Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

a hospital.
    Zawodniak, Sweeney, and many of their classmates were developing a black sense of humor under the twin pressures of medical school and hospital life. After about five deaths in patients who seemed to be recovering satisfactorily, all of them soon after anH & P by Swango, Zawodniak coined a nickname for his seemingly disaster-prone protégé: Double-O Swango.
    Other medical students thought the nickname was hilarious, and soon it was in widespread use. “Double-O Swango” meant License to Kill.

CHAPTER TWO
    D URING S WANGO’S last year of medical school, in January 1982, his mother called him and his brothers, Richard, Bob, and John, with the news that their father was dying and that they should return home to Quincy as soon as possible. Michael drove from Springfield. Richard, Virgil’s stepson, made the trip from Florida, where he was working as a certified public accountant, and Bob flew back from Eugene, Oregon, where he was an orderly at a nursing home. John, the youngest, stayed at his Air Force base in Italy. But Muriel’s call to her sons had come too late. Virgil died on January 29 at Quincy’s Blessing Hospital before the family had converged.
    Colonel Swango was given a twenty-one-gun salute and was buried with full military honors in a brief graveside service attended by a handful of family members and friends. At his request, there had been no visitation or memorial service at the funeral home, either. Michael was the center of attention—clean-cut, neatly dressed in blazer and tie, easily the most handsome of the colonel’s sons. Along with his girlfriend, an attractive brunette, he was at his mother’s side through the ceremony. None of the sons spoke. Muriel sat rigidly, saying nothing and showing no emotion at her husband’s death. But she seemed to glow with pride afterward as relatives congratulated Michael on his progress in medical school, his work as a paramedic, and his seemingly bright future as a doctor.
    Muriel had always favored Michael over the other boys, and she did so now, too. The attention galled Bob, who had long, unkempt hair, had never graduated from college, and still looked like a hippie. At the funeral, people kept referring to him as “Mike’sbrother.” He hadn’t spoken to Michael in years, but he thought his brother’s poise, his charm, and his earnest-young-professional demeanor were an elaborate charade.
    The military hero’s farewell accorded Virgil glossed over the reality that the Swango family had for all practical purposes disintegrated. Virgil had died from cirrhosis of the liver, lonely, living in a mobile home, his Vietnam exploits long forgotten. He and Muriel, though never divorced, had legally separated. She had had no contact with him since he left the family home in 1976, following a prolonged bout of heavy drinking and an altercation in which he struck her. Muriel had said that she wouldn’t tolerate physical abuse, and she insisted that he move out. Though she was in touch with his doctors, she did not visit or speak to her husband during his final days in the hospital.
    Like many Vietnam veterans, Virgil Swango had had a difficult time adapting to civilian life. He went to work in Quincy as a real estate agent for Richard “Hap” Northern, an old family friend, but his sales and commissions were meager. His father, John Harvey Swango, had been a prominent Democrat and served as Adams County recorder of deeds for twenty-eight years, a remarkably long tenure for an elected position. Confident that he would have high name recognition and would be greeted by voters as a war hero, Virgil tried to pursue a political career, running as a Democrat for a post as county supervisor. The campaign was his first indication that Vietnam veterans were viewed not as heroes, but as “losers,” as he later put it. He was painfully disappointed when he came in last in a four-man race.
    With his political hopes dashed, Virgil immersed himself in patriotic