Miranda O’Berry
Entertainment Editor
Michael Swango is an infamous American serial killer known for poisoning and killing roughly 60 innocent people. The story of Swango’s success in medical murder involves chilling details from expert sources, including a firsthand account from Jim Cullumber, the Director of Institutional Advancement at Crowder College.
Early Life
In the early part of his life, Michael Swango was known as an intelligent, charming young man. However, unlike his peers, Swango had an early fascination with news clippings and articles depicting car accidents and terrible death.
“Michael had a fascination about articles of violent death since childhood,” states James Stewart. Stewart is a writer for the Wall Street Journal and author of the book “Blind Eye: How The Medical Establishment Let A Doctor Get Away With Murder,” a biography of Swango’s life.
These actions went unquestioned by Swango’s close family. Instead, Swango’s mother, Muriel, aided him in collecting and pasting clippings. As Stewart detailed in his book, her excuse was simple. “Mike likes to keep up on these things.”
College
After high school, Swango joined the Marines for a short time before enrolling in Quincy College in Illinois. He graduated in 1979 with the American Chemical Award Society award for academic excellence.
“When I knew Mike, he was a very nice guy,” states William Gasser, Swango’s former chemistry professor of Quincy College. “He was one of my better students.”
During his years at Quincy, Swango developed a particular interest in poisons. He wrote his senior thesis over the poisoning murder of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer, who was murdered with a single pinhead full of ricin (a deadly poison) pricked in his leg.
A Medical Degree
After Quincy, Swango was accepted to medical school at Southern Illinois University. His abnormal behavior became a concern after five patients died under his care. He earned the nickname “Double-O Swango” from his peers, an inference to the famous James Bond movies. He was forced to stay another year at SIU after falsifying reports on OB-GYN patients.
Nonetheless, he graduated in 1983 and was accepted by Ohio State University for an internship.
As in previous settings, Swango had an uneasy reputation at Ohio State. He was reported by lead doctors as temperamental and unknowledgable in his profession.
According to True Crime, one patient, Rena Cooper, was recovering from back surgery at OSU when she suddenly went into violent convulsions. Her roommate later reported seeing Swango in the room, inserting a syringe into her arm. Later reports from Cooper enforced the idea that Swango had injected her with something that caused the near-death experience.
How the Medical Field Failed
Numerous other patients in the span of a year died from sudden respiratory attacks. An investigation was launched within the hospital, but it was quickly dismissed.
Ignorance from doctors that were involved in the situation heeded any further evaluation of evidence that would potentially link Swango to the incident.
According to Stewart, Swango’s continuation of medical school was greatly aided by the reluctance of hospital schools to scathe the reputation of their foundation and ongoing financial fears.
“They [Ohio State] didn’t want to be sued by Swango as a result of unfounded charges and nurses gossip, and then be ordered to reinstate him,” explains Stewart.
Against most wishes, Ohio State Medical Board granted Swango a license to practice medicine in September of 1984, but declined to offer him a second year internship.
Arrested
Swango returned home to Quincy and started work at the ambulance corps. It was during this time that Swango was arrested for the first time. Swango had made tea for his fellow paramedics. They detected a cloying taste within the tea, and took a sample to have sent off and evaluated.
A lethal dose of arsenic was found in the tea. Officials found multiple bottles of ant poison, arsenic, and sources of ricin in his apartment. Swango was arrested on the charge of attempted murder and in 1985, was sentenced to five years in prison.
Jim Cullumber was a police reporter for the Quincy Herald-Whig newspaper during this time in Quincy, Ill. He covered the story of Swango’s arrest and the outcome of his trial.
“When this case broke, all that we knew is that he was arrested for poisoning his co-workers,” stated Cullumber. “We had no idea.”
Swango was released from prison in 1987 and moved to Virginia. From there, the body count of patients that died mysteriously after being around Swango continued to rise. He took two jobs, but was fired from the first and left the second after deciding to continue to pursue his medical degree.
Cullumber explained that in 1990, Swango changed his name to David Jackson Adams. He forged multiple federal documents, reducing his serious prison sentence to a “bar fight” and restoring his own civil rights.
He charmed his way into a residency at the University of South Dakota. His time there was cut short when he attempted to join the American Medical Association (AMA), who did a thorough background check and exposed Swango’s record.
While at USD, Swango met a nurse by the name of Kristen Kenny. They were madly in love until Swango’s crimes were outed. Their relationship took a turn for the worse and they split for a brief while.
From there, Swango joined a psychiatry residency program that enabled him to work in the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, New York. While Swango was in NY, Kenny committed suicide.
Kenny’s mother was astounded at the bizarre situation. According to an excerpt in Stewart’s book, through a chain of informants, she relayed the information to Alan Miller, the head of the psychiatry department in Northport.
The Downfall
Swango confessed his lies to Miller and was promptly fired from the position. According to Stewart, the dean of the hospital, Jorden Cohen, sent an alert to every teaching hospital and medical school in the U.S. warning them about Swango. “Standard procedures for checking applicants were not followed.” Cohen stated furiously.
Shortly after the alert, the FBI obtained a search warrant for his arrest for falsifying federal documents.
Swango fled to Zimbabwe, where he posed as an elite doctor in a mission hospital. After seven recurrent patient deaths, he was suspended from the hospital under great suspicion.
Swango fled Zimbabwe. He planned to travel to Saudi-Arabia, but was forced to go through the U.S. to renew his passport in the process. It was here that Swango’s past caught up to him.
Convicted
He was obtained by airport officials at the Chicago-O’Hare Airport and sentenced to a year in prison for falsification of documents. With Swango in prison, officials worked around the clock to gather enough evidence to convict Swango of his crimes.
While there wasn’t a large case against Swango, the assistant to the U.S. attorney and lead on the case, Cecelia Gardner, felt uneasy towards it. “I was concerned we were looking at a much more serious criminal,” she states.
With a mass amount of circumstantial evidence, many tests had to be performed on the victim’s bodies before there would be solid proof connecting Swango to the murders.
In July of 2000, the federal court sentenced Swango to three life sentences in federal prison for four counts of planned murder and fraud. He is serving that sentence at the Federal Maximum Security Prison in Florence, CO.
Swango was given the choice to be sent back to Zimbabwe and held on trial for his crimes. However, according to Constitution Net, Swango chose to plead guilty in the U.S. due to the fact that Zimbabwe still practices the death penalty.
Cullumber casts a brighter tone on the horrifying situation.
We all now see things in retrospect,” says Cullumber. “Because of James Stewart’s book bringing it all to light, maybe the medical profession is more aware of the situation and the people around them.”
Following the Swango case, multiple investigations were launched in the hospitals that Swango was involved in. It is easier for the public and for the medical profession to rest knowing criminals like Michael Swango can be traced, caught and convicted.
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