Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (13 page)

Despite Carey’s “reservations,” the letter did nothing to deter the Ohio State Medical Board. In September 1984, it granted Swango’s application and licensed him to practice medicine in Ohio.

A
T
the Ohio State Hospitals that summer, head nurse Amy Moore was going through her desk when she came across the syringe, still wrapped in a paper towel, that Joe Risley had found in Room 966 the night of Cooper’s respiratory arrest. Several months had passed since those terrifying events, but the discovery brought back bad memories of the whole affair. Moore couldn’t understand why no one had seemed interested in the syringe, which she and the other nurses had been so careful to preserve. She’d told Dr. Goodman about it in their meeting, but he never mentioned it to her again. She’d never been asked for it in the course of any investigation. Then she heard that Swango had been cleared.

Moore was about to dispose of the thing, but for some reason she hesitated. She turned to another nurse and said she was going to throw the syringe away. “Do you think it’s okay?”

“Well, sure,” the nurse replied. “It’s gone now. It’s over with.”

Moore dropped the syringe into a waste container.

I
N
July Swango moved back to his hometown of Quincy, as he had during other intervals in his career. He told his mother and relatives that he hadn’t liked the doctors he worked with at Ohio State, and as a result had left his residency there. He planned to apply for a medical license in Illinois and in the meantime, work as a paramedic for a few months before resuming his medical career. He was immediately hired by the Adams County Ambulance Corps, where he had worked the previous spring and part-time while he was at Quincy College. Though his hours were unpredictable and he often worked weekends, he frequently made the eight-hour drive to Columbus so he could see his girlfriend, Rita Dumas, and her children. As in the past, he managed to function on amazingly little sleep; he once mentioned that he’d made the long drive to Columbus,
visited Dumas for just an hour, and then driven back and reported for work, all without any sleep.

Quincy had changed little since Swango’s childhood—or, for that matter, since its heyday as a Mississippi River port in the mid-nineteenth century. Maine Street, its central thoroughfare, runs through a national historic district lined with stately mansions built by riverboat captains and early industrialists. Swango rented an apartment on Eighteenth Street, just north of Maine, at the upstairs rear of an attractive older brick house. It had one bedroom and a screened porch. It was within walking distance of Quincy’s two hospitals, Blessing and St. Mary’s. Though Quincy had a population of just over 40,000, its distance from any major city (Springfield was two hours away) had made it a regional medical center, serving a large rural area.

The ambulance corps was headquartered at Blessing Hospital, in a suite adjacent to the hospital’s emergency room. The paramedics shared a central room with a large round table, comfortable chairs, and a television; a kitchen and bathroom; and several sleeping rooms. Paramedics worked twenty-four-hour shifts, responding to ambulance calls whenever they came in, and often ate and slept at the hospital. Since they spent so much time together, they were a close-knit group, drawn together by a shared temperament that thrived on the crisis, violence, mayhem, and serious accidents that trigger ambulance calls. The work required a strong stomach. The paramedics’ demeanor could at times seem vulgar and coarse to outsiders, and they often indulged in black humor to relieve the pressure of their work. Lonnie Long, who was in charge of the paramedics, and who hired Swango, was a guns and weapons enthusiast. Copies of
Soldier of Fortune
and the National Rifle Association magazine were often lying about the paramedics’ quarters.

Still, even by the standards of paramedics, Swango was considered bizarre. Nearly everyone knew him from his previous stint with the corps. An exception was Mark Krzystofczyk. Somewhat soft-spoken, dark-haired, and nice-looking, Krzystofczyk was twenty-seven and had graduated from SIU before moving to Quincy in 1982. He wondered why a resident at a big hospital like Ohio State would be coming to work as a paramedic in Quincy. “Wait till you meet Swango,” his coworkers told him when they
learned their former colleague would be returning in July. “He’s different.” But when Krzystofczyk asked why, they just grinned and shook their heads. “You’ll see.”

If anything, the qualities that had made Swango “different” were now even more pronounced. The paramedics who had worked with him before noticed that he was restless, on edge, constantly pacing around the room. He rarely sat down and relaxed with the other paramedics. He kept saying he wished something would happen so he could get on the ambulance. Still, they felt he was an effective paramedic and admired his medical degree and hospital experience, which put him on a different plane educationally from his colleagues. Long, in particular, told Swango that he envied him his education and internship, and warned Swango not to forget the paramedics when he resumed his career as a doctor. Long believed that most doctors had swelled heads and egos.

Soon after Swango started work, he ran into Jim Daniels, a fellow graduate of the SIU medical school and Quincy College, who’d been a year behind him at SIU. Daniels was now doing his internship at Blessing Hospital, and was assigned to the emergency room for his first rotation, just as Swango had been at Ohio State. “I thought you were a neurosurgeon,” Daniels said.

“No,” Swango answered. “It didn’t work out.”

Daniels thought Swango might elaborate, but he said nothing further. Swango was similarly vague with Krzystofczyk, who was often his partner on ambulance runs. Krzystofczyk also wondered what his fellow paramedics had been talking about when they warned him about Swango. All that struck Krzystofczyk about him in the first weeks they worked together were Swango’s “Beaver Cleaver” all-American looks, and how hard he was willing to work. He always volunteered for extra shifts. As if their long hours weren’t enough, even when he was off-duty Swango monitored ambulance calls with a shortwave radio and then would show up at the scenes of emergencies, sometimes even before the ambulance arrived. When he wasn’t on an emergency run or visiting his girlfriend, he seemed to be exercising. Krzystofczyk often saw him jogging in one of his old Marine sweatshirts.

Gradually, however, Krzystofczyk began to understand what his coworkers had meant when they said Swango was “different.”
Perhaps in the nearly all-male, gun- and violence-oriented atmosphere of the ambulance corps, Swango simply felt freer to express the kinds of interests that had surfaced only intermittently in college, at SIU, and at Ohio State. In any event, he now revealed far more about his fantasy life and fascination with violence than he ever had before. Krzystofczyk noticed that his colleague seemed extremely excited when they reached an accident and discovered a fatality. The normally talkative Swango grew even more animated than usual, often exclaiming “Wasn’t that great?” after they removed a body. Krzystofczyk thought maybe he was just testing him, trying to get a reaction. But then Swango started phoning him when he missed out on a gruesome call. “What did it look like?” he would ask. “What did you see?” Swango wanted even the goriest details repeated.

Another paramedic, Brent Unmisig, relayed a comment by Swango that seemed odd coming from someone who was trying to save lives. Unmisig had been driving with Swango down a busy Quincy street one day when a motorcyclist passed them. “That’s my friend,” Swango said.

“Why is that your friend, Mike?” Unmisig asked.

“He doesn’t have a helmet on,” Swango replied.

Swango was so interested in death that he mentioned to several of his fellow paramedics that he’d like to get the job of deputy coroner. Indeed, he approached the coroner, Wayne Johnson, asking for the job.

Swango’s interest in articles about violent death, first manifested when he was a child, now became an obsession, as he himself described it. Krzystofczyk and the other paramedics noticed that when Swango was on duty and waiting for an ambulance call, he spent much of his time working on four or five large scrapbooks. He’d spread out articles on the table and carefully paste them into one of the books. One day Krzystofczyk went over to the table and looked at some of the articles. Many were about fatal car crashes, and quite a few about poison. He could tell Swango didn’t like him sifting through the clippings. Swango told him that while he was living in Columbus, a cleaning woman had “messed up” the order of the clippings, and he said he’d “blown up” at her. Krzystofczyk took that as a warning.

Just to be friendly, Krzystofczyk mentioned that media magnate Rupert Murdoch had very recently purchased the
Chicago Sun-Times
, published in Krzystofczyk’s hometown, and he told Swango he might want to subscribe, given Murdoch’s reputation as a tabloid publisher. “It’s going to have all kinds of lurid articles,” he said. Swango thanked him for the suggestion.

“How’d you get started on this?” Krzystofczyk continued.

Swango explained that he’d been on an ambulance call in which someone was killed, and the next day he’d seen an article about the accident in the paper. He’d gotten a charge out of it, so he cut out and saved the article. Since then, he said, clipping articles about accident fatalities had developed into an “obsession.”

Krzystofczyk also asked Swango specifically about why he had so many articles on poison. “It’s a good way to kill people,” Swango replied matter-of-factly. Krzystofczyk shrugged. Was that a joke? He never knew when to take Swango seriously.

Few things distracted Swango from work on the scrapbooks, but on July 18, not long after his arrival, the paramedics were watching TV in their quarters when a news bulletin announced that an out-of-work security guard armed with a rifle and shotgun had killed twenty-one people at a busy McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California, before being gunned down by a police sharpshooter. Television crews had rushed to the scene, filming the gruesome spectacle of the dead and wounded, many of them children. Swango was relaxing in a recliner, but at the first mention of the massacre, he leaped to his feet, rushed to the television set, and turned up the volume as far as it would go. “Don’t do that,” shouted one of his colleagues, Greg Myers, annoyed at the earsplitting sound. Swango turned it down slightly, but then, still standing in front of the TV as he absorbed the news, he shouted gleefully, “That’s just great! I love it!” When the segment ended, he continued, “I wish I could have been there!” He talked about the killings the rest of the afternoon, jumping up every time CNN repeated the news and footage.

“Man, you’re crazy,” Myers thought, but he didn’t say anything.

“Did you hear about the McDonald’s massacre?” he asked Lonnie Long when he came in. “Every time I think of a good idea, somebody beats me to it.”

The next day, Swango mentioned the killings to another paramedic. “Wasn’t that something about that McDonald’s massacre?” he said. “I’d give anything in the world to have been there and seen it.”

Sexual banter wasn’t uncommon among the mostly male staff, but there, too, Swango set new standards. He loved to tease the one woman paramedic, Sandy Ivers, who also happened to be dating his boss, Lonnie Long (and later married him). “Sandy, do you know what I’d like to do to you?” he asked her. He then described in lurid detail what he called a “sexual fantasy” that culminated in his plunging a hatchet into the back of her head. After the first recounting of this “fantasy,” Ivers would say, “Get away from me, Swango,” but he nonetheless repeated it in her presence on several occasions, within earshot of other paramedics.

In addition to his visits to Rita Dumas in Columbus, Swango was now dating a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. While he never confided any details of his actual sex life, he often spoke of fantasies in which violence and sex were closely linked. His fellow paramedics detected a sexual element in his excitement over the McDonald’s massacre. He once told Krzystofczyk that “the best thing about being a doctor” was “to come out of the emergency room with a hard-on to tell some parents that their kid has just died from head trauma.”

“Mike, you are very weird,” Krzystofczyk told him.

To another paramedic, Swango said he’d love to take a gun into the emergency room “and start blowing people away.”

And then there was what he described as the “ultimate call.” Nearly all the paramedics, at one time or another, heard Swango recount, with only minor variations, his fantasy of this “ultimate” emergency. In this scenario, Swango is called to the site of an accident in which a busload of children has been hit head-on by a tractor trailer filled with gasoline. As Swango arrives on the scene, another bus plows into the wreckage, causing a massive explosion of the gas-filled truck. The force of the explosion throws the children’s bodies onto nearby barbed-wire fences. Swango “would see kids hurled into barbed-wire fences, onto the telephone polls, on the street, burning,” as Unmisig put it, describing what Swango had told him. Again, the paramedics sensed a sexual undercurrent to
Swango’s excitement as he narrated the ghastly details of burning children thrown onto barbed wire.

Later that summer, Krzystofczyk and Swango were drinking coffee together, waiting for a call, while they watched a public television special on Henry Lee Lucas, who at the time was believed to be the nation’s most prolific serial killer. Lucas had just been convicted of the murder of an unidentified woman known only as Orange Socks, the first of more than twenty victims he confessed to killing along Interstate 35 in Texas. In a widely watched televised interview, Lucas claimed to have crisscrossed the country with a partner, wantonly raping, robbing, and murdering. As he said on television, “We killed ’em every way there is except one. I haven’t poisoned anyone. We cut ’em up. We ran ’em down in cars. We stabbed ’em. We beat ’em. We drowned ’em. There’s crucification [
sic
]. There’s people we filleted like fish. There’s people we burnt. We strangled ’em. We even stabbed ’em when we strangled them. We even tied ’em so they would strangle themselves.”