Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (47 page)

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Michael (left) with his half brother, Richard Kerkering (center), and Bob. Richard later left the Swango home to live with his father, but Michael stayed closer to him than to his other brothers.

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Michael said his mother, Muriel, “held the family together.” She favored Michael, who she said was “gifted,” with a private school education and music lessons, but rarely bestowed any affection on any of the four boys, Richard, Bob, Michael, and John, the youngest.

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After Michael returned from the Marines in 1976, he was obsessed with fitness, dressed in military fatigues, and, when criticized, dropped to the floor to perform push-ups.

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Classmates at Southern Illinois University's medical school found it fitting that Swango was alone in all his yearbook photos. He made few friends, and some classmates tried to have him expelled. His nickname was Double-O Swango, which meant “License to Kill.”

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Confronted with eyewitness reports that Swango had tampered with a patient's IV tube and nearly killed her, Ohio State College of Medicine Dean Manuel Tzagournis asked for a report, then ultimately ordered that Swango be allowed to complete his internship.

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Dr. Joseph Goodman, the Ohio State neurosurgeon in charge of investigating Swango, attributed the reports to the “nurses' grapevine” and concluded the rumors were unfounded and “out of hand.”

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When police searched Swango's apartment in Quincy, Illinois, in October 1984, they found a virtual poison lab, with a book bearing a skull and crossbones amid vials, needles, bottles, and handwritten recipes for poisons. These are two photographs of the evidence. The recipe cards, shown at right, include formulae for ricin, botulism, supersaturated cyanide, and fluoroacetic acid.

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Kristin Kinney met Swango at a life support class in Newport News, Virginia. “He'll give me all his attention and take good care of me,” the popular, vivacious nurse told her parents.

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Like many who met him, Kristin was attracted to Swango's all-American looks and demeanor. Kristin and Michael became engaged in 1992, just after he was accepted to a residency in internal medicine at the University of South Dakota.

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When news broke in South Dakota that Swango was a convicted poisoner, he dismissed the reports as a “media hoax.” But horrified hospital officials rushed to suspend him, and South Dakota governor George Mickelson said he was “incredulous” that Swango could ever have been hired as a medical resident. Here Swango ducks the press after a hearing to protest his suspension.

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The VA hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota