Africa
“Whenever a doctor cannot do good,
he must be kept from doing harm.”
—HIPPOCRATES
It took us almost three years to get to the point of presenting evidence to the grand jury about the Northport murders. During that time, the FBI was busy investigating what exactly Swango was doing in Africa, after he fled from Northport.
Unbeknownst to me, AUSA Cecilia Gardner learned Swango, using forged documents, obtained a position at Mnene Hospital in Zimbabwe. She led a team to Africa and met with officials there about Swango’s status. Apparently, she accomplished little on her secret trip because one year later, in November 1995, Swango was arrested and charged with poisoning patients he treated at that hospital. But before he could be tried, he escaped to Zambia, where he hid out for a year.
In March 1997, Swango applied for a job in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, using those forged documents and a contrived résumé. But he could not travel to Saudi Arabia without first touching down in the US and having his passport stamped. When he did, that customs and immigration officers were waiting to handcuff him and lead him away to the federal lockup in Chicago.
While we were digging up bodies and examining the remains, the US Attorney organized another trip to Africa. Although it was a joint investigation, he wanted to dictate who from my office would go with them. The agent organizing the trip had the gall to tell Samantha Lockery that if she were to go to Africa, she would be left at the airport on her own and would only delay the FBI in its work. Hearing this, Tom refused to go at all. I agreed with Tom. To me this was intolerable. I can only attribute it to some ignorant male chauvinism. Tom was right to insist on Samantha being treated like the competent dedicated agent she had proven herself to be.
I was the guy on our team who knew how to handle the brass. I went directly to one of the most senior agents in charge of the FBI’s New York office and explained the untenable situation. I told him no one knew the Swango case as well as we did and to be shut out at this time was unprofessional and beyond reason. I was prepared to take my argument to DC if necessary.
Well, I did not have to go further. My argument fell on reasonable ears and the word was passed down to include Samantha, Brian Donnelly, and a calmed-down Tom on the traveling team. I was certain Brian and Tom would make sure Samantha was treated with the professional courtesy she deserved. We discovered that Swango, on the run, proved to be as cunning and amoral as ever. After he fled Northport and hid in Georgia, he contacted an agency that found English-speaking doctors for work in developing countries. Using his usual file of forged documents and résumés, he landed a spot in the remote Mnene Lutheran Christian Hospital staffed by Lutheran nurses in Mnene, Zimbabwe.
The people in Mnene who hired Swango and then assigned him to cases were more than eager to speak with our team. They said they were suspicious that such a sophisticated doctor who worked in top-rated American hospitals would want to practice in their ill-equipped facility in the middle of nowhere. But the smooth-talking con artist impressed them. He convinced them his heart was devoted to helping the less fortunate. They remained skeptical but American doctors were hard to come by, and they brought him aboard despite their misgivings.
The director of the mission station in Mnene was Doctor Christopher Zshiri, a man who was truly devoted to helping the less fortunate. Early on during Swango’s orientation period, Doctor Zshiri noticed the American lacked certain skills and was not interested in treating minor ailments that were so commonplace in his hospital. Burns, splinters, cysts, and infections did not interest him. Zshiri believed that Swango, who pretended to be a neurosurgeon, was just unfamiliar with this basic care. He decided to transfer him to Mpilo Hospital, a more advanced facility in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, as part of an internship.
After five months at Mpilo, Swango had become friendly with the locals and doctors, and had impressed many with his energy and verve. He was then able to return to Mnene.
Doctor Zshiri told our team that soon after his arrival, patients began to die unexpectedly for suspicious reasons. “People with simple illnesses or who were on the road to recovery kept dying on his ward,” said a nurse who was apprehensive about talking to our investigators because she feared reprisals from her bosses.
It was learned that Swango kept a private supply of drugs in a refrigerator in his home and carried two syringes on his rounds. He would hide one syringe in his pocket and hold another in his hand. One night, it was alleged, he used this hidden medication on an unsuspecting patient named Kennias Muzeziwa, fifty-six, a peasant farmer, who was recuperating after having most of his left foot amputated due to infection. The wound was virtually healed, and he was awaiting a prosthesis promised by a Swedish charity.
When my team visited him in his mud hut, he recounted that one night in the hospital, he was awakened by someone pulling down his pajama bottom. When he looked up from his pillow he saw “Doctor Mike with an injection, which he put in my buttocks. He then waved goodbye and walked away.”
Muzeziwa felt faint and tried to call for help but remembered he could not breath. Finally, a nurse heard his weak cry and rushed to his side. He whispered to her what had happened. The nurse found the top from a syringe under his bed.
Swango was confronted but arrogantly denied the entire episode, claiming a similar charge was brought against him at another African hospital. The nurses complained to my team that they could do nothing.
Muzeziwa lived through his ordeal but had to have his leg amputated up to the knee, which made it impossible for him to continue as a farmer and doomed him and his wife to a life of abject poverty.
Swango was suspended but no proof that he had done anything wrong could be determined because of inadequate investigations. Swango hired a lawyer to help him get more clinical work. However, a respected surgeon reported to authorities that he often found Swango snooping around the wards and ICU even when he was off-duty. Again, the surgeon had great suspicions about the untimely deaths but no physical evidence that could connect Swango.
While in Mnene, a woman named Edith Ngwenya, who washed and cleaned for Swango, fell violently ill after he cooked a meal for her, her nephew recalled for investigators. He reported she was sweating, vomiting, and complaining of severe heartburn. He did not know it, but the nephew was describing the symptoms suffered by the Quincy paramedics. That night, Edith was rushed to an emergency clinic. By morning, she was dead.
Another suspected victim was the foreman of the hospital. He died while recovering from a leg amputation soon after being examined by Swango. So did a woman being treated after a miscarriage.
Then, one night, a woman in the maternity ward began screaming for help after seeing Swango inject something into her intravenous drip. She broke into a sweat and vomited but survived to deliver a healthy baby.
Finally, the hospital acted and called in the police. Hospital brass admitted to a local reporter that they tried to keep all their suspicions about Swango under wraps because they desperately needed a skilled doctor.
The police investigation discovered fifty-five different drugs in Swango’s apartment. When questioned, he arrogantly responded that he came to the jungle out of the goodness of his heart and brought his own drugs. Swango was dismissed from the Mnene facility.
Back in Bulawayo, Swango rented a room in the home of a woman named Lynette O’Haire, a prominent socialite. Within a few weeks of having Swango as a border she began to have the same symptoms that other victims of the madman suffered. She had bouts of nausea, vomiting, severe headaches, and diarrhea.
O’Haire visited Doctor Michael Cotton, who worked at the same hospital as Swango and was a strong supporter of the American. But after examining O’Haire the doctor suspected arsenic poisoning. He sent hair samples to Pretoria, South Africa, for forensic analysis. The lab reports were sent to the Zimbabwe police, who shared them with Interpol, who sent them on to the FBI. Swango was called in for questioning by the Zimbabwe Criminal Investigations Department but they were not equipped to nail him down and he was released. However, once again he felt a noose tightening around his neck and fled, first to Zambia and then to Namibia, where he was hired for some medical work. We all found this impossible to believe.
The Zimbabwe government was determined to not let him get away with murder and they charged him in absentia with the poisonings.
In March 1997, Swango applied for a position at a hospital in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. That was where he was headed when he was captured at O’Hare and held on the fraud charges.
Back in the States, my team reported that, judging from interviews, records, and anecdotal evidence, it was entirely possible that Swango killed as many as sixty patients during his approximately three years in Africa. The FBI agreed with the conclusion but Tom and Samantha, who interviewed many of the staff members in Mnene and Mpilo, thought the figure could be even higher. Swango now became an international MSK.
So, as I had hoped when I first met with Cecilia Gardner, the day she advised me not to work with Doctor Baden, Swango was in jail for fraud and his time there turned out to be the most productive. From Quincy, Illinois, to Sioux Falls, North Dakota, to Newport News, Virginia, to Northport, New York, and on to Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Namibia, we traced a trail of suspicion, horror, disgust, and death that by all accounts could lead to one hundred innocent victims of an MSK. I feel to this day that if the FBI did not totally ignore me at that first meeting after Stony Brook, we may have stopped Swango before he went to Africa. That would have saved at least sixty lives.
Now, all that remained was to get a jury to believe us. It was legal crunch time. When AUSA Gary Brown called to alert me that Swango was almost due to be released on his fraud charge, I told him we were ready to present what we had in terms of a murder indictment. I remember Swango’s own attorney commenting that she was also afraid of Swango getting out and being free to kill again.
Tom told me he wanted to contact the Zimbabwe government directly to inform them that Swango could possibly be out of prison soon. He thought they should file charges and request his extradition based on their charge he poisoned patients.
That was an extraordinary move because under usual circumstances, federal agents are not allowed to contact a foreign government without going through the State Department. However, we were dealing with a serial killer and up until now our level of cooperation from other agencies was almost nil. I told Tom to go ahead while I called the State Department. Shortly after, I received notice that Zimbabwe had filed indictments charging Swango with poisoning seven patients, including killing five of them. Subsequently, they contacted the State Department and requested extradition.
On July 11, 2000, the feds filed a criminal complaint charging Swango with three counts of murder, one count of assault, and one count each of false statements, mail fraud, and conspiracy to commit fraud. One week later, he was formally indicted and pleaded not guilty.
Following that, AUSA Gary Brown, and Swango’s lawyer visited Swango in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan where he was being held. It was revealed to him that our investigators had been to Africa and that Zimbabwe had filed charges against him that included murder. They told him there was an outcry in Africa to have him arrested and executed there.
He was offered a deal of changing his plea to guilty and accepting a life sentence by which he would avoid extradition to Zimbabwe. He took the deal.
Surprisingly, Swango was not a tough nut to crack. Psychiatrists who examined him before his sentencing reported he was fascinated by death. His father used to tell him war stories about killing men and how they died. He admitted sitting in a patient’s room after administering a lethal injection and watching him die. He felt no compassion for the victims or their families. He just seemed to enjoy being intimate with death.
On September 6, 2000, Swango, wearing a blue prison jumpsuit and slippers, stood straight as a Marine and an honor guard before Judge Jacob Mishler in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, NY, to answer for his crimes. Before making his confession required by his plea deal, which spared him the death penalty, Swango and the audience in the courtroom—which contained families of his victims—had to endure the official record delivered by prosecutors.
Swango, now forty-five years old, stood as Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Brown read five scrawled pages from the killer’s diary that was seized from him when he was arrested in Chicago. The diary indicated Swango devoured books about doctors who killed their patients. I wondered if that diary was the reason Swango would not let me search his room at Northport. He must have been afraid I would find it. Alone it proved nothing, but with all the other circumstantial evidence, it painted him as a cruel, sadistic killer who loved to watch people die.
From one book on his reading list he copied in his diary: “He could look at himself in a mirror and tell himself that he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world—he could feel that he was a god in disguise.”
From another he copied: “When I kill someone it is because I want to. It’s the only way I have of reminding myself that I am still alive,” and then the words that seem to explain Michael Swango best: “I love it. Sweet, husky, close smell of an indoor homicide.”
When Swango got his turn to address the court, his words chilled the large courtroom.
Without hesitation and in a loud voice easily heard in the farthest seat in the gallery, Swango said he intentionally went to Northport on his day off and murdered George Siano. One nurse told me she saw Swango sitting near the veteran’s bed watching him slip away.
On other days he killed Aldo Serini and Thomas Sammarco while they were also patients at Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center.
Almost proudly, he explained to the judge how he used epinephrine and a paralyzing drug to kill his patients. “I did this by administering a toxic substance, which I knew was likely to cause death. I knew what I did was wrong.”
He also pleaded guilty to two fraud counts, which included an admission he murdered the gymnast Cynthia McGee in Ohio, injected toxins into another veteran in Northport who survived, and poisoned two patients at a mission hospital in Zimbabwe.
Before Judge Mishler announced his sentence, the families of victims were given the opportunity to speak.
“He’s worse than an animal. Animals don’t kill for pleasure,” said Siano’s stepdaughter, Roselinda Conroy.
Sammarco’s daughter, Carol Fisher, in tears, told the judge, “I hope he rots in hell.”
Kristin Kinney’s parents kept in touch with us for seven years since their daughter took her own life. We had the hair they took from her body just before cremation. It was found to be loaded with arsenic. Doctor Baden reasoned Swango had been feeding it in small doses to his fiancée.
The judge agreed to read a victim’s statement from the parents of Kristin Kinney even though Swango was not charged in her death. Everyone in the room believed he was responsible for her suicide. The note read as follows:
My daughter, Kristin Lynn Kinney, was engaged to be married to Doctor Michael Swango. However, on July 15, 1993 we were told that she had taken her own life. It is my belief and that of my husband’s that Doctor Swango had a hand in her death. When we saved a tress of Kristen’s hair on the day of her viewing, we had no idea that it would lead us on such a long and horrible seven-year journey to discover what really happened to Kristen.
Thanks to the efforts of Mr. Tom Valery of the Veterans Administration, a sample of that hair was tested for poison and was found to contain a toxic material. It is our belief that this toxic material strongly affected my daughter’s judgment and mental orientation on the day of her death. According to a therapist, who saw her just before she died, she was incoherent, screaming and crying uncontrollably.
My husband (Al Cooper) and I, as well as the remainder of Kristin’s family, respectfully request that the above information be weighed by you in any decisions you may make concerning the pleas made by Doctor Swango in respect to all of the charges that have been filed against him.
I have struggled not only with the death of my daughter, but with the fact that as a Registered Nurse and member of the Medical Profession, I am responsible for the welfare of the sick. Many years ago I took an oath that I would do my best, as a nurse, to protect those who are ill and in my care. It was with that in mind that I could not walk away suspecting there was a doctor killing people. After working with the FBI and Tom Valery of the Inspector General’s Office of the VA for the past seven years, I hope that I have upheld my oath and that his knowledge will encourage the public to believe that there are many of us who cherish life and fight to save it.
Respectfully yours,
Sharon Cooper, RN
Everyone in the courtroom sat completely still, as quiet as possible, as Judge Mishler announced the sentence.
Swango was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. The judge made the unusual pronouncement that even though he was sentencing Swango to life without the possibility of parole, if Congress should change the law and allow Swango to seek parole, his request for parole is denied in advance. I had never heard that before or since.
Looking across the room at Swango I thought of that day in the tiny room at Northport. I remembered his arrogance, his defiance, and my impression that he would make a good match for my daughter. While he stood ramrod straight behind the defense table as Judge Mishler read the law, I could see he was drained. He had just served almost three years in prison and was now facing the rest of his life behind bars. He was a beaten man. I noticed a scar on his face I had not noticed before. I wondered if some jailhouse justice had been handed out. I had no compassion for him.
As the sentence was being read, I was shocked to see one of Swango’s attorneys patting him on the back as if to console a poor victim. I turned away in disgust.
As of this writing, Swango is a sixty-three-year-old inmate at the nation’s toughest prison, Supermax, in Florence, Colorado. I am sure he has no curtain to hide behind.