Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (20 page)

“I stayed up late last night, I assure you of that, Dr. Swango. I looked at every piece of evidence. I went over it again and again. I spent perhaps ten hours of deliberation. I didn’t keep track. I didn’t watch the clock, but I didn’t get much sleep, and when I woke up this morning my decision was just as firm as when I went to bed.”

Because of the nature of the charges and the possibility that Swango might still poison others, Vahle moved that his bail be revoked and he be confined in the county jail until sentencing.

“It’s indeed a sad day,” Judge Cashman responded, turning to look directly at Swango. “You have the mind and the intellect to do great deeds, but yet you haven’t. On the one hand you have performed great deeds, but on the other you have clearly performed evil deeds. As much as it hurts me to do so, it’s clearly obvious to me that every man, woman, and child in this community or anywhere else that you might go is in jeopardy as long as you are a free person, Doctor.

“What makes it worse,” the judge continued, “is that there is no explanation . . . . It would sure help if I knew why, but there isn’t any why. There is no explanation why you would do these things to your friends and co-workers, and if you would do these things under those circumstances, I have every reason to conclude . . . that you might do them to anyone else. I think that you could and are very capable of it . . . . Those people deserve and need my protection, and I’m going to give it to them. I hereby revoke your bond.

“It is indeed a sad day for me, Doctor,” the judge concluded. “I don’t like what I had to do, but certainly it had to be done for the people of this community. I hereby recess.”

The judge stood and prepared to leave, but as he did, Swango handed a foam cup to Rita Dumas across the rail separating him from the spectators. A jail attendant, fearing the cup might contain
poison, leaped up and knocked it out of Swango’s hand. But the cup was empty. Inside it, Swango had written, “I love you Dumas. Hang in there.” Dumas broke down in sobs as Swango was handcuffed and led from the courtroom by sheriff’s deputies.

J
UST
outside, Swango met briefly with Dan Cook and then spoke to Muriel about the possibility of an appeal. He insisted on his innocence and said he needed her to pay for it. But Muriel had been badly shaken by the evidence and the verdict. This time, she refused to give Michael what he wanted. “I don’t have the money,” she said. “Anyway, I was there” for the trial, Muriel went on, looking her son squarely in the eye. “I know you’re guilty. The evidence showed you were guilty.”

Michael, furious, abruptly turned away, leaving his mother standing alone in the corridor.

CHAPTER
SIX

T
HE WEEK AFTER
the verdict, Muriel Swango called Judge Cashman’s office and scheduled an appointment with him. Cashman wasn’t looking forward to the visit. Though he considered it part of his job to explain his decisions, and had met parents and other relatives of people he’d convicted before, they almost invariably gave him a hard time.

Thus, it came as something of a surprise to him when Muriel came into his chambers, took a seat, and began the conversation by saying, “I understand why you reached the decision you did, and I have no quarrel with the verdict.” But she obviously felt the need to talk, to try to explain her son, and she stayed for an hour. She told Cashman that she wanted him to know that Michael was “a very troubled young man.” She said that he had bitterly resented his father’s long and frequent absences. Still, “Mike never caused me any type of unusual problems”; he “got along well with others and was well-adjusted.” It was only toward the end of his college career, after he had returned from the Marines, that Muriel began to worry. “He became easily agitated. He was always working. He never slept,” she said. She had found his behavior “bizarre.” Even so, she had initially believed in his innocence, and the notion that he might poison someone was “completely out of character.” Something inside him “must have snapped,” she concluded.

Judge Cashman found Muriel to be composed and dignified, and thought she was taking her son’s conviction as well as could be expected. Still, she indicated that since Michael’s arrest she hadn’t
been feeling well, and she had felt even worse after the guilty verdict. Perhaps it was the stress, the judge thought.

D
URING
the summer, the Adams County probation department prepared a presentencing report to guide Judge Cashman in imposing a sentence. Since Swango himself continued to maintain his innocence, the report was unable to offer insight into any possible motivation. “If this arrest had not occurred,” the report stated, Swango “believes he would currently be working as an emergency room physician at a hospital.” Swango “believe[d] his upbringing was normal and stable” and said he was “close to his mother” and had “regular contact” with his brothers. He said his father’s return from Vietnam “caused personal problems for him” and “alcohol became a problem.” He listed his “hobbies” as “running, exercising, reading, participating in and watching sporting events” and said he “does not smoke or drink.” He had refused to be examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist.

Muriel, too, had told the probation officer that Michael had “a normal childhood.” But she said that he had a difficult relationship with his father. Her husband’s return from Vietnam had been “extremely traumatic for him. [Virgil] was never the same person after he returned home,” and he had turned to “serious alcohol abuse.” The couple had separated; Michael “tried to get his father to curb his drinking and reconcile” with his mother. “There was an estrangement” between Michael and his father, Muriel explained, “because his father resented Mike trying to get him to straighten up.”

The presentencing report also reviewed Swango’s sterling academic record, noting that he had been class valedictorian in Quincy, had near-perfect grades at Millikin and Quincy College, and had received his medical degree from SIU. But the report suggests how difficult it was even for court officials to get information from Ohio State. Even after Swango had been convicted of poisoning his coworkers, the only description of the problems at Ohio State in the report is a brief, sketchy account of the Rena Cooper incident: “an incident occurred whereby a patient on a floor he was working [on] had a ‘respiratory arrest.’ The patient was placed in intensive care for one day. His supervisor told him to take two days off, away from the floor.” The result was that as Judge Cashman approached
the task of sentencing, he knew little about the most serious incidents involving Swango.

Cashman convened a sentencing hearing on August 23. Swango called several character witnesses, including his half brother and his girlfriend. Both testified that they had no qualms about leaving their young children alone with Swango and had done so on many occasions. Dick also told the court, “I personally don’t feel that he is guilty.” But pressed on cross-examination, he said “I was not here during the trial, and therefore, I really don’t know whether Mike is guilty or not guilty.” Muriel didn’t attend the sentencing hearing.

A few days before her testimony, Rita had broken her public silence about the case and spoken to an Associated Press reporter. She had refused to cooperate with the OSU police investigation and had agreed to answer questions only with a lawyer present. Dumas had been on duty the day Ricky DeLong died, but she had gone off duty hours before his death. “I love Michael, I do,” she told the AP. “I never, ever doubted that he was innocent, because I know his nature. He wouldn’t do something like that.” It was she, Dumas said, who complained about the ants in Swango’s apartment and told him to do something about them.

As a character witness, however, Rita did not repeat her claim about the ants. She testified that she began dating Swango in July 1983 after they met at the Ohio State Hospitals, and said, “I do not feel I would have survived had he not been there for me.” During the fall of 1983, she explained, “I went through some very, very difficult times in my life . . . . And even though Michael and I had not been dating for a long period of time and we were not seriously considering a long-term relationship at that time, he was very supportive. He would not let more than four or five hours go by, usually it was about three, that he would call and make sure that I was all right, make sure that I was still hanging in there, so to speak. And I do not think that I would have survived that period in my life had he not been there and been so supportive.”

But the witness who made the greatest impression on Judge Cashman, though probably not in the way he or Swango intended, was Robert Haller II, the vice president of National Emergency Service in Toledo, who had hired Swango as an emergency room doctor
while he was awaiting trial. Even though Swango had persuaded Haller to hire him without ever disclosing the fact that he was facing charges of poisoning his fellow paramedics, Haller traveled from Toledo to support Swango’s bid for leniency.

On the witness stand, Swango’s lawyer asked Haller whether he would “have any problem” hiring Swango again, even after his conviction. “I wouldn’t personally,” Haller replied. “But because of the press received in Ohio, and I can speak for most of the hospital administrators, they would have a hard time getting him credentialed.”

“But you personally, based on your knowledge, would have no problem?”

“I would have no problem at all, as well as the hospitals that he worked in. They wouldn’t have a problem themselves. But it’s the public that comes to the hospital that would find it, you know, which would create a problem.”

Cashman was startled almost to the point of disbelief by this testimony—the willingness to rehire a convicted poisoner, the disdain for a “public” that would “create a problem.”

Chet Vahle, the prosecutor, rose to cross-examine Haller.

“Mr. Haller, did Dr. Swango tell you about these charges when he applied for work with your firm?” Vahle asked.

“No, he did not.”

“And just exactly when did you advise the hospitals about these charges?”

“To be quite honest, it hit the paper before we were aware of it. It first broke in the Cleveland
Plain Dealer.
And we found out the day that it was going in the newspaper.”

“Did you consider that to be a breach of trust in the application process?”

“No,” Haller explained, “because on the application there is a question, if they have ever committed a felony, and at that time he had not been tried. So I, you know, don’t feel that it had any bearing on his ability nor had he violated anything in terms of the application that he filled out.”

After some further colloquy, Vahle asked, “What I’m getting at is that you as an employer of doctors wouldn’t be bothered by the fact that the doctor had been charged with six counts of poisoning?”

“We were concerned about it, sure.”

“And even though he has been convicted, you would rehire him?”

“Yes,” Haller replied. “Based on what he did for [the] company, the patients that he treated, if it were up to me, I would.”

Cashman shook his head in disbelief. Haller’s willingness to rehire Swango seemed so bizarre that the judge discounted the testimony. It seemed inconceivable to him that any doctor or medical administrator would ever hire Swango again.

Swango had spent weeks preparing his own statement to the court, which he had carefully written out in longhand. Now he rose and addressed the judge, reading from his prepared text.

He began by again asserting his innocence. “I am fully aware that I have been found guilty in a court of law. And with all due respect to the Court, I wish to state once again that I am innocent of these charges.” Without being specific, he attributed his interest in death and violence to his relationship with his father, “one of the most unique and talented men to ever come out of Quincy, Illinois.” Noting their respective military careers, and especially his father’s “involvement in the endless guerrilla war in Vietnam” and “close ties to the military and intelligence communities in Vietnam,” he said that “I naturally was very interested and concerned with what he was doing.” He continued, saying that “I deeply regret, your Honor, that my possession of items reflecting that natural father-son relationship led this court . . . to its verdict.”

After reviewing his sterling record of accomplishments, Swango made an eloquent, almost tearful, plea that he be allowed to pay his debt to society. Citing his “faith in God” and “[the] support of my family and friends,” he said he was left with one overriding question: “What can I do, Judge Cashman . . . to convince you and show you that I still have a great wealth of good and caring to return to this society and that I should be allowed . . . to resume that service to society?

“After graduation from medical school I took the Hippocratic Oath and I have never nor would I ever violate the sacred trust of the doctor-patient relationship . . . . In no way, shape, or form, under no conceivable circumstance am I now, or have I ever been, or will I ever be, a danger to any human being on the face of this earth.” With that, Swango folded his notes and sat down.

Judge Cashman thanked Swango and remarked that his position was “quite eloquently stated.” Nonetheless, he continued, “as I sit here today, I have never been more confident in my own mind that you were proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of these offenses than any other case I have had occasion to preside over.” Though Swango had begged for the court’s trust, Cashman pointed out that Swango had already violated it by finding employment as a doctor in Ohio, and then using his Christmas visit to his family to transport red ants back to his apartment. “You fabricated evidence in this case in an effort to show that somehow you had an ant infestation in your apartment,” the judge noted. “I found that evidence to be totally implausible and perhaps you are so smart that you didn’t quite accept the fact that someone might be smart enough to see through that. I don’t know . . . . In fact, your intelligence is so well documented that it is hard for me to understand how a person that smart could leave such a trail of guilt.”