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Reason First: The Slayer Orderly- Donald Harvey

What’s difference between an “Angel of Mercy” and an “Angel of Death”?

By Skyler SaundersPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Donald Harvey was no Jack Kevorkian, no “Angel of Mercy” helping people choose the time of their death. He murdered people instead of alleviating their pain with measured actions. As an orderly in the hospitals of Cincinnati, Ohio, and London, Kentucky, his methods included suffocating, pulling tubes from oxygen tanks, poisoning his victims with cyanide and arsenic, and overdosing people on insulin and morphine.

While Dr. Kevorkian used humane methods to help people slip from their existence, Harvey murdered out of spite. If a patient slighted him, or looked at him the wrong way, he would take offense, and administer his lethal “treatments” as punishment.

Whereas Dr. Kevorkian designed a machine to allow people in excruciating pain to be forever relieved, in response to the terminal patient’s request, Harvey meted out death sentences to people trying to get well. In one such case, he stuck a coat hanger into a patient’s catheter, causing infection and ultimately death from peritonitis.

For over seventeen years, Harvey secretly terrorized hospital patients in these midwestern and southern states. After he was caught, he claimed to have killed eighty-seven people, but only thirty-three deaths have been confirmed as his doing.

While Dr. Kevorkian was an actual hero to his patients, comforting them to voluntarily transition out of this life, Harvey, was a monster. He murdered without remorse, reflecting his profound psychopathy.

From the first murder to his thirty-third, Harvey felt no empathy for his victims whatsoever. His sloppy, ugly, and disturbing deeds were in service to the short term need to dominate and control his victims. He had no healthy sense of “self,” only immediate needs. In snuffing out the lives of others, he crossed the line between rational and irrational self-interest. In fact, he destroyed any hope he might have had of living life as a truly human being when his first victim drew their last breath at his hands.

Though physically alive for thirty years after his sentencing to eight consecutive life terms, Harvey was as good as dead in his mind. He either saw his victim’s faces every night as he closed his eyes to sleep and felt horror at what he’d done, or he felt nothing in which case he was already spiritually and emotionally dead.

Being the direct cause of a medical patient's death itself is not a “murder.” When the patient is asking to die, and submits to the lethal treatment voluntarily, as Dr. Kevorkian did, the treatment is an act of mercy. Deciding who should live and die as if it’s your right, based purely on subjective criteria, like hurt feelings or anger is immoral, unethical and inhumane. There’s a reason Harvey had to sneak around and administer death in secret; he knew what he was doing was wrong. He just dominated and rendered ultimate judgement. Kevorkian was upfront because he knew he was acting in concert with his patients. He even filmed a man with a debilitating disease to show authorities how much he was helping the man and dared police to stop him. He took a stand on behalf of their ultimate right to keep or leave their own life. All of his power to be the antithesis to Harvey shows the direct contrast between the merciful and the murderous. Both men have been accused of being evil killers, but only Harvey can claim that title. Kevorkian ended the lives of people ravaged by disease. They welcomed his calming hand and permitted him to bring their suffering to an end. His ways, although currently controversial, taboo and unorthodox and illegal federally, spared the pain of his patients. That’s heroic.

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Skyler Saunders

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