Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (28 page)

Of course Cook knew Swango, given all the recent publicity. He had already noticed him among that year’s group of residents. He admired the fact that Swango worked incredibly long hours, often staying at the hospital late into the night, long after his shift had ended. Cook, too, worked long hours. And Cook had noticed that Swango always took three or four of the pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting that Cook’s wife made and he brought to the hospital two or three times a week, almost as if he were hoarding them. Cook also knew Kinney from the hospital; he was crazy about her. He often thought that if he had another sister, he’d want her to be just like K.K.

Swango met with Cook three times before Cook agreed to represent him. He seemed relieved that Cook didn’t press him for details about his past. Cook never asked whether he was guilty of the poisoning charges or had harmed anyone at Ohio State. Cook didn’t want to know. Swango certainly didn’t seem like the kind of person who would poison someone, but Cook’s primary concern was simply that the VA had treated him unfairly, whatever had happened in his past. He agreed to take Swango’s case, and they were soon poring over the case law and having long strategy meetings at Cook’s house, often attended by Kinney.

Cook and Swango became close friends. Cook was a Vietnam War veteran, a former Green Beret who had participated in the CIA-led Phoenix Program while Swango’s father was in Vietnam. He also had a reputation, mostly from his union work, for being resentful of authority. Cook was impressed by the breadth and depth of Swango’s intellect, his seeming ability to speak knowledgeably about nearly any topic. The only person he’d met who was remotely
like Swango was a captain in Vietnam, who had gotten Cook to read and discuss the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Swango was fascinated with Cook’s experiences in Vietnam, often comparing them with what he knew from his father. Swango told Cook his father had worked in the CIA, but Cook couldn’t remember meeting him. Swango wanted to know all about the secret operations, intelligence work, special operations. He was especially interested in what Cook felt when he killed someone, asking him about it repeatedly. Cook thought it was impossible to convey the experience in words, but he tried. He hadn’t loved killing people, but he had loved the war. He felt he was skilled at what he did. His whole life had been the Army and the Green Berets, and even his family was sometimes forgotten.

Swango seemed to identify with Cook’s experiences, often saying how he had missed his father growing up, and how Virgil had shown little interest in the family he’d left behind in America. He said he couldn’t understand why his father had never explained his absences in terms Michael could understand. Cook thought Michael felt equal parts admiration and bitterness toward his father. He said almost nothing about Muriel. He never mentioned having any brothers.

Gradually, Swango opened up to Cook in a way he hadn’t with others in South Dakota. He talked of his fascination with disasters, occasionally sending Cook some of his newspaper clippings. Sometimes Swango couldn’t resist following sirens to the scene of a fire or accident in Sioux Falls. He seemed fascinated with serial killers Ted Bundy, a former law student who allegedly killed nineteen women, culminating in the murders of two Chi Omega sorority women at the University of Florida in 1978, and John Wayne Gacy, arrested in 1978, a building contractor who volunteered as a clown and killed an estimated thirty-three young boys. Swango was riveted by a television special on serial killers. Cook didn’t make much of these interests, since Swango had so many. Nor did he know that Swango had ever been linked to any suspicious deaths.

Swango’s and Cook’s conversations often lasted until four or five in the morning, occasionally all night. Cook’s wife would be getting up for work and he and Swango would still be talking at the dining table, legal papers and notebooks spread out before them.
Cook was struck by how restless Swango often was. His mind would leap from topic to topic. One thing they did not discuss was Swango’s medical career. Cook didn’t want to hear about it, and Swango seemed all too willing to ignore it.

At the ICU, everyone tried to rally in support of Kristin. The charges against her fiancé had sown considerable confusion among the nursing staff, especially since the hospital itself never made any attempt to explain what had happened. (It did make a staff psychiatrist available for anyone who wanted to talk about their reactions.) But the nurses took their cue from Kinney, who was adamant that Swango had been framed and now was being persecuted. No one could believe the way the media were hounding her and Swango; every time he appeared in public, it seemed, he’d be shown on television trying to flee the cameras. Though Kinney’s spirits weren’t as high as they had been before the news broke, she seemed to be reacting well, carrying out her duties as before and still displaying her quick wit and sense of humor. She even joked about the media and their tactics. She changed to the night shift, which offered a 25 percent pay raise, and worked weekends in order to help support Swango now that he wasn’t working and was incurring legal costs.

But privately, even some of Kinney’s closest friends were becoming concerned about Swango. Stories of odd behavior were beginning to circulate. One of his fellow residents was in the hospital as a patient, and she awoke in the middle of the night to find Swango sitting at her bedside, watching her. She was overweight, and she hadn’t liked the way other residents had teased her. But now something about his gaze frightened her. She would no doubt have been even more alarmed if she knew about one of Swango’s bizarre comments in Quincy: he’d said that he hated fat people, and had fantasized about slicing them with razor blades attached to the tips of his shoes.

Even more worrisome for Kinney’s friends were reports that Swango began dating another nurse at Sioux Valley soon after moving to Sioux Falls. Swango had apparently given her the phone number of a 7-Eleven convenience store where she could leave messages for him. Residents at Sioux Valley reported to nurses at the VA that they overheard Swango calling Kinney to say that he was tied up with an emergency and couldn’t be home until late, or had to cancel
plans. They knew those claims weren’t true, that there was no emergency. Then there came reports that a nurse at Sioux Valley thought she was being stalked by Swango, and might even file charges. Talk of the stalking was so rife that Linda Wipf decided Kristin had to be told. Kristin rejected the notion out of hand. She burst into tears and said, “Oh, what else are they going to dig up on him?”

No one else said anything about these things to Kinney. They wanted to protect her, even as they worried that Swango might not be the person she so fervently seemed to believe he was.

But as the weeks went by and nothing further developed, a sense of normalcy returned. The press attention tapered off. When the ICU nurses planned their annual potluck Christmas dinner, the possibility that Kinney and Swango wouldn’t be invited—or that Kinney would be invited but Swango wouldn’t—never even occurred to anyone. On the contrary, the other nurses encouraged Kinney and Swango to come, saying they needed to get out of the house.

Still, the party had a slightly surreal quality. The nurse at whose home it was held was married to a police detective, who insisted on following Swango from room to room to make sure he didn’t try to poison the food. At the same time, people were fascinated by Swango. Some guests who were on their way out when they saw Swango arrive returned and stayed for hours. He was the center of attention, seemingly eager to discuss the charges and his efforts to vindicate himself. He insisted he wanted to get back into the South Dakota residency program and, with help from his lawyer, thought he would succeed. If not, he’d practice medicine somewhere else. He was too good a doctor not to be practicing somewhere, he said.

Kristin and Michael had come to the party after attending a performance of Handel’s
Messiah.
Everyone else had dressed casually, but Swango wore a black jacket and tie, and Kinney wore a long black evening gown. They made an elegant couple. People thought Kristin had never looked more beautiful. She had told a fellow nurse that her difficult childhood had made her a stronger person. Perhaps, the nurse thought, she was right.

I
N
early January, after the holidays, Al Cooper got a phone call from Kristin. He knew immediately that something was wrong.
Her voice was wavering, and she seemed near tears. “I found something in the back of a picture,” she said.

“What?” Cooper asked.

She explained that she’d been cleaning around a framed copy of Michael’s medical diploma when something fell out from behind the backing in the frame. “It’s a recipe card,” Kristin said, taking a deep breath. “It looks like there are poisons on it.”

Al Cooper felt a stab of fear. “My God, are you all right?” he asked.

But Kristin seemed to have collected herself. “I’m okay,” she said. “I’ll ask Mike about it when he comes home.”

The Coopers heard nothing the next day, so Al called his stepdaughter. “Kristin, I’m coming to get you,” he said.

“No, no,” she insisted. Michael had explained that the card had belonged to his father. She didn’t say anything more, but Al’s mind was racing with questions, even though he and Sharon still didn’t know that Michael had been convicted of poisoning people. What was the card doing in the frame? Why would Michael save such a thing? What would his father have been doing with a recipe for poisons? But Kristin seemed withdrawn, unwilling to talk. He wondered if Swango was listening to the conversation. The Coopers and many of Kristin’s friends had noticed recently that when they called, Swango always answered the phone, never Kristin.

Despite her assurances to her parents, Kristin’s friends at work became concerned. Kristin had stopped laughing and joking. She had become withdrawn and seemed depressed. When Lisa Flinn asked her what the matter was, she said nothing, but then finally said, “I found something.” She wouldn’t tell Lisa what it was, but she said she now thought it possible that Swango was guilty. At about the same time, she confided her doubts about Swango’s innocence to another nurse, Eric Barnes. And one evening she just showed up at Vern Cook’s, without Swango. She sat down on the couch and curled up next to him, as his sister had done when she was a child. She cried and cried, and told him that she wasn’t sure she could trust Michael. She said she couldn’t believe how little she really knew him, even though he was her fiancé and they had been living together for over six months.

Whenever she confided any of her own concerns to Michael—such as when she asked for an explanation for the poison recipes—he
reacted angrily, even threatening to leave her. Every day, it seemed, she learned new facts that needed different and convoluted explanations. Compounding her emotional woes, her health deteriorated. She confided in Lisa Flinn and others at work that she had begun to experience severe headaches and nausea. They attributed her symptoms to the stress she was living under.

Then, on January 13, Kristin became violently ill in the lobby of a local clinic. She experienced intense nausea, headache, and disorientation, and she passed out when she got home. These are the classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning.

Though Kristin never expressed any suspicion that she was being poisoned, she was feeling increasingly desperate, and as if she had nowhere to turn. She began confiding her thoughts to a written journal. The first entry is dated January 14, 1993:

I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know how to help myself. I don’t know who to talk to. I can say only so much to Michael before the pain is too much for him. Anyone else in my life is too far away, and it gets too tiresome to try to explain and make someone else understand when I struggle to figure it out myself. I know I’m tired. Michael at times must be exhausted trying to make lawyers, the schools, the press, and the public understand. To look at the volume of papers on my kitchen table and listen to the twists and turns it seems impossible to make any sense out of this. Every day there are new “wartime strategies” to listen to and critique. Michael explains new things to bring up in the appeal and I don’t get it. He becomes angry. Maybe my headache has fried my brain. Every day there are new developments and I sit and listen to him rehearse how he will present it. Will it work? I don’t know.

I hope writing this will help. Maybe I won’t get any more migraines. I still feel numb and drugged from this one. It has been the worst ever and I can’t stand many more.

I was in the lobby of Central Plains clinic. I felt the color leave my face and sweat begin. I got tears in my eyes. I began wandering to find a restroom. I was dry heaving and my vision was getting blurry. I was hanging on to the staircase railing and latched on to some woman and pleaded with her to help me. I was vomiting in the bathroom. I kept thinking, I feel like a horse who broke their
legs in great pain and no way for it to heal and someone will come soon and shoot me and it will be all better.

Michael was angry the whole day, I think because I am weak and can’t control these headaches. He got me home. I passed out and he was gone . . . .

When things were overwhelming at home when I lived with my father, I would get in trouble so I could spend time in school suspension. It was quiet there. No yelling. No nothing. No one talked to you and you couldn’t say a word. I loved it. Time out. You didn’t have to deal with anyone or anything—for a few hours, anyway. I can’t find anything like that now.

I don’t want to find another job. I just want to be left alone. But one must not be weak and I have to get us through this financially.

Michael’s anger toward Kristin often seemed to trigger memories of abuse at the hands of her father. In certain passages, references to Michael’s displeasure are intertwined with explicit accounts of physical abuse she experienced as a teenager. After one such passage, Kristin wrote of her conflicting feelings toward her father: “So full of love—but a desolate, empty feeling.”