Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (18 page)

In this atmosphere, Officer Bruce Anderson arrived at the hospital the next night. A nurse told him she “was not at liberty” to tell him anything, not even whether the nurse he wanted to interview was still employed at the hospital. Anderson was furious. Despite the rebuff, he went to the ninth floor and tried to talk to some nurses there. When they refused, he accused them of interfering with a police investigation. A state of near-panic ensued, as nurses concluded they were being threatened with arrest and worried that patients would be alarmed. A nurse called Dickson at home; she in turn alerted hospital and university administrators. The matter got all the way to Vice President Jackson, but by then Anderson had left the hospital. Jackson said he’d deal with the problem in the morning.

The next night, a Wednesday, investigators Harp and Eley again showed up at the hospital and went straight to the ninth floor, where Dickson and Boyanowski were still at work. Even though they were the hospital administrators who had pressed most vigorously for an outside investigation, they were also upset over the events of the previous night, the effect on the nursing staff, and the potential harm to patients. Dickson and Boyanowski quickly intercepted the investigators, arguing that they were disrupting patient care. Harp angrily denied it. “Perhaps your definition of disruption is different from mine,” Boyanowski responded.

The heated argument proceeded in a conference room on the floor so patients and nurses wouldn’t overhear it. Boyanowski refused to let the investigators ask the nurses any questions, though he agreed to arrange future meetings in a conference room located off the floor. Harp and Eley were furious.

“I’ve been thrown out of better hospitals than this,” Harp reported to Herdt when he returned to police headquarters.

M
ICHAEL
Miller, the prosecuting attorney for Franklin County, which includes Columbus, walked into the office of Edward W. Morgan, one of his assistants. Miller said something had come up that he thought Morgan might be interested in: a search warrant at Ohio State. Morgan wasn’t excited at the prospect of a routine search warrant, but Miller had something of a twinkle in his eye. “This could turn into something,” he told Morgan, adding that Dick Harp would be calling him from the OSU police.

Morgan, forty, tall, good-looking, and a good speaker, liked being in the limelight. He’d joined the prosecutor’s office in 1973, after graduating from Ohio State Law School and doing a stint of college teaching in the south. He thought of himself as something of a frustrated actor, and he’d come to love the drama of trials, even though he lost his first one, involving a sixteen-year-old juvenile accused of running a red light. He’d since become one of Miller’s most experienced investigators and trial lawyers.

When Harp called Morgan, he explained that the matter involved Michael Swango. Morgan knew immediately why he’d been put on the case. He’d read about Swango in the papers, and given the hospital and university role, he knew, the matter could be explosive politically. Harp explained that the police had identified a storage locker on Kenny Road in Columbus rented by Swango, and needed a search warrant. Morgan helped prepare one, which a judge approved. By the time of the search itself, on February 5, the press had descended, along with the Franklin County sheriff’s bomb squad. Because of Swango’s fascination with weaponry and violent death, rumors had swirled that the locker might be booby-trapped. As Herdt and other police approached the locker, the crowd surged forward, and Herdt ordered them to back up. “I won’t be responsible if anyone gets blown up,” he warned.

The result was something of an anticlimax. The locker held some old newspapers, more clippings about accidents and disasters, some used Army clothing.

After the search, Morgan met with Herdt, who asked him to stay involved with the case as the investigation continued. Herdt
briefed him on all the problems he’d had with the hospital and how frustrated he’d felt. Morgan, sympathetic, reported back to Miller, who agreed that they should treat the matter as a potential murder case. Together, Miller and Morgan went to the law library to do some reading on poisons and related forensic issues. What they learned was discouraging, especially given the amount of time that had passed since the last suspicious patient death. They read that autopsies typically do not reveal poisons. For some poisons, among them ricin, there was no known test at all. As Morgan remarked to Miller when they finished their research, “Poisoning is the perfect crime.”

O
F
the various investigations now under way, the internal Meeks inquiry was the first to be finished. Meeks had enlisted a criminal-law professor who had been an assistant district attorney to help with the report, and though they did not interview Swango himself, they were the first to interview several critical witnesses. These included Rita Dumas; Rena Cooper; several of the nurses, including Dickson and Beery; and most of the doctors, who were told by Jennings and Tzagournis to cooperate.

Rita Dumas staunchly defended Swango, saying it was impossible for him to have harmed any patients. She tearfully told them how she felt she would not have survived without his support. He had helped her financially when she was nearly destitute, and had helped care for her three children.

The student nurse Karolyn Beery, who had been in the room and had seen Swango inject something into Cooper’s IV, “felt very vulnerable,” Meeks said. “She was shunted aside. She was upset. She had the most damning eyewitness account.”

Meeks questioned Dickson’s testimony. She insisted she had told the doctors about the patient deaths and brought the nurses’ incriminating observations to their attention at the meetings the previous February, but the doctors involved disputed it, saying they had no memory of Dickson having done so. As Meeks later put it, “Dickson claimed she told the meeting and was ignored. This is possible. But all of the doctors ignored her? That’s hard to believe.” Like many involved in the investigation, Meeks credited the united front of doctors over the word of a nurse.

Meeks found nearly everyone involved to be cooperative, except for Dr. Whitcomb, who was still on leave of absence in Washington, D.C. Meeks interviewed him by telephone. “He didn’t give us very much,” the investigator later said. Even if Dickson had presented her suspicions to Whitcomb, Meeks concluded it wouldn’t have made much difference. “Whitcomb paid no attention to the nurses,” he said. “There was tension between him and the nurses. He ignored them. All he was looking at was the medical record, and there wasn’t much there. He was very removed from the reality of the hospital floor.”

Meeks also quickly encountered what he described as “open hostility” between the medical personnel and the police force, stemming in part from the abortive undercover operation in the hospital. This tension came as a surprise to him.

The Meeks report was released to the public on April 2, 1985. To say, as Meeks did, that he was operating in a “political mine field” was an understatement. He had the Ohio press, the university president, and even the governor looking over his shoulder. He was charged with investigating some of the most powerful figures in the university community: Tzagournis, the medical dean, with his ties to trustees and legislators; Holder, an assistant attorney general; and Cincione, a prominent outside lawyer. The reputations of the university and its cherished medical school and hospital were at stake.

“We went into the review with completely open minds,” Meeks began his report. “We ended the review process with many doubts about what exactly had happened in this very complex episode. Our purpose, of course, was not to determine whether criminal behavior occurred. We leave resolution of criminal issues to the law enforcement officers and the courts. Nor did we enter with any presumption that evil or criminal behavior had necessarily occurred.” Indeed, the report concluded that “It is quite possible that there are innocent explanations for the [Cooper] incident, as well as other cases which were never investigated.” Meeks also pointed out that “the matter to which our inquiry was directed was a very unusual event in the life of any hospital. For that reason, it was difficult, we think, for anyone to fully grasp its significance or how to deal with it. Medical authorities here and elsewhere have agreed that it was such an aberrational
episode that it was almost impossible to plan for its handling or to have specific devices in place to try to prevent it.”

In several instances, Meeks resolved issues in the university’s favor, concluding that there had been no cover-up and that the hospital did not withhold information from investigators; that the medical school had cooperated with investigators within the constraints imposed by legitimate interests of patients; that the hospital had not “erred” in the decision as a preliminary step to conduct its own investigation; and that Dr. Carey, in particular, had been fully cooperative and had not misled the medical board in recommending that Swango be licensed to practice medicine.

But even couched in the diplomatic language chosen by Meeks and his assistants, the report was scathing, especially with respect to the hospital’s initial investigations of the Cooper incident. “Put simply, [the inquiry] was far too superficial,” the report concluded.

We have been apprised of facts which should have signaled the need for a more thorough inquiry . . . . The results were that there were numerous witnesses who were never interviewed; the interviews that were conducted were in many instances inadequate; no attempts were made to reconcile inconsistencies or clarify ambiguities; and the conclusions drawn from some of the key interviews are of questionable validity.

Meeks specifically faulted the treatment of Utz, Cooper’s roommate. “Her basic story has remained unchanged to this day,” his report noted. “Yet no one in a position to make a medical judgment about what she was saying, not even Dr. Hunt, talked to her about the incident . . . . The decision to discount her entirely without even a determination of the effect of her disease on her ability to perceive and recall is highly questionable, particularly in light of her eyewitness position and the substance of her highly incriminating allegations against Dr. Swango.”

The report noted that not one but three eyewitnesses—Beery, Cooper, and Utz—saw someone do something to Cooper just before her respiratory arrest. Yet all of their testimony was dismissed as unreliable. “The combined effect of all three statements is quite
powerful and suggests, at the very least, the need to investigate further. Indeed, assuming hypothetically that all three witnesses to an event are psychotic, the fact that they report the same basic facts would preclude rejection of all three versions due to the psychosis of each individual witness.”

Nor, the report noted, were various nurse witnesses interviewed; nor was Dr. Freeman, the head resident, who was the first to confront Swango.

“Most disappointing of all,” the report continued, was the failure to test the syringe discovered by Joe Risley, which Nurse Moore had brought to Dr. Goodman’s attention. “Dr. Goodman never asked to see the syringe and he did not make its existence known during any of the three meetings of the investigative team.” While Meeks found Goodman’s behavior understandable, “the fact that no one on the investigating team except Dr. Goodman is even aware of its existence to this day is troublesome.”

The report harshly criticized the doctors’ diagnosis of the cause of Cooper’s respiratory arrest as a grand mal seizure and the failure to consult appropriate experts who might have rendered an accurate diagnosis. As Meeks noted,

We consulted with two anesthesiologists who disputed the view that [Cooper’s] symptoms were inconsistent with the use of muscle relaxants such as Anectine [succinylcholine] or curare. Both of these drugs are readily available and frequently used in the hospital, particularly in the emergency room; they are eliminated quickly from the bloodstream and will not usually show up on a routine blood test; and they will cause paralysis and respiratory arrest . . . . Both anesthesiologists we consulted found the use of Anectine or curare quite plausible as explaining what happened here.

The doctors’ failure to investigate any of the patient deaths linked to Swango, other than a cursory review of their medical files, even where there were nurse witnesses, seemed inexplicable to Meeks and his assistants. “The failure to follow up on the nurse concerns and suspicions with regard to Dr. Swango’s involvement in cases other than the [Cooper] case was, in our judgment, a serious
omission.” And finally, using what under the circumstances was unusually blunt language, Meeks wrote,

We still find it astounding that no permanent record was kept detailing the occurrence and what was done about it. We understand the reluctance of those in the health profession to put anything in writing because it could be used in a subsequent civil liability litigation context. Nevertheless, we believe a full formal report of this incident should have been prepared by someone and kept in the hospital records.

“The inadequacy of the investigation . . . undermines the ultimate conclusion not to pursue the matter further, and specifically not to refer the matter to outside authorities,” Meeks concluded.

He called for several remedial measures, the most important of which was to establish a new office that would report to the vice president for health services or the hospital’s executive director and would be staffed “with persons trained as investigators and capable of handling medically-related investigations.” The office “should also monitor deaths and unusual events within the hospital in an attempt to detect illegal or undesired activity.”

The report also called for a “statement of principles” to govern police presence in the hospital in an effort to ease tensions between law enforcement and hospital personnel. “To this day,” the report noted, “the relationship between the Hospitals administration and the police is quite negative. The police are of the view that they simply get no cooperation from the Hospitals administration at all. The Hospitals administration is of the view that the police conduct themselves with total insensitivity to the special needs and requirements of a health care situation and have no respect for the confidentiality of patient records.”