Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (21 page)

Cashman said he had no explanation for Swango’s crimes. “The only explanation I can come to is that inside of Michael Swango there must be another person. There has to be two Michael Swangos . . . . Here there is no reason for what you have done that I can see. You are doing these things to co-workers for no apparent reason. There was a little evidence about maybe some petty jealousies or maybe a desire to work more and therefore if you made people sick you would get to work more. Well, I don’t think that is much of an argument . . . there is no real answer to what has happened here and I don’t understand it and probably never will.”

Cashman noted that if Swango’s behavior had not been so inexplicable—if, for example, the battery had occurred during a “barroom brawl where the individual was intoxicated”—he could order appropriate treatment and consider probation, as Swango had requested. But “probation is not appropriate. The protection of the community is more important because there is no way I can know of when and why you might do something like this again. Just on a whim.”

The judge sentenced Swango to five years in prison, the maximum sentence, saying that “you deserve the maximum under the law because there is no excuse for what you have done.”

A
FTER
sitting though Swango’s trial, Ed Morgan, the Franklin County prosecutor, told
The Plain Dealer:
“The verdicts indicated to me that we are now investigating a man who is obviously a very sick individual and has to be considered a very dangerous individual. It indicates to me and my office that we are on the right track in pressing the investigation and we will continue the investigation.” Morgan realized, nonetheless, that Swango was a formidable adversary. The doctor had been a poised and seemingly earnest witness—in Morgan’s opinion, smooth and good-looking; he could see why women fell for him. Had Swango opted for a trial by jury, the prosecutor wasn’t sure he would have been convicted. But the courtroom testimony, especially the evidence of Swango’s fixation on death and disaster, convinced Morgan that he very well might be dealing with a psychopath. He returned to Ohio convinced that Swango had committed crimes at Ohio State, probably murder.

In June, Morgan hired an experienced homicide detective Patrick McSweeney, to investigate Swango full-time on behalf of the prosecuting attorney’s office. Morgan and McSweeney set up an office at the Ohio State police headquarters, where they joined efforts with Eley, the medical board investigator, and Herdt, who remained in charge of the overall investigation. They frequently consulted the Franklin County coroner, William Adrion, and an Ohio State University toxicologist, Daniel Couri. To minimize the earlier frictions between the police and hospital personnel, all interviews with doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees were coordinated through Michael Covert, who had replaced Donald Boyanowski as the hospital’s executive director.

Finally, interviews with eyewitnesses got under way in earnest, though not without continuing problems at the hospital. Arranging interviews through Covert was time-consuming. Robert Holder, as Chief Herdt had predicted, had taken a new job as a special assistant to Tzagournis. Out of concern for patient confidentiality, Holder insisted on a subpoena before providing any documents, which was also a cumbersome and time-consuming process.

Some relatives of possible Swango victims, such as the parents of the young gymnast Cynthia Ann McGee, had quietly accepted monetary settlements from Ohio State. The investigators were angered
to learn that as a condition of the settlements, Ohio State had required the families to remain silent, even to the police, unless they obtained a subpoena. As McSweeney later described the process, “Everyone on the OSU staff was hesitant. Appointments were broken. We made it as convenient as possible. We’d go at two
A.M
. if that’s what they wanted. Not one of them showed up on time. Once we waited three hours for a doctor to show up. They sent some doctors away [out of town] when we wanted them. I got the impression that they thought we were just dumb cops and they were the saviors of mankind. I’ve dealt with hospitals for years on homicides, and I’ve never seen anything to compare to the treatment we got at OSU.”

Still, McSweeney, Harp, and the others were able to interview and in many cases videotape the statements of such critical witnesses as Rena Cooper; her roommate, Iwonia Utz; the head resident on duty that night, Rees Freeman; and numerous other doctors and nurses. After scouring the record of every patient who had died in the hospital during Swango’s rotations, they were able to identify five suspicious deaths, plus the possible poisonings of the doctors at Children’s Hospital, and interview the doctors and nurses involved. The results were startlingly at odds with the conclusions of the hospital’s own investigation.

McGee, the gymnast, had not died of a “pulmonary embolism,” as Goodman reported, apparently relying on a hearsay account of the autopsy results. On January 14, the head resident had asked Swango to draw a blood sample from McGee. At about 11:15
P.M
., Swango told a nurse he was going to draw the sample. He was seen heading toward her room carrying a syringe and culture bottles. At about midnight, a nurse found that McGee had “a pale, dusty, bluish look” and called a code, to which Swango didn’t respond. The code was unsuccessful, and McGee was pronounced dead.

Another doctor reported that six days later Swango had been among a group of doctors making evening rounds on the neurosurgery floor, but had been alone with patient Ricky DeLong while the others examined DeLong’s roommate. Swango had called out to them, “I think your patient is dead,” which had come as a shock since DeLong had seemed to be in stable condition. Swango had later written on the patient’s progress notes that he was “pronounced
dead at 1803 hours. Family notified . . . . Franklin County Coroner’s Office notified of death. They will assume jurisdiction and perform autopsy.” Swango called DeLong’s wife and told her DeLong had died of a heart attack. When she became distraught, he repeated the information to her mother. Family members came to the hospital, met with Swango, and requested an autopsy. They completed an autopsy form given them by Swango. But the form was never filed and no autopsy was performed.

Similarly, in the highly suspicious death of Rein Walter, who started gasping and lost consciousness ten minutes after a visit from Swango, Swango signed the death certificate, citing the cause as cardiopulmonary arrest. There was no autopsy.

And in the case of Ruth Barrick, whose death had so upset Nurse Anne Ritchie, Swango filled out a form on which he stated that “This is not a Coroner’s case” and “The Coroner will not assume jurisdiction,” Again, he had ensured that no autopsy would be performed.

Far from being routine, as Goodman and Whitcomb had indicated in their respective reports, the other deaths had seemed mysterious to the hospital’s medical staff at the time they occurred. When the investigators interviewed Dr. Marc Cooperman about the death of Charlotte Warner, he told them,

“The first problem that I had with her case, that I didn’t understand was the results of the autopsy . . . and that demonstrated what they called multicentric thrombosis. Basically what happened is she had developed clots in all of her major arteries. She had clots in the arteries in her heart, in the vessels to the intestine, in the vessels to her kidneys, to her liver, and to her lungs. And I could never understand why this type of thing would have happened to somebody who had undergone a straightforward surgical procedure five days earlier and was walking around having no problems. And so it always bothered me.”

In early 1985, when Cooperman learned that castor beans had been found in Swango’s apartment in Quincy, he consulted some toxicology texts at the medical school library. When he discovered that ricin poisoning causes, in his words, “blood clots, thrombosis, and thromboembolism throughout the vascular system,” and thus might explain Warner’s baffling autopsy findings, Cooperman
called his attorney, and they decided to notify the coroner. Cooperman thus became the first—and only—doctor at Ohio State to initiate contact with an investigative authority outside the hospital.

When asked about Evelyn Pereny, the gallbladder patient who also experienced bizarre bleeding, even from her eyes, Dr. Gary Birken told the investigators that such bleeding typically occurs in poisonings. He said that Swango had examined Pereny before she experienced the bleeding and “total body failure.”

In the now notorious case of Rena Cooper, there was none of the ambiguity or conflicting testimony that had caused Dr. Whitcomb to dismiss the whole affair as a grand mal seizure. Karolyn Beery, the student nurse whose testimony had been belittled as unreliable, was even now, a year after the incident, quite certain that she had seen Dr. Swango, from a distance of only three feet, standing by Cooper’s bed. “It looked like he was putting something in her IV,” she now told the OSU police. “I knew he was putting something in. You can just tell.” John Sigg, the first nurse to respond to Beery’s calls for help that night, testified that Beery told him when he arrived that she had seen Dr. Swango with a syringe doing something to Cooper’s IV. He recalled that Cooper, too, told him, “The doctor put something in my IV.”

But the most telling interviews were of Cooper and her roommate, whose earlier accounts had been dismissed as unreliable, if not delusional. Utz, the roommate, said she was alert and perfectly capable of remembering what she had seen. She remembered quite clearly that a doctor came into the room and “he gave her a shot or something . . . and I just started screaming for the nurse . . . . I started screaming like mad.” Utz described the doctor as young, with blond hair and glasses, wearing a white coat. Moreover, she said she recognized Swango as the doctor when she saw pictures of him on television after his arrest in Illinois.

Cooper said she was wide awake that evening and not suffering any aftereffects from her anesthetic. She remembered that a blond-haired person had come into her room and, using a syringe, had injected something into her IV. She was lying on her side, so she couldn’t see the person’s face, but she thought it was a man. She said nothing about the “yellow pharmacy jacket” that had figured so prominently in the doctors’ earlier exoneration of Swango, and
seemed puzzled by questions about it. She testified that as a “blackness” spread through her body and she realized she could not speak, she deliberately rattled the bed rail in order to attract attention. That is, she was
deliberately
shaking the bed rail; she wasn’t suffering a “seizure.” She recalled writing the notes because she couldn’t speak with the tube in her mouth and throat.

Morgan went to some lengths to determine the basis for the hospital’s conclusion that Cooper had been paranoid and thus potentially delusional. It appeared that another doctor had reported that Cooper had accused the OSU neurologist Dr. George Paulson of trying to burglarize her home, and this was the basis for the conclusion that she was suffering “paranoid ideation.” But in her interview with OSU police, Cooper vehemently denied ever accusing any doctor of such a thing. While her house
had
been burglarized, she hadn’t suspected Dr. Paulson, who in any event wouldn’t have known where she lived. (Dr. Paulson, too, said that to his knowledge Cooper had never made any such allegation, and said he wasn’t the source for the report.) Thus, the diagnosis of Cooper’s mental state appeared to rest on the flimsiest of hearsay and, as far as Morgan was concerned, was completely unjustified.

The investigators also interviewed the three doctors who had spoken to Swango about the incident: Freeman, the head resident; Carey, the chief of surgery; and Whitcomb, who headed the hospital inquiry. Freeman, the first to speak to Swango, testified that “I confronted him [Swango] and did question him and he said he was not in the room. Nor did he see her [Cooper] just prior to the incident.”

Dr. Carey reported that “I asked him whether, in fact, he had done anything to Mrs. Cooper, or injected anything in her I.V. and he said ‘no.’ I explained to him that there had been an incident report suggesting that he had and he said, ‘no.’ He was in the room at the request of one of the two patients, and I don’t remember which one, to get her slippers for her, and he had gotten the patient’s slippers, whether it was Mrs. Cooper, or the other person in the room, I don’t remember. But that’s all he had done. And he hadn’t done anything with the intravenous line.”

Dr. Whitcomb made this statement to the OSU police when he was interviewed on February 15, 1985: “He [Swango] told me that
he was in the room, as I remember now, that he was in there to draw blood. That was the reason for him to have been in the room and that he either had a brief conversation with Mrs. Cooper, or some contact with her and left the room and the next thing he remembers was to recognize that there was a resuscitation effort going on in that room.” (This statement differs from the account Whitcomb earlier gave Meeks.)

Thus, the testimony indicated that Swango had given three inconsistent accounts: that he wasn’t in the room; that he went in to get slippers; that he went in to draw blood.

As for the diagnosis of Cooper’s respiratory arrest as a grand mal seizure, Dr. Brakel, who witnessed it with Dr. Freeman and helped resuscitate Cooper, said the symptoms didn’t indicate such a seizure, but were instead “consistent with a paralyzing drug”—specifically, the anesthetic Anectine, to which Swango would have had ready access while he was in the hospital.

Armed with the witnesses’ accounts, Morgan, Herdt, and the other investigators turned to the physical evidence. To their dismay, none of the syringes used by Swango had been saved, nor had any of the patients’ IV tubes. And, of course, Nurse Moore had thrown away the syringe discovered by Risley after no one showed any interest in it and she was told Swango had been cleared.

Through the coroner’s office, the investigators did have tissue and fluid samples from all the patients on whom autopsies had been performed. The bodies of the three patients who were not autopsied—DeLong, Walter, and Barrick—were exhumed. But just as Morgan and prosecuting attorney Miller had feared, detecting the presence of poisons or paralyzing drugs proved a daunting and frustrating task. Given the supplies found in Swango’s apartment in Quincy, they tested for arsenic and nicotine and also tried to come up with a test for ricin. Because it was readily available in the hospital and could have caused Cooper’s symptoms, they also tested for Anectine.