Like so many nurses who kill patients, Donald got the nickname “the angel of death” in the press because his lawyer said he killed out of mercy. The prosecution questioned this characterization, pointing out that he also killed a couple people outside the hospital who weren’t suffering from anything, and in court, when he saw the names of all his victims, he started laughing. He’d later admit he enjoyed the feeling of control, and of deceiving doctors who were always acting like they were better than him. 

At Cincinnati’s Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital where he worked, Donald had a different but similar nickname: “the Kiss of Death.” That’s because patients kept dying under his watch. Everyone knew it, but no one did anything about it. “Whoops, I got another one today,” he’d say, and then his coworkers would all laugh. 

Sometimes, Donald suffocated patients with pillows. Sometimes, he emptied their oxygen tanks. Usually, he poisoned them by putting cyanide or arsenic in their meals; this is the true origin of all those jokes about terrible hospital food. These murders went undetected because no one has to do a post-mortem when a patient dies in a hospital. Not in Ohio anyway, not unless anyone has a special reason to suspect foul play. Then Donald made a mistake. He murdered a motorcyclist. 

When someone…