Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (46 page)

Following publication of this book,
The Columbus Dispatch
did its own inquiry, confirming that the important Meeks recommendations had not been implemented. “The people I talk to say it’s worse than it was before,” former OSU police chief Peter Herdt told the
Dispatch.
And the director of hospital security, Robert Meyers, told the paper, “Doctors are doctors. . . . believe me, I know. They’re like fighter pilots—you can’t tell them much.”

Meeks also recommended that Ohio State take steps to improve relations with the press. Initially, Ohio State’s director of communications, Malcolm Baroway, who also dealt with the press
during the original Swango affair, offered to help with my research and make others at OSU available. But little assistance was forthcoming, and doctors and other staff later told me they had been discouraged from talking. I arranged all of my interviews independently of the OSU public relations office. After David Crawford, a spokesman for the hospital, demanded that all questions be in writing and then refused even to disclose the number of beds in the Ohio State Hospitals, I called Baroway to complain. “Frankly, we’re just not very interested in helping you,” Baroway replied.

It is one thing to try to thwart a journalist. But Cecilia Gardner, the former assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Swango case, told me that her repeated calls to Holder went unreturned—the only instance she could think of in her career of another lawyer’s failing to return a call from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Nor did Holder return my calls after our initial conversation. Baroway told me Holder was “tired” of talking about Swango and would not be calling me back.

U
NLIKE
some of those who exonerated Swango, Jan Dickson, the chief of nursing who brought Swango to top OSU hospital administrators’ attention, left the university in 1985, shortly after the Swango investigation was concluded, after her position was eliminated in a reorganization. She became chief of nursing at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock. “The doctors did not want to believe,” she told me recently. “They were in denial.”

Donald Boyanowski, the acting OSU hospital executive director who thought the police should have been called, was replaced in 1985 and joined a hospital in Newark, Ohio. He was more blunt than Dickson. “Jan and I were ostracized” at OSU for raising concerns about Swango.

Boyanowski and Dickson were married in 1988. They retired and moved to Dickson’s family farm in northeast Missouri, which coincidentally is not far from Quincy. Dickson, who was afraid to walk her dog alone in Columbus while Swango was there, still worried that if Swango was released, he would return to the Quincy area.

E
D
M
ORGAN
remained an assistant prosecuting attorney in Columbus. After more than a decade, he was still bitter about his inability
to prosecute Swango and the behavior he encountered at OSU. “I was frustrated,” Morgan told me. “It was incredibly frustrating. If we had been contacted, there was a lot of evidence that would have been available. Instead, the evidence had disappeared. You have to have physical evidence. The circumstantial was not enough. It was shocking to me that this was not referred to me earlier.”

The doctors and administrators at the university hospitals “greatly resented the intrusion of law enforcement in their affairs,” Morgan said. “From day one they resented us. They never really cooperated, or it was grudging cooperation. They didn’t trust us. They were petrified of lawsuits. When they realized they had an errant doctor, they [simply] didn’t renew his contract and let him slip away.” In short, he said, “They covered it up, that’s what it was.”

Every year, Morgan and Tzagournis attended a New Year’s Day party at the home of a mutual friend. In the thirteen such occasions since he issued his report on Swango, Morgan said, Tzagournis barely spoke to him.

A
MONG
other university medical personnel who dealt with Swango, Dr. John Murphy, the faculty member who defended Swango at SIU and saved him from dismissal, continued as a pathologist in Springfield and remained on the SIU faculty. Having taken Murphy’s course that covered toxicology, Swango wrote him from prison after his conviction in Quincy asking Murphy to help him disprove the charges. But by then Murphy had changed his views about Swango, and realized he had made a terrible mistake in defending him. He didn’t reply to Swango’s letter.

“To be honest, I feel very bad,” Murphy told me. Rosenthal and Swango’s other critics, he conceded, “were much more correct” about Swango. “I was wrong about him. I was duped.”

Dr. Anthony Salem, who recommended Swango’s admission to the University of South Dakota residency program, left Sioux Falls in 1998 for reasons unrelated to Swango and is now a physician at the Veterans Administration hospital in Las Vegas. “I bungled it, no question” he said. “But I wasn’t the only one who bungled it.”

Dr. Robert Talley, who warned SUNY–Stony Brook that Swango might be among their residents, remained dean of the medical school at the University of South Dakota. He declined to comment on any aspect of this book.

Dr. Alan Miller, the former director of admissions for the residency program at SUNY–Stony Brook, remained on the faculty as a part-time professor of psychiatry. At the time he was asked to step down as director of the psychiatric residency program, residents protested that he was unfairly made the fall guy; they wrote a letter of protest to the dean and asked Miller to speak at their graduation. Dr. Miller was also forthright about what happened. Admitting Swango was “a conspicuous oversight,” he said, “and I take responsibility for it.” Still, he said, it pains him to think that after a long and illustrious career, this is how he will be remembered. “In my professional life, this is the worst single episode,” he told me.

After he resigned his post as dean at SUNY–Stony Brook, Jordan Cohen accepted a position as head of the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C., the same organization that handles applications for residencies. Cohen said at the time that he saw the new position as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be of service, nationally, to academic medicine.” Ironically, he was working there with Dr. Whitcomb, which meant that two of the doctors involved in Swango’s career were overseeing the application process of all medical school residents in America.

A
L AND
S
HARON
C
OOPER
, Kristin’s parents, moved to an attractive new condominium development in Yorktown, Virginia, with their cat and dog. Al fully recovered from his heart surgery. Sharon said that after Kristin’s death, and especially after she learned of his past, she feared Swango, but now would be happy to confront him face-to-face. “I don’t care if he tries to kill me,” she told me when I visited their home. “He can’t take anything more precious away from me than he already has.” After repeated inquiries, the Coopers were finally told by the FBI that Kristin’s hair sample had tested positive for the presence of a toxic substance. The sample also indicated that Kristin had been poisoned over a lengthy period of time.

Sharon Cooper has agonized over the thought that if she had acted sooner to warn people about Swango, others might be alive today. After she learned of Barron Harris’s death on Long Island, she called Elsie Harris, and both women wept. Harris tried to reassure her, saying that Sharon had done everything that could have been expected, probably more than most people would have done. “I was grateful to talk to Mrs. Harris,” Cooper told me, but whatever
happens to Swango now, “we feel we have been given a lifetime sentence. All I want from Michael is an admission of guilt for what he’s done and his willingness to take the consequences. My main interest is to make sure, or to try to help, to see that he is not back in circulation.”

R
ENA
C
OOPER
, the woman whose paralysis and brush with death at Ohio State Hospitals in 1984 launched the first serious investigation of Swango, was still living in Columbus at the time of Swango’s sentencing. She was eighty-four years old, lived alone on $737 a month in Social Security, and complained to me that she was subsisting at the “poverty level.” Her mind seemed alert and she said she clearly remembered the terrifying events in the hospital. “You know, they said we were crazy,” she told me with some indignation, referring to herself and her hospital roommate, Iwonia Utz. She told me that there was no doubt in her mind that Swango was the person who injected something into her IV tube. “It was Swango himself,” she said emphatically. “I’d seen him before, on his rounds.” She maintained that she never identified her attacker as a female, or as wearing a yellow pharmacy coat.

Cooper filed suit against the hospital in 1986. Advised by her lawyer that it was the best she could hope for, she settled the case in 1989 for a mere $8,500, an outcome that prompted her to write a letter to the judge. On lavender stationery adorned with small flowers and bees, she wrote:

I did not know that life was so cheap in the eyes of some people.

I have nothing against O.S.U. hospital, nor do I have any hatred for young Swango.

I do feel that he is asking for help but no one seems to hear him screaming. I hope before it goes too much further young Swango will get the help he is asking for and needs.

Sincerely,

[signed] Mrs. Delbert Cooper, Sr.

Rena E. Cooper

2000

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL
for the efforts of my two research assistants on this book, J. R. Romanko in the United States and Foster Dongozi in Zimbabwe. J.R., did extensive research and interviewing and tracked down scores of sources and participants, many of whom had married, changed their names, and moved to distant locations. This alone was a daunting and time-consuming process. He endured a freak snowstorm that closed the Sioux Falls airport, rendering service above and beyond the call of duty. He was also an indefatigable fact-checker. I will miss our work together.

To say the chapters on Africa would not have been possible without the assistance of Foster is no exaggeration. He speaks Shona, Ndebele, and English and served as an interpreter and a guide. I would never have reached Swango’s victims and witnesses in the Mnene area without the assistance of Foster and local police. He proved a resourceful and hardworking journalist.

Alice Mayhew, my editor at Simon & Schuster, as she has been for all my books, guided this book from its inception and provided critical support at just the right times in the sometimes daunting reporting and writing process. I am lucky to have the benefit of her wisdom and friendship. Carolyn Reidy, president and publisher of the trade division, was immediately enthusiastic when I proposed this book, and David Rosenthal, vice president and publisher of the hardcover division, was also a strong supporter. I am grateful to them both. My thanks also to Ana DeBevoise, Emily Remes, Layla Hearth, and Jolanta Benal.

My agent, Amanda Urban, encouraged me to pursue this story and made it possible for me to do so. I am grateful for her encouragement and advice.

Steve Swartz, editor and president of
SmartMoney
, provided a professional
home for my work and was a valuable sounding board throughout the reporting and writing. I am grateful for his advice and friendship. Julie Allen assisted me in myriad indispensable ways, always with efficiency and good cheer.

I first wrote about Michael Swango in the November 24, 1997, issue of
The New Yorker.
My editor there, John Bennett, encouraged me to pursue the story the moment I mentioned it to him, and provided valuable guidance. He also encouraged me to pursue the many unanswered questions remaining after the story appeared. Tina Brown, then the editor of
The New Yorker
, assigned the story and gave me her unqualified support. Amy Tübke-Davidson was an outstanding fact-checker and researcher.

I am also grateful to Tamar Galed and Jana Drvota at the Ohio State University Archives and to Ron Ackerman in Springfield, Illinois.

Dan Isenschmid, chief toxicologist at the Wayne County (Michigan) Medical Examiners Office, provided valuable guidance on the subject of poisons.

As usual in writing a book, I counted on the patience and love of my friends and family to see me through, even when I must have seemed preoccupied and unavailable. My parents, Ben and Mary Jane Stewart, in addition to deserving my gratitude for all they have done for me, also helped with my research, since they live in Quincy and know many of the participants there. My sister, Jane Holden; her husband, John; my nieces Lindsey, Laura, and Margaret and nephew Jack; my brother, Michael; and his wife, Anna, all provided support and encouragement as well as memorable family gatherings.

Elizabeth McNamara rendered valuable legal counsel as well as friendship. Kate McNamara, now eight years old, inspires and delights me. My thanks, too, to Barbara Noble for her friendship and encouragement.

James Swartz, my godson, and Langley Grace Wallace, my goddaughter, were born during the writing of this book, and I look forward to the day when they can read their names. I am grateful for the friendship of their parents, Steve and Tina Swartz and Monica Langley and Roger Wallace.

Among my friends, I wish to thank Jim Gauer, Joel Goldsmith, Edward Flanagan, Didier Malaquin, Gene Stone, Arthur Lubow, Jeffrey Khaner, Jane Berentson, James Cramer, Jill Abramson, Jane Mayer, Neil Westreich, Laurie Cohen, and George Hodgman.

Benjamin Weil provided daily sustenance and encouragement, read the manuscript, and offered astute editorial suggestions. I will always be in his debt. I am grateful, too, to his parents, Daphne and Richard Weil, who have made me feel a part of their family.

(1)
Michael (right) had little contact with his father, John Virgil Swango, a career military officer who seemed happiest during the nine years he spent in Vietnam. The family moved sixteen times before he retired. Here they are pictured at snowy Fort Richardson, Alaska, in 1957, when Michael was three. Michael's older brother Bob is at left.