New York Times
September 7, 2000
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
The Associated Press
Assistant United States Attorney Gary R. Brown said a
diary kept by Michael Swango explained his motive for murder.
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ENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y., Sept. 6 Most people in the courtroom knew how the
small, skittish man had managed to murder at least four of his patients without
getting caught: he injected them with poison, he admitted today. The question
observers wanted answered was "Why?"
And then prosecutors offered five scrawled pages from the killer's spiral- bound
diary as the motive. It seems that Michael J. Swango, a former doctor, killed
for the pure joy of watching and smelling death.
Reading from a notebook confiscated from Mr. Swango when he was arrested in a
Chicago airport in 1997 on his way to Saudi Arabia, where he had a job in a
hospital, prosecutors painted a portrait of a delusional serial killer. The
written passages show that Mr. Swango, 45, was a voracious reader of macabre
thrillers about doctors who thought they had the power of the Almighty.
In small, tight script, Mr. Swango transcribed a passage from what prosecutors
said was "The Torture Doctor," which they described as an obscure true-to-life
novel published in 1975 about a 19th-century doctor who goes on a quiet murder
spree and tries to poison his wife with succinylcholine chloride, a powerful
muscle relaxant.
"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," the notebook read.
Another of Mr. Swango's favorite books, according to prosecutors, was "The
Traveler," written by John Katzenbach. One passage that prosecutors contended
offered a window into Mr. Swango's mind was: "when I kill someone, it's because
I want to. It's the only way I have of reminding myself that I'm still alive."
With the victim's relatives weeping in the rear of the courtroom, Assistant
United States Attorney Gary R. Brown read more excerpts from the notebook. From
what he identified as the text of "My Secret Life," Mr. Swango was inspired to
copy: "I love it. Sweet, husky, close smell of an indoor homicide."
Mr. Brown, on the steps of United States District Court, said today: "Basically,
Dr. Swango liked to kill people. By his own admission in his diary, he killed
because it thrilled him."
Wearing prison blues and faded slippers, Mr. Swango stood in the courtroom and
admitted that he murdered three of his patients at a Long Island hospital with
lethal injections.
Each time Judge Jacob Mishler asked Mr. Swango how he pleaded, he answered
impassively: "Guilty, your honor."
Accusations, incriminations and death followed Mr. Swango wherever he went, from
the time he began medical school at Southern Illinois University in the early
1980's to his tenure as a physician in Zimbabwe. And although an inordinate
amount of his patients died over the years some officials estimate as many as
60 Mr. Swango always managed to find employment.
Prosecutors in New York could charge him only with the three murders in their
jurisdiction, committed when he worked for three months as a resident at the
Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport in 1993. His victims were Thomas
Sammarco, 73; George Siano, 60; and Aldo Serini, 62, all of Long Island. He
faced federal, rather than state, charges because those three murders were
committed at a federal institution.
And for the first time, Mr. Swango acknowledged today that he killed Cynthia
McGee, 19, a student who was in his care at Ohio State University Hospitals in
1984 when he worked there as a resident.
He was not charged with her murder, because it was not a federal crime, but he
pleaded guilty to lying about his role in her death, and also to falsifying
records about prison time he served in the mid-1980's for poisoning co-workers'
coffee and doughnuts with ant poison.
When Judge Mishler asked for an explanation of the death of Mr. Siano, Mr.
Swango read from a prepared text. "I intentionally killed Mr. Siano, who was at
the time a patient at the veterans' hospital in Northport," he read. "I did
this by administering a toxic substance which I knew was likely to cause death.
I knew it was wrong."
Not only did Mr. Swango administer the lethal injection to Mr. Siano,
prosecutors said, he did it on his day off, a day when he was not even on call.
Prosecutors said that a nurse saw Mr. Swango sitting on a radiator near Mr.
Siano's bed watching the man die from the lethal dose.
"I'm still shaking my head that a madman got a plea bargain today," said Mr.
Siano's stepdaughter, Roselinda Conroy. "He's worse than an animal. Animals
don't kill for pleasure."
Judge Mishler sentenced Mr. Swango to three consecutive life sentences, without
the possibility of parole, in a maximum-security prison in Colorado.
Mary A. Dowling, director of the hospital in Northport, tried to answer the
wider question of how a man with Mr. Swango's background could find employment
there.
She said that he was hired by the State University of New York at Stony Brook,
and rotated through Northport as part of his Stony Brook residency training.
"Michael Swango failed to truthfully disclose the reason for a prior criminal
conviction on his application," Ms. Dowling said, explaining that Mr. Swango
had told administrators that his jail time had to do with a barroom brawl. "It
was an offense he pled guilty to and for which he served three years in
prison."
That explanation was not good enough for the relatives of the dead men. "He left
a trail of death wherever he went," Ms. Conroy said. "Because of the gross
negligence of these institutions, Swango was allowed to kill. They, too, should
be held accountable."
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