Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (40 page)

Swango never said much to Daly about what had happened at Mnene, or why he was having trouble finding medical work in Bulawayo, which was suffering from such a shortage of doctors. Like the Kerrs, who had introduced him to her, she was vaguely aware that he had been falsely accused of malpractice of some sort, and that he was suing the Lutheran church. But she didn’t press him for any further explanation and he didn’t volunteer any.

One day, however, she had what she considered a peculiar call from Karen Kerr, who asked her how things were going with Michael. Joanna said they were fine. “Just be careful,” Kerr said.

“Why?” Daly asked, surprised.

“You know he had another girlfriend, and she dumped him,” Kerr said ominously.

“Why? Is there anything else?”

But Kerr said she couldn’t say any more. Daly mentioned this to Swango, and it seemed to irritate him. “Everyone is gossiping about me,” he complained. He seemed to want to go out less and less.

Then, in late July, the
Sunday News
ran another article: “Whereabouts of Fired U.S. Doctor Unknown.” The article said
police were “mum” on the whereabouts of “an American doctor who is alleged to have caused the deaths of five patients at Mnene Hospital.” It added,

The American doctor is alleged to have administered fatal injections to five patients at the district hospital, resulting in their deaths.

Five nurses from the hospital were summoned to Zvishavane to help with the investigations.

Swango’s name still wasn’t mentioned, but Joanna knew it was he, and she raised the subject of the continuing press coverage. “People just don’t write all these stories out of nothing,” she told him. “You must have done something.”

Swango seemed shocked and annoyed at her suggestion. “No, no,” he insisted. “They’re just causing trouble. It’s a nuisance. People are always hassling me.”

“Are you sure?” she persisted. “You’re not lying, are you?”

“No, no, no,” he repeated, shaking his head emphatically.

Although she had questioned him, Daly didn’t doubt Swango. She trusted her intuition and her feelings, which told her he couldn’t be guilty of murder, or a danger to anyone else.

The first week of August, all four of Daly’s children fell ill with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. She blamed the illness on the local water supply, which had been causing problems in the wake of a severe drought. She was getting them into her car to take them to the doctor when her husband emerged from the cottage and asked where they were going. She said the boys were sick. “Why don’t you have your doctor boyfriend take care of them?” he asked in an insinuating tone. This infuriated her. She had never considered having Swango treat them. He wasn’t a proper doctor, as she saw it, since he wasn’t practicing, and in any event he wasn’t a pediatrician. The children’s doctor sent them home, saying they probably had a stomach virus.

Though her hands were full with the sick children, Joanna still felt obliged to cook Swango’s dinner that evening. She’d promised him fried chicken, as close as she could get to commercial Kentucky Fried Chicken, which he’d often said was his favorite food. Swango
arrived that afternoon in an unusually good mood, asking after the children and offering to fix her a cup of tea. She was surprised. He’d never offered to prepare anything for her before. “That would be nice,” she said, grateful for the kind gesture.

Swango brought Daly the tea, and she sat down and drank at least half of it, perhaps more. Then she went into the kitchen to begin preparing dinner. But after about ten minutes, she suffered a sudden attack of nausea. “Excuse me,” she said to Swango as she rushed to the bathroom and vomited. Then she lay down on the bed, weak and disoriented.

But all she could think about was Swango’s dinner. Conditioned over the years by her father and husband, she felt it her duty to fix a meal, no matter how ill she felt. She struggled to her feet, returned to the kitchen, and fried the chicken. She managed to get the food to the table, then sat down, saying she couldn’t possibly eat herself. Swango paused before eating and looked at her with a searching gaze. Finally he said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this for me.”

Weak and nauseated, drenched with perspiration, Joanna did her best to stay at the table as Swango ate. But finally she said, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll lie down.” She returned to her bedroom, and felt as though she blacked out. She remembered nothing more of that night. She spent the next day in bed, and took several days to recover. Though she had never before felt so violently ill, she assumed she had come down with the same bug that had afflicted the children.

L
YNETTE
O’H
ARE
couldn’t get over the change in Swango since he had met Joanna Daly—he seemed as he had been when she’d first met him, sunny and talkative. She fussed over him and tried to encourage him in his medical career despite the persecution she believed he was suffering. She introduced him to “nice people” she thought he’d enjoy, including Judith Todd, a prominent human rights activist, and a Catholic priest she held in high regard. He spoke to a class of children at the Catholic school about what it was like to be a doctor. It seemed Swango made a favorable impression on everyone he met. He wrote O’Hare’s daughter regularly, usually two to three times a week, lavishing praise on her and filling his letters with quotations from the Bible. He struck up a friendship with
the Samaritan who had called him when Mrs. O’Hare feared he might attempt suicide.

Swango continued to seek work as a doctor, but seemed to be growing discouraged. He applied for a position at the mental hospital, but its director, though lamenting what a waste it was that someone with Swango’s skills was unemployed, said she could do nothing as long as the Ministry of Health maintained his suspension. Even though he was suing the Lutheran church, O’Hare thought Swango should be more aggressive at vindicating himself. “Why don’t you go to the American embassy in Harare?” she urged him. “Surely you have rights as an American citizen.” But he argued that such a trip would be pointless, since he wasn’t formally accused of any wrongdoing. O’Hare was also busy with a Rotary campaign to eradicate polio; she urged Swango to volunteer at one of the stations where parents were bringing their children for inoculations. But Swango adamantly refused, saying “no doctor will go near me” given the accusations against him.

O’Hare was nonetheless grateful to have a doctor in the house, since her own health had been declining precipitously. Though she had always had a strong constitution, she had been experiencing recurring bouts of severe nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, some of which kept her in bed for days. But Swango reassured her, telling her the symptoms were just a bad bout of the flu. Each time she fell ill, he gave her some medication, and seemed solicitous and concerned about her welfare.

While O’Hare was convalescing, she and Swango would watch TV and continue their conversations. He was passionately interested in anything having to do with O. J. Simpson, who had been acquitted the previous October of murdering his wife, and spoke often of how much he admired him. He seemed thrilled at the verdict, which puzzled O’Hare. “Do you actually think he’s innocent?” she asked him.

He stared at her in disbelief. “Of course not,” he snapped.

He seemed almost as fascinated by the story of English serial killer John Reginald Christie, who was convicted of murdering eight people, including his wife and a baby, over ten years ending in 1953. But before Christie was caught, another man, Timothy Evans, whose wife and child were among Christie’s victims, had been tried, convicted, and hanged for their murders. Evans was posthumously
pardoned in 1966. Swango told O’Hare the whole story, and seemed especially to savor the fact that Christie had been able to deflect blame onto an innocent man. (This same notion, that the wrong man might be accused of serial murder, figured in the suspense thriller he told Joanna he was writing.) Swango often spoke of the incompetence of the police and other members of the medical profession.

And Swango exhorted O’Hare—as well as everyone at the Bible study class—to watch the TV miniseries on Ted Bundy, professing his admiration for the handsome law student and exulting that no one had suspected him for so long. O’Hare had never heard of Bundy, but at Swango’s insistence, she watched the program. Under the circumstances, O’Hare found Swango’s enthusiasm peculiar.

“In view of what you’re suspected of, I wouldn’t go around talking about serial killers,” she warned him after watching the show.

Given his faithful attendance at the Presbyterian church and his friendship with the Lorimers, she was also surprised by the irreverence of some of his comments. He often mocked participants in the Bible study class, especially Rosie Malcolm, the woman with the “ginger hair” he had once shown a romantic interest in, and would comment sarcastically, “Guess what we prayed about today?”

“Why do you go?” O’Hare finally interjected.

“I like to mix with nice people,” he replied.

On another occasion, Swango seemed so contemptuous of religion that O’Hare asked, “What do you believe in?”

“I believe in God,” he replied.

“Do you believe in Christ?”

He didn’t reply.

But O’Hare drew nothing of significance from these conversations, which were isolated puzzling notes in a generally cordial relationship. She trusted her young lodger so much that she turned her car over to him. He would take her to work in the morning, pick her up for lunch, and return to take her home at the end of the day. That gave him unlimited mobility, and freed him from having to depend on Joanna or other friends for rides. Only the servants, Lizzie Keredo and Mary Chimwe, remained suspicious. One afternoon Keredo was washing O’Hare’s car, as Swango stood watching.

“Are you sure it’s clean?” he said as she finished.

“Yes, I am,” she replied, annoyed at the insinuation.

“Well, maybe I should wipe it with a white cloth,” he said. “In jail, the security officers wipe everything with a white cloth to see if it’s clean.”

“How would you know what they do in jail?” Keredo shot back.

Swango looked momentarily flustered, then explained that jail was just like the Army, and they’d done the same thing when he was in the Army. But Keredo was suspicious.

One day Swango offered Keredo and Chimwe some empty plastic vials, and asked if they wanted them. They said they did, but then thought the vials had a strange smell, so they threw them away. Another time, Keredo suspected that Swango had tampered with the peanut butter she kept in the kitchen in her cottage. It was a new jar, but it had been opened and an indentation suggested something had been pushed into it. She was afraid to eat it.

If Swango was at home when she needed to clean, he would stand in the room and make Keredo vacuum around him. When he left, he always carried a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, which made her wonder whether he had something he didn’t want her to see. But her “madame” would hear nothing of these suspicions.

Then one day Keredo came to O’Hare and insisted that she come into Swango’s room. They all had considered it odd that Swango insisted on so much bacon and four slices of toast for breakfast every morning. Now Keredo pointed to a closet shelf and said, “I’m worried.” There, neatly wrapped and arranged, were dozens of bacon sandwiches. O’Hare was upset. When Swango returned that evening, she told him a fib, that the cat had come across the sandwiches in his closet. “That is unwholesome in our climate,” she lectured him. “It will attract ants, if not worse. Please put the sandwiches in this plastic box and put it in the refrigerator.”

But a few weeks later, Keredo came to her again with a triumphant look on her face. “Come look,” she said, and led O’Hare into Swango’s room.

This time she opened the bureau drawer. Wrapped with minute precision, concealed in the center of the drawer, were more bacon sandwiches. O’Hare was alarmed. Obviously, Swango suffered from some sort of food-hoarding syndrome. “I’m frightened,” Keredo said. “No doctor would hide food in such a way.” She insisted that
she and Chimwe begin sleeping in the other bedroom, next to O’Hare’s, with their door open. If he asked why, they would tell Swango they had come into the house from their cottage because they were suffering from colds.

Swango did seem upset at their presence, scoffing at the explanation and asking them every day when they planned to return to the cottage. But they felt their vigilance was vindicated. O’Hare slept with her bedroom door ajar so the cat could go in and out during the night. On several evenings, Keredo heard Swango open his door and come into the hallway. He would stand motionless, peering into O’Hare’s room. Each time, Keredo made a sound to indicate she was awake, and he quickly returned to his room.

O’Hare began to notice odd things around the house: a few souvenirs and books were missing; small amounts of money vanished; the liquor bottles were nearly empty. She began to worry about what he was doing with the car; sometimes he was out until four
A.M
., and would come creeping into the house in a way that frightened the servants. Then one day, when Swango was supposed to pick her up for lunch at home, he failed to show up, stranding her at the office. When he arrived that evening, she was angry. “Where were you?” she demanded.

“Do you think I was trying to make a getaway to Botswana?” he asked in a mocking tone, offering no other explanation. O’Hare was suddenly alarmed. Such a possibility had never even crossed her mind. Had he tried to flee? If so, was there something to those stories from Mnene? These suspicions hardened when the
Chronicle
ran a brief news item two days later, “Doctor Tried to Escape”:

An American doctor accused of causing the deaths of five patients at Mnene Hospital in Mberengwa, reportedly tried to leave the country for Botswana, but was apparently stopped, police sources claimed.

They said the doctor was believed to be still in Bulawayo, but his exact whereabouts were not known . . . .