Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (29 page)

In entries dated January 15 and 19, 1993, she continued to complain of depression. “I feel I don’t belong anywhere,” she wrote. “It’s a constant empty feeling that mysteriously and wonderfully disappears when I’m taking care of someone ill. I hear over and over from my patients, ‘You’re always so happy.’ ‘I love when you take care of me.’ Why can’t I feel okay at other times?” Another entry describes a memory of going into her father’s closet, reaching for his gun, and pointing it at her head, but being unable to pull the trigger. “During the episode this morning I still wished I had done it. Why do I feel so strong sometimes—most of the time—and it seems instantly I’m beyond the point of [no] return?”

On January 22, Kristin wrote of her admiration for actress Audrey Hepburn, who had become an ambassador for UNICEF. “I would also love to be helping—maybe I will soon,” she wrote. But then she returned to her plight:

Michael hates the weekends and I worry about him while I’m at work. He says he feels like things aren’t happening . . .
it’s two days where he knows he wouldn’t possibly hear any news about getting out of here. This place was once an area of opportunity. Now—well, you can imagine how it feels now. Not so nearly the same as jail, but a reminder, I’m sure. He wants out, but can’t right now. I don’t know how I feel about being here. I want out—to go to another country—but at the same time I feel paralyzed.

Vern Cook sensed during this period that something had come between Michael and Kristin, though neither was specific about what it was. Kristin began seeing a marriage counselor in Sioux Falls, Carol Carlson, who insisted that Michael also attend the sessions. Kristin mentioned trouble in the couple’s relationship in a journal entry dated January 28:

It’s been two long months since all of this began. I can feel Michael growing more anxious to move on. We haven’t heard when the date for the appeal is. He continues to write to organizations and send resumes and such but hasn’t heard anything yet. I admire his perseverance. I am very nervous about our future. Sometimes I feel like I’m pulling away from him. He keeps repeating how he could be leaving me. I feel like I’m waiting for another bomb to go off. In a way I wish it would hurry up and happen but I don’t know how I’ll deal with it.

February was a difficult month, part of what Kristin described as “the longest and coldest winter in my life. –14 degrees tonight. Colder in more ways than one.” Her migraines and nausea continued. One afternoon she called her friend Lynette Mueller, who was a nurse on duty at the ICU, asking if she could leave work and meet her somewhere. Mueller was worried about Kristin, so she asked the head nurse for permission to leave, and went to Champs, a local sports bar. Kristin was sitting in a corner wearing dark glasses, and said she was afraid of being recognized. She seemed terribly unhappy. “I need out,” she told Mueller, asking if she might stay with her and her husband at some point. Kristin said Michael was talking about finding a job as a doctor in a foreign country to escape all the controversy. Kristin said she’d like to do some missionary work, to
help people. She was thinking of going with him, but felt she needed some time away from him to think. Mueller thought Kristin was torn by indecision, uncertain whether she was really in love.

Kristin spent the weekend of February 27 alone. Michael had driven to West Virginia, for unspecified reasons. She wrote in her journal, half-seriously, that she was grateful for that day’s World Trade Center bombing because it diverted Michael and “gives [him] something to do.”

That Friday evening she watched the tabloid television program
A Current Affair
, which did an episode on Swango’s poisoning people in Quincy. She seemed to take the program in stride. “It was mostly on his past and very little of the present situation,” she wrote. “Michael didn’t see it.” But then, later the same evening, she wrote that “I found some things (papers) that disturbed me and I panicked. My mind was racing so fast.”

Kristin began taking pills to calm down—possibly the antidepressant Prozac, which she was taking—and called Carlson, the marriage counselor. Talking helped, but the next day she was trembling with weakness and anxiety, and called in sick. Saturday evening she drank a few gin and tonics to calm herself. She remembered nothing more.

The Coopers had been calling Kristin all day, but there was no answer. Alarmed, Sharon Cooper had called Lisa Flinn at the hospital, asking if she knew where Kristin was. She didn’t. Kristin hadn’t shown up to work the weekend shift. The Coopers were distraught.

Late Saturday night, the Sioux Falls police picked up a young woman walking naked on East Fifth Street. At the time the temperature was three degrees. It was Kristin Kinney. She was admitted for observation to Charter Hospital, a psychiatric facility, where she awoke Sunday morning. She was released on Tuesday.

Kinney wrote in her journal the next day, Wednesday, that “everyone should do a stint in a psychiatric hospital just to walk on the other side. I met some interesting people. I couldn’t talk about the situation for fear it would end up in the papers. I was numb. I couldn’t think. I just sat at my window most of the time and watched six inches of snow fall, looking for an answer. I didn’t find one.”

Whatever Kristin had found in Swango’s documents that so upset her, and that she felt she couldn’t talk about in the psychiatric
facility, she was determined not to allow her doubts to undermine her devotion. Perhaps, as with her father, she couldn’t reconcile her love for Michael with her growing doubts and the evidence of his cruelty. “I got out Tuesday morning,” she wrote. “Michael came to get me. He’s so good to me. God, this past three months have been hell. But I love him so much. I don’t know what will happen or where we’ll end up, but I know that I love him.”

When Kristin returned to work, she told Lisa Flinn that she needed to talk to her in private, so they went to the small room the nurses used for their breaks. “I need to know,” she began, somewhat haltingly, “I need to ask, if I ever need a place to come to or go to, whatever time, day or night, can I call you?”

“Of course,” Flinn replied. “You know that you can.” Then she asked, “Are you feeling like it’s not safe anymore where you are?”

“No,” Kristin replied. But she said she’d been experiencing some “strange things,” and told Lisa that she’d been found by police that weekend walking around in the cold without a coat. She suggested to Lisa that the incident might have been triggered by smoking too much, though she had no memory of smoking that day. The notion might have been suggested by a diagnosis at Charter of possible nicotine poisoning. Besides being the primary addictive ingredient in cigarettes, nicotine is also a potent poison; in high doses, it can cause paralysis, coma, and death. Symptoms of nicotine poisoning include confusion, muscular twitching, weakness, and depression, all of which Kristin had experienced. But Lisa found this explanation puzzling, since Kristin hardly ever smoked, and couldn’t have had much more than a pack of cigarettes even if she had chain-smoked that Saturday. And despite Kristin’s denial, Lisa was convinced that she was feeling so threatened and unsafe around Michael that she was having bizarre, even delusional experiences.

Neither Kristin, nor Lisa, nor anyone at Charter knew that nicotine had been among the poisons discovered in the search of Swango’s apartment in Quincy.

O
N
March 21, Al Cooper was taking a routine treadmill stress test during a physical exam when he collapsed from a heart attack. He was rushed to the hospital for multiple bypass surgery. The emergency seemed to energize Kristin, giving her something to focus on
other than Michael’s troubles in South Dakota. She called her mother to say she’d fly back immediately to be with Al, and something in her voice told Sharon that she was desperate to get away from South Dakota. A nurse herself, Sharon knew she’d need Kristin’s help more once Al was back from the hospital, but Kristin insisted on coming immediately for the surgery. She also asked to pay for her ticket with a credit card Sharon had given her for emergencies. Her mother said of course. She knew Kristin had to be short of cash, for she had never used the credit card before.

When Kristin arrived in Virginia, her mother was shocked by the change in her appearance. She had lost weight. She seemed exhausted. She complained of headaches and nausea. She was using a nasal inhaler to take Stadol, a prescription painkiller. She looked at her mother with tears in her eyes and said, “Why have I gone through so much in the short time I’ve lived?”

All Sharon could say was “I don’t know.” But, she added, “Remember, I’m here if you need me.”

Sharon also reminded her daughter that if things got too bad, she could seek professional counseling. “Promise me you will,” she insisted, and Kristin agreed.

Al’s surgery was successful, though he remained in the hospital for several weeks of recovery. Kristin spent hours with him, cheering him up and telling him how much she loved him. The Coopers couldn’t tell whether the cause was being away from Michael, or helping her mother care for her stepfather and feeling needed, but Kristin seemed to regain her bearings and good humor. Her aunt offered to rent her an apartment she owned in Portsmouth if she moved back, and Kristin said she’d consider it. The Coopers didn’t want to put any pressure on her, but they were desperate to get her out of South Dakota and away from Michael Swango.

One day Kristin turned to her mother and said, “I have something to tell you. Promise you won’t tell anyone.” When Sharon agreed, Kristin said that when she went to Michael’s apartment the first time, she was shocked to discover that he was living in the bathroom. He had a mattress on the bathroom floor, a TV, a few clothes, a frying pan, and a fork. That was it. His underwear was so worn and dirty that Kristin immediately took him shopping for some new clothing.

Sharon was shocked. “Didn’t that scare you a little?”

“Yeah,” Kristin replied, “but if you knew everything . . . .”

“Like what?”

“I’ll tell you sometime,” Kristin said.

W
HEN
Kristin returned to South Dakota in late March, she had made up her mind to leave. “I’m feeling more ready to get out of here and strong enough to do it,” she wrote in her journal. She gave notice at the hospital and told her friends she was returning to Virginia. Some of them worried that she wouldn’t have a support group to turn to in a new location. “I need to know that you’re going to be safe,” Lisa Flinn told her. But Kristin assured her she’d be close to her parents.

Her friends at work noticed that she had stopped wearing her engagement ring. When Lisa asked her about that, Kristin said only, “I just can’t right now,” and didn’t elaborate. But she made it clear that Michael would not be following her to Virginia, and that she would spend some time away from him. Even though that year’s Match Day had come and gone, and Michael hadn’t landed a new residency, Kristin hinted that he had new job prospects and would be moving somewhere else. When Michael left for several days of job interviews, Kristin was secretive about the trip, telling Lisa “I’m not going to tell you where.” Lisa thought Kristin was afraid to say anything.

Kristin wrote in her diary, “I won’t miss Sioux Falls”—a place she described as a “black cold hole of depression”—but “I will miss a lot of the people I work with.” A couple of days before she left, her friends held a going-away party for her at Chi-Chi’s, the Mexican restaurant. Michael came, along with six or so people from the hospital. Everybody drank margaritas, and both Kristin and Michael seemed in good spirits. But when Linda Wipf got out her camera and started taking snapshots, Michael leaped in front of her. “Who’s gonna see this?” he demanded. “I just want it for my photo album,” she assured him.

On April 9, Kristin packed her belongings in her pickup and left for Virginia.

S
WANGO
had planned to stay in Sioux Falls to pursue the appeal of his dismissal. The Waco massacre on April 19, 1993, when federal
agents stormed and set fire to the Branch Davidian complex, diverted his attention; he was glued to CNN with Vern Cook. Then job possibilities elsewhere seemed to be opening up. Swango told Cook that he was looking into two possible medical residencies, one in psychiatry and the other in pediatrics. Cook wasn’t so sure it was a good idea for Michael to pursue a position as a physician. He thought it too likely that what had happened in South Dakota would recur once the local media learned of his past. But if Swango was determined to remain a doctor, Cook stressed two things: “Use your own name” and “Don’t take a job in pediatrics.”

“Can you imagine if something happened to a child? They’d crucify you,” Cook warned him. Michael was upset at the suggestion, saying he “loved” children.

Less than two weeks after Kristin’s departure, Swango came to tell Cook good-bye. He said he’d packed his things and was ready to leave. Cook didn’t know where Michael was going and didn’t want to. If law enforcement authorities questioned him, Cook didn’t want to have to betray Swango’s whereabouts.

Michael told Vern that he’d always admired Vern’s writing talent. The two had worked so well together that Michael vowed to see him again. “We are going to get together and we are going to write a book,” he told him emphatically. “Perhaps a novel.”

Swango hugged Cook and went out to his truck. But then he came back and hugged him again. He left and came back a second time. Swango had tears in his eyes. “I wish you were my father,” he told Cook, and then he left for good.

CHAPTER
NINE

T
HE
C
OOPERS
were delighted by Kristin’s return to Virginia. She looked better the minute she arrived, bounding out of her truck, wearing shorts and a fanny pack. “Isn’t this silly?” she said. “Anyone could see I was carrying a gun.” Her nine-millimeter pistol was plainly outlined in the small pack. The Coopers thought she had to have been frightened, to be carrying the gun.

Sharon noticed immediately that Kristin wasn’t wearing the engagement ring, and asked her about it. “That’s on hold for a while, I guess,” Kristin replied, but didn’t elaborate. Sharon was relieved.