Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (33 page)

Around Christmas, Dunlap spoke to Al Cooper again and told him Swango was living with her. This time, he all but ordered her to get Swango out of the house. But before she could say anything, she got a call from one of her roommates, who was working as a nurse in Fort Myers; the roommate told her to drive over immediately. She had met two visiting nurses from Long Island, who told her about Swango and even showed her a picture that looked like their long-term guest. Dunlap and her roommate hurried to the Fort Myers library, where they pulled up articles about Swango from
Newsday.
When she read them, Dunlap felt she might have a heart attack.

Dunlap immediately called the FBI in Miami. But the agent she spoke with expressed no interest in anyone named Swango; he suggested
they call the local police. Dunlap concluded that would be a waste of time, since Swango hadn’t done anything in Florida.

In any event, they were worried about their other roommate, who was at home alone with Swango. They hurried back to Naples and told Swango he had to move out immediately. They showed him copies of the
Newsday
articles. “It’s not true,” he insisted, but he didn’t argue further. He packed his belongings into the truck and left that night.

The next day, an FBI agent appeared at the hospital where Dunlap worked, asking about Swango, but it was too late. Dunlap had no idea where he’d gone.

Swango had driven back to Georgia and stayed with Bert Gee. Three days later, at two
A.M
., he and Gee showed up at the storage locker in Portsmouth. The night manager, who knew nothing about Swango, let them in. Swango and Gee loaded the truck and left. No one called the FBI.

Only on October 27, 1994—a full year after his dismissal from SUNY–Stony Brook—did federal authorities issue a warrant for Swango’s arrest on charges of defrauding a federal facility, the VA hospital, by gaining admission to the Stony Brook residency program on false pretenses. Because the FBI agents thought they were investigating a potential murder case, it hadn’t occurred to them to seek a warrant for this far lesser offense until they took what evidence they had to the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Long Island. Swango was now officially a fugitive, but the action produced no new leads.

Ed Schrader visited the Coopers with the disappointing news. “We’ve lost him,” he said, attributing the delays and mishaps to squabbling within the FBI over who should be in charge of investigating the case. Schrader had checked with the FBI’s Miami office, which confirmed that it had initially ignored the call from Tracy Dunlap. Swango “wasn’t a priority,” Schrader said, sounding bitter and disappointed.

“If I were you, I’d forget about this,” Schrader told the Coopers. “He’s the kind of person who will just show up dead someday.” For Swango had vanished.

CHAPTER
TEN

B
Y
N
OVEMBER
1994, spring had finally come to the tropical regions of southern Africa, bringing welcome rains that helped relieve the severe drought that had afflicted most of Zimbabwe for nearly three years. Dr. Christopher Zshiri, the director of the Mnene Mission Hospital, was in good spirits, bounding out to greet the new doctor from America when he arrived with Howard Mpofu, the church official who had picked him up at the Bulawayo airport. Mpofu introduced him to Dr. Swango, whose blond hair and fair complexion reminded him of some of the Swedish missionary doctors who had come before. Zshiri noticed that Swango had something of a nervous twitch in his eye. Perhaps he wasn’t used to the bright sunshine.

Swango was charming and talkative, and they all chuckled over Mpofu’s account of Swango kneeling to kiss the bishop’s ring. Still, Zshiri was a bit skeptical of the mission hospital’s good fortune.

“Why are you coming from a rich country like the United States to the bush?” he asked as soon as Swango had deposited his belongings in his bungalow.

“I love Africa,” Swango replied. “I love blacks. I can breathe out here,” he said, gesturing toward the sweeping, rain-freshened view beyond the hospital.

“Is that so?” Zshiri responded. “You’ll be earning one-twentieth of what you could make in the U.S.”

“I don’t mind,” Swango replied.

Zshiri wondered. It did seem odd to him that a young doctor from the United States would want to come to this remote African
outpost. But Swango seemed so idealistic and earnest. Zshiri thought that maybe he was becoming too cynical.

Though Swango had been looking for a job through an agency called Options, a subsidiary of Project Concern International, which specializes in placing American doctors in foreign countries, he had been hired by the church directly through a Lutheran placement organization in Harare, which obtained a copy of his application from Options. Swango had supplied a copy of his medical school diploma; a glowing letter of recommendation from Robert Haller II, who had hired Swango as an emergency room physician in Ohio ten years before and testified at his sentencing hearing in Quincy; and a letter from Diann Weaver, a nurse who was married to a friend of Swango’s from America Ambulance in Springfield. Both letters were dated 1994. The dates must have been altered, since Haller and Weaver hadn’t written letters for Swango since his sentencing in 1985. Swango also rewrote the text of Haller’s recommendation, making it far more positive than the original.

The new doctor didn’t quite prove to be the godsend Zshiri had hoped for. He seemed curiously inexperienced considering that he’d graduated from medical school in 1983 and, according to his résumé, had been practicing medicine in the United States since then. Despite his impressive academic credentials and his internship at Ohio State—a name recognized even in southern Africa—Zshiri discovered that Swango had trouble with routine surgery and seemed never to have delivered a baby. But Swango ascribed his lack of experience to his specialization in neurosurgery, a skill for which there was little demand at Mnene, and Zshiri had indeed heard that American doctors were highly specialized. In any event, Swango readily agreed to undergo a five-month internship at Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo to improve his skills, concentrating on obstetrics and gynecology.

Mpilo Hospital is a teeming facility on the outskirts of Bulawayo. It is still referred to as the “African” hospital, as opposed to the United Bulawayo Hospitals, which, before Zimbabwean independence, were for white patients only. Though differences between the hospitals have supposedly been leveled, Mpilo patients remain overwhelmingly black and poor. The hospital has been inundated with AIDS patients and, at the time of Swango’s arrival, was
woefully understaffed. There were only three residents working at the hospital rather than the usual six, which meant one of them was on duty for a twenty-four-hour period every third night. Swango’s arrival provided welcome relief.

Swango impressed the superintendent at Mpilo, Dr. Naboth Chaibva, as sociable and eager to learn. He was assigned to work under Dr. Christopher King in obstetrics. Soon after, at a lunch for the medical staff, Ian Lorimer introduced himself to Swango, who said his name was pronounced “Swan.” Lorimer, tall, good-looking, and athletic, was a resident in surgery, and Swango said he was eager to improve his surgical skills. He asked if he could accompany Lorimer on his rounds. Affable and outgoing, Lorimer welcomed the company. He was amazed to find that Swango had the stamina to accompany him on his twenty-four-hour shifts, then continue immediately with his own rotation.

Swango was never anything but helpful, attentive, and eager to learn, and quickly won over almost everyone on the medical staff. The one exception was Dr. Abdi Mesbah, who was almost instantly suspicious of Swango. An Iranian national, Mesbah criticized Swango’s skills as a doctor, puzzled over the vague references to his past, and concluded that Swango must be a CIA agent. But other doctors attributed Mesbah’s suspicions to his open anti-Americanism, and dismissed his spy theories as far-fetched.

Lorimer was impressed by Swango’s general medical knowledge and his ability to handle trauma cases—the result, Swango told him, of his having successfully completed an intensive advanced trauma life-support course. (He made no mention of his work in emergency rooms or as a paramedic.) On the other hand, Swango seemed woefully inexperienced in even rudimentary surgical procedures, such as draining an abscess. Lorimer didn’t feel he could allow Swango to undertake common but more complex operations, such as hernias and appendectomies. Still, he felt his new colleague was learning quickly. Lorimer’s only real concern, and a minor one in the scheme of things, was the frequency with which Swango swore or, as Lorimer put it, “blasphemed.” Lorimer and his wife, Cheryl, a former ballet dancer, are devout Presbyterians, and led a weekly Bible discussion and prayer group at Bulawayo Central Presbyterian Church. When Lorimer asked Swango to watch his language,
Swango seemed startled that he might have offended, and never again took the Lord’s name in vain in Lorimer’s presence.

Indeed, Swango seemed so chastened that Lorimer invited him to join them at church on Sundays, and he was soon a fixture in the congregation. Along with the Anglican Cathedral, Bulawayo Central Presbyterian Church is a pillar of the local establishment, numbering prominent businessmen, lawyers, and doctors, including Dr. King from Mpilo, among its members. Swango and Lorimer became close friends, and not just because Lorimer was becoming Swango’s spiritual mentor. In the long stretches of time they spent together at the hospital they spoke often—in Swango’s case, incessantly—about books, about current affairs, about personal relationships, especially Swango’s eagerness to meet a girl and, eventually, to marry.

Lorimer was amazed by how well-read Swango was, not just in popular best-sellers and detective stories, which Swango loved, but in the classics: all of Dickens, Jane Austen, Tolstoy. He often referred to Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment.
The medical staff, some of whom felt derelict in their own attention to matters outside their field, came to rely on his trenchant analyses of current events. On one occasion, Swango expounded at length on the conflict in Bosnia, showing, in Lorimer’s view, an amazing command of detail and ability to make sense out of a bafflingly complex matter. Indeed, if there was anything slightly irritating about Swango, it was that he never seemed to stop talking. He sometimes followed Lorimer into the men’s room so as not to interrupt a train of thought.

As the two became close, Lorimer, twenty-seven, naturally talked about his upbringing: his father was Irish; he’d been born in Zambia but moved to Zimbabwe when he was two, had grown up in Harare, the capital, and had graduated from medical school there. For his part, Swango said he, too, was twenty-seven years old. (In reality, he was now forty.) His father had been in the military, was a strict disciplinarian, and was absent from the home for long stretches. It was his mother, Swango said, who held the family together. He mentioned a couple of brothers, but Lorimer had the impression that Swango hadn’t been in contact with them or with his mother in some time. But Swango didn’t seem to want to discuss
his past. He was vague about just where he was from, where the family had lived, where he was educated or had worked in the United States. Lying about his age no doubt made it easier to gloss over his past.

Lorimer didn’t press, though he did ask what had brought a young doctor like Swango to Africa. Swango said he’d always wanted geographic variety in his career. He said he’d considered Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia; that Zimbabwe hadn’t been on his list; but that when the Mnene opening was mentioned, it immediately appealed to him.

In any event, no one in Bulawayo was inclined to think ill of someone like Swango. The beleaguered white community there would no doubt have embraced any charming, handsome young white American doctor who had come to live in their midst. Depressed by years of emigration, the failure of white rule, and constant fear that their remaining status, privileges, economic security, and even physical safety could be shattered by dictatorial decree, most whites who met Swango were flattered that someone with his stellar credentials—someone who could seemingly live anywhere—not only chose to come to their community, but was constantly extolling its virtues: the friendliness of the people he met; the ideal climate; the satisfaction of working in a hospital where he was truly needed and could make a contribution.

Swango not only attended the Presbyterian church on Sundays but also joined a weekly Bible study group led by Lorimer and enrolled in a sixteen-week Christian-marriage course also taught by the Lorimers. He played volleyball every Thursday evening, usually at the home of Ted Mirtle and his wife, Margaret, Cheryl Lorimer’s parents, and played table tennis on Tuesday evenings in a league that met at the Catholic church. He seemed eager to meet women and to have a girlfriend. He told friends of the Lorimers, “I really like that girl with the ginger hair,” referring to Rosie Malcolm, who also attended the Bible-study sessions. They jokingly told her to “watch out” for Swango unless she wanted a boyfriend, but he never directly asked her on a date. In May 1995, when the internship ended and it came time to return to Mnene, he told the Lorimers he wasn’t all that excited about returning to such a remote location, but would honor his commitment. But he pledged to stay in touch, and
said he’d like to return permanently once he completed his stay at the mission hospital. Doctors King and Matt Oliver wrote him glowing letters of recommendation, with Oliver writing that he was “very keen and hard-working.”

A
T
Mnene, Dr. Zshiri was happy to have Swango back, and felt that his performance had indeed improved as a result of his months at Mpilo. Swango’s earlier enthusiasm and cheerful mood, however, seemed to have evaporated. Perhaps the stimulation of Bulawayo had soured him on the isolation of the bush—it was in the month he returned, for example, that Swango asked for the use of a car, saying he wanted to attend “medical conferences” in Bulawayo. While he remained affable and friendly toward Zshiri, his habits increasingly struck the doctors and others at the hospital as peculiar. Dr. Larsson told Zshiri that something about Swango made him uneasy, and he didn’t want his children to be around him. Although Swango had indicated he was something of a diet and fitness buff, Zshiri couldn’t figure out what he was eating. He never cooked for himself, didn’t eat with others, and seemed to live on popcorn and Coke.