Michael Swango | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers

Michael Joseph Swango (born October 21, 1954 in Tacoma, Washington) was a physician and surgeon, who fatally poisoned at least thirty (and possibly many more) of his patients and colleagues. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and is currently serving that sentence in prison.

History

Details of Swango's early life are unclear, but he did serve in the Marine corps, receiving an honorable discharge in 1980. From there he went to Southern Illinois University, where he entered medical school.

Swango's troubles were first noticed during his time at SIU. He had bad manners and no bedside manner. As early as that, he had a noticeable fascination with dying patients. He was also called lazy, and was nearly expelled after being caught cheating during his obstetrics and gynaecology rotation. In the end, the school let him graduate if he repeated the course work.

Despite a poor recommendation from SIU, Swango got a surgical internship at Ohio State University in 1983. Nurses began noticing that apparently healthy patients on floors where Swango worked began mysteriously dying with an alarming frequency. One nurse caught him injecting some "medicine" into a patient who later became strangely ill.

The nurses reported their concerns to the administrators, but were met with accusations of paranoia. Only a superficial investigation was conducted. But although Swango was cleared by this investigation, Swango resigned under mysterious circumstances in 1984, and was not asked back to OSU because of concerns about his skill as a surgeon.

In July 1984, Swango returned to Illinois and began working as an Emergency Medical Services technician. Soon, many of the paramedics on staff began noticing that whenever Swango prepared the coffee or brought any food in, several of them usually became violently ill, with no apparent cause. In October of that year, Swango was arrested by the Quincy, Illinois Police Department, who found arsenic and other poisons in his possession.

On August 23, 1985, Swango was convicted of aggravated battery for poisoning co-workers at the Adams County Ambulance Service. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment.

After his release in 1991, Swango forged several legal documents which he used to reestablish himself. He forged a fact sheet from the Illinois Department of Corrections that falsified his criminal record, stating he had been convicted of a misdemeanor for getting into a fistfight with a co-worker and received six months in prison, as opposed to the five years for felony poisoning that he actually served.

He also forged a "Restoration of Civil Rights" letter from the Governor of Virginia, falsely stating that the Governor had decided to restore Swango's right to vote and serve on a jury, based on "reports from friends and colleagues" that Swango had committed no further crimes after his "misdemeanor" and was leading an "exemplary lifestyle."

In 1991, Swango used an alias, David J. Adams, to apply for a residency program in West Virginia. Then, in July 1992, he began working at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

A few months later, in December of that year, Swango made the mistake of attempting to go from there to joining the American Medical Association. The AMA did a more thorough background check than the medical center, and discovered the poisoning conviction in Swango's past. The AMA informed the medical center where Swango was working, and the medical center discharged Swango quietly.

The AMA temporarily lost track of Swango, who managed to get employed at the residency program at the Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center, affiliated with the State University of New York Medical School at Stony Brook School of Medicine.

This time, Swango posed as a psychiatry resident, and once again his patients began dying for no explicable reason. Four months later, the Dean at South Dakota finally learned that Swango had moved to New York, and placed a call to the dean at Stony Brook, Dr. Jordan Cohen. Swango was discharged in October. This time, the residency director learned from past mistakes and sent a warning about Swango to over 125 medical schools and over one thousand teaching hospitals across the nation.

Now that most of the hospitals in the country had been warned about him, Swango had no choice but to practice in another country. In November 1994 he surfaced in Zimbabwe and got a job at Mnene Hospital. There again, his patients began dying mysteriously. It was not for another year, however, that the poisonings were traced to him, and he was arrested in Zimbabwe.

He was charged with poisonings, but he escaped Zimbabwe before his trial date, and hid out elsewhere in Africa and Europe. A year and a half later, in March 1997, he applied for a job at the Royal Hospital in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, using a false resumé.

In June 1997, he began a double flight from Africa to Saudi Arabia. He had a layover between flights at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois, and it was there that he was arrested by Federal authorities. Three years later, he was finally tried for the murders he had committed in his medical practices. On July 11, 2000, Michael J. Swango pleaded guilty to killing three of his patients, and fraud charges. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Modus Operandi

Swango did not often vary his methods of murder. With non-patients, such as his co-workers at the paramedic service, he used poisons, usually arsenic, slipping them into foods and beverages. With patients, he sometimes used poisons as well, but usually he administered an overdose of whichever drug the patient had been prescribed, or writing false prescriptions for dangerous drugs for patients who did not need them.

It is estimated that, over the course of his career, Swango killed anywhere between thirty and sixty people, even though he was only convicted of three of them.

Trivia

While he was in training, Swango's colleagues gave him the nickname "Double-0-Swango" (a play on James Bond's 007) because seemingly any patient he came in contact with would soon die.

In 1999, Simon & Schuster published a biography of Swango, entitled Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder, written by James B. Stewart.