The Angel Of Death

Thirty-seven murders on paper. Seventy in confession. Numbers that are supposed to feel big and dramatic, but they don’t. They feel clinical. Like chart notes. Like a checklist. Like something you initial and move on from. That’s what scares me the most — how clean it all sounds when you strip it down to facts. Born here. Raised there. Abused. Believed in God. Believed in Satan. Believed he was justified. Believed he was merciful. Believed it was his right.

I hate how human he sounds.

He said he was nice. Caring. Compassionate. And I don’t even know why that bothers me so much, because everyone says that about themselves. It’s the most normal lie in the world. But coming from someone who poisoned coffee and pudding and pie, who disconnected oxygen like it was an annoying alarm clock, it makes my skin crawl. Like, no shit you thought you were nice — you were playing God with a conscience you rewrote yourself.

That line won’t leave me alone: After I didn’t get caught for the first fifteen, I thought it was my right.
Imagine fucking up fifteen times and calling it a promotion.

I try to picture him walking into the VA that morning, cyanide in his pocket, telling himself it was for him. Suicide, sure. That old excuse. Then he sees John Powell, still breathing, still inconveniently alive, and suddenly the poison has a new purpose. I put him out of his misery, he said. Like he was doing housekeeping. Like death was a favor. Like he was handing out mercy the way you hand out mints at a restaurant.

Sometimes I wonder how many people convince themselves they’re being kind while they’re actively destroying something.

His childhood reads like a checklist for tragedy: rural Kentucky, effeminate, gay, trapped, abused by a neighbor for thirteen years, abused by an uncle, threatened into silence. Semi-happy, he called it. Semi-happy feels worse than miserable. At least miserable is honest. Semi-happy is rot with a smile on it.

He believed you reap what you sow. Which is funny, in a dark, sick way, because in the end someone else reaped him. Beaten to death in a prison cell. No God, no Satan, no mercy killings, no justifications. Just blunt force trauma and a body that finally didn’t get to decide anything anymore.

Part of me hates that I feel anything close to understanding. Not sympathy — I won’t give him that — but understanding the logic spiral. The way anger becomes righteousness. The way pain turns into permission. The way someone decides they’re sane, in control, fully aware… and still chooses horror. He said he wasn’t mentally disturbed. He just decided one day he wanted to die. I don’t know why that sentence feels like it could belong to half the people I know, minus the murder.

The scariest part isn’t the cyanide or the arsenic or the plastic bags. It’s the calm. The showers afterward. The reporting for duty. The diary entries. The belief that some people deserved it and some didn’t, and that he was qualified to make that call. Judge. Prosecutor. Jury. God with a keycard.

I think about how he regretted killing good people but not the ones who made him mad. How anger was a death sentence and annoyance was a capital crime. How “mercy” somehow stretched to include poisoned pies and contaminated coffee. How easy it is to slap a holy word on something ugly and sleep at night.

And I think about myself, which is the part I don’t like admitting. About how rage can feel clean when you justify it long enough. About how resentment whispers that it’s earned. About how everyone has a line where empathy snaps and something colder takes over. Most of us just don’t cross it with a syringe in our hands.

Donald Harvey scares me because he wasn’t a monster in the way movies want monsters to be. He was organized. Polite. Religious. Helpful. He scares me because if evil can look that ordinary, then the distance between “I’m hurting” and “you deserve this” is thinner than anyone wants to believe.

Maybe that’s why I can’t let him go.
Because the real horror isn’t what he did.

It’s how easily he explained it.