Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (39 page)

I
N
Newton West, a Bulawayo suburb south and west of O’Hare’s house, life lately hadn’t been easy for Joanna Daly. Recently separated from her husband, Steve, she was trying to keep divorce proceedings amicable, but he had taken up with another woman, a situation made all the more painful by his proximity. He was living in the servants’ cottage on the property, while Joanna and the four children, all boys, ages two through eight, remained in the spacious ranch house with its kidney-shaped pool. With the often boisterous young children on her hands, Joanna couldn’t think of getting a job outside the home, so she had begun a dressmaking business in the former sun room. She could no longer afford the maids who once occupied the cottage, and had only a part-time gardener and handyman to help around the house. Her days seemed an unending sequence of cooking, laundry, and sewing, and she was barely making ends meet.

Though Daly was attractive—slender, soft-spoken, with light reddish-brown hair—the idea that she might meet another man or go out on a date seemed remote to her. She hardly ever got out of the house except to drive the children to school, and by nightfall she was usually too tired, even if she could have afforded a babysitter. So she was floored when Karen Kerr, Steve’s sister, invited her to dinner late in June 1996, saying that there was a “nice man” she wanted Joanna to meet.

Joanna told herself that she didn’t want to meet another man and certainly had no intention of remarrying. Still, she did her hair, put on makeup, and wore her most attractive clothing to the Kerrs’ dinner. And much to her surprise, she immediately found the man in question good-looking and charming. He was a doctor. He had apologized for his earlier rudeness in failing to greet the Kerrs, and through O’Hare’s persistence, they had since become friendly. The Kerrs, too, embraced Swango’s version of what had happened at Mnene. They told Joanna he had been persecuted while working there, unfairly blamed for the deaths of several patients. Indeed, when they introduced her to Michael Swango, they joked that his nickname was “Dr. Death.”

Swango seemed instantly attracted to Joanna. Showing the same unerring instinct he had with O’Hare, he quickly discovered that both her father and uncle were career officers in the British military, and then told her all about his own military upbringing: his father served as a colonel in the Army in Vietnam; the family had moved frequently; his father was authoritarian and was absent from the home for long periods. All of this Joanna could relate to. Her own father had been harsh and domineering, often belittling her achievements, scoffing at notions of women’s rights. He had made her feel that her only option in life was to marry, have children, and be a housewife, which was what she had done. As she put it, “I’m used to being dictated to.” But she needed to say very little. Swango kept up a monologue throughout the evening, and never allowed his attention to stray. Her head was spinning from the attention.

The next day, Swango phoned her at home, and Joanna invited him over that afternoon for a cup of tea. Her estranged husband happened to be in the house when he called, which Joanna mentioned, and Swango said he didn’t want to have to deal with him. But she assured him that Steve wouldn’t be present when Swango arrived. Overhearing the conversation, her husband did go into a jealous tirade, and Joanna later suspected him of spying on Swango’s arrival.

Swango came for tea and stayed for hours. He asked Joanna how old she was, and when she said she’d be twenty-eight in November, told her he was the same age. He talked about what a committed Christian he was, citing his attendance at the Presbyterian church, at Bible study, and at the Lorimers’ marriage seminar. He even showed her a pamphlet on Christian marriage that he’d been studying. Daly was a bit nervous about such sudden talk of marriage, but she was impressed by his seeming earnestness and decency. By the end of the afternoon, she felt all but overwhelmed by the handsome, attentive young doctor who had so suddenly brightened her otherwise bleak life.

Soon Swango was spending nearly every day at Daly’s house. She’d pick him up at Lynette O’Hare’s in the morning when she drove two of the boys to school, and take him back when she picked them up at the end of the school day. Often he would regale her with stories, especially of Mrs. O’Hare, whom he ridiculed as a
fussy English aristocrat, always worrying that he was touching her things. He told Daly he was convinced O’Hare had commissioned the servants to spy on him.

Swango would plan excursions for the two of them and the children—picnics, for example, or outings to a game park. He was a fitness buff and would sometimes go jogging in a West Virginia Mountaineers sweatshirt. He wouldn’t eat sugar and fretted about getting enough fiber in his diet. Increasingly often, Joanna would prepare dinner for him, and he would stay with her for most of the evening. He told her how much he’d loved
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, and when she said she had a VCR, he got a copy of the tape and they watched it together. Swango seemed especially to enjoy the part where the Hugh Grant character leaves his prospective bride at the altar in order to marry his real love, Andie MacDowell. Daly came to realize that death and marriage were Swango’s favorite topics.

Swango continued his volleyball, table tennis, and badminton games, usually without Daly, but the two socialized with the Lorimers, or visited the Kerrs or other friends of Joanna. One afternoon Swango took her to meet his landlady, and O’Hare served them tea by the pool behind the house. But Joanna felt somewhat intimidated by O’Hare, whom she deemed to come from a higher social class than her own, and on the many other occasions when she picked Swango up or dropped him off at the house, she stayed in the car or remained outside the gate.

Although Swango was talkative and sociable, most days he preferred to work alone in Daly’s living room while she worked on her sewing. He always seemed to be scribbling in notebooks, doing some kind of writing, but he made it clear that he didn’t want Daly to pry into his activities. Given how upset he was that O’Hare’s maids were spying on him, Daly respected his privacy. She wouldn’t go so far as to say she was in love with him, let alone that she would marry him, but the relationship blossomed into romance. Although Swango never spent any money on her or bought her gifts, neither had other men in her life, and she recognized that as a missionary doctor, he was unlikely to have much money. After the emotional trough she had been in with her husband, she was flattered by Swango’s affection and attention. While he never asked her in so
many words to marry him, he often discussed the subject, saying how much he would like to be married and leaving little doubt that she was his choice for a wife. Daly felt better about herself than she had in years.

Acquiescent by habit, she didn’t ask Swango many questions. As he’d been with everyone else in Bulawayo, he was vague about his birthplace, his schooling, where he’d worked in the United States—any geographic reference that might be traced. He attributed his lack of a medical job to reverse racism, but otherwise said little about Mnene or Mpilo. Still, as the weeks went by and their lives settled into something of a comfortable routine, Daly learned a good deal about him; more, probably, than had anyone else in Bulawayo. He often talked about his father, a man he seemed to resent bitterly. He said Virgil had had a brilliant military career, but ended up dying an alcoholic. He told her that his father had kept a famous photograph of a Viet Cong soldier on his knees with a gun held to his head—the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph Virgil had shown him years before. He also told her how, when he and his brothers were young children, his father would make them march in formation, salute, and execute his commands whenever visitors came to the Swango home. He said it was something he had always hated. When Daly said she didn’t think it sounded so terrible, he angrily retorted, “I don’t think it’s right.”

Swango rarely mentioned his brothers, except for his older half brother, who, he said, also despised their father and was the only one of their siblings he got along with. Nor did he refer to any friends, with one exception. He spoke often of “Bertie Joe,” a Southern name, he said, belonging to his best friend. Bertie Joe was a medical specialist who traveled a lot, Swango told Daly—a description that fits Bert Gee, the respiratory therapist in Atlanta with whom Swango often stayed after he left Stony Brook. But he never used Gee’s real name, so Daly could never have contacted him, had it occurred to her to do so. Swango described Bertie Joe as a “big, powerful guy” who was always very protective of him. If there was any trouble, Swango said, Bertie Joe would just pull out his big revolver. Joanna laughed at the image, thinking that this must be what life was like in America, where everyone carried guns.

Swango often returned to the subject of his family. He said that
he dreaded family vacations, when he and his brothers would be installed in the backseat for what seemed like endless drives across middle America. He said their parents ignored them, sitting in the front seat, mostly in silence, smoking. He said he never detected any warmth in his parents’ marriage, and that they rarely saw each other, even during the increasingly rare periods when Virgil was at home. Swango spoke with much more affection about Muriel, who he said had read to him as a child, typed all his school papers for him, and held a semblance of a family together. Still, he described his home life as a lonely one, from which he often sought refuge in books at the public library. He wistfully described a Christmas break when he spent every day alone at the library.

Indeed, he remained an avid reader, especially of crime and detective novels, which he read constantly when he wasn’t busy with his own writing. Sometimes he tried to tell Daly the plots, but they sounded twisted and sordid to her, and she told him she wasn’t interested. But one day Swango seemed unusually excited, and said he wanted to write a book himself that he thought might be a bestseller. He insisted on telling her the idea. “Someone is in town,” he began, “and there’s a serial killer at large. Then someone else kills in the same way. Everyone thinks this person is the serial killer—but they’re wrong! They relax, and ten years go by. Then the serial killer kills again—just for fun.” Daly wasn’t sure she ever quite understood the plot, but Swango seemed so excited that she bought him a large book of blank paper so he could begin writing the novel.

Then there was his fascination with Ted Bundy. When Swango heard that a miniseries on Bundy’s life was going to air on Zimbabwean television, he insisted on watching and taping it on Daly’s VCR. Swango was riveted to the screen. He told Daly that he loved Bundy.

“You mean you loved the show.”

“No, I love Bundy,” he said. “He was a genius.”

Swango took the tape and played it for the Lorimers. He called particular attention to the program’s description of Bundy’s mental state, which suggested that the “normal” Bundy was unable to recognize the “abnormal” state that coexisted in his mind.

He showed a similar interest in Jim Jones, the charismatic religious leader of the People’s Temple whose nearly one thousand followers
committed mass suicide in 1978 by poisoning themselves in Guyana.

If these incidents struck Daly as somewhat macabre, as they did, they hardly seemed cause for concern. Many people were fascinated by people like Bundy and Jones, she assumed, or there wouldn’t be miniseries about them. And Swango’s interest in murder was more than overshadowed by his sense of humor, his kindness, and his encouragement. She especially liked the way he could converse with her pet green parrot, comically imitating the bird’s voice. At the same time, he said he felt bad for the parrot being confined in a cage, saying no one should be cooped up like that. He was also affectionate toward Daly’s part-Siamese cat, though he told her an odd anecdote about a cat he had once owned. He said he’d left the cat alone for a month with a supply of food, and the cat had thrived. “But what about the litter box?” exclaimed Daly, aghast at the idea of the filth, knowing that cats abhor an unclean litter box. Swango only shrugged, and seemed amused by her reaction.

Swango also seemed concerned for the rights of minorities. One day he criticized the city of Los Angeles, where alcohol commissioners were allegedly harassing gay bars. He staunchly defended the rights of homosexuals. Daly was surprised at his view, saying that she thought homosexuality was “wrong” and that in conservative Zimbabwe, most straight men would like to shoot gay men. Swango insisted that she was wrong, spent a good deal of time explaining homosexuality to her, and eventually persuaded her to change her views on the matter.

He was even more forceful on the subject of women’s rights, an unusual stance in Zimbabwe. He insisted that it was ridiculous for women to assume they could only aspire to be housewives. He encouraged Cheryl Lorimer to pursue an interest in psychology. And at his urging, Joanna began reading some of Swango’s medical texts, which she found surprisingly absorbing. Swango told her he thought she might have an aptitude for medicine. He urged her to go back to school, finish the equivalent of a high school degree, and study medicine. She was thrilled by the suggestion. No man had ever before suggested she was intelligent or encouraged any intellectual pursuits, let alone told her that she might have the ability to become a medical doctor.

At times like this, Daly thought she might be in love with Swango. But at the same time, she knew on some level that the relationship might not last. She was well aware there were things that Swango wouldn’t share with her, that kept him at a distance, such as his pent-up anger or frustration. He went through mood swings, which she could tell from his handwriting: when he was cheerful and ebullient, his handwriting was open and rounded; when he seemed depressed, it became cramped and slanted, almost as though it were someone else’s. When he was in a dark mood, Daly couldn’t reach him; she found it better to leave him alone, writing furiously in his notebooks.

There was also the possibility that he might soon find work and leave Zimbabwe altogether, even though he said he loved the country and wanted to stay in Bulawayo. She knew he was filling out applications for medical jobs in places like South Africa and Zambia; he mentioned a trauma unit in Johannesburg that he was especially interested in. Daly took out a post box in both their names so that he would have a mailing address to use on his job applications.