Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (6 page)

In 1972, Virgil Swango prepared a lengthy report on his activities in Vietnam, which is relentlessly optimistic and, with benefit of hindsight, almost touchingly naive. “While Free World Military forces battle the enemy with guns and grenades,” he wrote, “there is an equally vital, if less publicized, battle underway. No less than 40 nations of the Free World are involved in this battle—the struggle against hunger, poverty, ignorance and fear. Each success in this field makes the enemy’s appeal weaker, and makes the job of the fighting man easier.”

To his colleagues in Vietnam, Virgil made no mention of a family in Quincy. He lived in a mobile home decorated with knickknacks he’d picked up during vacations in Southeast Asia. One plaque quoted the chronically inebriated W. C. Fields: “Water? Who drinks water? Fish fuck in it!” There were no family photographs. Virgil drank heavily and liked to socialize with colleagues. They knew he had been married more than once, but not that he still had a wife or children.

Perhaps the reason for his silence was that he was living with a Vietnamese woman. According to a family member in Quincy in whom he confided, he had fallen in love. He made brief, sporadic visits to Muriel and the boys only out of a sense of duty. After he was featured on the
NBC Nightly News
in 1972, the
Herald-Whig
ran a brief article about his being on TV. Interviewed by the paper, Muriel said she hadn’t known he was going to be on television and hadn’t seen the program.

Back in Quincy, there was almost a sense of relief among his sons that Virgil had returned to Vietnam for what seemed an indefinite stay. Since the incident at the Presidio, relations between husband and wife had been even cooler than usual. On his visits home
he seemed restless and eager to return. He told his wife and sons little about his life or activities in Vietnam. He maintained that disclosing details of his work, even to his family, would be a breach of security, but his reticence may have fostered the boys’ speculation that he was engaged in violent CIA-directed exploits. As the boys grew older and more independent, they increasingly resented their father’s military strictures.

Once they moved back to Quincy, the semblance of a family life steadily eroded. Muriel gave up on the family meal, preferring to spend her evening hours bowling or playing bridge with friends—two activities she pursued avidly. She left a supply of TV dinners in the freezer, and the boys simply heated their own meals whenever they wanted, almost never sitting down together. One Thanksgiving she baked a turkey and made rolls, but then seemed to give up, for there was nothing else on the table.

When Muriel was home, she spent her time with Michael, listening to him play the piano or clarinet, typing his homework, or discussing the mysteries and thrillers that she loved and that he had begun to read almost as avidly. As early as the sixth grade, Michael had been a reader of true-crime magazines and comic books, as had Bob. But Bob soon moved on to science fiction, whereas Michael began buying copies of the
National Enquirer
, scanning its pages for sensational crime stories. He clipped some of the articles, and Muriel helped him assemble them into a scrapbook.

Bob and John began to feel left out. Whatever love their mother could muster for her children seemed to be allocated disproportionately to Michael. Only he received the music lessons, the expensive clarinet, the private-school education. But not even Michael received motherly hugs or kisses. Muriel seemed incapable of expressing any physical affection. Bob and John increasingly sought emotional contact and a family life outside their home, and were all but adopted as surrogate sons by their friends’ parents. Bob dressed in tie-dyed overalls, let his hair grow, and hung out with hippies. Though Michael seemed to have a few close friends in high school, he seemed content, even eager, to stay at home with their mother whenever she was there.

Michael’s aunts, Louise Scharf and Ruth Miller, and other relatives were concerned about Muriel’s blatant favoritism toward
Michael. But she always defended it, saying Michael was much smarter than the other boys, was gifted, and needed special attention. Louise and Ruth disagreed. Michael was undeniably smart and talented, but so were Bob and John. Virgil’s sisters thought Michael was arrogant and rude, in part because he was spoiled by his mother. Once when relatives were visiting the Swango home, some from out of town, Michael entered the living room, looked them over briefly, then went to his room without so much as saying hello.

On another occasion, Muriel mentioned to Ruth and Louise that Michael had wrecked his car. “What happened?” they asked.

Muriel said, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask,” she replied.

After Bob left home, Muriel complained to Ruth that she’d had to hire a yardman because Michael didn’t want to mow the lawn. “If I had a strapping young man like you do at home, I certainly wouldn’t hire someone” was Ruth’s indignant reaction. Yet Muriel seemed indifferent to their concerns. As the family members said on many occasions, for Muriel “the sun rose and set” in Michael.

Given Virgil’s work in Vietnam and devotion to the American cause, Bob’s dress, friends, and increasingly antiwar politics were bound to cause trouble. Muriel expressed no views of her own on the Vietnam conflict, saying only, “Your dad’s there so you should support him.” But Bob and Virgil argued violently on his rare visits home and grew increasingly estranged. Muriel worried that Bob’s views would influence Michael and John, and that further conflict might erupt in the already fractured family.

Bob graduated early from high school and enrolled for his freshman year at Quincy College. In the spring of 1970, he wrote his father a letter reiterating his opposition to the war and concluding, “How can you call yourself a Christian, doing what you’re doing to these people?” He showed the letter to his mother. “You can’t send that,” she protested. “It will really upset him.” Despite the warning, Bob posted the letter.

Several days later, Muriel told Bob that his father was flying home to see him. When Virgil arrived after the twenty-two-hour flight, he met with Bob alone, grim-faced and determined. Virgil said his son was nothing but a “Commie fag,” gave him $20, and ordered
him out of the house. He had paid for one night at a downtown hotel, after which Bob would receive no financial support and would be on his own.

Bob vacated the house as ordered. His brothers seemed stunned into silence. Michael didn’t even say good-bye. Muriel showed no emotion at his departure, saying only that it had been his father’s decision, and it was his duty to accept it. The next morning, less than twenty-four hours after arriving, Virgil left for Vietnam.

Bob lived with friends in Quincy and then with his half-brother Richard in Florida for the summer. The following fall, Muriel relented and, without telling Virgil, let Bob live at home temporarily while he continued his studies at Quincy College. She also paid his tuition. But after his sophomore year he dropped out and hitchhiked to Oregon, leaving home this time for good. Bob never saw his father again, nor did he see Michael until Virgil’s funeral.

In the tumultuous waning days of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Virgil was placed in charge of evacuating the cities of Nha Trang and Qui Nhon. North Vietnamese troops had cut off the road from Nha Trang to the airport, so Americans, anticommunist Vietnamese, and foreign nationals had to be moved by military helicopters, which were mobbed by panicking refugees. In his nomination for an Award for Valor, Swango was cited for “courage, coolness and discipline . . . that brought the crowd under control and prevented deaths, injuries, and damage to the helicopters.” He was nonetheless unable to evacuate the woman with whom he had been living; she stayed behind in the Delta. “I left Vietnam in 1975 with only my boots, pants, shirt, and glasses,” he later said.

After the evacuation, Virgil retired from the State Department and returned home to an America bitter about the war and indifferent to its veterans. Despite the nomination, no medal ever materialized. Virgil confided in his sisters, Ruth and Louise, that he was bored with being a husband and father. Relations with Muriel remained strained, and the tensions culminated in the fight that caused Muriel to order him out of the house. Within a year of Virgil’s return from Vietnam, she was granted a formal separation, though divorce proceedings were later suspended. Michael made some attempts at getting his parents to reconcile, but to no avail. Virgil moved into a mobile home that oddly replicated his quarters
in Vietnam. One of his close friends from the war called him there from his bachelor party in Washington, D.C., to include Swango in the festivities. Virgil seemed touched by the gesture but wrapped in loneliness.

Swango spent his last years drinking Jack Daniel’s whiskey, chain-smoking cigarettes, and reading books about Vietnam. He was mugged at gunpoint one night outside the Plaza, a popular Quincy restaurant and bar. Increasingly infirm from cirrhosis of the liver, he moved into the Illinois Veterans Home the year before he died. He was bitter over the American defeat and his reception as a Vietnam veteran. When the
Herald-Whig
interviewed him for a 1979 retrospective on the conflict, he maintained that “the war was lost in Washington . . . the enemy was aided and abetted by the anti-war attitude and knew it would eventually lead to victory . . . . We came home the losers when we could have been the winners.

“In World War II,” he continued, “the GIs came home to open arms. Their jobs and sweethearts were waiting. They were heroes. In Vietnam, nothing like that happened. They came home to people who somehow blamed them for the war.”

A
FTER
Virgil’s funeral, Muriel discovered a box of books and papers that had belonged to her husband, and in it she found a scrapbook of articles and photographs of car crashes, disasters, and other incidents of violent death. Knowing he would be interested, Muriel later gave the scrapbook to Michael. “I guess my dad wasn’t such a bad guy after all,” he said.

Michael had had a fascination for articles about violent death since childhood, when he began clipping
National Enquirer
articles. He dutifully clipped articles and photographs and entered them into an ever-expanding library of scrapbooks, which probably explains why his classmates at Millikin noticed an interest in car crashes. Sometimes, when he was busy, his mother clipped and pasted the articles into the books for him. Ruth Miller thought this peculiar; she once asked Muriel why she kept articles on such grisly subjects for Michael. Muriel just shrugged and said that Michael had asked her to clip and save anything about violent death. “Mike likes to keep up on these things,” she explained, presumably in connection with his work in emergency medicine.

Working with America Ambulance in Springfield brought Swango into regular contact with victims of car crashes, heart attacks, and violent crime. His fellow paramedics, many of whom thought highly of his work, nonetheless noted his unusual fascination with violent death, and were familiar with the scrapbooks. They often saw him cutting out the articles while waiting for an ambulance call. Once, a coworker asked him why he clipped and saved the articles. “If I’m ever accused of murder,” he replied, the scrapbooks “will prove I’m not mentally competent. This will be my defense.” No one took this seriously.

Absent his fixation on violent death, it is hard to understand why he commuted to Springfield during his first year of medical school, and worked up to twenty-four-hour shifts during his second and third years, crowded with clinical and academic demands, for a job that paid ten cents above the minimum wage. Swango told fellow paramedics that he could maintain such a schedule because he subsisted on only two to three hours of sleep a night. Indeed, colleagues in the ambulance service were amazed that Swango would sleep only thirty minutes, then jump up and work for twelve hours straight, almost manic with energy. They’d never seen anything like it.

Even so, his work on the ambulance crew increasingly took a toll. He became so angry one day that he kicked in a cabinet door in the kitchen area of the ambulance headquarters. (He had to pay for it.) His long hours also affected his performance as a medical student. Whereas he had prepared feverishly during his first year, some of his fellow students now found him ill-prepared, careless, and hasty to the point of negligence, always rushing from one class or task to another, interrupting his work whenever his pager indicated he was needed for an ambulance run. Still, when it came time to apply for internships and residencies, Swango secured a glowing letter of recommendation from Dr. Wacaser, the neurosurgeon who had been his mentor, which he sent to about ten teaching hospitals. Wacaser inscribed a handwritten addendum to each copy of the letter—“He’ll really do a good job for you”—the only time Wacaser had gone to such lengths for one of his students.

Much as they do in applying to medical school, graduating medical students apply for internships and residencies through the
Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C., which forwards applications to teaching hospitals with openings. After the initial screening of applications, hospitals winnow the field and conduct personal interviews with candidates who seem attractive. Then they rank the candidates, returning the list to the national match program, which then compares the applicant’s preferences with the hospital rankings.

Every year, the third Wednesday in March is known in medical schools nationwide as Match Day.
¹
At noon, Eastern Standard Time, students and hospitals all over the country learn whether they have gotten their first-choice internships and candidates. It’s possible for a student to receive no match at all. Though pleased, even Wacaser was surprised when Swango told him that he had been accepted for an especially prestigious internship in neurosurgery at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. Given that SIU’s medical school was not especially well known, had no recognized neurosurgery program of its own and no nationally known surgeons to serve as mentors, and awarded only pass-fail grades, Swango’s success was hard to fathom even apart from the fact that most of his classmates thought he was weird and incompetent. It was especially galling to Sweeney, the other classmate specializing in neurosurgery, and to Rosenthal, who remained the most vocal of Swango’s student critics.