnati's "Angel of Death" in a prison beating could soon face charges in the fatal attack.
The Toledo Blade reported James D. Elliott confessed to killing Donald Harvey, who was serving multiple life sentences for killing 36 people between 1970 and 1987 while working as an orderly at hospitals in Cincinnati and Kentucky. Harvey claimed to have killed at least 50. He said he started selecting patients for "mercy killings" but continued killing because he liked it.
Prosecutors will present a case against Elliott, 44, to a grand jury in the next week or two, according to Michael Loisel, chief of the criminal division at the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office.
Harvey had been held at Toledo Correctional Institution since 2008 and was in a protective custody unit at the time of the attack. He was 64 at the time of his death in 2017. Authorities said then that they could take their time with the investigation because the suspect was already behind bars.
The Blade reported that Elliott wrote a letter to the newspaper later that summer and claimed responsibility for Harvey's death in correspondence with a reporter, describing the attack and questioning why he hadn't been charged yet.
Ohio prison records show Elliott has been serving a 37-year sentence for numerous burglary offenses since 2006.
Loisel said investigators had been working to determine if any others had been involved in Harvey's death. Authorities have no plans to bring a case against anyone else to a grand jury related to the attack, he said.
Harvey was charged with killing one Cincinnati Drake Hospital patient after a doctor doing an autopsy caught a whiff of cyanide and alerted police. That might have been the only charge, but WCPO news anchor Pat Minarcin received an anonymous tip, followed up on it and eventually identified a pattern that broke the case wide open in 1987.
Several officials and relatives of victims told WCPO they believe Harvey should have been given the death penalty. But he avoided that by pleading guilty to 24 deaths.
Harvey was hospitalized on life support after the prison beating. He died the next day.
