Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder (14 page)

Krzystofczyk was amazed at how excited Swango was by the program. “Wouldn’t that be great?” Swango exclaimed after the interview. “To travel around the country killing people! Just moving on, killing some more—a great lifestyle!”

E
ARLY
on the morning of September 14, Swango showed up at the paramedics’ quarters in the hospital with a box of Honey Maid doughnuts and put them on the table. Krzystofczyk was mildly surprised. It wasn’t unusual for the paramedics to bring food to work, but he couldn’t remember Swango ever showing much generosity. Usually it was Lonnie Long who brought in doughnuts or sweet rolls. Krzystofczyk had gone along with Swango recently when he stopped by to see his mother. Muriel gave Michael a chocolate cream pie she had baked. Krzystofczyk had expected Swango to offer him a piece when they returned to the hospital. Instead, Swango had devoured the entire pie himself.

“I got you guys a bunch of doughnuts,” Swango said as he put the box on the table. Krzystofczyk took a doughnut, as did the three other paramedics in the room that morning. But Swango didn’t take one; he sat down near the TV. This in itself was somewhat unusual, because Swango usually had so much energy that he
stood up or paced in front of the TV while watching CNN. Krzystofczyk took a bite. He thought the doughnut tasted okay, though the icing on it looked as if it had melted slightly, maybe from exposure to heat. It was a warm day for September.

One of Swango’s colleagues chided him: “What did you do, buy day-old doughnuts?”

“They’re fresh, just bought them this morning,” Swango replied cheerfully.

About a half-hour later, one of the paramedics began to feel nauseated, flushed, dizzy, and had to rush to the bathroom to vomit. Within another fifteen minutes all four who had eaten the doughnuts were ill with similar symptoms.

“What did you do, Mike, poison us?” joked Unmisig. Swango looked incredulous, sitting forward in his chair and shaking his head earnestly.

“No, I didn’t,” he replied, staring down at the floor as he said it. “You know I wouldn’t do anything like that.” He picked up the box with the remaining doughnuts, saying he was going to take them down to the nurses’ station.

As their condition worsened, the paramedics reported to the emergency room, where they told the doctor on duty that they’d all just eaten doughnuts and become violently ill. The doctor suspected food poisoning and gave them a drug to retard vomiting. But if anything, the drug seemed to make matters worse. All four had to leave work.

The incident was reported to the Adams County Health Department as a case of suspected food poisoning, and two investigators for the department interviewed the paramedics and personnel at the Honey Maid doughnut shop. The shop owner was indignant at the suggestion that there was something unhygienic about his operation, and personally ate six doughnuts on the spot. The investigators inspected storage conditions and packaging materials, but nothing suggested food poisoning. With nothing more to go on, they concluded that an unidentified virus was to blame, and the matter was closed.

Krzystofczyk’s symptoms hadn’t been as bad as the others’—he wasn’t sure he’d even finished the doughnut—and he later returned to the hospital. As he got out of his car in the parking lot, Swango materialized.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, seemingly genuinely concerned. Krzystofczyk said he’d been sick, but was feeling a little better. “How are the others?” Swango asked, eagerly pressing him for details.

Swango also called the homes of the other victims, asking relatives or roommates how they were feeling and how their illnesses were developing.

T
HE
next evening, a Friday, Swango was assigned to work at the Quincy Notre Dame High School football game, where two ambulances are always on duty in case of injuries to players. Swango was assigned to the backup ambulance rather than (as he preferred) to the primary emergency vehicle. Swango’s alma mater, Christian Brothers, had merged with the private Catholic girls’ school in Quincy, and the combined schools used the name Notre Dame. With marching bands, cheerleaders, and enthusiastic students, the football games were festive occasions that attracted large crowds. Swango had once marched with his clarinet in the half-time shows.

Swango’s partner on the ambulance that evening was Brent Unmisig, who was in his twenties, easygoing, and popular, especially with nurses. With a twinge of envy, the other paramedics sometimes teased him about his good looks. Unmisig was still feeling sick from the doughnuts and had barely been able to make it to the game after his violent illness. The game was proceeding uneventfully when, just before half-time, Swango offered to get Unmisig a soda. Unmisig said he’d like a Coke.

Swango returned with a cola in a paper cup and gave it to his partner, who took a sip. He’d drunk about half the cup by the time half-time began and the players left the field. Soon after, Unmisig felt a renewed wave of nausea. He sat the cup on the spare tire of the ambulance, ran behind the vehicle, and vomited. When he returned, he noticed the cup was gone, though he was too ill to care. By the end of the third quarter, he was again vomiting behind the ambulance and suffering severe stomach cramps. He had to go home.

Unmisig lived with his aunt, Connie Meyer, who worked as a secretary in the emergency room. The next day, Swango called her to see how Unmisig was doing, asking whether he’d have to miss his
next shift and probing for details of his symptoms. Suffering from an intense headache, continued nausea, and dehydration, Unmisig couldn’t get out of bed for three days.

Gradually the others, too, recovered and returned to work. Twelve days later, on September 27, several of the paramedics teased Swango over the fact that he’d again been assigned to the backup ambulance rather than the primary emergency vehicle. This seemed to infuriate Swango, which only encouraged them to keep up the banter. Swango, in turn, had been complaining that the other paramedics weren’t keeping up with reading the latest literature on emergency medicine and weren’t working hard enough.

A little after noon, after responding to an ambulance call, Swango said, “I’m going after some sodas. Does anybody want one?”

“Yeah, I’d like a 7-Up,” replied Greg Myers, who hadn’t eaten any of Swango’s doughnuts. After a few minutes, Myers saw Swango coming down the corridor with four sodas. But then Swango turned suddenly into the men’s bathroom. When Swango handed him his 7-Up, Myers noticed that it had already been opened.

“Hey, what the heck did you do?” Myers asked jokingly. “Go in the bathroom and take a whiz in mine?”

“What do you mean?” Swango asked.

“I saw you go into the bathroom,” Myers said.

“No, no,” Swango said, explaining that he’d opened the 7-Up by mistake.

Though the can seemed full, Myers noticed the residue of some liquid around the opening, and again teased Swango about having urinated in it.

“I wasn’t feeling well,” Swango said this time, explaining he’d taken a sip of the soda to settle his stomach.

“That’s fine, as long as you didn’t whiz in it.” Myers laughed.

He poured the 7-Up into a cup filled with ice and drank about a fourth of it. Soon after, he started to stand up, then suddenly sat down, overcome by nausea. He rushed to the bathroom, where he was racked by vomiting, the worst he’d ever experienced. While he was in the bathroom, Swango came to the door holding the cup of soda and asked if he wanted more, saying it might settle his stomach. Myers declined. He was so weak he had to lie down. He
couldn’t even drive home. Someone else had to replace him on the shift.

When Myers’s girlfriend, who worked at the hospital, stopped by later that afternoon, he told her, “Something’s not right. I never get sick like this.” She asked him what had happened, and he told her he’d just drunk some 7-Up that Swango had gotten for him. She mentioned that she’d just passed Swango in the kitchen area, where he was emptying a cup and ice into the sink. Myers suggested she look for the can. She found it in the sink, upside down, drained.

About an hour later, Myers managed to drive himself home, but had to stop three times to vomit en route. That evening, he got a call from Swango, who asked how he was doing and wanted to hear about his symptoms in great detail. Did he have diarrhea? How long had it lasted? Had his headache grown worse? Myers felt that most people would have asked how he was doing and left it at that. Swango was a doctor, but his interest seemed so acute that when he hung up, Myers said to himself, “I think he gave me something.”

Several days later, when he had recovered enough to return to work, Myers described the incident involving the 7-Up to Connie Meyer. Her eyes widened as she listened to his story. “Oh my God,” she finally said. “That’s just what happened to Brent” at the football game. The pattern seemed obvious: Swango had offered both Unmisig and Myers a soda just before they fell ill. But Myers and Meyer were reluctant to share their suspicions. When Myers mentioned them to Lonnie Long, the boss brushed them aside, dismissing as preposterous the notion that someone like Swango might have tampered with their drinks. Nevertheless, the two confided in another paramedic, Fred Bennett, who thought they might be on to something.

About two weeks later, on October 12, while Swango was on duty, two other paramedics brewed some iced tea, then left on a call. They each took a sip of the tea when they returned. Both preferred unsweetened tea, and they hadn’t added any sugar. But inexplicably, the tea tasted very sweet. Alarmed by the recent spate of severe illness among their fellow paramedics, they poured out the glasses and began searching for any empty sugar packets that might explain the sweet taste. They found none. Swango, hearing their remarks, dumped out the entire pitcher of tea.

Later that afternoon, after Swango had left on an ambulance run, the two noticed that his duffel was open and a bag stamped “George Keller & Sons” had fallen from it. Keller is a large garden and feed store in Quincy; and when they looked in the bag, the paramedics saw two boxes of Terro brand ant poison. One of the boxes was empty; the other contained a full bottle. The primary active ingredient in Terro ant poison is arsenic, which is concentrated in a sweet sucrose solution. When they shared this discovery with Krzystofczyk, he went into the emergency room and looked up arsenic in the medical encyclopedia. The symptoms of arsenic poisoning—violent vomiting, stomach cramps, and severe headaches—were exactly what they had been experiencing.

Now several of the paramedics baited a trap. They had been careful to keep their suspicions confined to a small group—Krzystofczyk, Unmisig, Myers, Fred Bennett, Connie Meyer, and a few others. They didn’t want anyone tipping off Swango. First, they planted some fake ambulance calls that would summon everyone from the paramedics’ quarters, leaving them vacant. Swango would hear the calls on his scanner, they assumed; someone in the emergency room would surreptitiously watch the paramedics’ room to see what he did. But nothing materialized.

Then, about a week later, on Friday, October 19, Myers brewed a pot of iced tea, adding no sweetener. He and Bennett poured the tea into their glasses, which were marked with their initials. They had taken just a few sips when they received an ambulance call, put the glasses down, and left.

Not long after, Swango drove out of the parking lot and stopped at a busy intersection. Another paramedic pulled up just behind him. Suddenly, as Myers and Bennett approached in their ambulance, Swango pulled over, threw his car into reverse, and backed up at high speed until he could turn into the nearest alleyway.

Curious, the paramedic who’d stopped behind Swango’s car at the intersection returned to the hospital, where he told Myers and Bennett about Swango’s strange behavior. Unaware of the recent developments, he said laughingly that it seemed Swango didn’t want them to see him. Myers and Bennett looked at each other knowingly, then went to their tea. Bennett took a taste.

“Taste this,” he said to Myers. Myers took the glass.

“Damn, that’s sweet,” he said.

Shortly after, Mark Krzystofczyk arrived. “Here,” Myers said, handing him the glass of tea. Krzystofczyk tasted it. We’ve got him, he thought.

But now that the paramedics had the sample of sweetened tea, none of them knew what to do with it. They poured the remaining tea into a plastic container they obtained from the emergency room, then put that inside an empty cottage cheese container and stored it in a brown paper bag in Bennett’s locker.

At two
A.M
., Swango showed up at St. Mary’s Hospital, where one of his closest friends among the paramedics, Lamont “Monty” Grover, was on call, sleeping in the paramedics’ quarters. Swango woke him up and insisted Grover walk outside with him into the hospital garage. There Swango said, “Sometimes I feel I have an evil purpose in life.” Grover didn’t know what to say.

The paramedics left the tea in the locker over the weekend. When they told Connie Meyer about it, she called Dr. William Gasser, who in addition to having been one of Swango’s chemistry professors at Quincy College also worked part-time helping the pathologists at Blessing Hospital as a laboratory consultant. Meyer told Gasser she had some tea she’d like tested for the presence of arsenic. Gasser said he couldn’t test specifically for arsenic, but he could do a relatively simple test that would indicate the presence of heavy metals. Arsenic is a heavy metal, along with cadmium and tin.

Gasser knew only that the liquid was tea. On Monday, he took the sample to his lab at Quincy College. First he tested ordinary tea, which did not show the presence of any heavy metals. Then he tested the sample. It was positive.

Myers took the sample to the Adams County coroner, Wayne Johnson, who forwarded it to the crime lab at the Illinois Bureau of Investigation for further tests. It was positive for arsenic.

Armed with this evidence, the group of paramedics, along with Connie Meyer, met with Gene Mann, the director of the Adams County Health Department, in his office. They shut the door, and laid out their findings. Noticing their absence, Swango asked several secretaries at the emergency room what was going on, but none of them knew.