Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (45 page)

The FBI concluded that it had to find physical evidence of at least one American murder to make a case against Swango. If they
could, they could then introduce evidence of Swango’s activities in Africa to show a pattern of serial murder, much as Gardner had used evidence from Africa to establish a pattern of fraud. To that end, agents reexamined the records of every patient Swango treated at the Northport VA Hospital, his most recent U.S. employer, looking for symptoms consistent with the kinds of poisons already linked to Swango—among them arsenic, nicotine, ricin, potassium chloride, and succinylcholine. The process was tedious and lengthy, but despite the hasty reassurances issued by Stony Brook officials, their suspicions were strongly aroused by some of the evidence.

Eventually, three bodies were exhumed on Long Island. In addition, autopsy remains were preserved from two potential victims, including Barron Harris, who had lapsed into a coma then died, after an injection by Swango. One of those exhumed was Dominic Buffalino, the retired Grumman employee. Tissue and hair samples were collected and sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., for analysis. Agents also obtained a sample of Kristin Kinney’s hair from the lock saved by her mother.

Tests to determine the presence of poisons are labor-intensive and time-consuming. Even the suspected Long Island victims had been dead for over five years, and many potentially lethal substances decay and disappear in that length of time. But only a few months after Swango’s sentencing, Andrew Buffalino, Dominic’s brother, heard from one of the federal investigators, who said he didn’t want to call Teresa, Dominic’s widow, because his news might upset her.

“Was Dominic a smoker, by any chance?” he asked.

“No,” Andrew replied. “He quit smoking more than fifteen years ago. Why?”

The investigator told him that test results showed an “extreme” level of nicotine in his brother’s body—a level consistent with nicotine poisoning.

EPILOGUE

M
ICHAEL
S
WANGO
, after eight months at a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, entered the Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution in Oregon, a medium-security prison fifty miles southwest of Portland, on February 10, 1999. Following publication of this book and related publicity, including a feature on ABC’s
20/20
seen by other inmates, Swango was moved to a maximum-security facility in Colorado, ostensibly for his own safety. There is no parole in the federal system. But with credit for the seventeen months he had already spent in prison, including the time he was held in Brooklyn, and with credit for good behavior, Swango was scheduled for release on July 15, 2000. He would be forty-five years old, with the possibility of a long medical career ahead of him.

Not long after Swango entered Sheridan, I wrote to him to request an interview for this book. Scott Holencik, a prison spokesman, called to tell me that Swango had emphatically declined my request, and that it would be a waste of my time to pursue the matter.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Holencik replied. I said that, on the contrary, I did want to know.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” he insisted.

As is often the case with suspected serial killers, it is impossible to say with any certainty how many victims Swango has claimed. He began working as a paramedic even before he entered SIU medical school in 1979, and except for the time he was in prison in Illinois, had access to potential victims in an emergency or hospital setting almost continuously until his arrest at O’Hare airport in
1997. My own investigation found circumstantial evidence that links him to the deaths of five patients at SIU, five at Ohio State, and five at the VA Hospital in Northport, Long Island, for a total of fifteen in the United States. In Africa, he became either more prolific or more reckless or both. The evidence suggests that in the three years he spent there, he killed five people at Mnene and fifteen at Mpilo, for a total of twenty in Africa, or thirty-five in total. At least four of his intended victims survived. Given my limited access to patient records, and the efforts of the hospitals involved to minimize the possibility of murder on their premises, it seems highly probable that the actual total is higher. For example, I included no deaths from hospitals in Sioux Falls, although some patients died there while in Swango’s care. The FBI may well suspect sixty murders, as an agent told Judge Cashman in 1995.

If proven, these numbers alone would make Swango one of the top serial killers in American history, possibly the most prolific. The only person for whom reliable data suggest a larger number is Donald Harvey, the Ohio nurse’s aide, who confessed to fifty-two. The next highest total belongs to John Wayne Gacy, who is believed to have killed thirty-three young men. Swango’s hero, Ted Bundy, is estimated to have killed nineteen.

Swango also poisoned people nonfatally. In addition to the five victims in Quincy, evidence links him to three poisonings at Ohio State, three at the placement office in Virginia, and two at Aticoal, to his landlady Lynette O’Hare, and to his girlfriends Kristin Kinney and Joanna Daly, as well as Daly’s four children, for a total of twenty poisoning victims.

If, indeed, Swango was responsible for so many deaths, then, given the evidence of his psychopathology, it is all but certain that such a pattern of killing and poisoning would resume if he is released from prison. At Swango’s sentencing, Judge Mishler ordered that he remain under supervision for three years after his release, and that he receive psychiatric counseling, but Mishler noted that “if the patient doesn’t want it, it won’t do any good.” In any event, there is no known effective treatment for the severe psychopath. To deter Swango from manufacturing or harboring poisons or weapons, the judge also provided for periodic, random searches of Swango’s living quarters during his supervised release. Ominously,
Swango protested this aspect of his sentence, and appealed on the ground that it is unconstitutional.

The FBI feared that Swango would flee the country immediately after release, rendering all efforts to monitor or control him futile. Only conviction on a murder charge would secure the mimi-mum sentence likely to protect the public: life imprisonment. (The federal code specifically cites murder by poison as a crime punishable by “death or imprisonment for life.”)

With encouraging test results from Dominic Buffalino in hand, FBI agents, other federal investigators, and pathologists traveled to Zimbabwe in late 1998. They exhumed the bodies of four of Swango’s victims at Mnene: Mahlamvana, Chipoko, Ngwenya, and Shava. They returned to the United States with tissue and hair samples, as well as samples from Margaret Zhou that had been saved by Zimbabwean authorities.

While the critical physical evidence that had so long eluded investigators appeared to be falling in place, proving murder beyond a reasonable doubt still seemed less than certain. The earlier FBI record in the Swango case had hardly been stellar. The Bureau repeatedly lost track of Swango—in Florida through what seems sheer disorganization—and allowed him to elude prosecution for years. By the time it occurred to Cecilia Gardner to pursue him on lesser fraud charges, Swango had fled the country. Nor was a thorough investigation of suspicious deaths at the Northport VA hospital undertaken until after Swango’s arrest at O’Hare, when evidence had had four more years to disappear or grow stale. But the FBI no doubt deserves credit for its more recent work on Long Island and under difficult conditions in Zimbabwe, as well as for its sophisticated lab work.

Despite this success, the FBI had no potential U.S. case in which an eyewitness saw Swango give an injection to a patient who died and in whom subsequent tests found physical evidence of poisoning. No one saw Swango inject Buffalino or any of the other suspected victims on Long Island apart from Barron Harris. Though the Buffalino family was told that Dominic’s body had elevated levels of nicotine, they weren’t immediately shown the official autopsy results. Then investigators seemed to back away from nicotine as the likely poison. (In fact, test results indicated a lethal dose of a drug called epinephrine, a form of adrenaline readily available in hospitals. In moderate
doses it is used to stimulate a failing heart but in higher concentrations can be fatal, causing the heart to go into overdrive.)

Though Elsie Harris saw Swango give an injection to her husband, Barron Harris lingered in a coma for thirty-seven days, making it extremely difficult to prove that the injection she saw was the immediate cause of his death. Only in Africa were there numerous potential eyewitnesses. Even though test results there could have been contaminated because the corpses were not embalmed and, buried in simple cloth shrouds, were exposed to the earth, Swango could be extradited to Zimbabwe. The extradition treaty between Zimbabwe and the United States was ratified in late 1999.

Still, given the overwhelming amount of consistent, circumstantial evidence from numerous possible victims, from multiple hospitals and locations, it seemed highly likely that Swango would face a murder charge before the end of his prison term. A grand jury was convened for that purpose in the spring of 2000.

M
URIEL
S
WANGO
, Michael’s mother, who had set such store by her bright, talented third-born child, knew nothing of his fate. Despite Michael’s occasional references to his mother being dead, she was alive in a nursing home in Palmyra, Missouri, a hamlet across the Mississippi River from Quincy. Michael never visited her or, so far as nursing home officials knew, made any attempt to contact her. Her condition steadily deteriorated. She didn’t recognize the last relative who visited her, one of Michael’s cousins, who found Muriel lying in the fetal position, unable to feed herself and unable, or unwilling, to speak.

Muriel died in the autumn of 1999 at the age of seventy-eight. There was no ceremony and no announcement.

Only Michael’s half brother, Richard Kerkering, visited him in prison. Swango asked to be assigned to a prison in Oregon so he could be near Richard, who retired from his accounting practice in Florida and now lives in the Portland area. But after Swango was transferred to Colorado, the visits from Richard ceased.

Swango’s brother Bob has read avidly on the subject of the psychopathic mind and serial killers. He and his brother John have spoken on the phone about Michael, and agreed that Michael is fully capable of murder.

A
T
Ohio State University in Columbus, Dr. Manuel Tzagournis remained vice president for health services after Swango’s apprehension. Tzagournis, both through a spokesman and his secretary, repeatedly declined comment on all aspects of this book. In late 1999, Tzagournis resigned his administrative post, saying “this is a good time to make the change.” To mark the occasion, the university trustees named the OSU medical school research facility after him. He remained a practicing physician and faculty member at the medical school.

Michael Whitcomb, the hospital medical director and the doctor in charge of the Swango investigation, took a leave of absence and then left Ohio State. He became dean of the University of Missouri school of medicine in Columbia in 1986 and then, in 1988, became dean of the medical school at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In 1990 Dr. Whitcomb resigned after an employee claimed he plied her with liquor, left with her in his car, and, after suffering a flat tire, sexually assaulted her, first on the ground outside the car and later in a public park. She filed a criminal complaint, but evidence suggested that the sexual activity was consensual, and the King County prosecutor declined to file charges. At the time of his resignation, Whitcomb said the charges were “false and unfair” but conceded, “This is conduct I consider unbecoming for anyone.” He acknowledged he had had a drinking problem for several years, but said he had stopped drinking and was undergoing counseling.

Despite the controversy in Seattle, and despite the problems that had surfaced while Whitcomb was still at Ohio State, Tzagournis rehired Whitcomb as director of the Institute of Health Policy Studies; he returned to Ohio State in 1992. He resigned two years later.

After working briefly for the AMA in Chicago, Whitcomb became senior vice president for medical education at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. Reached there in 1998, Whitcomb said, “I have no interest in talking to anyone about this [Swango]. It’s been poorly reported and there have been many inaccuracies.”

Dr. Joseph Goodman, who initially handled the hospital’s investigation of Swango, was promoted from assistant to associate professor of surgery and remained on the faculty, specializing in neurosurgery. Goodman did not respond to repeated phone calls.

R
OBERT
H
OLDER
, the Ohio assistant attorney general who handled the Swango investigation, became an associate to Tzagournis in charge of legal affairs, retaining the post after Tzagournis’s resignation. When I reached him at his office early in my research for this book, he defended the university’s investigation of Swango and the decision to allow him to complete his internship. “Naturally, our review was criticized after the fact,” he said. But “you don’t come to a meeting thinking someone is a complicated psychopathic killer.” He emphasized that at the time, no one knew of any blemish on Swango’s character. “This complaint was taken very seriously and was considered by a distinguished group” that “did a more extensive review than my subsequent experience tells me that a lot of places would do.” He added that “the concern of the group at the time was to be evenhanded,” and he denied that concern over potential liability was a factor. Still, he acknowledged that with benefit of hindsight, “we could have done better—there’s no doubt about that.” He said the university and the hospital had heeded the recommendations in the Meeks report and that steps have since been taken to improve relations between the police force and the hospital.

But of the three most important recommendations contained in the Meeks report, none was implemented. In 1999, thirteen years after the report was issued, there was no security office that reported to a hospital administrator staffed “with persons trained as investigators and capable of handling medically-related investigations,” as Meeks recommended. Nor was a “statement of principles” formally implemented to govern police presence in the hospital in an effort to ease tensions between law enforcement and hospital personnel.