an angel of death
When American doctor Michael Swango successfully sued his bosses at a rural Zimbabwean hospital for wrongful dismissal, he was aided by one of the country’s most eminent human-rights lawyers and a host of Christians who believed he was a victim of malicious rumours and professional jealousy.
They little suspected that the dejected be- spectacled 42-year-old (he claimed to be 27), who was a regular at the Presbyterian church’s bible classes, could be one of the most prolific serial killers in United States history and was on the FBI’s Internet file of wanted fugitives.
Swango’s genteel white champions were equally oblivious to the fact that he had served half of a five-year sentence for poisoning medical colleagues and had left a trail of mysterious deaths among patients in hospitals across several US states.
Nor were they aware that nurses at the Meneni Hospital, some 300km south of Bulawayo, had accused him of killing nine (the official figure is five) black patients and attempting to murder two others, by injecting them with unknown drugs.
They were in the dark because the Lutheran missionary hospital followed the pattern of its counterparts in the US, where Swango came under suspicion after the sudden death of patients in his care, and tried to keep the matter hush-hush.
“He conned the lot of us, ably assisted by the authorities who refused to prosecute him,” complained lawyer David Coltart — who was particularly puzzled that Swango took the public recourse of going to court when he was already a wanted man in the US.
“He struck such a pathetic victim pose when he came into my office. He portrayed himself as someone who had come to Africa to help rural black people and was being treated in an abominable fashion.” Swango had been referred to him by a doctor friend and fellow church-goer.
“I knew allegations had been made about him being responsible for a number of deaths, but he denied that anyone had died,” said Coltart, who remembers his client having icy blue eyes and cold hands. “I wrote to the police on several occasions but they failed to reply as to the specifics of any charges, so we went ahead with the case.”
Staff at Meneni Hospital heard about the court case and could not believe Swango’s gall, in light of what they believed about the mercurial doctor who would vacillate between charm and brashness with the alacrity of a Jekyll and Hyde character.
“We thought he was an angel of mercy come to save people when he first arrived, because we were so short of doctors,” said a Sister Hove. “But it was not long before we saw that this was not a very nice man. He turned out to be an angel of death.”
She and other nurses at the rural hospital became suspicious shortly after Swango arrived in their midst. Of average height, with thinning blond hair, a squint and a loud, honking voice, the American had been given glowing testimonials by the acting head of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine, University of Harare.
But patients had a tendency to become violently ill and die after he saw them. “People with simple illnesses or who were on the road to recovery kept dying on his ward,” said another nurse who begged not to be named for fear of repercussions from her tight-lipped bosses. “He liked to do ward rounds on his own and often prescribed multi-drugs to individual patients, which is not the way a real doctor behaves.”
Swango, who kept his own private supply of drugs at home in a fridge, was suspected of carrying two syringes on his rounds — one hidden in his pocket and another in his hand. It is alleged that he used this hidden medication on Kennias Muzeziwa one night.
Muzeziwa (56) had suffered from sores on his left toes which resulted in amputation of his left foot up to his heel. The wound had virtually healed and he was awaiting news of a promised prosthesis from a Swedish charity. “One night when I was asleep I felt someone pulling down my pyjama bottom,” he said from his mud hut deep in the heart of the Mberengwa province.
“I woke up to see Dr Mike standing over my bed with an injection, which he put into my buttocks. Then he put it in his jacket pocket, waved goodbye and walked away. I was trying to get back to sleep but felt my whole body go numb.”
Unable to move, Muzeziwa tried to shout for help. “I could barely breathe. I felt faint, but managed to get my voice back after several attempts,” he said. Hearing his harsh cry, a nurse rushed to his side. He told her what had happened and Swango was called.
Swango denied the story. He complained that the same thing had happened at a hospital in Bulawayo, where he had spent three months before going to Meneni, and he did not understand why people kept making such allegations about him. Even though Muzeziwa later found the syringe top under his bed, nurses said they could do nothing.
Muzeziwa, a peasant farmer, lived through the ordeal, but his limb quickly became septic and he had to have the leg amputated up to his knee. Now living on his small plot in a remote rural area, he is a shadow of the man he once was.
“I can’t do the farming because of my crutches. My wife has had to do everything, including thatching this house we live in. No one has compensated me for what happened. It seems they want to cover it over to hide the fact that this man should never have been allowed to work in this country.”
Despite several other sudden patient deaths, Swango continued his duties for about a year. Two of his alleged victims were workers at the hospital. One of them, Edith Ngwenya, washed and cleaned for the American.
She fell ill suddenly sometime in 1996 and was taken to the outpatients clinic by Swango. Chipo Gumbo recalled seeing her aunt that day. “She was vomiting, sweating a lot and complaining of heartburn. She told me she was going home to rest, but that night she was rushed to emergency and by the morning she was dead. It was so sudden.”
Gumbo believes her aunt may have been poisoned as a result of Swango’s experimenting with various drugs.
Yet another suspected victim was Philemon Chipoko, who was the hospital’s foreman. He died while recovering from a leg amputation soon after being examined by Swango. So did a young woman who had been kept for observation overnight after a miscarriage.
With the spectre of so many unexplained deaths hanging over their hospital, the nurses became increasingly vigilant of Swango, whom they also disliked because of his poor personal hygiene and the fact that he wore the same blue corduroy trousers all the time. “We thought he was responsible for the deaths, but he was very clever and we never caught him doing anything,” said one nurse.
Then one night a woman in the maternity ward started screaming soon after Swango was seen hovering over her bed. She claimed he had injected something in her intravenous drip. He initially insisted she was hallucinating, then contradicted this by claiming he was only flushing it out with water. The woman broke into a sweat and suffered severe vomiting but lived to deliver a healthy baby.
This incident forced the hospital’s hand after months of ignoring the allegations — one newspaper report quoted an unnamed hospital representative admitting they had tried to keep the matter a closely guarded secret to avoid unnecessary panic.
The police began investigating and discovered 55 different types of drugs, brought into the country illegally, in Swango’s living quarters. During questioning he appeared affronted. “I thought I had come to a jungle and out of the goodness of my heart had brought my own drugs,” he told officers.
After his dismissal an aggrieved Swango moved to Bulawayo and hired Coltart. He found lodgings with Lynette O’Hare in a quiet middle-class suburb on the outskirts of town, after being introduced to her by a member of her daughter’s church group.
O’Hare, a credit controller for National Foods, believed her lodger innocent of the allegations that had started to leak out in the press — though Swango was not publicly identified until he had absconded. “My daughter Paulette was going to live in London and had prayed for God to send a nice person to come and live with me,” said the still-frightened widow. “Instead I got this demon who brought nothing but misery to my life.”
Soon after moving into O’Hare’s modest three-bedroomed house in April 1996, Swango was rejected by a girlfriend. He locked himself in his tiny bedroom, with the curtains closed, for five weeks. “I did not see him. My domestic would leave his breakfast outside his room and it would disappear, then he would push the empties out in the hall.”
With hindsight, O’Hare said she should have realised then that he was unstable. Instead she worried over him like a mother, making several attempts to coax him out of his room. When she had to go out of town, she phoned the local Samaritans to keep an eye on him.
“He seemed such a lost soul, my heart was wrung,” she recalls. Eventually Swango emerged from hiding, coaxed by the loan of O’Hare’s car. He found a new girlfriend — a young divorcee with two children — and would disappear with the car until the early hours.
It was not long before the disenchantment set in for O’Hare. “Food would disappear from the fridge [Swango was supposed to be paying her about R230 per month for bed and breakfast] and my liquor was being filched.” Her electricity bill had quadrupled because he slept with a heater on, and her phone bill trebled.
The crunch came one day when Swango was out of the house. The domestic worker approached and with a voice full of foreboding said there was something in his room her employer should see. The two women stood over an open dresser drawer in which plastic bags had been neatly folded into parcels and, according to the widow, “cunningly concealed” in the centre columns were six packets of stale bacon sandwiches made from leftover breakfasts.
“I knew then his was an insane mind and felt sick with terror. I also began to believe he could have been guilty of the allegations.” Fearful for her life, she asked her two employees to move into her house. They had already voiced suspicions to her that Swango did not behave like a proper doctor.
“They later told me he would sneak out of his room at night and peer at me through the crack in my bedroom door — I assume with malice in mind.”
O’Hare now remembers the times he would exalt infamous US serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, gleefully pointing out that no one had suspected for a long time that these men were killers. She later found newspaper cuttings on these criminals and the OJ Simpson trial, alongside books on pornography, mutilation and poisons, in a trunk he left behind. He had also stolen and hidden her daughter’s underwear.
Swango stole money from her purse and from guests. She even had to take a few days off work after falling mysteriously ill. Finally, scared her life was at risk, she asked him to leave. He did not ask why. Two days later a garage mechanic discovered more than 2kg of sugar in her petrol tank. She reported it to the police and hired a guard for two months.
In August 1996 Swango moved in with his girlfriend and her children. Despite the local police’s inability to charge him with any of the Meneni deaths, they wanted to see him about the sugar incident. Realising the net was closing in, he skipped the country. The FBI believes he went on to work in Zambia and Namibia.
Although he is wanted in the US only for making false statements on a job application to a government hospital, Swango is suspected of having been responsible for the deaths of dozens of hospital patients. The son of a military officer and a housewife, he was born at Fort Lewis, Washington, in 1954. The family moved to Quincy, Illinois, in 1967.
Muriel Swango, who became estranged from her alcoholic husband, said her son was well-adjusted as a child and achieved 97% in his college aptitude test. A high-school teacher described him as a brilliant clarinet player and one of his most promising students.
Swango won a music scholarship to a prestigious private university in Illinois, but left after two years to join the marines. Here he served two years and received an honourable discharge with the rank of sergeant. On his return home to Quincy, he switched his major subjects to chemistry and biology; he wanted to become a doctor.
But soon after arriving at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine at the age of 24, Swango began to show signs of maladjustment. He was withdrawn and a loner. Some students suspected he was cheating and one described him as “immoral to the point of psychopathic”.
According to a story in The New Yorker magazine, he was nicknamed “Double-O” Swango because of the number of times his reports indicated that a patient was doing well but then died or had a serious problem.
Only one month before his graduation a disciplinary committee voted for his dismissal after he prepared a report on a patient without having seen the patient. A teacher pleaded for him to be given a second chance, and after an additional nine months on the programme he passed with “satisfactory” evaluations.
His first residency was a five-year appointment in neuro-surgery at the Ohio State University hospitals in July 1983. After a year he was dismissed — apparently no reason was given. So Swango returned to Quincy, working as a paramedic for the ambulance service in 1984.
On September 14 he showed up at work with a box of doughnuts for four colleagues. Within 30 minutes they were feeling dizzy and vomiting so violently they had to leave work. There were numerous other incidents of colleagues falling sick after consuming food or drinks from Swango.
They recalled that he was very interested in different types of poisons. One ambulance worker told police Swango had said it was “a good way to kill people”. He said Swango was fascinated with violent deaths and kept a series of large scrapbooks filled with such stories.
Swango allegedly talked about getting an erection when he had to tell parents their child had died from a head trauma. Former co-worker Mark Krzystofczyk told The New Yorker that, while watching a TV programme on a notorious serial killer, Swango had remarked: “Wouldn’t that be great? To travel around the country killing people? Just moving on, killing some more — a great style of life.”
When the Quincy ambulance crew searched his bag, they found a branded ant killer with an arsenic derivative as the primary active ingredient. A week later Swango made a pot of tea, which was analysed and found to contain elements consistent with the presence of arsenic.
He was arrested on October 26 1984 and on searching his flat police found a mini-lab filled with vials, needles and bottles containing various chemicals, suspected poisons and poisonous compounds. Police confiscated a “do-it-yourself mayhem” publication, popular with paramilitary enthusiasts. A small arsenal of weapons, including a 12-gauge pump shotgun and a Magnum revolver, was also seized.
He was charged with seven counts of aggravated battery when his trial opened on April 22 1985 before Judge Dennis Cashman. Swango, who waived his right to a jury, emphatically denied he had poisoned anyone, but he was found guilty on six counts and was sentenced to the maximum five years’ imprisonment on August 23 1985.
The judge concluded he had not intended to kill his colleagues, only to experiment in taking them to the edge of death.
In light of the trial, investigators decided to look into Swango’s earlier activities at Ohio. Police discovered a storage locker in his name that contained firearms clips and 200 rounds of blank machine-gun ammunition.
The public prosecution department began to look into a series of deaths that occurred at Ohio State hospitals during Swango’s tenure. They discovered that in January 1984 he had been told that unless his performance improved, his appointment would not be renewed for a second year. Investigators concluded this setback triggered a violent reaction and over the following weeks the hospital recorded a number of near-fatal or mysterious deaths.
In one incident Swango was accused of injecting “something” into the drip of a 69-year-old woman, who subsequently died. An internal investigation was held and Swango returned to his post, but the hospital did not renew his contract.
Unable to find any concrete evidence to charge Swango with murder, the police could do nothing when he was released from prison after serving half his sentence. He found work in the health field during the latter part of the 1980s — again colleagues kept falling ill around him.
Swango legally changed his name to David Jackson Adams and around 1991 began doctor’s residency with the University of South Dakota.
He had declared his criminal conviction, but claimed it resulted from an altercation in a restaurant in which a friend was accosted and he intervened. The head of the residents’ programme was convinced he had been harshly judged.
In October 1992 Swango, who was then engaged to a pretty young nurse called Kristin Kinney, had his past outed by a cable television programme called Justice Files. He was dismissed from work, despite having hired a lawyer and appealing through the local press.
Despite the publicity, he received a residency in psychiatry at the State University of New York in Stonybrook on June 1 1993. Kinney stayed in Ohio and on July 15 her body was found in a park with a gunshot wound. She had left a suicide note, but her mother suspects she killed herself because of her grief on learning that her fiancé was poisoning her.
In New York Swango was assigned to Veterans Hospital on Long Island. Now called Michael Kirk, he fled after the sudden death of a 60-year-old cabinet-maker, to whom he had administered a sedative. The FBI and local police began to review patients who had been under his care — there had been several deaths, but the hospital insisted none had been unusual.
It is unclear what happened to Swango after this, but he eluded capture and made his next known appearance in Zimbabwe in 1994. By the time David Coltart had secured his R10 000 compensation for unlawful dismissal from Meneni, Swango had again disappeared. “He wrote me on August 26 1996, to say he would be out of town for several days,” said Coltart, who expressed anger that the Department of Health had not checked Swango’s records thoroughly enough.
Health officials in Zimbabwe were reluctant to talk about Swango, but have come under heavy criticism for letting him loose in the country’s hospitals.
Coltart said he was also concerned the police had not properly investigated and laid charges against the American.
Swango was arrested in June last year, when he returned to the US to pick up a Saudi Arabian visa before flying to Riyadh the same day. His name flashed on the computer when customs officers ran a routine check on fugitives from federal charges. “For once the system worked,” said an FBI agent.