Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (36 page)

So when Swango called Ian Lorimer in August saying he might need a lawyer, Lorimer naturally thought of Coltart. The Lorimers hadn’t seen much of Swango since he’d gone back to Mnene, but Abdi Mesbah, the Iranian doctor at the hospital, had reported in something of an I-told-you-so manner that Swango had stopped working at Mnene and “something was amiss.” This Mesbah claimed to have heard from a Swedish nurse at Mnene, presumably Larsson’s wife, but he knew no details. When Swango himself called the
Lorimers from Mnene, he told them only that “something had gone wrong” and he needed a lawyer. He declined to elaborate, saying he would explain everything when he returned to Bulawayo and saw the Lorimers in person. Ian was curious, but not all that surprised that things hadn’t worked out for Swango. He knew how isolated Mnene was, and how different the bush culture.

Swango arrived at Coltart’s office on the fourth floor of the Haddon & Sly building in downtown Bulawayo on August 23. The blond young doctor struck Coltart as quiet, almost timid, but idealistic and determined to clear his name. He said that he had been summarily suspended by the provincial minister of health without being told any specific charges or given any opportunity to respond. All he knew, he said, was that he was accused of having given some patients injections that caused “ill effects,” and that he was being unfairly blamed for the deaths of a few patients who had died of natural causes. He added that police had come to his house at Mnene armed with a search warrant and had seized a quantity of drugs he kept there.

“Why did you have drugs in your cottage?” Coltart asked, immediately concerned that the case might involve narcotics. Swango replied that since he was coming to “darkest Africa,” he had brought a selection of drugs that he thought might be unavailable at the mission hospital.

Coltart was impressed that Swango had gone to such trouble, personally carrying drugs into the country. As a lawyer trained to judge the credibility of witnesses, Coltart found Swango earnest and believable. But he was more impressed by the glowing letters of recommendation Swango produced from Doctors Oliver and King at Mpilo Hospital; Oliver, in particular, was a friend of Coltart’s and a fellow member of the Presbyterian church. Coltart knew nothing about Mnene Mission Hospital, but he had heard of some factional feuds within the Evangelical Lutheran church. He thought Swango’s troubles might possibly be related; then again, this might be a case of reverse discrimination against a white American doctor. Such situations were common in postindependence Zimbabwe. Coltart thought Swango idealistic and probably naive—someone who didn’t understand the local culture and was in turn misunderstood. He thought it would be a terrible precedent if a promising young doctor
were unfairly driven from Zimbabwe at a time the country so desperately needed doctors. So Coltart agreed to represent Swango, thus lending his considerable prestige to Swango’s cause. Swango seemed relieved and agreed to pay the firm’s fees in cash.

In any event, to Coltart the charges seemed vague and farfetched. The next day he sent a letter to the police in Gweru, demanding to know on what grounds they had searched Swango’s residence and to learn the details of any charges they anticipated filing. He complained that his client had been confronted with “unspecified allegations” to the effect that he had “injected patients with the wrong drugs that caused a bad effect.” Coltart said he would appreciate “precise details . . . at your earliest convenience.”

The police replied on September 9, writing that “precise details will be forthcoming in a matter of days.” But nine days later, Coltart received a letter saying that “We are now unable to give details as the docket has been referred to a higher office for action.” That “higher office” turned out to be Zimbabwe’s director of public prosecution, the equivalent of the attorney general of the United States.

But the evidence was still far from conclusive. Lab results from Margaret Zhou’s tissue, which had been sent to Bulawayo and then to Harare for testing, proved inconclusive. The pathologist pointed out that unless someone could indicate what substances were believed to have induced death, he had no way of proceeding—the same problem that had beset pathologists in the United States. Given the lack of physical evidence, the prosecutor’s office had ordered the police to continue investigating and postponed any decision to file charges.

None of this was known to Coltart or Swango, and additional letters from Coltart produced no further explanation. As time passed and no charges or evidence materialized, Coltart began to suspect that this might indeed be a political case of antiwhite discrimination against Swango. Coltart knew of other cases—white safari operators were a recent example—in which people were arrested but never charged. In Coltart’s view, the practice was one of the worst abuses of the judicial system by the authoritarian Mugabe regime.

Then, in October, Swango had received the letter from the Lutheran church terminating his employment, a letter which also
made no reference to any specific charges. Coltart recognized as soon as Swango showed him the letter that Swango’s termination was improper under Zimbabwean law. An employer may fire an employee only if the employee violates a code of conduct registered by the employer with the Department of Labor. Mnene Mission Hospital had no such code (few employers in Zimbabwe do). Absent such a code, the Lutheran church was within its rights to suspend Swango, but it had to apply to the Labor Ministry for an order terminating his employment, a procedure that would have given Swango an opportunity to respond.

The possibility that he was a pawn in a larger political drama was a theme Swango mentioned when he met with Ian Lorimer. As he’d promised, Swango offered Lorimer a detailed explanation of what had happened, describing three patients whose deaths had been blamed on him. One, he said, evidently referring to Phillimon Chipoko, was a diabetic who became ill after an amputation on a Friday afternoon. Swango had happened to be on duty that weekend when he died, but the man wasn’t his patient. (Chipoko actually died on a Tuesday.) The second, evidently Margaret Zhou, was a woman experiencing severe bleeding after a miscarriage. Again, she was not Swango’s patient, but had died while he was on duty. And the third account Swango gave was a highly abridged version of Edith Ngwenya’s death. Swango said Ngwenya had worked for him, that he’d visited her socially, and that after she complained of abdominal pain, he’d insisted that she be admitted. But neither he nor Dr. Zshiri had been able to diagnose her illness before she died. Nurses unfairly suspected, he said, that he had given her a drug, which he denied. Because he was a white doctor, he said, he was being made a scapegoat for every death in the hospital.

Swango’s account made selective use of the facts, and naturally Lorimer had no way of knowing that he had already told inconsistent versions of the same stories to the nurses (denying any injections) and the police (claiming he had injected water). Lorimer and his colleagues at Mpilo found Swango’s account plausible, though Lorimer did think it odd that none of the doctors at Mnene had been able to diagnose Ngwenya. Mike Cotton, another resident at Mpilo, said he’d known two Dutch doctors, a husband-and-wife team, who had worked at Mnene for two years and then
left when something went wrong. So there was obviously some precedent for trouble at Mnene. But Lorimer did quiz Swango about the matter.

“Did you do anything you shouldn’t have?” he asked on one occasion. Swango emphatically denied it, adding that “no doubt can be cast on my management of patients.”

“Did you clash with anyone?” Lorimer asked.

“No, I got along very well with everyone.”

Finally, Lorimer asked him, “Were you on drugs?”

“No, of course not,” Swango answered, laughing at the suggestion.

Even more persuasive than Swango’s denials was the fact that David Coltart had taken on his case. Lorimer, Oliver, and other doctors at Mpilo held Coltart in exceptionally high regard, and given Coltart’s reputation for integrity, believed he would not have accepted the case unless he believed Swango was being persecuted.

So when Swango said he’d like to practice medicine again at Mpilo, Lorimer and others on the medical staff were for the most part enthusiastic. Lorimer went to Mpilo’s director, Dr. Chaibva, and argued that Swango should be hired despite having been dismissed from Mnene. Mpilo was desperately understaffed, and even if Swango couldn’t handle everything, at least the other residents would only have to be on call every fourth night rather than every third. Swango was better than no doctor at all. Dr. Oliver, too, urged Chaibva to hire him.

Finally, Swango himself went to Chaibva and said he would be willing to work without pay if the hospital would provide living quarters. Chaibva asked him what had happened at Mnene, and Swango told him he didn’t get along with church officials. But Chaibva said he’d have to get some kind of explanation from Mnene.

The next day, Chaibva called Zshiri, saying that Dr. Swango had volunteered to work at Mpilo, and that the hospital was short of staff. Zshiri was silent, which Chaibva found odd. Finally Zshiri said, “If I were you, I would not employ him.”

“Why not?” Chaibva asked.

Again, there was a pause. “It’s under investigation,” Zshiri said. Chaibva again tried to get an explanation, but Zshiri would say
nothing more, repeating only that if it were up to him, he would not hire Swango.
¹³

Despite this admonition, Chaibva made no further inquiries about what had transpired at Mnene; he assumed, as his staff doctors had, that the problems had arisen from disputes over religious doctrine, not medical matters. And in any event, Swango’s license to practice medicine was still in effect. Chaibva restored Swango’s hospital privileges and Swango took up his duties at Mpilo. He began living in a room that had been used for residents when they stayed at the hospital overnight. It had a private bath and a separate entrance, and it also provided immediate—and discreet—access to the hospital wards at any hour of the day or night. By actually taking up residence in the hospital, Swango could now reach virtually every patient without being noticed by other members of the staff.

In no time, it seemed, Swango resumed his congenial life in Bulawayo—the weekly prayer meetings at the Presbyterian church, the volleyball and table tennis games, the visits to the Lorimers and the Mirtles. He even baby-sat for the Lorimers’ infant daughter, Ashleigh. People thought it laudable that he was willing to work without pay at Mpilo. He threw himself into his job, carefully writing down the full names of all his patients so he could greet them by their first names. He became an advocate for patients’ rights, arguing, for example, that people were having to wait too long before having operations once their conditions were diagnosed. Though they had been curious when he first arrived, no one now thought it odd that Swango, who could presumably go anywhere and earn a handsome living, was working without pay and living in a room in the hospital.

But word of the mysterious deaths at Mnene, already widespread in the Mberengwa region, inevitably reached a wider audience in Bulawayo. In mid-January a local newspaper, the
Sunday News
, ran an unbylined article with the headline “Expat Doctor ‘Experimenting’ on Patients”—the first published account of Swango’s activities in Africa. The article read:

An expatriate doctor at a hospital in Mberengwa is alleged to have been experimenting with some drugs on patients, resulting in the death of three of them, The Sunday News has learnt.

The doctor, who is white, has since been relieved of his duties and it is reliably understood that he was arrested by members of the Criminal Investigations Department and is still in the country helping police with investigations.

Sources said the doctor was using drugs imported from his country on patients, especially women. Three people died as a result but The Sunday News could not establish whether the deceased were all women. Officers from the CID have carried out their investigations as far as Gweru Central Hospital.

Though there weren’t many white doctors in Mberengwa, the article didn’t mention names, or even the doctor’s nationality, and was both sketchy and inaccurate. It didn’t alarm Lorimer and the other doctors at Mpilo, who were already aware of Swango’s dismissal, nor were there any follow-up articles.

Then one evening Lorimer’s mother phoned him from Harare, where that day she had had lunch with someone who worked in the Ministry of Health. When Mrs. Lorimer mentioned that her son was a resident at Mpilo Hospital, the health official had told her about an American doctor who had interned there who had done “some terrible things” at Mnene Hospital, including administering poisonous injections. Mrs. Lorimer had immediately recognized that the doctor must be Dr. Swango, Ian’s friend. “I don’t believe it,” Lorimer told his mother, dismissing the stories as preposterous rumors. “It’s all political, and he’s being framed.” He insisted that he knew Swango well enough to trust his instincts, and his mother seemed satisfied. Still, her last words to him in the conversation were “Be careful. Beware.”

The next day, Lorimer did say something to Swango to the effect that there were rumors he had injected people at Mnene, which was odd since doctors generally don’t administer injections. “Did you ever give injections?” Lorimer asked him. “Did you ever experiment with poisons?”

Swango seemed shocked and genuinely puzzled. “No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically, adding only that he had occasionally administered intravenous antibiotics because some of the nurses were nervous about doing it.

But the Iranian doctor, Mesbah, was also continuing to raise concerns about what had happened at Mnene, based on secondhand accounts he was hearing from the nursing staff. Finally, Mike Cotton said he’d go to Mnene and investigate himself. When he returned, he said rumors were running rampant. Swango was being blamed for scores of deaths—even of patients who died while Swango was doing his internship at Mpilo. This was obviously preposterous, and it undermined all the claims against him.