Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (15 page)

At the meeting, several paramedics, Krzystofczyk among
them, argued for more time to collect evidence. They knew Swango was smart and cocky, and they were afraid he’d wriggle out of any charges unless they caught him red-handed. But presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was scheduled to arrive in Quincy for a speech at the college later that week. Swango had been talking recently about assassinations, and they worried that such a prominent visitor might be at risk if Swango remained at large.

The paramedics had the feeling that Swango had merely been experimenting with them, though the arsenic dose in the pitcher of tea might have been lethal to anyone who actually consumed it. But they felt that their evidence suggested that Swango, far from the all-American image he projected, was psychologically twisted and fully capable of murder. Mann decided that the police should be notified immediately. He picked up the phone.

S
WANGO
seemed suspicious that so many of the paramedics had been meeting with Mann, but when he asked what they were doing, Myers claimed it was nothing important. Swango badgered him. “What were you talking about?” he asked. “Nothing I can tell you about,” Myers replied.

The next day, Friday, October 26, Swango got a call at work asking if he’d stop by the Adams County Sheriff’s Office. He had applied for the deputy coroner job; Sheriff Bob Nall implied that he was about to get the job. When Swango arrived he was instead arrested, read his rights, charged with battery, which under Illinois law includes nonfatal poisonings. Though he said he wouldn’t make any statement without his lawyer being present, he gave the police permission to search his apartment.

When police arrived at the neat, two-story house on Eighteenth Street and opened the door to Swango’s apartment, they were startled. The place was a mess. Spread out on a table and shelves was a virtual poison lab, with a large book bearing a skull and crossbones on the cover placed prominently amid the vials, needles, and bottles. The book,
The Poor Man’s James Bond
, which is said to be popular among paramilitary enthusiasts, is described by its publisher, Paladin Press, as “the undisputed leader in the field of books on improvised weaponry and do-it-yourself mayhem,” which tells “how to buy most of the needed chemicals from your grocery and garden store.”

As the police report described the scene, “An entire mini-lab set-up was observed. Detectives found numerous chemicals, suspected poisons and poisonous compounds. Underground-type magazines were observed that gave technical information on exotic poisons . . . . Handwritten recipes for poisons/poisonous compounds were observed.” The poisons and recipes included ricin, botulin, nicotine, supersaturated cyanide, and fluoroacetic acid. The report continued, “Detectives also observed numerous newspapers and various scrapbooks etc. The suspect appears to have been collecting information on disasters, car accidents, and even newspaper clippings in regards to the Tylenol murders in the Chicago, Ill. area.”

The police seized as possible evidence the
James Bond
book, various pesticides including numerous bottles of Terro ant poison filled to varying levels, chemicals, a large supply of castor beans—the raw material for the poison ricin—syringes, needles, and a gallon jug of sulfuric acid. The police also confiscated a small arsenal: a Mossberg twelve-gauge pump shotgun with a combat stock; a Llama .357 Magnum revolver; a Raven .25 automatic handgun; and two large K-Bar survival knives. But perhaps the most peculiar items dealt with the occult. Among the books confiscated were
The Book of Ceremonial Magic, The Necronomicon
, and
The Modern Witch’s Spell Book.
Police also found numerous handwritten spells, incantations, and a bag of stones bearing peculiar markings.

Mostly out of curiosity, the police also checked with the Quincy Public Library. The library’s records indicated that Swango had recently checked out two books:
One by One
, a novel by Linda Lee, and
The Healer: A True Story of Medicine and Murder
, by Leonard Levitt. According to its jacket copy,
One by One
describes how a pair of “diabolical psychopaths” injects botulism toxin into food in New York City supermarkets, terrorizing the entire city’s population.
The Healer
is a nonfiction account of the 1975 fatal injection of his wife with Demerol by Charles Friedgood, a Long Island surgeon. According to its jacket copy, it is “a fascinating psychological study of a physician-murderer.”

N
EWS
of Michael’s arrest stunned the extended Swango family. Muriel Swango was staying in Florida with her son Richard when Michael called Friday afternoon to say he’d been arrested for battery
and needed bail money. Muriel called Michael’s aunt Ruth Miller in Quincy, and asked her to go to the courthouse and put up the $5,000. Muriel promised to repay her as soon as she returned. Swango was released that evening. Muriel also called Bob in Oregon to tell him about his brother. She was matter-of-fact and unemotional.

When Louise Scharf heard the news in Springfield, she called Ruth for details. “It’s all a misunderstanding,” Ruth explained. “Michael told his mother it was some kind of fight.”

But on the Monday after Swango’s arrest,
The Quincy Herald-Whig
ran a brief story that made no mention of any fight or brawl. The headline was “Man Suspected of Poisoning Co-worker”:

Michael W. Swango, 30, 220 N. 18th, was arrested Friday on a charge of aggravated battery in connection with the earlier poisoning of a co-worker.

Police chief Charles A. Gruber said investigators are still trying to learn the exact nature and content of the toxic pesticide. The toxin is being checked at laboratories in Chicago and Atlanta, Gruber said . . . .

Muriel returned to Quincy immediately after hearing the news. Ruth asked her what had really happened.

“He’s not guilty at all,” Muriel said.

“How can you say that?” Ruth asked.

“Because he told me he wasn’t,” she replied firmly.

CHAPTER
FIVE

T
HE
O
HIO
S
TATE
U
NIVERSITY
police department occupies spacious quarters near the football stadium, and with fifty officers, is larger than the police force in many medium-sized cities. Police Chief Peter Herdt, who was forty at the time of Swango’s arrest, reported to a university vice president, and though the force often cooperated with the Columbus police, it was autonomous. Indeed, Herdt had been personally assured by President Edward Jennings before he agreed to take the job that he would have unfettered freedom to investigate any crime. So when Quincy authorities called the Columbus police asking for background on Swango, an Ohio State intern, they were referred to the Ohio State force.

OSU police officer Bruce Anderson returned the call; the Quincy police briefed him on Swango’s arrest and on the bizarre evidence found in his apartment.

This was hardly the usual fare for a university police officer, even on a campus the size of Ohio State. Anderson, age thirty-four, had a bachelor’s degree in microbiology; he had minimal experience in major-crime investigation. He went to the hospital, was told to speak to the chief of surgery, and met with Dr. Carey on the afternoon of October 26, the same day as Swango’s arrest. Coroner Wayne Johnson had also phoned Carey earlier that day, but Carey thought he was calling about a job recommendation for Swango and ignored the call. That was why Johnson had turned to the police for help.

Anderson now told Carey that Swango had just been arrested in Illinois, and that he was pursuing a background check for the Illinois
authorities. Carey was taken aback. He had largely put Swango out of his mind in the four months since the intern had left Ohio State, and didn’t remember much about the internal investigation. He refreshed his memory by looking at Swango’s file. Carey told Anderson that Swango’s performance as an intern had been sub-standard, and that he hadn’t been reappointed at the end of his first year. He added that Swango had been accused of “tampering” with a patient’s IV line. The hospital had conducted an internal investigation, he said, and Swango had been “exonerated,” the same language he’d used in recommending Swango to the medical board. Anderson thought Carey cooperative, though he didn’t show the officer Swango’s file, since it included confidential evaluations of his performance. Carey did tell Anderson that Swango’s personnel file should be available in the office of the acting medical director.

The possible import of the news from Quincy wasn’t lost on Carey. As soon as Anderson left, he called Tzagournis. (Apparently unrelated to the Swango incident, Whitcomb, the medical director who conducted the internal investigation of Swango, had taken a leave of absence, and Cramp, the hospital’s executive director, had resigned.) Tzagournis, in turn, consulted university vice president Richard Jackson and Alphonse Cincione, the outside lawyer brought in for the Swango investigation. This suggests that Tzagournis immediately recognized the potential significance of Swango’s arrest.

Tzagournis called a meeting to discuss the latest turn of events; the group included, for the first time in the Swango affair, someone from the hospitals’ public relations office. The focus of the meeting seems to have been to limit the legal and public-relations damage to the Ohio State Hospitals. Concern was expressed about the confidentiality of files—Swango’s and patients’. Consideration was even given to issuing a press release, since word of Swango’s arrest in Illinois was likely to surface publicly in Ohio sooner or later. But that impulse was quickly suppressed. There is no indication that anyone decided to notify the Ohio State Medical Board that Swango had been arrested.
⁸

Instead, the upshot of the meeting was that Assistant Attorney General Holder, who had been involved in the earlier investigation and was therefore familiar with the facts, should handle all police inquiries as well as any others. Specifically, no files relating to Swango or patients would be given to the OSU police by anyone at the hospital. In keeping with the hospitals’ policy, they were moved to a locked file cabinet to which access was strictly limited. The possibility of cooperating fully with a police investigation—and perhaps finally getting to the bottom of the Cooper incident, not to mention the patient deaths—doesn’t seem to have been discussed, even though it was a police officer’s request for cooperation that had triggered the meeting.

The decision to position a lawyer between the university police force and the hospital doctors and other personnel—in particular, to use the same lawyer who had already “exonerated” Swango and endorsed the decision to return him to hospital duty the previous February—was surely based on the perceived need to protect patient confidentiality and to limit any potential liability and embarrassing publicity. But it may also have reflected a long-standing deterioration in relations between doctors and the police at Ohio State; similar tensions developed in many American communities during the preceding decades of malpractice litigation and skyrocketing insurance premiums. Many doctors had come to see the police as little more than evidence-seekers for plaintiffs’ lawyers. The hospital administrators’ defensiveness also reflected doctors’ concerns that the police, in their zeal to find and convict criminals, were insensitive to the well-being of patients and the workings of the hospital, which they seemed all too willing to disrupt. But in the case of Ohio State, ill will between doctors and police had reached the boiling point during a recent investigation within the hospitals.

As a result of a spate of reports of gambling and loan-sharking at the university hospitals, the OSU police had mounted a relatively sophisticated undercover operation, using investigators posing as hospital employees. Evidence soon emerged of drug abuse at the hospitals. Fiber-optic cameras were mounted inside, several of them being trained on carts used to store and dispense drugs. The agents obtained footage of doctors, nurses, and nurses’ aides taking drugs
from the cart. In some cases they injected themselves with narcotics intended for patients who needed relief from pain, then replaced the drugs with a saline solution given to patients. Investigators observed one doctor who was obviously drunk while on duty, and others who appeared to be working while under the influence of marijuana and other drugs.

Chief Herdt took the evidence to Holder, the assistant attorney general now involved in the Swango inquiries, arguing that criminal activity was far more widespread in the hospitals than anyone had suspected and that the investigation should be expanded. Holder sent Herdt to the university’s “risk management” committee, which aims to reduce liability. Herdt was later told that hospital personnel suspected of drug and alcohol abuse should be quietly encouraged to seek treatment, but that no other investigative steps should be taken. The surveillance operation was later dismantled. No drug charges were ever filed.

Still, as word of the operation spread within the hospitals, many doctors became angry. They thought the OSU police had been trying to entrap them, and this generated even more distrust of the force. The police, in turn, were angered and made cynical by their perception that the hospitals were more interested in covering up any possible liability or embarrassment than in stopping drug and alcohol abuse in the hospitals.

With these recent tensions still simmering, Holder and Jackson called Charles Gambs, the university administrator who oversaw the police force, and asked him to find out exactly what the police were doing in the hospital. Gambs, in turn, called Chief Herdt.

Herdt, with his rugged good looks, prematurely gray hair, and forceful presence, was viewed by some as overqualified for the university job, not to mention overzealous. He was nationally known in police circles for his work in the seventies on the Oakland, California, police force, where he investigated the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Since then, however, his career had been somewhat less exciting. He had come to Ohio State from comparatively peaceful Springfield, Vermont, where he had been police chief, and the university assignment seemed to make up in job security and benefits what it lacked in drama. For that, Herdt turned to his own imagination, writing
crime fiction for
Police
magazine. He had just arrived at OSU and it wasn’t yet clear whether he’d be a team player, someone who was equally sensitive to the safety of the community and the reputation of the university.