Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (31 page)

“Stop it,” he said, urging her to get a grip on herself. “She’s twenty-seven years old. Give her some space.”

Sharon got on the phone to her sister. “Please go see if Kristin is all right,” she begged. But her sister, too, said she was overreacting. Kristin was a grown-up, and if she needed or wanted her mother, she’d ask.

Then the phone rang, and it was Michael calling from New York, the last person Sharon wanted to speak to. Michael said he’d just spoken to Kristin, and suggested Sharon call her. “She sounds like she’s upset,” he said.

“Well, apparently she’s calmed down,” Sharon replied. She told Michael she’d just spoken to her daughter.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t go down there?”

Sharon said no, that Kristin had been very even-toned and collected by the time they finished speaking.

The next morning, after a restless night, Sharon said she had to see Kristin, and suggested she and Al drive over to give her their house key, in case she ever wanted to come stay with them. They arrived at her apartment in Portsmouth at about ten
A.M
. There was no answer, which was surprising, since Kristin was working the three
P.M
.–to–eleven
P.M
. shift at the hospital. There was no sign of her red truck, so it appeared that she was out.

The Coopers drove past some of her favorite places, and then drove aimlessly, hoping to spot her truck. They returned home that afternoon, then called the hospital. Kristin had called in sick. It was too hot and humid to go anywhere else, not that they had any
more ideas about where to look. The mercury was over ninety degrees.

Exhausted from worry, Sharon went to bed early. She heard the phone ring at about nine
P.M
. and Al answered. Then he came into the bedroom, threw some clothes toward her, and said, “Get up. Kristin’s in trouble.”

“Why?” she asked, panicked. But Al had no explanation. All the police had said was that they should come to the Newport News police station.

Sharon and Al were nearly silent in the car. Sharon’s mind was racing. What could Kristin have done? They were going to police headquarters, a jail. Had she been drunk? That was very unlike Kristin. Had she been arrested for a traffic offense? But did the police put you in jail for a traffic offense? It must be something more serious. Bank robbery? She knew Kristin was short of money.

“Honey, I don’t think this looks good,” Al said gently, but Sharon barely heard him.

At the station, they were greeted by a police officer.

“Can you tell me why you’re detaining my daughter?” Sharon asked indignantly.

“We’ll talk to you upstairs,” he said.

They were taken on the elevator and shown to a second-floor room. The police officer avoided their gaze. They waited for what seemed hours, but was probably only a few minutes. A second police officer entered and introduced himself. “Your daughter has been found shot through the chest,” he said.

“Where is she?” Sharon asked, tears welling in her eyes, thinking she had to get to the hospital. There was silence. “Take me to her!” she demanded.

“We can’t,” the officer said. “She’s at the medical examiner’s office.”

Sharon was motionless. Life seemed suspended. Then the officer said he had a photograph, and she heard Al say he’d identify Kristin.

“No!” Sharon exclaimed. “I will.”

The officer placed a photograph on the table in front of her. It was Kristin’s face. Her head was leaning against a tree.

Sharon had seen enough corpses in her work as an emergency room nurse to know that her daughter was dead.

K
RISTIN
left several notes. One, found at the site of her death, was evidently written as the effect of tranquilizing drugs began to be felt, for the writing trails off at the end. It read:

“I am—I am finally happy. My greatest joy in my life has been my work—I loved my patients and many loved me back. I never felt better than when I was taking care of a critical patient. I excelled and I cherished it.”

Another, found in her apartment, was addressed to “Mom and Alp”:

Please be sure Mike-O gets some money to hold him until the end of July.

I love you both so much. I just didn’t want to be here anymore. Just found day-to-day living a constant struggle with my thoughts. I’d say I’m sorry but I’m not. I feel that sense of peace, “peace of mind,” I’ve been looking for. It’s nice.

Take care and go travel more.

Love,

K.K.

At the bottom, she added “I’ll be seeing you!”

Another brief note was addressed to “Mike-O”:

I love you more! You’re the most precious man I’ve ever known.

Love,
K.K. 

A fourth note said, “I want Mike-O to have all of my belongings. Kristin L. Kinney.”

W
HEN
the Coopers finally got home, still stunned, it was nearly two
A.M
. Sharon called Swango in New York; evidently still awake, he answered immediately. When she told him the news, he paused briefly, as if collecting his thoughts, then said, “I’m sorry. When’s
the funeral?” He said he’d be down the next day, and asked if he could stay in Kristin’s apartment. Sharon was too numb to object.

Sharon and Al couldn’t bear to see Kristin’s things. Sharon called her sister and asked her to go over to the apartment before Swango got there. Kristin’s aunt stayed briefly, and found the notes on the kitchen table. She also took Kristin’s journal, in which the last entry was the sadly optimistic “I know it will get better.”

At Kristin’s funeral, there was an outpouring of sympathy from Sharon’s and Kristin’s friends in the nursing community, and many others. Swango mostly kept to himself, saying little and avoiding Kristin’s friends. He talked mostly to Bert Gee, a respiratory therapist who had become a friend of Kristin’s when she was working in Florida. Gee had evidently become much closer to Swango than the Coopers had realized. He stayed with Swango in Kristin’s apartment.

Despite all that had happened, Sharon felt sorry for Michael. She did find it odd that he showed so little emotion. She went over to him after the funeral ceremony and put her arm around him. He said, “You know, Kristin would not have wanted this. She would not have wanted all these people here.”

Expecting to comfort and perhaps be comforted, Sharon was taken aback by the hostility in his tone, and suddenly wanted to get away from him. “Here,” she said, giving him a necklace that Kristin had loved. And, though she had little spare money herself, she gave him $200 in cash, in an attempt to heed Kristin’s wish that he have enough money to get through the month of July. Swango took the gifts, but then said, “I would have thought Kristin would have handled this better.”

“How dare you,” Sharon retorted, hurt and angry. “I’m her mother.”

I
N
South Dakota, Vern Cook had learned of Kristin’s death from a reporter at the
Argus Leader
, which also ran a brief obituary. He was so devastated he had to leave work. That night, Swango called him with the news, the first time he’d heard from him since he left Sioux Falls three months earlier. Swango called again after Kristin’s funeral, and Cook thought he was upset over her death. But their conversation quickly shifted to Swango’s new residency on Long Island. Swango told Cook he was using a false name and had lied
about his conviction, defying Cook’s advice. Cook was furious with him. “Mike, what the fuck are you doing?”

Swango insisted that he felt he had no alternative—he had to lie and conceal his past, or he’d never complete a residency.

T
WO
days after the funeral, Michael left for Long Island. When the Coopers finally mustered the strength to visit their daughter’s apartment, it was bare. Swango had taken everything. Sharon was left with virtually nothing to remember her daughter by, except her photographs and a lock of Kristin’s hair. And Swango had placed scores of long-distance telephone calls from Kristin’s apartment (including the lengthy call to Vern Cook), leaving the Coopers with an enormous bill.

As they struggled to make sense of their daughter’s death, the Coopers learned from Kristin’s neighbor about her reaction to the phone call from Swango the night before her death. They speculated that something Swango had told her—that he was dating someone else, or that he needed even more money—had brought Kristin to the breaking point. They also learned from Kristin’s friends in Sioux Falls that she had been seeing Carol Carlson, the counselor, and they spoke to her about what might have been troubling Kristin. Carlson was no doubt guarded out of professional responsibility; still, she insisted that Swango wasn’t to blame. “You know, Kristin could be manipulative, too,” she said. Michael was “a wonderful person,” and what the media were saying about him was entirely untrue.

The Coopers also learned that Kristin had turned to a therapist the day she died. She had been to see her for the first time the day before, and had come in the next day distraught. “Nobody is coming for me,” Kristin had repeated over and over. If she told the therapist anything about her last conversation with Michael, the therapist didn’t share it with the Coopers. By the time Kristin left her office on July 15, the therapist felt she was considerably calmer. She had been devastated, she added, by her new patient’s death.

Sharon despaired of ever understanding what had happened. All she knew is that she, too, now felt that life was hardly worth living.

B
ARRON
H
ARRIS
checked into the Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center on September 29, 1993, for what he and his wife, Elsie, expected would be relatively brief treatment for pneumonia. The sixty-year-old Harris was otherwise in good health and, when not working as a cabinetmaker, enjoyed spending time with his five children and two grandchildren. The couple had recently celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

After a brief consultation with a respiratory specialist, Harris was assigned to a resident. When Elsie Harris arrived, she found the doctor sitting attentively near her husband’s bed in the private room. He had blond hair, clear blue eyes, an athletic build, and a broad smile that Mrs. Harris found immediately reassuring. He introduced himself as Dr. Michael Kirk.

Harris was impressed by the time and attention Dr. Kirk bestowed on her husband, behavior that contrasted with the harried indifference she’d seen in many other doctors. Several days later, when she arrived to discover that her husband’s hands were tied to the bed rails, Dr. Kirk was reassuring. Her husband, he explained, had suddenly become “agitated” and he had given him a sedative. Harris was now sleeping peacefully. The doctor had ordered several tests—something to do with Barron’s liver—but it would be several days before they had any results.

On her next visit, Mrs. Harris arrived to find that the blinds in her husband’s room had been lowered and closed, darkening the room. Dr. Kirk was alone with her husband, and was in the process of injecting the contents of a large syringe into her husband’s neck. “What’s that?” she asked. “Vitamins,” Dr. Kirk replied. He removed the needle and left the room.

Later, when a nurse arrived, Mrs. Harris mentioned that the doctor had given her husband a vitamin injection. “You must be mistaken,” the nurse said. “Doctors don’t give injections at all. That’s the nurses’ job.”

Barron Harris remained under what seemed heavy sedation. Still, when his wife introduced him to the nurse at the end of the week, he was able to smile and wave. Elsie Harris was wholly unprepared to find her husband unconscious and on a respirator the following Monday.

“I hope it’s nothing I did,” Dr. Kirk said.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“He’s in a coma, and I know he’s not coming out of it,” Kirk replied.

Elsie Harris began to sob. Pressed by Dr. Kirk, who argued that her husband had already suffered irreparable brain damage, she agreed to a DNR order: “Do Not Resuscitate.” Despite her anxiety and grief, Mrs. Harris was struck by the change she perceived in Dr. Kirk. His solicitous concern for her husband had evaporated. His manner seemed cold, detached.

S
HARON
C
OOPER
knew only vaguely that Swango was working as a doctor somewhere in New York. But then she received a letter from him. “I think of you so much,” Swango wrote. “I know Kristin wanted us to stay in touch . . . . I can feel Kristin sitting by me . . . . She taught me to have a better bedside manner.” Sharon was not interested in corresponding or otherwise “staying in touch” with Swango. But she noticed he had written his address on Long Island at the bottom of the letter.

She wrote back, saying she didn’t think it was a good thing for them to stay in close contact. “You’d better let go of Kristin,” she advised.

But Sharon couldn’t put Swango or his letter out of her mind. She knew he was working as a medical resident under false pretenses, that he hadn’t told anyone he’d been convicted of a felony and had been in jail. No one would want to be treated by a doctor with such a record. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been responsible, directly or indirectly, for her daughter’s death. She’d dedicated herself to taking care of sick people. If she did nothing now, she feared, more people—perhaps another vulnerable young woman like Kristin—might die. Should she contact the authorities? If so, who? She didn’t know where to turn. Nor did she want to expose Kristin’s death to more publicity and inquiries. It was all too painful. And she herself was afraid of Swango. She thought he would retaliate if he knew she had revealed his secret. She was in such turmoil that she was having trouble sleeping.

Finally Sharon wrote a letter to one of Kristin’s close friends in South Dakota, with whom she’d been corresponding since Kristin’s death. “I was glad that Kristin was away from Michael and I knew he
couldn’t hurt her anymore,” she wrote. “She is in a safe place. But I’m worried [about] who Michael is. He’s gone to another residency in New York.” Then she wrote Swango’s full address. She thought of the letter as a silent plea. Every day she thought to herself, “Please, God, let this message get through.” Sharon was still so apprehensive that she told Al about the letter only after she’d mailed it.