Michael Joseph Swango was a licensed physician who poisoned patients and colleagues in the United States and Zimbabwe between 1981 and 1997. He admitted causing four deaths. Estimates of the real number run to sixty and will not now be established. He is serving three consecutive life sentences without parole at ADX Florence in Colorado, where he asked to be held.
He was born James Michael Swango in Tacoma, Washington on October 21, 1954 and raised in Quincy, Illinois, the middle child of Muriel and John Virgil Swango. His father was a career Army officer who served in Vietnam, was listed in Who's Who in Government, and was an alcoholic. Swango kept scrapbooks of disasters and violent deaths. He qualified in medicine at Southern Illinois University in 1983, over faculty concerns serious enough that his graduation was nearly blocked.
During his internship at Ohio State University Hospital in 1984, nurses on his ward reported that patients were dying or suffering sudden respiratory collapse after he had visited them, and one saw him inject something into an intravenous line. The hospital ran a brief internal inquiry, cleared him, and did not go to the police. He did not get his residency. When Ohio State's own officers later tried to obtain his files, hospital officials stalled them, and by the time Franklin County prosecutors had the material, too much evidence had been lost or destroyed to bring charges.
He returned to Illinois and worked as a paramedic. In 1985 he poisoned co-workers with arsenic in doughnuts and iced tea, was convicted of aggravated battery, and served two years, during which Illinois and Ohio rescinded his medical licence.
He then re-entered medicine repeatedly on forged documents and an invented account of the conviction as a barroom brawl. He was taken on in South Dakota, and in 1993 at Stony Brook, which placed him at the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Long Island; his application was never properly checked. He was discharged from that residency in October 1993. He went on to Zimbabwe, where patients again died and the authorities suspended him in 1995 and prepared a warrant.
His fiancee Kristin Kinney killed herself. Her parents believe arsenic poisoning caused the mental disorientation that led to it.
He was arrested at Chicago O'Hare in June 1997, on his way to a post at a hospital in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The immediate charges were fraud and improper use of controlled substances: he pleaded guilty on July 12, 1998 and Judge Jacob Mishler imposed the maximum, with a direction that at no point in his confinement should he have any duty involving the preparation or delivery of food.
That sentence bought investigators time. Bodies were exhumed and tested positive for poison, and days before his release in July 2000 a federal indictment charged him with three murders at Northport. George Siano, Aldo Serini and Thomas Sammarco, killed in 1993 by injection. A fourth patient, Barron Harris, was poisoned and survived; in two of the cases Swango had told staff the families had issued do-not-resuscitate orders. On September 6, 2000, facing a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to five counts of a nine-count indictment and told the court he had intentionally killed each man by administering toxic substances he knew were likely to cause death. Mishler imposed three consecutive life terms without parole.
Prosecutors read from his diaries at the hearing. Asked for a motive, the assistant US attorney Gary Brown said that basically Swango liked to kill people. The stepdaughter of one of the dead told the court that the institutions where the murders happened should also be held accountable.
He was then returned to Columbus and on October 11, 2000 pleaded guilty in Franklin County to the aggravated murder of Cynthia Ann McGee, nineteen, a gymnast recovering from a road accident, whom he had injected with potassium on January 14, 1984 while an Ohio State intern. Judge Lisa Sadler imposed life with parole eligibility after twenty years, the maximum available for the offence as it stood in 1984. Prosecutors have said they needed his admission to charge it at all: their evidence was a nurse who had seen him enter McGee's room with a syringe.
The case is standard teaching in medical governance, and the reason is the sequence rather than the poison. Ohio State cleared him internally and told nobody. Illinois and Ohio took his licence but the record did not follow him. Stony Brook did not check his application. Each institution passed him on, and he went on killing at the next one. The American press called him the Doctor of Death.