Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: Doctor Death

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Michael Swango was a charming, ambitious young doctor who seemed destined for a successful medical career when he began his residency in Ohio in the early 1980s. But wherever he worked, patients who should have recovered began dying without explanation, and colleagues who fell ill after eating food he brought them narrowly survived. For years, hospitals and medical boards across the United States and eventually as far as Zimbabwe passed him along rather than confront the mounting suspicions, allowing him to keep practicing and leaving a trail of poisoned patients in his wake. By the time authorities finally caught up with him, he may have been responsible for dozens of deaths. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the case of Michael Swango, the institutions that trusted him long after the warning signs appeared, and the chilling question of how a man sworn to heal was able to kill for so long while hiding in plain sight.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. The most important promise in the world of medicine is do no harm. When you check into a hospital, you hand your life to strangers

and you trust that every one of them wants you to walk back out. Michael Swongo understood that trust better than anyone. He knew that a man in a white coat can stand over a bed, do the unthinkable, and have everyone in the room assume he's helping. For more than a decade, he moved from hospital to hospital and country to country. Patients died, nurses grew suspicious,

and somehow over and over he kept his job and his license. By the time anyone stopped him, it was too late. And no one, not the FBI, not the investigator who spent years chasing him, not even Michael Swango himself, has ever been able to count how many people he really killed. This is the story of Dr. Death. People's lives are like a story. There's the beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on.

Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, the Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come at every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. and for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time,

plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head, the ones where the evidence points in multiple directions,

and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Crime House Studios, and be sure to like and subscribe. A heads up before we start. This story includes descriptions of murder, poisoning, and suicide. Please listen with care. Today, I'm talking about Michael Swango, a man who lied his way into one of the most trusted jobs there is

and used it to kill. Almost nothing he told people about himself was true. And for years, no one thought to check. He kept getting hired as a promising young doctor, and everywhere he went, the people in his care kept dying. Every time his coworkers got suspicious, Michael was already gone. He was in the next town, the next state, and eventually the next continent. Stopping him would take years.

The federal investigator who wouldn't let him. let go and in the end digging his victims out of their graves. All that and more coming up. Michael Joseph Swango was born on October 21st, 1954 in Tacoma, Washington. He was the middle of three brothers, and by the time he was a teenager, the family had settled in Quincy, Illinois. His father, Virgil was a career army officer, and by most accounts, he was a hard man to live with.

He drank, he ran the household with military discipline, and according to the investigator who later spent years on Michael's case, Virgil liked to tell his sons about his time at war, specifically about the men he had killed. That's a heavy thing for a child to grow up with. Other kids got bedtime stories, Michael got war stories, with his own father as the one pulling the trigger. For a long time, though, Michael looked like the family's success story. He was the well-behaved one. He wore a jacket and tie when the other kids were in bell bottoms. He topped the honor roll. He played clarinet in the school band, and in 1972, he graduated from his Catholic high school

in Quincy as valedictorian, a national merit finalist with his pick of colleges. He chose Milliken University, a small school in Decatur, Illinois, on a school in Decatur, Illinois, a full music scholarship. For two years, he did well. He made friends. He started dating someone. And then his girlfriend broke up with him. Something in Michael seemed to shift after that.

He traded the neat sport coats he'd always worn for combat boots and military clothes and painted his car, Army Green. Eventually, he fully pulled away from the people around him, dropped out of school and enlisted in the Marines. He trained at the Recruit Depot in San Diego, and by all accounts, he was a decent Marine, but he never saw combat after his service. He came home to Quincy in 1976 with an honorable discharge

and a couple of minor commendations. Whatever he'd gone looking for in the military, he hadn't found it. What he found instead was a new fixation. Around this time, Michael started collecting stories about violent death. He clipped articles about car wrecks, plane crashes, and gruesome accidents out of the newspaper and pasted them into scrapbooks. He kept adding to them for years.

That morbid streak didn't stop him from chasing something respectable. He told his mother he wanted to become a doctor, enrolled at Quincy College, and threw himself into chemistry. in biology. He graduated summa cum laude and won a National Chemistry Award. But on campus, he stood out and not in a good way. He still trained like a Marine, and he took a side job as an ambulance attendant at a local medical center. Even then, he wanted to be around emergencies. And to get into that program, Michael stretched the truth. To pad his application, he claimed he'd earned a bronze star and a purple heart in the Marines. He hadn't, but nobody checked.

It was the first documented lie in what would become a lifelong habit of inventing his own story and getting away with it. And then there was his senior thesis. Of all the topics, a promising chemistry student could pick, Michael chose to write about the killing of a Bulgarian dissident named Georgi Markoff. Markov had been assassinated in London in 1878, jabbed in the leg with the tip of an umbrella

that injected a tiny pellet of poison. In 1979, degree in hand, Michael started medical school at Southern Illinois University. And this is where the pattern that would shape everything after first showed up. Academically, it was bright. But the hands-on work of medicine, and the part where you sit with sick people and care for them, bored him.

He'd rather be out riding ambulances, and his classmates started to notice something they couldn't quite name. Michael seemed strangely at home around dying patients. When someone on the ward took a turn for the worst, he was somehow already there. His fellow students landed on a nickname for him that was half a joke, and have something else. 00 swango, as in a license to kill. Nobody believed a medical student was killing anyone, of course. He was just the odd one, the loner who kept to himself

and didn't seem to need anybody. Then, in his final year, he nearly got caught doing something that should have ended his career before it started. During an obstetrics and gynecology rotation, Michael was supposed to examine patients and write up their histories. Instead, he faked them. He'd spent a couple of minutes in a room, or skip the visit entirely,

then turn in a thorough-looking report on a patient he'd barely spoken to. For a while, it made him look diligent. Then a supervising doctor got suspicious, went to check on one of his patients and realized the examination described in the chart had never happened. After that, a faculty committee had to decide what to do about Michael.

He came within a single vote of being expelled. One vote. If that vote had gone the other way, everything that followed might never have happened. But it didn't. The school held him. back a year instead and in April 1983, Michael Swango graduated. He was now officially a doctor. Even more remarkable, he had a prestigious job waiting for him, a surgical internship at Ohio

State University Medical Center with a neurosurgery residency to follow. Ohio State knew what happened at his last school and they took him anyway. In his book on the case, blind eye, James B. Stewart called what came next, quote, a conspiracy of silence. From here on out, at hospital after hospital, people would sense that something was deeply wrong with Michael Swango, and again and again, they would decide it wasn't their job to prove it. The first of those hospitals was Ohio State. In the summer of 1983, 28-year-old Michael Swango arrived at a ward called Rhodes Hall, wearing a white coat with his name on it.

He finally had exactly what he wanted. Access. He could walk into any room at any hour, and no one would question why he was there. And almost right away, he started using that power to kill. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now.

How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace? This is History's Greatest Mysteries, a history channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode dives into one of the world's greatest enigmas, the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics, and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure, to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures. These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far stranger. Follow history's greatest

mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcasts. In 1983, Michael Swango began his internship at Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. He was 28 years old, and for the first time in his life, he had real power over other people, the power to decide who got better and who didn't. At first, he blended right in, just another new intern making his rounds, checking on patience, doing the job. Then that fall and winter, the deaths on his ward started to pile up. And they didn't make sense. Patients who were sitting up in bed, recovering, expecting to go home, were suddenly dying.

One of them was Cynthia Ann McGee. She was 19, a gymnast on the team at the University of Illinois. She'd come back to Ohio, her home state, to recover after being hit by a car while riding her bike. And things were looking up. She was young, healthy, and getting. better. On January 14, 1984, Cynthia died suddenly. Michael had treated her. At the time, doctors chocked it up to complications from her accident. It would be years before anyone learned the truth. But the nurses in the ward were already starting to notice that something was off. There was the case of Ruth Barrick

an elderly patient Michael was treating. One day a nurse named Anne Ritchie went in to check on her and found Michael in the room. When he finally left, Ruth turned a terrible shade of blue. The staff tried everything, but she died gasping for air. What stuck with Ritchie was Michael himself. While everyone else scrambled to save Ruth, he stood at the foot of the bed. Calm, doing nothing. His one comment was that the sight of it was disgusting.

Then came the case that nearly blew everything open. Her name was Rina Cooper. She was 69 years old, recovering from routine back surgery and doing fine. On the evening of February 7, 1984, a student nurse named Carolyn Beery looked in on her. What Beery saw was Michael, standing over Rina injecting something into her IV line. Moments later, Rina couldn't move. She couldn't breathe. In the next bed, her roommate saw what was happening and started screaming for help.

Staff came running, and within about 15 minutes, they pulled her back. The paralysis eased. She could breathe on her own again. Rina Cooper survived, but was left shaken. and her case had a strange epilogue. When investigators wrote up her account of the man she'd seen in her room, the description somehow changed. Her memory of a tall man became, on paper, a short woman.

Years later, Rina said she felt like words were being put in her mouth. By now, the nurses were sure. They believed Michael was connected to a string of deaths on the ward, at least five of them, and they weren't just making things up. These nurses worked those wards every day. They compared notes, they watched who was in the room and when, and they did not like the pattern they kept landing on. So they took their concerns up the chain the way you're supposed to.

And the hospital investigated? Sort of. After a short inquiry, administrators cleared Michael of any wrongdoing. Some of them decided the nurses were being paranoid that a promising young doctor was the victim of a witch hunt. But the story doesn't end with him being cleared because even though they exonerated him, Ohio State decided it didn't want him back. When his internship ended in June 1984, they pulled his neurosurgery residency offer. Later, it came out why they handled it so gently. Hospital officials were afraid that if they fired him outright and accused him of something they couldn't prove, Michael would sue.

So instead of stopping him, they eased him out the door and let him become someone else's problem. In July, 1984, Michael moved back to Quincy and took a job as an emergency medical technician with the county ambulance service. And within weeks, his co-workers started getting sick. It began with donuts. One morning, Michael brought in a box for the crew. Not long after, several medics who'd eaten them were dizzy, cramping and vomiting. They figured it was a bad bat. But then it kept happening. People got sick after drinking sodas, he offered them. After sipping tea they'd left sitting out.

But the thing that finally gave Michael away was small. A few of the medics noticed that drinks they'd sit down and come back to would taste faintly sweet, even when they hadn't added anything. Suspicious now, two of them went through Michael's things and they found it. Ant poison. Its active ingredient, arsenic had been cut with sugar. It matched their symptoms exactly.

This time, there was no looking the other way. The medics took a poisoned batch of tea to investigators who tested it and confirmed the arsenic. In October, police arrested Michael and searched his apartment. What they found there, was its own kind of nightmare. Michael had turned part of his home into a small chemical lab. There were bottles and syringes and pages of handwritten recipes,

instructions for brewing poisons like ricin and cyanide. His scrapbooks of disasters were stacked in among the chemicals, right where he lived and ate and slept. In 1985, Michael was convinced. of aggravated battery for poisoning his coworkers. He was sentenced to five years. He served about two years and got out in 1987. Both Illinois and Ohio revoked his medical license.

For most people, that would be the end of any medical career. For Michael, it was just a detour. After prison, he landed in Virginia. First, he worked as a counselor, at a state career center until they let him go for spending his work hours pasting disaster clippings into a scrapbook. Then he got a job as a lab technician at a coal company

and right on schedule, some of his coworkers there started complaining of stomach pains. Nobody put it together at the time and Michael was never charged, but it was the same pattern following him from job to job. something else happened in Virginia too something that mattered he met a woman named christin kinney a nurse at a local hospital by every account the michael that christen knew was warm attentive funny and devoted the ex-convict who'd served time for poisoning the people he worked with never showed his face across the table from her they fell for each other and they started making plans for a life together. She had no idea what she was walking into. Michael, meanwhile, wanted to get back into medicine, and he'd figured out how to do it. He would forge whatever it

took. Under a new name, he started applying to residency programs, burying his conviction under fake documents. One program in West Virginia caught the forgeries and turned him down, But in July 1992, a residency at the University of South Dakota in Sioux Falls said yes. When they asked about his criminal record, Michael waved it off as a bar fight, and they believed him. He and Kristen moved to South Dakota together and got engaged. At the hospital, his new colleagues liked him. He seemed knowledgeable, calm, always first-tribed. respond when there was an emergency, he must have thought he'd finally outrun his past,

but he'd just made a careless mistake. He applied to join the American Medical Association, and this time they weren't going to let him get away with murder. The government gets a bad reputation, but did you know that the roads under your feet, the forecast on your phone, the letter in your mailbox, that's all government too. I'm Professor Lindsay Cormack, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Government That Doesn't Suck, alongside Professor Greg Jackson, who you may know from the hit podcast, History That Doesn't Suck. Each episode, we dig into the surprising story of an American institution, from the origins of the internet to the National Park Service to the GI Bill, and so much more. You'll hear the stories behind them, plus a conversation with an expert who knows it inside and out.

This is the real history of how we built the country underwomen. your feet, and you'll never look at any of it the same way again. Listen to and follow, government that doesn't suck, available now wherever you get your podcasts. By the fall of 1992, Michael Swongo was a first-year resident in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, engaged a Kristen Kinney, and on paper, a respected young doctor again. Then his application to the American Medical Association triggered a real background check. Around the same time, a cable television program aired a segment about his past. Suddenly, the hospital knew everything.

The poisonings, the prison time, the revoked licenses. In late 1992, the University of South Dakota dismissed him. Now, Michael was unemployed, exposed, and stuck. And the man Kristen had fallen in love with started to disappear. He became angry and withdrawn, snapping at her. over nothing, then going quiet for hours at a time. Around that same time, Kristen started to get sick. At first it was headaches, then dizziness, nausea, fog she couldn't shake.

The woman her friends knew was sharp and steady. It was suddenly exhausted and frightened of her own body, and no doctor could tell her why. Then when she finally went home to Virginia to see her parents, something remarkable happened. She had better. Away from Michael. her symptoms eased.

Her mother, Sharon, could see her daughter coming back to herself. Kristen decided to stay in Virginia, but Michael talked his way back into her life, the way he always could. He told her he had a fresh start lined up, a new residency, and that everything was going to be different. He wasn't lying about the job, at least. In June 1993, using forged documents, once again, Michael had gotten. himself a psychiatry residency at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The dean there later put it bluntly. The standard checks on applicants hadn't been done.

Michael's residency placed him at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport on Long Island. For Michael, this was the perfect hunting ground. It's full of long-term, seriously ill patients. Many of them are older, many of them don't get many visitors. If one of them dies, no one is shocked, and no one goes looking for a reason. According to reporting on the case, Michael's very first patient at Northport, a veteran named Dominique Bufalino was dead within about a day of Michael's arrival. It was the beginning of a very short, very deadly stretch. But the story of how Michael was finally stopped doesn't start in that hospital.

It starts that same summer, more than a thousand miles away, with the one person who loved him. Kristen had stayed behind in Virginia when Michael left for New York, and in mid-July, 1993, only weeks after he arrived at Northport, 27-year-old Kristen was found dead. She had taken her own life. At the time, it looked like a private heartbreak, a young woman drained by a hard relationship. What no one knew yet was that Kristen's mother, Sharon, had kept a lock of her daughter's hair. Years later, when it was finally tested, it came back full of arsenic. Sharon came to believe that Michael had been poisoning Kristen for months without her ever realizing it,

and that it had worn down her mind and body until she couldn't see a way out. We'll never know how much Kristen understood about what was happening to her, but of everyone Michael Swango ever hurt, she may be the one who loved him the most. Back in New York, Kristen's death didn't slow Michael down at all. If anything, it made him bolder. Barely a week later, on July 26, 1993, he killed another patient at Northport, a veteran named George Ciano.

First, he told the staff that Ciano's family and doctor had approved a do-not-rescitate order. They hadn't. He entered it in the chart anyway so that if anything went wrong, no one would try to save him. Then he injected Ciano with epinephrine and his heart. stopped. Through the late summer and fall, he kept going. On September 23rd, he murdered Aldo Serini, injecting him with toxic substances that shut down his breathing. Then, in early October, two more men. On October 2nd, he injected Baron Harris with succincticolene, a powerful paralytic. Harris fell into a coma and died weeks later on November 9th. His wife said,

he'd watched Michael inject something into her husband more than once. When she asked what it was, he told her it was vitamins. That same day, Michael pulled the same trick he'd used on Siano, telling Thomas Simarko's family they were signing a do not intubate order when what he actually recorded was a do not resuscitate order. Two days later, on October 4th, he injected Samarko with succinacoline. Sumarco died. But the walls finally started closing in that October, and it happened because of Kristen.

After she died, her mother couldn't let go of her questions about the man her daughter had been engaged to. She reached out to a friend of Kristen's, a nurse, back in South Dakota. That nurse alerted the dean who dealt with Michael there, and he picked up the phone and called the dean at Stony Brook. On October 22nd, 1993, Stony Brook fired Michael Swango. But by the time anyone tried to build a case against him, he was gone. In 1994, he packed up and disappeared. And this time, he didn't just leave town. He left the country.

Michael surfaced in Zimbabwe, where he'd used forged papers to land a job at a rural mission hospital in a place called Menenay. Their same awful cycle repeated itself. Patients under his care began dying. Others suddenly got worse. Nurses reported seeing Michael inject sleeping patients with something. Two of them, Kenyus M. Kandla and Virginia Sibanda, were dosed with poison in 1995 and somehow lived.

The Menenei Hospital was staffed by nuns, and as the deaths mounted, they pushed the medical director to act. He suspended Michael. The police obtained a warrant and searched the cottage where Michael was staying. Inside, they found a small pharmacy, syringes, some still filled with liquid, and bottles of drugs the local doctors didn't recognize. What Michael did next, a real nerve. He hired one of the most respected human rights lawyers in the country.

a man named David Coltart to fight the suspension, and he threatened to sue the hospital for defamation. Coltart's name carried so much weight that other doctors assumed Michael had to be innocent, and a hospital in the nearby city of Bulaweo let him keep treating patients while he waited on a hearing. Only later, as the evidence piled up, did Coltart come to realize he'd been representing a killer.

The case was tightening another way, too. Michael's own landlady had fallen ill, and a test of her hair turned up arsenic. Zimbabwe and police passed what they had through Interpol, and it reached the FBI. It had taken the better part of a year to trace the deaths back to Michael, and Zimbabwe did eventually move to charge him with poisoning his patients, but before the country could bring him to trial, he slipped over the border into Zambia. From there, he drifted through Namibia and then lined up yet another hospital job,

this time at the Royal Hospital in Iran, Saudi Arabia. And that job is what finally undid him. To get his Saudi visa, Michael had to briefly return to the United States. On June 27, 1997, he flew into O'Hare Airport in Chicago. When his name went into the system, it flagged an outstanding federal warrant for lying his way into that VA hospital. He was arrested right there in the airport. He'd spent years slipping across borders and changing names, always a step ahead. In the end, when the murders didn't catch up with him, a lie on a job application did.

He pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to three and a half. years in prison. The judge who sentenced him added an unusual condition, one that says a lot about how they'd come to see him for the length of his term. Swongo was barred from any prison job that involved preparing or handing out food or going anywhere near medication. On his face, fraud charge was minor, but it did something crucial. It kept Michael Swango, locked up and in one place, and it bought investigators' time. The person who used that time was a Veterans Affairs agent named Bruce Sackman. Chasing a killer was well outside his usual beat.

VA agents handled fraud and theft. Murder was the FBI's job, not theirs. Plenty of people thought Sackman was in over his head. He kept going anyway. He built a team. team, and he brought in a renowned forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, to help make sense of the medical evidence. This was bigger than one hospital. To understand what they were up against, the team had to reconstruct Michael's entire career

and follow a trail of suspicious deaths from Illinois and Ohio to Long Island and all the way to southern Africa. They decided their best shot at a conviction was the three, VA patients, Aldo Serini, Thomas Samarko, and George Siano. So investigators did the hardest thing this kind of case asks of anyone. They went to the families and asked to exhum the bodies. When the remains were tested, they gave Michael away. The men had been poisoned with substances like epinephrine and succincticoline, drugs that are nearly invisible unless someone already suspects a killing. In July of 2000, just days before Michael Swango was set to walk out of prison a free man,

federal prosecutors charged him with three counts of murder. Faced with overwhelming evidence and the very real possibility of a death sentence, he took a deal. On September 6, 2000, 45-year-old Michael Swango pleaded guilty to murdering Aldo Serini, George Siano and Thomas Samarko. In open court, he admitted he had killed them on purpose by giving them substances he knew were likely to kill. Judge Jacob Mishler sentenced him to three consecutive life terms

without the possibility of parole. The case came out of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn. At the time, it was run by Loretta Lynch, who would go on to become Attorney General of the United States. United States. The families were in the courtroom that day. Among them was Carol Fisher, Thomas Marcos' daughter. She said she hoped Michael would spend the rest of his life in a living hell. As part of the deal, Michael was spared the death penalty, and Zimbabwe, which had been preparing its own murder case, agreed not to seek his extradition. But there was one more reckoning to come.

A month later, in October 2000, Michael was brought to Columbus, Ohio, and pleaded guilty to a fourth murder, Cynthia McGee. The 19-year-old gymnast who died back in 1984, and Ohio court handed him another life sentence on top of the three he was already serving. And that plea untangled and old injustice. The young man who was driving when Cynthia got in that accident had been. been convicted of reckless homicide. For 16 years, he'd carried the blame for her death. By the time Michael admitted the truth, the driver had already completed his sentence, but his family still fought to clear his name. Michael Swango is still alive today, held at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He was convicted of four murders,

but almost no one who studies this case believes that's the real number. James B. Stewart, whose book Blind Eye remains the definitive account, linked Michael to around 35 deaths and 20 non-fatal poisonings. The FBI has suggested the true figure could be as high as 60. Bruce Sackman, the agent who caught him, has said he thinks it could be as many as 100 across the United States and Africa. Investigators also found Michael's own diary among his belongings.

In one entry, he described killing as the only way he had of reminding himself that he was still alive. In another, he wrote, quote, the sweet, husky, close smell of an indoor homicide. After everything, this is what I keep coming back to. Michael Swango left a trail so obvious that anyone could have followed it. He faked records

in medical school and nearly got thrown out for it. He was convicted of poisoning his co-workers and lost his license in two states. Patients kept dying around him, ward after ward, and nurses kept raising their hands and saying that something was very wrong. And at almost every step, someone chose the easier thing. The medical school passed him along rather than risk a fight. A hospital let him move on rather than

accuse him. Program after program never bothered to make the phone call that would have exposed him in an afternoon. He didn't slip through the cracks. He walked through open doors. The investigators

who finally caught him weren't satisfied with putting one man away, they wanted to understand how the system had let it happen in the first place. So the next Michael Swango couldn't forge a document and start over in a new state. Sackman would spend years hunting people like Michael and later helped bring down a VA nurse named Kristen Gilbert who murdered her own patients in Massachusetts. because the frightening thing about this case is that being a monster wasn't enough to stop Michael Swango. He needed dozens of other people to look away.

And for years, they did. So I want to leave you with the people who paid for that. Cynthia McGee, a 19-year-old gymnast who should have gone home. Aldo Serini, George Siano, and Thomas Samarko, veterans who had served their country only to die in a hospital bed. Ruth Barrett, Rina Cooper, who lived and was never believed, and Kristen Kinney, who trusted him most of all. Those are the names we know. There are almost certainly others in Ohio, Illinois, and overseas, whose families never got a try. an answer, or even the knowledge that a crime had happened at all.

In Zimbabwe, some of those families are still asking to this day why he was never tried for what he did there. How many people did Michael Swango kill? Was it the four he admitted to? Was it the 35 that Stewart documented? Or the 60, the FBI has floated? or the 100 that the agent who caught him believes. We don't know. We may never know.

Every one of those people did the most ordinary thing in the world. They got sick, and they trusted a doctor to help them. That trust is what medicine is built on. And Michael Swango spent his whole life betraying it. So maybe the most haunting thing about, Dr. Death isn't what he did. It's how long we let him do it.

Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support.

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powered by Pave Studios. This episode is brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Sarah Camp, Mara de la Rosa, Nicolette Tavallero, Claire Swartlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter.

Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from. reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this, except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.