Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (48 page)

(13)
When she returned from South Dakota, Kristin had stopped wearing her engagement ring. But Swango told Kristin's mother, “I want to get everything back on track with Kristin.”

(14)
The remote Mnene Mission Hospital in the African nation of Zimbabwe seems little changed since its founding in 1927 by Lutheran missionaries. Church officials could hardly believe their good fortune when they recruited Swango, who they thought was dedicated to the poor and afflicted and had an outstanding résumé.

(15)
Doctors at Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, at first embraced Swango's assertion that he'd been a victim of reverse discrimination against whites at Mnene. Only later did the fact that he was living in the hospital, with access to patients at all hours, seem sinister.

(16)
At this Zimbabwean farmstead, five brothers and sisters, now orphans, are trying to support themselves by farming. Both their father and their cousin died unexpectedly while being treated by Swango at Mnene.

(17)
Swango arrives for arraignment at the federal courthouse in Uniondale, New York, on Long Island. He agreed to plead guilty to fraud charges and was sentenced to forty-two months in prison in June 1998 for gaining admission to a medical residency at the State University of New York under false pretenses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James B. Stewart is the author of
Follow the Story, Blood Sport
, and
Den of Thieves
. A former editor of
The Wall Street Journal
, Stewart won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading. He is a regular contributor to
The New Yorker
and
SmartMoney
.

ALSO BY JAMES B. STEWART

Heart of a Soldier

Follow the Story

Blood Sport

Den of Thieves

The Prosecutors

The Partners

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NOTES ON SOURCES

I
WROTE
M
ICHAEL
S
WANGO
three times in the course of my work on this book, once while he was in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn after his arrest, and twice after he had pleaded guilty and was transferred to Sheridan, Oregon. He declined each of my requests for an interview. In my last letter, I offered him the opportunity to write his own statement, which I would include in the book. He declined.

As I told Swango, “At times I feel I have visited, spoken to, or tried to speak to virtually everyone who has known you.” Much of the information in this book is based on hundreds of interviews with participants in the story, conducted from September 1997, when I first spoke to Judge Cashman, until May 1999.

Most of these were on-the-record interviews. In researching most of my previous works, I had to conduct many interviews on a not-for-attribution basis because sources feared retaliation in the form of damage to their careers and professional lives. With respect to the present book, fear of retaliation was a factor primarily for sources at Ohio State. But some sources expressed a different and more potent fear: that Swango would exact retribution by poisoning them or their families.

Because of these concerns, some people refused to talk. A few interviews were conducted on a not-for-attribution basis and in one instance, that of the person who alerted Dean Talley to Swango’s presence on Long Island, I deleted a name. For others, the decision to speak to a journalist required an unusual level of personal courage and dedication to the truth. While I think it highly unlikely that Swango would seek revenge—it has not been his modus operandi to do so—I decided it would be unfair to protect some sources by withholding their names and not do the same for
others. I have thus taken the unusual step of not listing the people I interviewed, not even the many who spoke on the record.

All quotations of dialogue and descriptions of states of mind were carefully reported and whenever possible, verified with multiple participants. Usually, where I have attributed a state of mind to someone, that person has expressed it directly, in an interview or in contemporaneous notes; in rare instances, the person in question revealed his or her state of mind to someone else. Quotations come from the speaker, from someone who heard the remark, or from transcripts and notes of conversations.

The major events of this story span approximately fifteen years, and participants’ memories of some events, especially those occurring in the mid-1980s, have naturally faded over time. Some of these incidents, however, were so shocking and unusual that they seemed to lodge quite clearly in witnesses’ and participants’ memories, and many people were able to provide remarkably detailed accounts. Fortunately, the events at Ohio State in 1984 and 1985 and in Quincy, Illinois, in 1985 were the subject of numerous interviews and written reports shortly after they occurred. Most of the relevant dialogue comes from those earlier written records; in cases where later recollections differed, I have generally deferred to the earliest accounts. Particularly useful were the voluminous trial records in Quincy and the Meeks and Morgan reports in Ohio. In other cases, the text refers to notes and diaries kept by participants, which provided insights into their thoughts and comments at the time of the events in question.

These materials made possible an unusually detailed account of events that happened some time ago. But readers should bear in mind that remembered conversations are rarely an exact reproduction of the words actually spoken. Multiple witnesses to an event often provide at least slightly different accounts of what they saw and heard. This is apparent in the discrepancies between the Meeks and Morgan reports, which described some of the same events. In a few instances I discovered that both reports, while consistent, were nonetheless wrong. In nearly every case I was able to harmonize conflicting accounts, and that version appears in the text.

An exception is the varying accounts Dr. Whitcomb gave of his pivotal interview with Swango soon after Rena Cooper suffered her respiratory arrest at Ohio State. Did Swango say he was in the room because Cooper asked for her slippers, as Whitcomb told Meeks, or because he was going to draw blood, as Whitcomb later told police?

In another discrepancy, Rena Cooper insisted in an interview with me that she was never interviewed by Dr. Whitcomb, who was in charge of the hospital’s investigation. During the Meeks investigation, however, Dr. Whitcomb said he interviewed Cooper. Meeks concluded, however, “it is
not clear to us whether Dr. Whitcomb separately spoke with [Cooper] or simply relied upon Dr. Goodman’s interview.”

In each of these instances, Dr. Whitcomb could presumably clarify these inconsistencies, but he declined to be interviewed.

Spellings of African names are English transliterations of the Shona and Ndebele languages. The spellings are based, whenever possible, on police records. However, in many cases different spellings are in widespread use.

Published accounts on which I relied are usually mentioned in the text. Following is a bibliography of the principal written source material. Several books are included for general background on the psychology of murderers.

B
OOKS

Abrahamsen, D.
Confessions of Son of Sam.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Capote, Truman.
In Cold Blood.
New York: Random House, 1966.

Douglas, John E.
Journey into Darkness.
New York: Pocket Books, 1997.

———.
Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit.
New York: Pocket Books, 1996.

Hickey, Eric W.
Serial Murderers and Their Victims.
Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1991.

Lane, Brian, and Wilfred Gregg.
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.
London: Headline Press, 1992.

Linedecker, Clifford, and William A. Burt.
Nurses Who Kill.
New York: Pinnacle Books, 1990.

Mailer, Norman.
The Executioner’s Song.
Boston: Little Brown, 1979.

Meloy, J. Reid.
The Psychopathic Mind: Origins, Dynamics, and Treatment.
New York: Jason Aronson, 1988.

Ressler, Robert K.
I Have Lived in the Monster: Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Serial Killers.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.

———.
Whoever Fights Monsters.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.

Rule, Ann.
The Stranger Beside Me.
New York: New American Library, 1996.

Sullivan, Terry.
Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders.
New York: Pinnacle Books, 1999.

ARTICLES

On Swango’s father:

McGauley, John. “Swango: We Could Have Left as Winners,”
Quincy
(Ill.)
Herald-Whig
, Sept. 20, 1979.

Swango, John Virgil. “The Year of the Rat: Free World Assistance in Vietnam,” Agency for International Development, 1972.

On Swango at Ohio State:

Associated Press. “Girlfriend Says Swango Innocent,”
The Plain Dealer
(Cleveland), Aug. 20, 1985.

Barry, Steve. “Seizure Witness Voices Fear of Dr. Swango,”
The Columbus
(Oh.)
Dispatch
, Feb. 20, 1985.