Michael Swango was a physician who killed patients by injection. In 2000 he pleaded guilty in federal court on Long Island to murdering three veterans at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport, New York, in 1993, and a month later he pleaded guilty in Columbus, Ohio, to the 1984 murder of Cynthia Ann McGee, a 19-year-old patient at Ohio State University Hospitals. Those four killings are the ones a court has recorded. He had already served prison time in Illinois for putting arsenic in the food and drink of ambulance co-workers, and he spent most of the years between his release in 1987 and his arrest in 1997 getting back into hospitals by hiding that conviction.
His case became a study in how institutions handle a dangerous colleague. Nurses at Ohio State raised the alarm in 1984 and were not believed. Hospitals in South Dakota and New York hired him on altered papers. A mission hospital in Zimbabwe took him on after that. Federal investigators who had only a fraud charge to hold him on spent years building a murder case, and they filed it days before his scheduled release. Investigators and the author of the main book on the case believe he killed many more people than the four he admitted. Those figures are estimates.
Swango was born in 1954 in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up in Quincy, Illinois, Columbus Monthly reported in a 2022 timeline drawn from court records, the press and James B. Stewart's book Blind Eye. His mother, Muriel Swango, told the Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg in 1998 that he had been a well-adjusted child; she was estranged from his father, whom the paper described as an alcoholic. A publisher's summary of Blind Eye likewise describes an absent, alcoholic father and a boy who showed early promise in schoolwork, music and athletics.
He was the valedictorian of his high school class in Quincy in 1972 and scored in the 97th percentile on his college boards, The Toledo Blade reported in 2000. A high school teacher remembered him as a brilliant clarinet player. He went to Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, on a music scholarship, played the clarinet there for two years, then dropped out and joined the Marine Corps. He received an honorable discharge in 1976. Back in Quincy he enrolled at Quincy College, where he took a double major in chemistry and biology with a 3.89 grade-point average and graduated summa cum laude in 1979.
Stewart, according to a Salon review of his book, traced warning signs back to this period, including notebooks Swango filled with newspaper clippings about train wrecks and car crashes. A paramedic who later worked with him in Quincy told The Blade that Swango kept scrapbooks of clippings about accidents and poisonings and called it "just a compulsion."
Swango entered the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in 1979, The Blade reported, and most sources give his graduation year as 1983 (the Daily Egyptian, SIU's student paper, gave 1982 in one 2000 article). The clinical school is in Springfield.
Classmates there gave him the nickname "Double-O Swango," after James Bond's license to kill. The Blade reported that the nickname came after patients he saw died unexpectedly. Dr. John Murphy, an SIU professor who had taught him, told the Daily Egyptian in 2000 that the name reflected only that Swango was different. Murphy described him as eccentric, said there was "never any indication he was a danger," and called reports that the killing began at SIU unsubstantiated, because a student had no patients under his direct care. The Daily Egyptian reported that the medical school had never formally investigated deaths of patients he saw.
Other accounts are harsher. According to the Mail & Guardian, a vote was once taken to dismiss him before he was allowed to finish, and classmates described him as "immoral to the point of psychopathic." The publisher's summary of Blind Eye says classmates saw poor performance, that he commuted 100 miles to work as an emergency medical technician against school rules, and that students' charges of incompetence failed. Despite all this he won a place in Ohio State University's neurosurgery residency program; The Blade reported he was the only student offered a spot out of about 60 applicants.
Swango began a surgical internship at Ohio State University Hospitals in Columbus in July 1983, according to the federal indictment later filed against him. By early January 1984 he had received unsatisfactory performance evaluations, the Franklin County prosecutor Ed Morgan said in court in 2000, and on January 14 he began a one-month rotation on the neurosurgery floor of Rhodes Hall.
That night he killed Cynthia Ann McGee. She was 19, grew up in Dublin, Ohio, and was a gymnast at the University of Illinois, according to Columbus Monthly and the Associated Press. Two months earlier a car had struck the bicycle she was riding, and she was in the hospital recovering from her injuries. She was running a fever of 102 to 104 degrees, and Swango was called to draw a blood culture, which he said he did at about 11:30 p.m. At midnight a code blue was called and she was found unresponsive, Morgan told the court. Swango was on the floor at the time and did not respond to the call. A nurse's report described her as having a "pale, dusty bluish look." Prosecutors said in 2000 that he had injected her with a lethal dose of potassium; the indictment says it caused cardiac arrest. The 17-year-old driver of the car that hit her was convicted of reckless homicide and sentenced to probation and community service; his mother said in 2000 that she hoped his record would be cleared.
Her parents, William and Janis McGee, said in a statement read at the 2000 hearing that not a day went by when they did not think of "Cindy."
McGee's was one of several deaths on the floor in a short time. The Blade, reconstructing the period from records and interviews in 2000, counted seven deaths in just over two weeks, where two or three would have been normal: McGee on January 14; a 21-year-old man within the following week; a 43-year-old man on January 24; and an elderly head-injury patient on February 6, at whose bedside a nurse said she saw Swango using at least two syringes. None of these other deaths was ever charged. The prosecutor who investigated them, Ed Morgan, said in 2000 that he had always believed Swango was involved in "a lot more deaths at Ohio State" but lacked the evidence to prove it.
On February 7, 1984, a 69-year-old woman who had undergone back surgery hours earlier stopped breathing after Swango had been at her bedside. Her roommate said she saw him inject something into the woman's IV line, and three witnesses in all, a nursing student among them, saw or described the injection. Doctors revived her. Afterward she wrote notes asking who the blond doctor was and saying someone had put something in her IV tube. A nurse's aide found a syringe with its plunger pushed down on a bathroom sink in a room Swango had just left; another nurse put it in a cabinet. It was never tested, and it was later thrown away because no investigator asked for it, The Lantern and The Blade reported. The federal indictment of 2000 charged that Swango assaulted her that day with an intravenous toxic substance that caused respiratory and neurological paralysis. She survived.
Medical center officials met with two lawyers on February 8, The Blade reported, and the police were never called. The hospital put the inquiry in the hands of Dr. Joseph Goodman, a professor of neurosurgery. According to The Blade, he did not interview key nurses or residents, did not speak to the surviving patient's roommate and did not examine the syringe, and no autopsies or tests were carried out. He concluded the complaints were unfounded. Dr. Manuel Tzagournis, then the medical college dean, allowed Swango to return to work. A follow-up review by the medical director, Dr. Michael Whitcomb, consisted of three interviews and produced no notes. A 72-year-old leukemia patient died the day Swango was cleared, and two more patients died afterward, The Blade reported.
In late February the residency review committee voted not to keep him on after June, and he left the program on June 30, 1984. Three doctors nevertheless wrote letters supporting his application for a medical license, one rating him "good" and another "excellent"; the final letter described him as "exonerated" and wrongly said the February patient had died. He received his Ohio medical license in September 1984. The Blade also reported that while at Ohio State he brought "extra spicy" fried chicken to three fellow residents at Children's Hospital, all of whom became violently ill.
Kirkus Reviews, summarizing Stewart's book, said administrators declined to discipline him because they "didn't want to be sued by Swango."
In July 1984, while waiting for medical licenses from Illinois and Ohio, Swango went home to Quincy and took a job as a paramedic with the Adams County Ambulance Corps, according to the indictment and United Press International. On September 14, 1984, four paramedics fell sick after eating doughnuts he brought in, The Blade reported. Later a Coke he handed a colleague at a high school football game and a 7-Up made others ill, and in the end six paramedics had been sickened. Mark Krzystofczyk, one of the paramedics, described Swango's scrapbooks to The Blade.
On October 12, 1984, paramedics looked in his duffel bag and found two bags of Terro ant poison, whose ingredients are arsenic and sugar, one full and one empty. They set a trap with a jug of iced tea, and it later tested positive for 35 milligrams of arsenic. Police arrested him on October 26, 1984, on seven counts of battery. In his home they found mouse poison, Terro ant poison, castor beans, roach powder, syringes, a jug of sulfuric acid and other chemicals, three guns, and books including one called The Poor Man's James Bond, along with handwritten cards on extracting ricin and making botulism toxin and cyanide, The Lantern and The Blade reported. The same day, Quincy investigators phoned the Ohio State campus police, who told them they had never heard of him.
Days after the arrest, Swango applied to National Emergency Services, a Toledo company that staffed hospital emergency rooms, and its vice president, Robert Haller, was impressed enough to hire him. He was introduced at Fisher-Titus Medical Center in Norwalk, Ohio, and at Wyandot Memorial Hospital in Upper Sandusky. Fisher-Titus said he worked two shifts there; Wyandot could not say how often he had worked. News of the Illinois case broke on January 31, 1985. A doctor later reviewed the charts of 52 patients Swango might have seen and found nothing unusual, The Blade reported.
The case went to trial in the spring of 1985. On May 3, 1985, a jury convicted him of aggravated battery, according to the federal indictment. The Blade reported that he was found guilty on six of the seven counts, the seventh having been dropped because of a low arsenic level in one paramedic's hair. None of the paramedics became seriously ill, UPI reported. At trial Swango said the poisons came from a chemistry set he had bought in Columbus and that his notes on ricin grew out of a castor bean research project at Quincy College and newspaper articles, The Lantern reported.
Sentencing came on August 23, 1985, in the Adams County courthouse before Judge Dennis Cashman. The State's Attorney, Thomas Leeper, asked for 20 years. The defense lawyer, Dan Cook, asked for two to three years and argued that his client had never been a "threat to society." The prosecutor Chet Vahle questioned Robert Haller of National Emergency Services, who testified that he would hire Swango again "if it were up to me." Cashman later called that "the most preposterous thing I've ever heard in court." He said he believed Swango was a threat to society and imposed the maximum the law allowed: five years, with the six terms running concurrently. Cashman later told The Lantern that Swango "wasn't trying to kill them" but enjoyed bringing people close to death and asking them about their symptoms, and he described him as "very superficially charming" but "actually a very dangerous person." Swango had been in the Adams County jail since August 15, when the Illinois Supreme Court revoked his bond.
His Illinois medical license was suspended, and both his Illinois and Ohio licenses were revoked, according to UPI and the Associated Press chronology. He served his sentence at the Centralia Correctional Center, the Daily Egyptian and Long Island Press reported, and was released on August 21, 1987, after about two years, under an Illinois good-conduct rule that Cashman said was later discontinued. "Of course he had good behavior," the judge said.
The Illinois case forced Ohio State to look again. In October 1984 the campus police, the Franklin County prosecutor and the state medical board began examining his internship, Columbus Monthly reported, and Ohio authorities opened a murder investigation in 1985, according to the federal indictment. The investigation was started at the request of an Illinois police department, not the hospital, The Lantern reported. Investigators from Quincy, the Ohio State police under Chief Peter Herdt and the Adams County coroner said hospital officials stalled officers who asked for his files. By the time records were released, evidence had been lost.
Morgan's report found that wrongdoing could not be proved. Of the deaths examined, only one was ruled a homicide by the Franklin County coroner's office, The Lantern reported in 1998. Morgan criticized the hospital's inquiry for having no leader, missing witness statements and ignored physical evidence. Ohio State also asked James Meeks, the former dean of its law school, to review its handling of Swango. His report, completed in 1985, called the hospital's inquiry "far too superficial" but found no cover-up. It described "open hostility" between medical staff and campus police, rooted in an earlier undercover police investigation of staff, as the reason the police were not called. It found that the three witnesses to the February injection had been dismissed despite their consistent accounts, and that the syringe was never tested. Investigators, Meeks wrote, "still find it astounding that no permanent record was kept." Herdt said years later: "This could have been stopped in 1983."
While Swango was in prison, ABC's 20/20 interviewed him in a segment broadcast in 1986, in which Hugh Downs remarked that the story had "an ending that leaves room for a sequel," Salon reported. The interview mattered later. According to Bruce Sackman, the VA special agent who led part of the federal investigation, an ABC replay of the prison interview cost Swango a later medical post, and Kristin Kinney's mother said she followed his story through 20/20 and other news programs.
After his release Swango went to Virginia, whose medical board rejected his application for a license, The Blade reported. He worked at a career counseling business, where three co-workers fell sick with sudden vomiting. The Associated Press chronology records that he was investigated in 1989 for the nonfatal poisonings of three co-workers in Newport News, Virginia, and that no charges were filed; in 1990 he was certified as a paramedic in Virginia.
He legally changed his name to David Jackson Adams, according to The Blade; the indictment lists "David Jackson Adams" and "Jackson Kirk" as names he used. In November 1990, as "David Adams," he applied for a residency at the Ohio Valley Medical Center in West Virginia. On May 20, 1991, according to the indictment, he submitted altered court documents describing his conviction as the result of a barroom brawl. The hospital rejected him on June 3, 1991, after learning the truth.
The forgeries became his standard method. He altered a document to recast his felony poisoning conviction as a misdemeanor for a fight with co-workers, with a six-month sentence in place of five years, and he forged a letter supposedly from the governor of Virginia restoring his civil rights, the Mitchell Republic reported. He called Robert Haller several times for help getting back into medicine and used him as a reference, The Blade reported.
Swango became engaged to Kristin Kinney, a nurse. The Daily Press of Newport News reported in 2000 that she had worked with him in South Dakota, where he went next, and that a Sioux Falls therapist, Carol Carlsen, treated her for depression connected with her situation with her fiancé. Carlsen said Kinney at first believed Swango "was being victimized," then came to doubt him, and that she believed Kinney had discovered the truth and found it "too much to bear."
Kinney killed herself on July 15, 1993, at Lake Maury, near the Noland Trail and the grounds of The Mariners' Museum in Newport News. Her note, which police did not pass to her parents, Sharon and Al Cooper, for several weeks, said she had chosen the place because it was peaceful. Swango went back to New York two days after her memorial service. Kinney's parents came to believe that arsenic poisoning caused the mental disorientation that preceded her death, CBS News reported, and Stewart wrote that he believed Swango was responsible for it. No charge was ever brought, and no test result from a lock of her hair, which the Coopers gave to the VA investigator Tom Valery in March 1998, has been reported.
In September 1991 Swango applied for an internal medicine residency run by the University of South Dakota, telling the program that his conviction arose from co-workers becoming ill, according to the indictment. In March 1992 officials offered him a place, accepting his claim that a crime laboratory had framed him, The Blade reported; Ohio State did not warn them, despite a request for his records. He started on July 1, 1992, at the VA Medical Center in Sioux Falls. The Mitchell Republic reported that he also worked with the hospital now part of Sanford Health, and that staff valued him and no one reported suspicious activity during his time there. Sackman told the paper he doubted Swango had reformed and believed he had either held back or hidden what he did better.
The end came through the American Medical Association. In October 1992 his application for AMA membership led to a background check and a call to Judge Cashman, and a Discovery Channel broadcast about the Illinois case followed, The Blade reported. He was suspended and then discharged in December 1992, after officials learned the facts of his conviction and of his time at Ohio State, according to the indictment.
In April 1993 Swango applied to the psychiatry residency program of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, according to the indictment, describing his conviction again as the result of a barroom brawl. The program did not check the Federation of State Medical Boards, which would have shown that his licenses in Ohio and Illinois had been suspended, The Blade reported. He began on July 1, 1993, and was assigned to the VA Medical Center in Northport, which Stony Brook ran. Federal prosecutors said later that patients died between July and October 1993. Kinney's mother told the Daily Press that patients there began to suffer paralysis and comas and to die.
George Siano, 60, of Shirley, New York, was the first. On July 26, 1993, according to the indictment, Swango told staff that Siano's family and attending physician had agreed to a do-not-resuscitate order and wrote it in the chart, though they had not. The same day he injected Siano intravenously with epinephrine, causing cardiac arrest.
In August 1993, the indictment says, Swango told the program's director of residency training that he had never been investigated for murder and that his only criminal charges came from a barroom brawl in Quincy. Both statements were false.
Aldo Serini, 70, of Port Washington, New York, died on September 23, 1993, after Swango injected him intramuscularly and intravenously with a toxic substance that caused respiratory failure, according to the indictment.
On October 2, 1993, Swango injected a fourth veteran with succinylcholine, a drug that paralyzes the muscles, the indictment charged. That patient survived, according to the VA Office of Inspector General; the government said it lacked the evidence to link the injection to a death and charged it as an assault. The same day Swango obtained a do-not-resuscitate order for Thomas Sammarco by telling his family they were agreeing only to a "do not intubate" order, and recorded a family approval that did not exist. On October 4, 1993, he injected Sammarco, 73, of Islip Terrace, New York, with succinylcholine, causing respiratory and neurological paralysis, according to the indictment. All three men were patients of a federal hospital for veterans.
What exposed him at Stony Brook was a letter from a grieving mother. That fall Sharon Cooper received a letter from Swango saying Kristin "would have wanted us to stay in touch," the Daily Press reported. She believed he was responsible for her daughter's death, and, learning he was working in a hospital again, she wrote to one of Kristin's friends at the South Dakota VA hospital. That friend alerted officials, who alerted Stony Brook. Swango was suspended from patient care on October 13, 1993, and terminated from the program on October 22, according to the indictment (the Daily Press gives October 19 as the day he was dismissed). The VA opened an investigation and the FBI joined it.
Swango went to Florida and stayed for several weeks with a nurse who had worked with Kristin Kinney in Naples. She and her roommate found photocopied newspaper articles about him in a library; when she confronted him he denied everything and left, duffel bags in hand, the night before an FBI agent arrived, she told the Daily Press. He moved on to Atlanta and stayed with a respiratory therapist he had met at Kinney's memorial service, then used a false name to get a job as a chemist at a company near Atlanta, where, the Daily Press reported, he had access to the metropolitan water supply. When the FBI tried to question him in July 1994 he refused, quit and disappeared.
On October 27, 1994, federal authorities obtained a warrant for his arrest. The charge was fraud over the Stony Brook application, not murder, the Daily Press reported.
Swango had already been preparing an exit. On May 19, 1994, according to the indictment, he gave the Zimbabwe Association of Church Hospitals a letter falsely stating that he was in good standing with the Federation of State Medical Boards. In November 1994 Howard Mpofu, director of hospitals for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe, met him at the Bulawayo airport, Stewart wrote in an excerpt of Blind Eye published by Salon. His résumé described an honors graduate of an American medical school who had interned at Ohio State. At church headquarters he knelt and kissed the floor in front of the Lutheran bishop.
He was posted to Mnene Mission Hospital, a remote Lutheran hospital in the Mberengwa district of south-central Zimbabwe, whose director, the Zimbabwean physician Dr. Christopher Zshiri (as the excerpt spells the name), became friendly with him. Because he lacked experience in the surgery and obstetrics the hospital most needed, he spent five months at Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo, where doctors wrote him glowing recommendations, before returning to Mnene in late May 1995. A surgical resident at Mpilo, Abdollah Mesbah, grew suspicious after repeatedly finding him in the intensive care unit and the general wards when he was not on call, and later refused his offer to volunteer there, Religion Unplugged reported in 2026.
At Mnene he was known as "Dr. Mike." Nurses noticed that patients with simple illnesses kept dying on his ward and that he preferred to do his rounds alone, the Mail & Guardian reported in 1998. One nurse, Sister Hove, said staff were glad at first to have a doctor but came to call him "an angel of death."
On May 14, 1995, according to the indictment, Swango injected a patient named in the indictment as Kenias Mueaza with a toxic substance that caused paralysis. The patient, Kennias Muzeziwa as the Mail & Guardian spelled his name, was a farmer of 56 recovering from the amputation of his left foot. He told the paper in 1998: "I woke up to see Dr Mike standing over my bed with an injection." He was left numb and struggling to breathe; a nurse found a syringe cap under his bed. Swango denied giving him anything and suggested he was delirious. The leg later became septic and was amputated at the knee, and Muzeziwa said no one ever compensated him. Swango was not his doctor, Stewart wrote.
On July 7, 1995, the indictment charges, Swango injected a second patient, a woman, with a toxic substance through her intravenous line, causing paralysis. She survived. The Mail & Guardian described a maternity patient who screamed that he had injected something into her drip; he said first that she was hallucinating and then that he was flushing the line with water. She was violently ill but survived and delivered a healthy baby. After that incident the hospital, which a representative admitted had tried to keep the allegations quiet to avoid panic, acted. Swango was suspended from practice at Mnene on July 21, 1995, according to the indictment. Police searching his quarters found 55 types of drugs that had been brought into the country illegally; Swango said he had thought he was coming to "a jungle."
Nurses and relatives attributed several deaths at Mnene to him, none of them ever tried. They include a hospital worker who cleaned for him, Edith Ngwenya, who fell ill in 1996, was taken to the outpatient department by Swango and was dead by morning; her niece, Chipo Gumbo, told the Mail & Guardian she believed her aunt was poisoned. The hospital foreman, Philemon Chipoko, died while recovering from a leg amputation after Swango examined him, and a young woman kept overnight after a miscarriage also died, the paper reported. Irene Chinyere, who was 73 when Religion Unplugged interviewed her in 2026, said Swango injected her in the shoulder at Mnene in 1996, that she lost consciousness and was revived by nurses, and that she refused when he tried to inject her again.
Swango fought his dismissal. He hired David Coltart, a human rights lawyer in Bulawayo who later became the city's mayor, and sued the hospital for wrongful dismissal, the Mail & Guardian reported. Coltart said later: "He conned the lot of us, ably assisted by the authorities who refused to prosecute him." Coltart told Religion Unplugged in 2026 that the health ministry and police never properly checked Swango's background or pursued charges to the end.
In Bulawayo, Swango rented a room from a widow, Lynette O'Hare. She told the Mail & Guardian that he took her food, liquor and money, ran up her bills, locked himself in his room for weeks, and praised killers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer; she found clippings and books on poisons in his trunk. After she asked him to leave, a mechanic found more than two kilograms of sugar in her car's petrol tank, and the police wanted to question him about it. In August 1996 he moved in with a girlfriend and then left the country before the police reached him.
The FBI believed he went on to work in Zambia and Namibia, the Mail & Guardian reported. The Blade reported that he worked in Zambia for a few months until Zimbabwean officials alerted that hospital, and then found work through a placement agency in South Africa. In November 1995, while he was in Africa, the television program Unsolved Mysteries featured him as a fugitive wanted for falsifying a federal job application, the Daily Egyptian reported. Zimbabwe issued a warrant for his arrest. In January 1998 the Associated Press reported that he had been charged there with killing five patients; later reports described a warrant covering seven poisonings, five of them fatal.
In May 1997, from Africa, Swango sent an application and résumé to KAMA Enterprises, a placement agency in Portland, Oregon, for a post at the Royal Hospital in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, according to the indictment. The application said he had never been convicted of a crime. The résumé claimed emergency room work at D.C. General, Kings County and Harlem hospitals from 1990 to 1995 and physician service in "U.S. Government Service" from 1984 to 1990, years that included his time in prison.
The job required a visa and a stop in the United States. On June 27, 1997, he landed at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, where a customs check turned up the federal warrant, and federal marshals arrested him, the Daily Press and The Blade reported. On March 16, 1998, he pleaded guilty to making a false statement on his Stony Brook application, according to the Daily Press, and he was sentenced to 42 months in prison (some reports said three years). The prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney Cecilia Gardner, said he had told the hospital that his prison term came from a "bar room brawl."
The fraud sentence set a deadline. Swango was due for release in July 2000, a date that fell on the seventh anniversary of Kristin Kinney's death, the Daily Press noted. A team from the VA Office of Inspector General, including its healthcare inspectors, the FBI and federal prosecutors spent what the inspector general described as thousands of hours over seven years on medical records, laboratory studies and interviews with witnesses in the United States and Africa. Tom Valery, the VA's chief investigator, collected evidence including the lock of Kinney's hair in March 1998. Bruce Sackman, the VA special agent in charge in New York, led the VA side of the inquiry and later wrote a book about the cases he worked, the Mitchell Republic and Long Island Press reported. The bodies of Northport patients were exhumed. Columbus Monthly reported that the exhumed remains were found to contain poisons; The Blade reported that toxins in the exhumed bodies had degraded too far to detect. Prosecutors also drew on Swango's own notebooks.
Valery said Swango used arsenic to control people rather than to kill them, and that he had "absolutely no doubt that Kristin knew he was a killer," the Daily Press reported. In Colorado, where Swango was held at the federal prison complex in Florence, a prison spokesman described him in 2000 as a "model inmate" who kept to himself, The Lantern reported. During that sentence, The Lantern reported, he first confessed to the New York poisonings.
On July 11, 2000, days before his scheduled release, United States Attorney Loretta E. Lynch of the Eastern District of New York announced charges that Swango had killed three patients at Northport. The charges could carry the death penalty. Lynch called him "exactly the kind of doctor you would want to avoid," the Associated Press reported. A grand jury returned a nine-count indictment: a mail fraud scheme and a wire fraud scheme covering November 1990 to June 1997; the murders of George Siano, Aldo Serini and Thomas Sammarco; the assault on the fourth Northport patient; and three false-statement counts, two over the do-not-resuscitate entries in Siano's and Sammarco's charts and one over his statement that he had never been investigated for murder. The indictment also set out, as background, the McGee killing and the February 1984 assault at Ohio State and the two injections at Mnene. Swango pleaded not guilty.
On September 6, 2000, in federal court in Central Islip, Swango pleaded guilty to five of the nine counts: the three murders and two fraud counts covering the lies on his résumé and applications, according to the Associated Press and the VA inspector general (whose report dates the plea September 7). In return, prosecutors did not seek death, and Zimbabwe agreed to drop its charges, the Daily Egyptian reported. He told the court he had killed each man by "administering toxic substances which I knew were likely to cause death." Judge Jacob Mishler sentenced him to three consecutive life terms without parole. Each fraud count carried a 14-month term.
Prosecutors read from his handwritten notebooks to show motive. In one entry Swango wrote that killing was "the only way I have of reminding myself that I'm alive," the Daily Egyptian reported; another referred to the "sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide," according to the Associated Press. The lead prosecutor said simply that he "liked to kill people," the BMJ reported. Under the plea agreement he also had to go to Ohio and admit the McGee killing.
Relatives of the dead were in court. Carol Fisher, Thomas Sammarco's daughter, said: "I just hope Michael spends the rest of his life in a living hell." The stepdaughter of another victim told the court that the institutions where the murders happened should also be held to account, the BMJ reported. Lynch said that Swango had deceived his way into the confidence of hospital administrators, and the VA's inspector general, Richard J. Griffin, called the prosecution one of his office's most significant cases for the protection of veterans.
An FBI spokesman, Jim Margolin, said the plea did not protect Swango from prosecution for a killing elsewhere in the country.
On September 21, 2000, the Franklin County Prosecutor, Ron O'Brien, announced an aggravated murder charge in McGee's death and said Swango had agreed to plead guilty. On October 18, 2000, in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, Swango admitted injecting her with a lethal dose of potassium, the Associated Press reported. Prosecutors needed his admission: their evidence was circumstantial, including the nurse who saw him go into her room with a syringe.
The hearing lasted less than half an hour. The courtroom was full of reporters, and a high school class on a field trip was in the gallery, The Lantern reported. Swango, his hair in a short strawberry-blond crew cut, sat fidgeting while prosecutors described the killing and made no statement. Judge Lisa Sadler imposed life in prison with parole eligibility after 20 years, the heaviest penalty the law allowed for the crime in 1984. "You have betrayed that trust and betrayed the medical profession," she told him. McGee's parents, who lived in Florida, did not attend. Their lawyer, Brian Miller, read their statement, which said they were saddened by "the reopening again of old wounds," that "time heals all wounds" was only a slogan, and that they were grateful to the federal investigators who had stopped him from harming anyone else.
On September 27, 2000, the families of Siano, Serini and Sammarco filed notices of claim against the Northport VA Medical Center, the State of New York and Swango, seeking $2 million for each man, UPI reported. They argued that a background check would have shown that his licenses in Ohio and Illinois had been revoked. Edward Nitkewicz, a lawyer representing the families, also planned to sue Ohio State for negligence in its 1984 investigation, The Lantern reported. The outcome of these claims was not reported.
In Zimbabwe no case was ever brought to trial. Religion Unplugged reported in July 2026 that families of Mnene patients and survivors there still feel justice has eluded them. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe's presiding bishop, Michael Dube, declined to answer questions about helping families, and Coltart said a civil claim against the church or the hospitals might not be viable because they had suspended Swango rather than supported him.
Swango is in federal custody. The Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, checked on October 19, 2026, lists Michael J. Swango, register number 08352-424, aged 71, at the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of "LIFE." Religion Unplugged reported in July 2026 that he was serving three life terms in a Colorado federal prison. The Ohio sentence of life with parole eligibility after 20 years runs alongside the federal life terms without parole.
James B. Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote about Swango for The New Yorker and discussed that article on NPR in a segment posted November 20, 1997. His book, Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder, was published by Simon & Schuster in September 1999, while Swango was still serving the fraud sentence and had not been charged with murder. Publishers Weekly summarized Stewart's argument that Swango had injected at least 35 patients over about 15 years, as a medical student at SIU, an intern at Ohio State and a physician in the United States and Africa, and had made colleagues and friends ill by poisoning their food and drink. UPI described the book's count as 35 suspected murders on two continents, at least 15 in the Midwest and on Long Island and 20 in Africa, and CBS News reported that Stewart linked him to 20 nonfatal poisonings.
Reviewers praised the book chiefly as an account of institutional failure. Kirkus Reviews said it showed how doctors protect one another, administrators fear lawsuits and regulators fail to share information. Publishers Weekly said its strongest part was its account of how male physicians dismissed nurses who linked deaths to his injections. Salon's reviewer thought Stewart did not go far enough in criticizing medical culture. Stewart said in 2000 that the national data bank meant to track incompetent or criminal physicians had been "an abject failure," the BMJ reported. Sackman's own book, Behind the Murder Curtain, takes its title from what he described as Swango's practice of entering a room alone and closing the bedside curtain before giving an injection.
The Swango case was cited repeatedly in arguments about how hospitals check doctors. The Blade noted in 2000 that the National Practitioner Data Bank, created in 1990, was underused, and Stewart argued that most of the hospitals that took Swango were not required to check the data bank or report him because he was a trainee, Salon reported. Stony Brook did not query the Federation of State Medical Boards. Ohio State said after Blind Eye appeared that it should have called in outside police in 1984 and that it had adopted many of the Meeks report's recommendations, The Lantern reported.
In 2012 American Medical News listed Swango's case among the reports of crimes by doctors that state legislatures, hospitals and the public cited as justification for criminal background checks of physicians, while reporting that no single law was tied to it. By then 27 states required fingerprinting for licensure, up from seven in 2001, and the Association of American Medical Colleges had recommended background checks for all medical school applicants since 2006. Officials said that if Swango's criminal history had been known, he would not have been hired. "Medical credentialing is 100 times more restrictive now than it was back then," Sackman told the Mitchell Republic.
Proven by his own guilty pleas, and final: the murders of Cynthia Ann McGee (1984), George Siano, Aldo Serini and Thomas Sammarco (1993). Proven by a jury: six counts of aggravated battery against Quincy paramedics (1985). Also final: the federal false-statement conviction (1998) and two fraud counts (2000).
Charged but not adjudicated: the assault on a fourth Northport patient with succinylcholine (October 2, 1993). Sources differ on whether that patient later died; the VA inspector general says he survived.
Named in the indictment as background, never tried: the February 7, 1984, assault at Ohio State and the injections of two patients at Mnene in 1995, both of whom survived.
Charged abroad, never tried: Zimbabwe's case over deaths at Mnene, described as five killings (Associated Press, 1998) or seven poisonings with five deaths (later reports). Mnene nurses alleged nine deaths, according to the Mail & Guardian. Zimbabwe dropped its charges under the 2000 plea agreement.
Suspected, never charged: the other deaths at Ohio State in January and February 1984 (Ed Morgan put the number of suspicious deaths at "at least six"); the illnesses of co-workers in Virginia and of residents at Ohio State; deaths at Mnene beyond those charged; any deaths in Zambia; and the death of Kristin Kinney, which her family and Stewart believe he brought about.
Estimates of the total, all attributed: at least 35 deaths (Stewart, Blind Eye); about 60 (an FBI agent quoted by Judge Cashman, and Bruce Sackman); as many as 50 (the FBI, as reported by American Medical News in 2012); 35 to 60, mostly in Zimbabwe (Stewart's range as given by The Lantern). None of these figures rests on a court finding.
Whether he killed patients at SIU is disputed. The BMJ and The Blade reported that patients he saw as a student died unexpectedly; his former instructor said he had no patients under his direct care and called the claim unsubstantiated.
The substance used at Northport is a matter of record only in the indictment (epinephrine, succinylcholine and an unnamed toxic substance). The question of whether exhumation tests found poisons is reported both ways.
1954: Born in Tacoma, Washington; grows up in Quincy, Illinois.
1972: Valedictorian of his Quincy high school class.
1976: Honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, after two years at Millikin University.
1979: Graduates summa cum laude from Quincy College; enters SIU School of Medicine.
1983: Graduates from SIU; begins internship at Ohio State University Hospitals in July.
January 14, 1984: Cynthia Ann McGee, 19, dies after he injects her with potassium.
February 7, 1984: A 69-year-old patient stops breathing after he injects her IV line; she survives. Ohio State's internal inquiry clears him.
June 30, 1984: Leaves Ohio State.
July 1984: Becomes a paramedic with the Adams County Ambulance Corps in Quincy.
September 14, 1984: Four paramedics fall ill after eating doughnuts he brought.
October 26, 1984: Arrested in Quincy; poisons found in his home.
January 31, 1985: News of the Illinois poisonings breaks while he is working Ohio emergency room shifts.
1985: Ohio murder investigation opens; the Meeks report calls Ohio State's inquiry "far too superficial."
May 3, 1985: Convicted of aggravated battery (six counts).
August 23, 1985: Sentenced to five years.
1986: Interviewed in prison for ABC's 20/20.
August 21, 1987: Released from prison.
1989 to 1990: Works in Virginia; investigated over co-workers' illnesses, not charged.
June 3, 1991: Rejected by Ohio Valley Medical Center after submitting altered court papers under the name David Adams.
July 1, 1992: Starts a University of South Dakota residency at the Sioux Falls VA Medical Center.
December 1992: Discharged after an AMA background check and a television broadcast expose his past.
July 1, 1993: Starts the Stony Brook psychiatry residency at the Northport VA Medical Center.
July 15, 1993: Kristin Kinney dies in Newport News.
July 26, 1993: George Siano, 60, dies after an epinephrine injection.
September 23, 1993: Aldo Serini, 70, dies after a toxic injection.
October 2, 1993: A fourth veteran is injected with succinylcholine.
October 4, 1993: Thomas Sammarco, 73, dies after a succinylcholine injection.
October 13 and 22, 1993: Suspended from patient care, then terminated.
July 1994: Refuses FBI questioning in Atlanta and disappears.
October 27, 1994: Federal fraud warrant issued.
November 1994: Arrives in Zimbabwe; posted to Mnene Mission Hospital, then Mpilo Hospital, Bulawayo.
May 14 and July 7, 1995: Injects two Mnene patients, who survive.
July 21, 1995: Suspended at Mnene.
August 1996: Leaves Zimbabwe; later works in Zambia.
May 1997: Applies for a post at the Royal Hospital, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
June 27, 1997: Arrested at O'Hare International Airport, Chicago.
January 1998: Reported charged in Zimbabwe with five deaths.
March 16, 1998: Pleads guilty to a federal false-statement charge; sentenced to 42 months.
September 1999: Blind Eye published.
July 11, 2000: Charged with three Northport murders days before his scheduled release.
September 6, 2000: Pleads guilty to three murders and two fraud counts; three consecutive life terms without parole.
September 27, 2000: Northport families file notices of claim.
October 18, 2000: Pleads guilty to the aggravated murder of Cynthia McGee; life with parole eligibility after 20 years.
July 2026: Religion Unplugged reports Zimbabwe families still without redress.
October 19, 2026: Federal Bureau of Prisons lists him at ADX Florence, Colorado, release date "LIFE."