co-workers as an emt in quincy, illinois. i m not thinking that that doughnut that i m eating is laced with poison. nobody thinks that the cup with soda is going to be injected with arsenic. that s what makes him so dangerous. he was trying to kill me. you had this trail, this trail of death and illness under suspicious causes, that were attached to this doctor. when he was in medical school, his fellow students referred to him as 00 swango, licensed to kill. he had the highest death rate of any of the intissues down there. swango was dismissed from the surgical residency program at the ohio state university hospitals. nurses all afraid to be around him. they sensed something is wrong with this man. according to reports, swango was suspected of killing at least one patient there. cindy mckee was a 19-year-old gymnast. she was in a trauma unit, but we
oh, no, no, no. this was all just a big misunderstanding. and i said, well, thank you very much, doc, you know, i really appreciate that. but could we just take a look around your room? that s when his attitude completely changed. then he said, no, you can t, and this interview is over. just the way his eyes were. uncomfortably sneaky looking. sinister. and tom and i are looking at each other. something s not right here. the decision was made, get him out of the hospital. get him out. then the next thing you know, a few days later, michael swango s gone. don t know where he is. so the fbi typically doesn t work murder cases. but in this instance, because it involved a va hospital, the property belongs to the united states government. then it automatically falls under fbi jurisdiction. the fbi tracked him to atlanta, georgia, before the
it had originally aired on abc s 20/20 on february 13th, 1986. while dr. michael swango was in prison for poisoning his colleagues, he sat down for an interview with john stossel. we got permission from the prison in illinois to interview him. and he was very convincing. i m not guilty. i didn t do those things. in that abc news program 20/20, dr. michael swango had an answer for everything. i would say, what about the ant poison? i had an ant problem. i don t know anything about ants. all i know is i had an apt problem and i took care of it as best i could. what about all these other poisons? oh, if you looked at any suburban home, you d find lots of things the lawyers could spin as a poison. okay. started to wonder. you hear the horrendous things he s been accused of and been found guilty of and you
this whole investigation, he was talking to everybody about everything, anything. you know, just to try to convince people that he was, you know, innocent. despite his claims of innocence, dr. michael swango was officially dismissed from the medical school program in south dakota. and in the spring of 1993, he and his fiancee kristin kinney left town. when they went into his house after he was gone, it was full of poisons. and after he left sioux falls, supposedly the behavior really did not change. it was like he skirted right under the law. my father s name was thomas marco. he was in the army, world war ii. my father was confined to a wheelchair from an accident at
young man hit her. [boom] when they got her stabilized they sent her to ohio state. then she dies unexpectedly. she had a high fever. i think that was the reason dr. swango was tasked with taking a blood draw and that was to see if she had and infection of some sort. seconds later he went out and she turned blue and died. the cause of death at the time was deemed pneumonia. we didn t know how it happen until later on. there may have been some warning signs, had someone thought it unusual that he was exiting the room with a syringe and shortly after that she coded and died. but they really didn t add up those things at the time. nobody had bothered to report