Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (42 page)

Tucked between the pages of one of the books was a piece of paper. On it Swango had carefully handwritten a poem by W. H. Auden. O’Hare was initially puzzled, but then she recognized the poem as the funeral oration in
Four Weddings and a Funeral:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone
,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead
,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves
,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West
,

My working week and my Sunday rest
,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

O
N
J
UNE
27, 1997, an immigration official at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago took the American passport of a man arriving from Johannesburg via London. He was en route to Portland, Oregon, and then, on the same day, to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The immigration official entered the name on the passport, Michael J. Swango, and the passport number into a computer. When the results appeared, he asked Swango to step into a private room.

Swango was arrested on federal charges of fraud. The outstanding warrant for his arrest had shown up on the INS computer. The next day, he was transferred by a federal marshal to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, the federal prison primarily serving the Eastern District of New York, which covers Long Island.

Since leaving Zimbabwe nearly ten months before, Swango had already obtained two new positions as a physician. The first was at University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, the African nation which lies to the north of Zimbabwe and east of Angola. He had obtained a temporary medical license from the Zambian government and had been treating patients for over two months when Zimbabwe authorities issued an alert on him to other southern African nations, including South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia. Zambian authorities promptly fired Swango from the hospital on November 19, 1996, and suspended his medical license.

Swango protested the action by letter, saying he had left Zimbabwe because the medical system there was in turmoil and he was
being harassed by government authorities and had never been given an opportunity to contest the charges. But as in South Dakota, he didn’t stay to pursue the appeal. By the time hospital officials replied, Swango had again vanished.

Swango next surfaced in Johannesburg, South Africa. Through a medical placement firm there, he quickly secured a position at a hospital in Saudi Arabia, far from the scrutiny of U.S. or southern African investigators. There was only one snag: he had to obtain a Saudi visa through a consulate located in the United States. Saudi Arabia only issues visas to foreigners in the country of their citizenship. Swango argued strenuously that it was absurd to make him fly all the way back to America rather than travel directly from Africa to Riyadh. But Saudi officials would not make an exception. Since the Saudi royal family, which ran the hospital that had hired Swango, had often used a medical placement firm in Oregon to obtain physicians for its hospitals, it was arranged for Swango to pick up his visa there, then travel that same day to Saudi Arabia.

Though his reluctance to return to America suggests that Swango was aware that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, and that he might be picked up while going through customs and immigration, he nonetheless traveled under his real name, using his own passport. Perhaps he felt he had no choice, since the medical diploma he had used to secure his job was in the name Michael Swango. Or perhaps he simply couldn’t forge or obtain a new passport in the short time before his scheduled departure. Of course, he could have turned down the job offer and sought nonmedical employment. But access to hospital patients appears to have become a compulsion, something he would take extraordinary risks to maintain.

Swango’s arrest attracted little public attention. An indictment charging him with “willfully making a materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement and representation” to gain admittance to the New York veterans hospital, a “matter within the jurisdiction of a department or agency of the United States,” was filed on July 3, but it wasn’t unsealed and made public until July 25. The hitherto somnolent FBI investigation now went into high gear, and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Cecilia Gardner, was assigned to handle the case. A brief New York
Daily News
article on
July 26 reported that Swango had been “nabbed” in Chicago. When Elsie Harris, Barron Harris’s widow, heard the news, she could hardly believe it, and burst into tears. She thought everyone had forgotten about Swango, even though in her heart, she was convinced Swango was responsible for her husband’s death.
¹⁵

In September she traveled to federal district court in Uniondale, Long Island, for Swango’s arraignment. She noticed that he had lost weight but seemed calm, polite and respectful. She was hoping he might offer some explanation, or say something to her. But he avoided her eye and didn’t acknowledge her presence.

I
N
Quincy, Dennis Cashman, the judge who had found Swango guilty of poisoning his coworkers eleven years earlier, heard about Swango’s arrest from a
Newsday
reporter who called, and then from Nancy Watson, the official at the AMA in Chicago who had rejected Swango’s application while he was in South Dakota. The judge was amazed and dismayed that Swango had surfaced yet again, en route to still another job as a physician.

This time he picked up the phone and called me.

I have known Dennis Cashman nearly all my life. I was born and grew up in Quincy, Illinois. Cashman’s parents were friends of my parents. I was on a swimming team with one of his sisters, and while Dennis was several years older than we were, I knew him as the city golf champion and an outstanding athlete.

My parents still live in Quincy, and I have other friends there, so I usually visit at least twice a year. Over the years I have come to appreciate much about Quincy that I took for granted while I lived there: the beautiful architecture, much of it dating from Quincy’s heyday in the late nineteenth century; the wide, tree-lined streets and numerous parks; the well-maintained though mostly modest homes; local pride in the school system; and the friendly goodwill that greets me no matter how far I’ve traveled or how long I’ve been gone. But given the town’s relative isolation (St. Louis is over two hours away) and its population of just over 40,000, I was at first
skeptical when Dennis Cashman told me he thought he had been caught up in a story of national significance.

Cashman told me that he’d just learned that a Michael Swango had been arrested at O’Hare. He said Swango had grown up in Quincy and had been the valedictorian of his high school class. I had to think for a moment, but the name Swango was familiar to me from campaign signs that used to dot local lawns when Michael’s grandfather ran for Adams County recorder of deeds. Cashman confirmed that it was the same family. I didn’t know Swango, nor had I ever met him, as far as I can recall. Though he was just three years younger than I, and would have been in high school at the same time, I attended the public Quincy High School, and there was little contact with students at the private Catholic high school. I didn’t remember the poisoning charges that had rocked Quincy back in 1985.

I asked Judge Cashman why Swango had been arrested. “They’ve got him on a minor charge,” he said. But the real issue, he said, was far more serious. Two years earlier, an FBI agent from the bureau’s Springfield, Illinois, office, John R. McAtee, Jr., had visited Cashman in his chambers and said the Bureau was trying to develop a psychological profile of Swango as it continued its search for him. McAtee said the Bureau had recently intervened to have Swango fired from a job dealing with the water system of a large Southern metropolitan area (evidently he meant Atlanta) because of fears he might try to poison the water supply there. Cashman found this startling enough, but then the agent told him the FBI had now connected Swango to numerous possible homicides. The bureau was “reasonably confident,” he said, that Swango had killed sixty people.

“Did you say six?” Judge Cashman asked in disbelief.

“No, sixty,” McAtee replied.

The number of Swango’s alleged victims, would, if proved, rank him among the most prolific and successful serial killers in American history. But Cashman was equally disturbed by the conduct of members of the medical profession. He briefly recounted to me Swango’s employment history, pointing out that doctors and administrators had entrusted patients to a man they knew to be a convicted felon. The medical profession seemed blind to the possibility that one of its own could be a serial murderer. “It’s outrageous
that he has been allowed to go on,” Judge Cashman said. “It’s a national scandal.”

I, too, was stunned by the possibility that someone from my hometown could be a prolific serial killer, and that he had been able to move from one hospital to another. How could such a thing have happened? What could possibly explain the mind of a doctor who took an oath to help people, but instead killed them, seemingly at random? Or was it possible that, as Swango always maintained, he was a victim of a bizarre series of coincidences and a miscarriage of justice?

My nearly two-year-long search for answers took me back to Quincy, to Ohio, Virginia, South Dakota, and Long Island, and finally to Africa. It was only as I stood in a remote field in Zimbabwe, face-to-face with one of Swango’s victims, that I became convinced of his guilt. That Keneas Mzezewa would tell substantially the same story as Rena Cooper, a woman he had never met or heard of, who spoke a different language, and who lived a hemisphere away, could not be coincidence. At the same time, the full horror of Swango’s story sank in. For Swango had preyed on the trust and hopes of sick, helpless people. Mzezewa, who is now impoverished and unable to till his modest plot of ground because he has only one leg, had rolled over and pulled his pants down to make it easier for Swango to inject him. Like all Swango’s victims, he had looked to “Dr. Mike” to save him.

M
ICHAEL
S
WANGO
has consistently refused to be examined by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. He has maintained that there is no reason why he should be examined, since he has done nothing wrong. Or perhaps he is intelligent and knowledgeable enough to have a pretty good idea what a psychiatrist would find.

To better understand someone like Swango, I contacted Dr. Jeffrey Smalldon, a clinical and forensic psychologist whose specialty is psychopathology, and more specifically, serial killers. He has consulted in about 120 death penalty cases, and has interviewed numerous serial murderers, including John Wayne Gacy. As it happens, Dr. Smalldon lives in Columbus, Ohio, and while he has no association with the Ohio State medical school or hospitals, he was familiar with Swango from local news accounts. During the spring
of 1999, I shared with him nearly everything I had learned about Swango’s early life and upbringing, his relationships with family members, girlfriends, and others, and the charges and suspicions he amassed during his medical career.

When we spoke, Dr. Smalldon cautioned me that no diagnosis, however useful, can entirely explain an extreme case such as Swango’s. “Any single explanation will ultimately come up way short,” he said. “Antisocial, narcissistic—there’s still a large amount of unexplained variance and large unanswered questions.”

Still, in many ways Swango seems a textbook case of a psychopath who exhibits extreme narcissistic tendencies. Though the term “psychopath” isn’t currently in formal diagnostic use, the label is still widely used by both professionals and laypeople. A psychopath is generally understood to be someone who lacks a capacity for empathy and may exhibit aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior. The psychopath tends to be highly self-absorbed. The condition is usually classified as an extreme and dangerous variation of narcissistic personality disorder, narcissism being the excessive love of self. But it is not a form of insanity; psychopaths are fully aware of their actions and of the actions’ consequences, and can distinguish right from wrong.

Dr. Smalldon emphasized that he could not diagnose someone he’d never met. But he said that almost immediately after reading the materials I gave him, he “was struck by the incredible narcissism, which is often the most prominent personality feature of a lot of these people [serial killers]. Swango seems to have that sense of entitlement, a preoccupation with control and manipulation.” Swango was a narcissist in some relatively obvious ways, such as his obsession with physical fitness and control over his body’s appearance, and in the control he exerted over his girlfriends. But the ultimate expression of a narcissistic preoccupation is control over life and death.

Serial killers typically betray a fascination with the military and law enforcement, careers in which people are armed, and they often fantasize about violence and disasters in which they emerge as heroes. Serial killer David Berkowitz, the so-called Son of Sam, aspired to be a fireman. He later told an interviewer, “I wanted to die while saving lives, battling a blaze. This is why I wanted to become a
fireman, helping people, rescuing them, and being a hero, or possibly dying in the blaze.”
¹⁶