Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (5 page)

Muriel had always favored Michael over the other boys, and she did so now, too. The attention galled Bob, who had long, unkempt hair, had never graduated from college, and still looked like a hippie. At the funeral, people kept referring to him as “Mike’s
brother.” He hadn’t spoken to Michael in years, but he thought his brother’s poise, his charm, and his earnest-young-professional demeanor were an elaborate charade.

The military hero’s farewell accorded Virgil glossed over the reality that the Swango family had for all practical purposes disintegrated. Virgil had died from cirrhosis of the liver, lonely, living in a mobile home, his Vietnam exploits long forgotten. He and Muriel, though never divorced, had legally separated. She had had no contact with him since he left the family home in 1976, following a prolonged bout of heavy drinking and an altercation in which he struck her. Muriel had said that she wouldn’t tolerate physical abuse, and she insisted that he move out. Though she was in touch with his doctors, she did not visit or speak to her husband during his final days in the hospital.

Like many Vietnam veterans, Virgil Swango had had a difficult time adapting to civilian life. He went to work in Quincy as a real estate agent for Richard “Hap” Northern, an old family friend, but his sales and commissions were meager. His father, John Harvey Swango, had been a prominent Democrat and served as Adams County recorder of deeds for twenty-eight years, a remarkably long tenure for an elected position. Confident that he would have high name recognition and would be greeted by voters as a war hero, Virgil tried to pursue a political career, running as a Democrat for a post as county supervisor. The campaign was his first indication that Vietnam veterans were viewed not as heroes, but as “losers,” as he later put it. He was painfully disappointed when he came in last in a four-man race.

With his political hopes dashed, Virgil immersed himself in patriotic and veterans’ organizations—the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Reserve Officers Association—and made the rounds of Quincy’s many neighborhood taverns. When he was cited for valor by the State Department in 1976, he commented bitterly to
The Quincy Herald-Whig
that “Vietnam is old hat now. Everybody’s forgotten about it.” The same article mentioned Virgil’s “pride” in his son “Michael, at 21 following in his father’s footsteps with the military as a sergeant with the Marine Corps.”

It is ironic that in his last years, Virgil looked to Michael as a source of paternal pride. For he had almost no contact with him or
his other sons, and had had only sporadic involvement with them as children. The family moved sixteen times in the course of Virgil’s military career, from Washington State, to Fort Benning, Georgia, to Fort Worth, Texas, to San Francisco. From 1968 to 1975, the stretch when Virgil served in Vietnam, the family lived in Quincy, where Michael entered junior high school. Virgil visited once every six months, and then seemed only too eager to return to Southeast Asia. A photo from his time in Vietnam shows him relaxed and smiling, sunbathing on a webbed lounge chair outside his trailer with a drink in hand.

When he did spend time with the family, he ruled with military precision. When the boys were young and the family was living at Fort Benning, he trained them to march in formation, salute, and execute military commands. Whenever visitors came to the spacious house reserved for the family because of John Virgil’s rank as an officer, he put the boys through their paces, then dismissed them. He also enforced a disciplinary code derived from the military principle that an officer is responsible for the conduct of those he commands. In the Swango household, this meant that the oldest child was responsible for his younger brothers, so Bob was punished whenever Michael or John misbehaved. (Dick, Muriel’s oldest son from her prior marriage, had left to live with his father, in part to escape the rigors of life with Virgil.) But the actual punishment was usually delegated to Muriel, except on a few occasions—such as the time Bob stole $10 from his father, or when he referred to an officer named Maloney as Baloney—when Virgil whipped Bob with a belt. Michael, on the other hand, was never subject to corporal punishment, nor was John. Still, all the boys were afraid of their father.

Muriel herself had little stomach for discipline, which tended to flag whenever Virgil was away. One day at Fort Benning the boys returned home to find her sobbing, slumped over the kitchen table. It was the first time any of them had seen her cry. When they asked what was wrong, she explained that a colonel who lived next door had berated her for “letting your children run wild.” The boys rode their bikes and roamed the neighborhood unsupervised, and while watching professional wrestling on TV, Bob and Mike often wrestled, too, which sometimes threatened to get out of hand.

But the boys were no more unruly than most children their
age, and despite the neighbor’s criticism, Muriel seemed determined to be a good mother. She read to the children, helped with their homework, created math problems for them. She belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club and was always giving them books. (She especially loved mysteries and true-crime thrillers.) Muriel did her best to maintain a routine of family meals. Thanks to Virgil’s military salary and the low cost of living, the family was well provided for, and the boys were clean and neatly dressed.

At the same time, Muriel was oddly distant emotionally. Virgil’s sister, Louise Scharf, and her husband lived with the Swangos for a while in Quincy, and later visited them at Fort Benning. They rarely saw Muriel kiss or hug any of the boys or display any other affection toward them. Nor did they ever see her cry. When Virgil’s handsome, popular, much younger brother Robert died suddenly of kidney failure at age twenty-four, emotionally devastating the Swango family, Muriel shed no tears at the funeral, even though she had been close to her brother-in-law. (She named Michael’s older brother Bob after him.) Louise had worked in Quincy as a waitress at the Dug-Out, a popular restaurant where Muriel and her first husband, Richard Kerkering, often went out for dinner. Muriel struck Louise as very reserved and formal in her demeanor.

At Christmas, none of the boys’ presents were ever wrapped. Muriel simply put them in paper bags, which she stapled shut. When the boys clamored for a pet, Muriel said no, citing their father’s allergic reaction to animal hair. But the children never saw any evidence of such allergies. When Michael was in first grade, the boys were given a rabbit for Easter. It lived in a chicken-wire cage behind the house for two weeks, until a neighbor’s dog got into the cage and ate it.

The Swango clan, most of them gregarious and affectionate by nature, generally found Muriel and Virgil’s home cold and inhospitable, but they chalked it up to Muriel’s upbringing. Muriel’s father, John Strubhart, was a barber in tiny Breese, Illinois, due east of St. Louis. Of German background, he was a strict disciplinarian who maintained a stereotypically Teutonic distance from Muriel and her sister. And Muriel’s failed first marriage to Richard Kerkering, who turned out to be a heavy drinker, had done nothing to bolster any inclination toward warmth or intimacy.

Virgil met Muriel near the end of World War II, when he was
home on leave. She was recently divorced and working as the office manager for the Swango family physician. A slender, attractive brunette, she had been raised a Catholic, but never attended church or said much about religion. Virgil was tall, handsome, solidly built, sociable, and had worked for his father in the recorder of deeds’ office before joining the Army.

At the end of the war, Virgil, who held the rank of captain and was serving in Korea, was among the American signatories to the Japanese surrender. He had been married twice before, both times briefly, and had a daughter from his first marriage. He wrote his second wife from Korea to tell her he wanted a divorce; she was devastated by the unexpected news. He had another girlfriend at the time, but after meeting Muriel, he courted her assiduously; they were married in 1947. A few years later, he returned to Korea. Virgil was away when Bob was born, in 1950, and Muriel moved back to Breese to live with her parents until her husband returned in 1953. The family moved to Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington, where Michael was born in 1954, and then to Fort Richardson near Anchorage, Alaska, where John was born. Snapshots from Alaska show an apparently happy, laughing young family in a snowy landscape, with Bob and Michael on miniature skis. After three years there, Virgil was transferred to Fort Benning.

In later years, Muriel and Virgil never said anything about their romance and courtship or early years together. Bob sometimes compared his parents to the prim Ward and June Cleaver on
Leave It to Beaver
, a television show the family watched. Muriel and Virgil slept in twin beds and there were no signs of physical affection between them. Not even the boys ever saw them kiss or trade affectionate hugs. Still, they always assumed their parents were happily married. The only mention of sex came when Bob was in the eighth grade. Virgil took him aside and in serious tones told him it was time “to teach you the blood lines.” Though Bob waited expectantly, that was all his father ever had to say on the subject.

Despite living in far-flung military outposts, the Swangos stayed in touch with their families in Breese and Quincy. Although the boys pleaded for trips to Disneyland or a national park, visits to relatives constituted the family’s only vacations. Until Virgil left for Vietnam, every summer he loaded the family and their luggage into
a station wagon and they set out for visits to the grandparents. The boys were lodged in the rear of the unair-conditioned car for what seemed like unending treks across the sweltering Southern or Plains states. Their parents sat in the front seat, chain-smoking. Virgil ran the expeditions like military maneuvers, barking orders at the boys, rejecting pleas to visit tourist attractions along the route or to make brief stops, even to use a rest room. They stopped only when he deemed it appropriate. On these trips, he referred to Muriel as “the navigator.”

When Virgil returned from Vietnam in 1963, after his first tour there, he was assigned to teach military science in the ROTC program at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and the family moved to Texas. But Virgil, plainly chafing at his classroom assignment, eagerly volunteered to return to Vietnam less than a year later. The family moved back to Quincy. Then, in 1966, Virgil was transferred from Vietnam to San Francisco, where the family lived at the Presidio. After nearly twenty-six years, his Army career was winding down, and it was clear he would soon be retiring with a generous pension. But he made little pretense of any interest in the family. Even though he was now back in the United States, with a routine desk job, he was out late almost every night, and Muriel and the boys rarely saw him.

One evening Bob, Michael, and John were watching TV and doing their homework when their father returned. They heard their mother confront him. “Why are you never home?” she angrily demanded. Some kind of argument ensued, with shouting, that left Muriel in tears. Virgil stormed out of the house. The boys were shocked. This was only the second time they had ever heard their mother weep, and they had never seen her openly angry at their father. They thought maybe their parents would divorce. But nothing more was ever said, and in September 1967, after Virgil was promoted to full colonel and almost immediately announced his retirement, the family returned to Quincy. They moved into a spacious new ranch-style brick house on Maple Street. Michael entered the seventh grade at Quincy Junior High School.

Virgil talked vaguely about entering politics, but he had barely settled in when he joined the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and studied briefly at the Foreign Service Institute
in Washington, D.C. He flew to Vietnam, arriving in Saigon on December 30, 1967, just in time for the Tet offensive, beginning January 30, 1968. On February 1, 1968, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a Vietnamese national police commander, executed a Viet Cong insurgent in downtown Saigon in full view of an NBC crew, an AP photographer, and some American officials. The resulting photograph, which won a Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most enduring images of the war, shows Nguyen holding a pistol inches from the head of the prisoner, who stands with his hands tied behind his back. Virgil Swango kept a copy of the photograph for the rest of his life, and made a point of showing it to Michael. He may have witnessed the execution, since he was in Saigon at the time.

After a few weeks in Saigon, Swango was assigned to Go Cong province as a senior adviser to CORDS, or Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. Go Cong province, located in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon, is often cited as one of the few successful U.S. efforts at “pacification” of the Vietnamese countryside. The fertile rice-growing area experienced relatively few combat operations.

A photograph from the period shows Colonel Swango escorting visiting American defense secretary Melvin Laird; in another snapshot, he is with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu. Swango was also close to the American military adviser John Paul Vann, the subject of Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book
A Bright Shining Lie.
The two had fought together at the pivotal battle of Ap Bac in 1963, a significant early defeat for the American and South Vietnamese forces. In 1970, Vann shifted Swango to Chau Doc province, noting that since Go Cong had been successfully pacified, Swango “must be bored.”

While the full history of AID’s involvement in Vietnam remains murky, the CORDS operation embraced both military and civilian operations. During Swango’s tenure, CORDS was staffed in part by CIA agents, many with military backgrounds. The CIA also ran the Phoenix Program, a “pacification” project that overlapped and sometimes merged with CORDS operations until 1969, when responsibility for Phoenix was transferred to the military. The Phoenix Program gained notoriety for torturing and executing suspected Viet Cong agents operating in the South. Bob and Michael
later told others that their father was in the CIA and served in the Phoenix Program—“murdering people and burning villages,” as antiwar Bob described it—but while he surely would have known the extent of CIA activity and counterinsurgency operations in his region, there’s nothing to suggest that Virgil was directly involved. On the contrary, his colleagues and friends in Vietnam at the time say that Swango was a bona fide AID official who oversaw agriculture and civilian development projects and believed passionately in the American cause.