Dr. Death | Michael Swango
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The box of donuts was a peace offering. The employees working at the Adams County Ambulance Service in Quincy, Illinois, were happy that their coworker had brought them the sugary treats. After all, who doesn't like getting free surprise donuts at work? Little did they know the donuts had been tampered with, poisoned, in fact.

They didn't know that the man who had brought them in, Michael Swango, had left behind him several mysterious deaths at his previous job in Ohio. But after everyone who ate the donuts became violently ill, their suspicions started to take root. They wanted to test the remaining donuts, but when they returned to the break room, the box was suddenly empty. The incident with the donuts was one of several unexplained illnesses among the staff.

These incidents, coupled with Swan Goh's strange behavior and fascination with death, prompted them to take action. They waited until Swan Goh was out on a call one day and forced open his locker. What they found inside would prove their suspicions. The two bottles of ant poison, one half empty and one full, told them that they were dealing with a sadistic individual. But this would not be the end of Michael Swan Goh's story. In fact,

it was barely the beginning. Through cunning, tenacity, and sheer will, Swango would go on to claim dozens of victims on two different continents over several years. By some estimates, Swango remains one of America's most prolific serial killers. Here's the insane, frustrating, and disturbing story of Michael Swango, also known as Doctor Death. Part One: Becoming a Doctor of Death

Imagine for a moment that you're in a hospital. Perhaps you've been in a recent car accident or you've just finished a routine surgery. You're resting, gathering your strength. Your primary doctor says everything looks good. You should be on your way home in a day or two. Your doctor leaves you to sleep or watch television or pass the time on your phone. Pretty soon, another doctor comes into your room. He's charming, striking up a conversation with you.

His bedside manner puts you at ease. Maybe you've seen him around the hospital, maybe not, but he looks like a doctor. He says all the right things. You trust him. Why shouldn't you? That nagging feeling in the back of your mind, that feeling that there's something off about this man is nothing to be worried about, just an overactive imagination. The doctor looks at your chart and says he's going to give you a sedative to help you sleep.

He pulls a syringe out of his pocket and pulls off the protective cap. You don't stop him. Why would you? He's the doctor. He's the one who has gone to medical school. He knows what he's doing. He injects the contents of the syringe into your IV line and then leaves the room with a strange smirk on his face. You don't think much of it, not until you break out into sweats. A terrible pain starts in your chest. You can't breathe.

Your vision blurs. You hear the insistent beeping of the machine next to you, but it barely registers. The pain is too much. Yelling hospital staff members rush into the room, but the doctor who gave you the shot isn't among them. You try to speak, to tell them that the strange doctor gave you something, but you can't speak. You can't breathe.

And with your last ounce of energy, you wonder what exactly it was that doctor put in your body and whether he was, in fact, trying to kill you. This was one of the ways that Dr. Michael Swango would kill people during his reign of terror. He used his position as a medical professional to commit his heinous murders, and he got away with them for nearly 20 years.

While murderous medical professionals like Michael Swango or his British counterpart, Harold Shipman, are incredibly rare, the fact that these men were able to get away with their crimes for years is troubling, to say the least. But as we explore these crimes, it will become clear what allowed Swango to get away with murder for as long as he did.

and how, in many cases, it was easy for him to continue his long, measured, and tenacious killing spree. Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1954, Joseph Michael Swango was the middle child of Muriel and John Virgil Swango. Michael's father was often absent, tending to his military career and showing little interest in his family.

His parents divorced eventually after John Swango returned from serving in the Vietnam War and became an alcoholic. Joseph Michael Swango, who preferred his middle name from an early age, was raised primarily in Quincy, Illinois. He earned the title of valedictorian in his graduating class at the Quincy Catholic Boys High School. He seemed to have a talent for music, and after graduating high school, he decided to pursue that talent.

attending nearby Milliken University College with his sights set on a music degree. But during his second year in college, a seemingly drastic change came over Michael. He lost interest in music and became fascinated with death and violence. He started a scrapbook of news clippings about any and all kinds of violent death. He abandoned his musical studies and joined the Marines.

He didn't see any combat and was honorably discharged. Upon returning home, he told his mother that he wanted to study medicine. He attended Quincy University, graduating with distinction. For his work at Quincy University, he earned an American Chemical Society Award.

Given what we know now about his modus operandi, this award takes on a chilling meaning, especially when we consider that his senior thesis was a detailed dive into the poisoning of a famous writer in London. But it wasn't until medical school that Michael Swango's strange behavior caused him to stand out from his peers. He attended Southern Illinois University, enrolling in their medical school program. His classmates quickly took notice of the man's odd behavior

It seemed he was more interested in working as an ambulance attendant than attending classes, studying, or putting in the work that the 71 other medical students were struggling through. Perhaps some were jealous of the fact that Michael Swango somehow managed to skate by, using some combination of brains, charm, and tenacity. He was known to be a sloppy student when it came to dissections, and some found him conceited.

He reportedly had a poor bedside manner during those days, and he barely hid his fascination with death. One incident involved Swango's inability to identify the human heart on an x-ray, a task that even those without a day's medical training could likely do. Another incident involved his severely botched dissection of a cadaver, which was then put on display and became a running joke among students. But Michael Swango didn't seem to notice,

Or if he did take note of his overtly poor performance and the ridicule from classmates, he didn't care. He did well on his written exams, which helped to keep him afloat and prevented him from flunking out. One big part of medical school is called H&P, which stands for history and physicals.

Under supervision, medical students are taught to summarize any given patient's health history, perform a physical, and then come up with a plan for that patient's treatment. Suango was particularly poor at this aspect of his training, clearly fixating on terminal patients and adopting a cavalier attitude about those patients that died.

it was around this time at Southern Illinois University, that Swango earned the nickname "00 Swango," a moniker that was often followed by three disturbingly grim words: "licensed to kill." It seemed patients Michael Swango was drawn to were more likely to die than those of other students. Some estimate that even in these early days, Swango was already poisoning people whenever he thought he could get away with it.

Still, it was clear to his fellow students and even some university staff that Swango needed to be watched. One supervising physician started to suspect Swango of shirking his responsibilities during the final semester of his senior year. Swango had been assigned to the gynecology ward where chief resident Dr. Kathleen O'Connor took it upon herself to watch him closely.

She found that, when he was supposed to be on rotation, he would instead be working on his ambulance job. O'Connor also found that Swango wasn't doing proper H and P checks on his patients. Instead, he was making his written reports up whole cloth, or copying what had been written about the patient on previous reports. Either way, it was a serious breach of ethics that was endangering patients.

In light of this information, among other issues he'd been having, the university moved to expel Swango. Michael's response was to hire a lawyer and threaten legal action. Instead of expelling him, Southern Illinois University agreed to give Michael a mulligan. They would let him pass, provided he completed the rotations he'd been skipping out on. This pushed back his graduation from 1982 to 1983.

By the time he earned his diploma, he had a poor reputation. His dean's letter, which accompanies each student's profile, stated in so many words that he was barely fit to be a doctor. Yet, it wasn't hard for Michael Swango to land a coveted year-long internship at the Ohio State University Medical Center. Whether those responsible for choosing candidates even read the dean's letter is unclear.

Either way, despite his poor performance and ethically questionable practices, Michael Swango left Southern Illinois University one step closer to becoming a full-fledged member of the medical community. Had he been expelled at the time, it's no doubt that he wouldn't have been able to so easily prey on some of the most vulnerable people from a position of trust and power. Part two, a lust for death.

Ruth Baric, a neurosurgery patient in the Ohio State University Medical Center, was in her room on the morning of January 31st, 1984. Deborah Kennedy, the attending nurse, thought it strange that an intern, Swango, came into the room ostensibly to check on Baric's IV. It was 10 o'clock in the morning and they usually did the rounds earlier in the day. Plus, doctors, not interns, usually did the rounds.

But when the intern asked her to leave, the nurse did just that. When she came back into the room later, the intern was gone. The patient, Ruth Baric, was still there, but she was turning blue from suffocation. Hospital staff members were able to prevent her from dying from respiratory failure, but they had no idea what would cause such a thing. It had come out of nowhere.

A week later, another nurse, Ann Ritchie, noticed a worrying reading on Beric's central venous pressure gauge. She called for a doctor to determine what, if anything, should be done about it. Swango responded. The nurse left the room but didn't go far. In fact, when Swango had been in the room with Beric for an unusually long time, she ducked back in to ask if everything was okay. Swango dismissed her, perturbed at being bothered by her.

A little while later, after seeing Swan go leave, Richie returned to the room once again, only to find Beric turning blue again. Much like she had a week earlier, staff tried to save her, but Beric died.

According to the nurse, Swango came back into the room and stood calmly at the foot of the bed, watching while other staff members performed emergency resuscitation procedures. At this point, some staff members were starting to suspect Swango, if not of outright murder, of being incompetent to the point of danger. But the very next day, another incident would alert many nurses to the true threat Swango posed to their patients.

Little more than 24 hours after Beric died, a student nurse walked into a patient's room to check on her. The patient, Rena Cooper, had undergone back surgery and was expected to recover nicely. But when the student nurse came into the room, she saw Swan go there, injecting something into Cooper's IV line.

Swango left the room quickly without a word. Not thinking much of it at the time, the nurse was still in the room when Cooper started convulsing and gasping for air. Several staff members rushed into the room and managed to resuscitate the woman. Once she had stabilized, Cooper gestured for a pen and paper since she wasn't yet able to talk again.

Someone brought her the requested items and Cooper wrote, "Someone gave me some med in my IV and paralyzed all of me, lungs, heart, speech." This was a serious allegation. And when Cooper was able to speak again, a doctor asked her to describe the person that did it to her. Her description of male, tall and blonde Fitzswango.

That, coupled with the student nurse's sighting of the doctor in training, was enough for staff members to confront Swango. He denied ever having been near Cooper's room. In fact, he was insulted at such an insinuation. But the nurses who worked there got to talking. In fact, directly after the incident in which Cooper almost died, another nurse saw Swango rush out of a nearby bathroom with a strange look on his face.

In the restroom, the nurse found an empty syringe. It looked as if it had been rinsed out and left on the wash basin. Syringes were not just left lying around, so this was a significant find. The nurse brought the syringe to the night manager. A little bit of digging by the nurses found that deaths had increased since Swango had started working in their area. They'd had more mysterious deaths in just a few weeks than they'd had in the past year.

A total of seven strange deaths, including Ruth Baric, had occurred while Swango was around. All seven of these patients had been expected to recover fully, only to die from complications that seemed to come out of nowhere. The nursing staff knew something was wrong, and all evidence pointed to Swango. So the assistant director of nursing went to neurosurgery professor Joseph Goodman and asked him to look into it.

Bafflingly, Goodman dismissed the allegations as gossip and rumors, suggesting that the nursing staff should mind their own business. However, he agreed to do an investigation. Unfortunately, it wasn't much of one. Goodman didn't interview those nurses who had seen or had good reason to suspect Swango. He didn't interview staff who had responded to the emergency codes of the seven patients who had died.

he simply reviewed the medical files of the seven deceased patients. He also reviewed Cooper's medical file and interviewed her. But somehow, as Cooper later told a reporter, her description of the perpetrator who injected something into her IV line was nearly the opposite of what she actually said. Instead of it being a tall, blonde man in the investigation report, it was written as a short woman.

It seemed that the hospital brass only gave token attention to Swango. Their investigation concluded that Swango was the victim of the rumor mill and perhaps a bit of bad luck. He was allowed to continue working at the hospital. After Swango was transferred to a different section of the hospital, a few more mysterious deaths followed him.

Two incidents on February 19th and one on February 20th, all involving Swango, would still not be enough for the university to take any action. Rather than report these allegations to the authorities and risk a lawsuit or slandering in the media, the university decided to refuse Swango's admittance as a resident doctor, citing his poor performance.

Despite his lackluster performance and reports of combative behavior with fellow staff members, the medical board still granted Swango a medical license in Ohio. Had the university taken action or done more than a token, closed-door investigation, they might have saved many lives. Instead, Swango received his medical license.

but he was angry at the way he'd been treated. So he headed back to his home state of Illinois, determined to get a license there. This apparent unwillingness to take these allegations seriously would come back to haunt the Ohio State University Medical Center soon enough because Swango was far from done with his murder spree. Part three, killing patients is not enough. Back in Quincy, where he'd grown up, Swango got a job as a paramedic

Perhaps because he was having a harder time keeping his killer self hidden, or perhaps because it was a less formal workplace than the hospital, Swango seemed particularly candid with his coworkers. Some of the things he said were taken as jokes, laughed at and shrugged off. Others seemed to give a glimpse into a truly disturbed mind. Either way, Swango had more medical experience than the other paramedics and was, at times, entertaining. Still,

Some of the things his coworkers later recalled him saying were downright chilling. One reported remark pertaining to why he liked being a doctor was about the pleasure Swango received when he could tell a kid's parents that their child was dead. He said that death turned him on. While working for the Adams County Ambulance Service, Swango described for his coworkers his ideal call.

It would involve two gas tankers exploding after a head-on collision with a school bus full of children. He described the bodies of the children caught in power lines and in the nearby barbed wire fences. It was his fantasy, his hope. But it wasn't the dark and often disturbing remarks that turned the tide for Swango. It was a box of poisoned donuts he brought to work one day.

After they ate the treats and suffered from stomach cramps, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, Swango's coworkers got to talking. They noted that Swango hadn't eaten any of the donuts he brought. They wanted to test one of them.

but the box was empty when they went to check. Not long after this incident, Swango bought one coworker a soda while working at a high school football game. After drinking half the bubbling beverage, the coworker had to be taken home with the same symptoms. He was out of commission for three days. After yet another such incident, they'd had enough.

When Swango was out on a call one day, a few of his coworkers got into his locker. Peeking inside his duffel bag he always brought to work with him. Inside, they found ant poison. Primary ingredient: arsenic. They all knew Swango was poisoning them, but they needed some proof that they were to take action, so they devised a plan. They left out a pitcher of iced tea on a day when they knew Swango would be around. After Swango had come and gone, they saved the tea.

sending it to a local FBI lab with the help of a coroner they knew. Sure enough, the lab results told them that there was poison in the tea. They now had enough to go to the local sheriff, who soon searched Swango's apartment. The sheriff's department found a plethora of disturbing evidence, including bottles of poison, syringes, and handwritten recipes for homemade poisons, among other things.

Michael Swango was arrested and charged with seven counts of aggravated battery. It didn't take long for the prosecution to lay out a case. There was little Swango's lawyer could say in defense. His history at Ohio State University came to light, and the case garnered national attention. Swango was quickly sentenced to five years in prison for the non-fatal poisonings.

Public outcry prompted Ohio State University to perform an investigation in which OSU's Dean of Law, James Meeks, admitted that the university failed to take the allegations seriously, letting a suspected poisoner continue as a part of the medical community. The judge who sentenced Swango to five years would go on to say that he thought the man was conducting some kind of experiment, using his fellow paramedics at Adams County Ambulance as guinea pigs.

After all, Swango certainly had enough poison and ample opportunities to kill every one of them. Swango apparently behaved himself in prison as he was released in August 1987 after serving only two years of his five-year sentence. After finishing his obligatory year of probation, he left Illinois, moving to Virginia. In 1990, Swango changed his name in an effort to distance himself from his past.

He started working as an emergency medical technician in Virginia under his new name. He also tried to apply at the Ohio Valley Medical Center there, but a bit of checking into the name change and conviction caused the center to reject him. He worked for other jobs in Virginia. He was a job counselor briefly, and then a lab technician for a coal export company. At this point, it had been years since his name had been in the headlines.

And when several employees of the company nearly died from food poisoning, no one seemed to suspect Swango. It's unclear why, but Swango would revert to his given name while still living in Virginia. Perhaps he thought others saw it as suspicious, or perhaps he simply didn't feel the need to hide any longer. In August 1991, Swango met Kristen Kinney, who was in her mid-20s and worked as a nurse in a hospital in Newport News.

The two were soon an item, although some of Kristen's friends were wary of the blonde man. Kristen was newly divorced, and some of her friends, along with her mother and stepfather, were uneasy about the speed at which the new relationship seemed to be moving. Meanwhile, Swango was still trying to get back into a residency program. One of the many resumes he'd sent around the country got a bite.

a doctor at the University of South Dakota in Sioux Falls wanted to talk to Swango about the residency program there. The process started with a phone call, during which the doctor in South Dakota, Anthony Salem, asked about the battery charge from Illinois. Michael lied, saying he'd been involved in a drunken barroom brawl with several other people. He insisted that he'd been selected as the fall guy. Then he doubled down on the lie,

saying that he was licensed to practice medicine in Virginia. Swayed, Dr. Salem invited Swango to South Dakota to interview for the program. Bafflingly, none of the several interviewers asked him further about the charges in Illinois. They did not check the veracity of his story. It seems they took Swango at his word. In March of 1992, Swango was notified that he'd gotten the job

He was to start in June. Swango soon proposed to Kristen Kinney, and the two of them moved to South Dakota together. Things went well for a little while. Michael's coworkers and bosses were happy with his work. Kristen fit in well where she secured a job at a Veterans Affairs hospital. The future was looking bright for the young couple, but then Michael's hubris got the better of him. Unfortunately, he wouldn't be the one to take the brunt of the blow when it all came crashing down.

In late 1992, Swango applied for membership in the American Medical Association, despite the fact that he didn't have a valid license to practice medicine. Having pulled the wool over the eyes of those at the University of South Dakota, he apparently thought he could do it again. But unlike the university, the American Medical Association actually did a thorough background check on Swango, finding the truth of his battery convictions.

Judge Cashman, who had presided over Swango's conviction in Illinois, heard that the AMA was checking up on Swango. He wasted no time calling the AMA back and telling them the full story. The American Medical Association, in their turn, contacted the University of South Dakota as if to send home the message. A 1986 interview Swango did while in prison was aired again. And although he'd maintained his innocence throughout the interview,

The implications were impossible to ignore as lies came crashing down. Suddenly, everyone knew about Swango's past. Kristen, who'd had no idea about her fiance's past, was soon hounded by reporters asking for comment. She heard people gossiping behind her back to make things worse. She started suffering from terrible, debilitating headaches. Pretty soon, she couldn't take it anymore. She flew back to Virginia, leaving Michael behind.

And, strangely enough, her headache stopped as soon as she was no longer around him. It was no coincidence. Despite all the evidence against him, she still loved Suango. But the struggle was too much for her. She killed herself with a gunshot to the chest in July 1993. Traces of arsenic were reportedly found in her body after her death. Amazingly, Suango found medical work yet again, this time in New York.

He once again used the barroom brawl excuse for his conviction and presented forged documents indicating that he could still practice medicine. In the summer of 1993, Swango started his new job in internal medicine at the Veterans Administration in Long Island, New York. On Swango's very first day, one of his patients, Dominic Buffalino, died mysteriously.

Having been in the hospital for a mild case of pneumonia, it seemed strange that he would suddenly die for no clear reason. Over the next few months, several of Swango's patients died of sudden and inexplicable heart failure, confounding hospital staff. One woman even walked in on Swango giving her husband a shot in the neck in a dark hospital room. When she asked Swango about it, his one-word reply was simply, "Vitamins."

The man who'd received the mystery shot from Swango, Mr. Harris, soon went into a coma. He'd lingered for some time before dying. Mrs. Harris knew something was wrong, and she sued the hospital for negligence. Unfortunately, at the time, there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. It was around this time that Kristen Kinney's mother, still despondent over her daughter's suicide, was talking to one of Kristen's friends from South Dakota.

Mrs. Cooper blamed Swango's lying and the subsequent heartbreak it caused for her daughter's death. She had heard that Swango got the job in New York, which she felt was a terrible mistake. And while on the phone with her daughter's friend, she expressed her concern.

The friend was taken aback, unaware that Swango was working in healthcare again. Soon enough, Kristen's friend had spoken to Dr. Talley, Dean of the University of South Dakota, who'd been involved in the decision to fire Swango after his past came to light. Dr. Talley called his counterpart at Stony Brook University, the school that was running the program under which Swango was working at the Veterans Affairs Hospital.

When called out on his lies about the Barroom Brawl, Swango admitted his deceit, saying he'd been convicted on suspicion of poisoning. Once again, there was a swirl of media coverage, and once again, Swango was fired. But this time, a doctor from Stony Brook would take steps to help ensure Swango couldn't work in medicine again, at least in America. It essentially took Swango being caught three times before anyone took it seriously.

Dr. Jordan Cohen, Dean of Stony Brook University, resigned. But he also sent a letter about Swango to every medical school in the country, ensuring they wouldn't make the same mistake he made in hiring the sinister blonde killer. Finally, after all this, the Justice Department was looking hard at Swango, building a case

But before they had enough to arrest him, he disappeared from the country. He wasn't done killing, and if he couldn't do it in America any longer, he would find somewhere else to do it. Part 4: Death Sentence or Life in Prison. Swango descended onto African soil in late 1984. A tall, affable angel of death, he'd used a number of forged documents to secure employment as a doctor in Zimbabwe.

Like many places in Africa, the country needed competent doctors.

and ones with Swango's training and experience were rare. Dr. Christopher Zashiri, the director of a mission hospital in Manene, wanted to know why such a seemingly successful doctor would want to come work in Africa. Swango, with his usual charm and confidence, told the director that he wanted to help those who hadn't had the same chances he'd had. As Zashiri watched Swango those first days, he noticed the man lacked the basics of doctoring,

He attributed this to specialization and suggested an internship at another hospital so Swango could relearn things he presumably hadn't done since medical school. Swango agreed.

Spring of 1995 came around and Swango returned to the Mission Hospital after the five-month internship program at a hospital in the city of Bulawayo. At first, he seemed to be doing well. His attitude was positive and he made improvements to help streamline treatments at the little hospital. But before long, things changed.

His work grew noticeably sloppy. The nuns with whom he worked started complaining about his attitude, insisting that he was disdainful and snide with them. Sometimes, Suango would disappear, leaving no one to tend to the patients.

Worst of all, people under Suango's care started dying. Their hearts failed, causes unknown. One woman, who was recovering nicely after suffering some burns in an accident, died shortly after Suango took over her care. One man woke up to find Suango bending over, injecting him in the arm. After the white doctor pulled the needle out, he reportedly waved goodbye to the patient.

Soon after, the man felt an unbearable burning sensation, followed by nausea and then paralysis. He managed to scream out, and the nuns came running, saving his life with their quick action. As soon as he was able, he pointed the finger at Suwango, screaming about the injection. Suwango insisted the man was hallucinating, scoffing at the accusation.

What Swango didn't know was that the nuns had found the cap to a syringe underneath the patient's cot. Swango went into another patient's room, insisting that his visiting friends leave. Shortly after they did, the man screamed. His friends rushed back in, witnessing the patient's frenzied shouts about the doctor injecting him with something. The man died that afternoon from heart failure.

After one woman nearly died giving birth, she told the nuns that Swango had pulled a syringe out of his lab coat and injected her. She said that within seconds, pain wracked her body. Luckily, both she and the baby survived. The nuns had enough. They told Dr. Zashiri that they would go to the police if he didn't.

Zashiri relented, and the police soon raided Swango's cottage, finding syringes, medical equipment, and vials filled with lethal liquids foreign to African doctors. Swango hired a lawyer after the raid and was able to practice medicine in the same hospital where he'd done his internship while the investigation continued. But as the police in Zimbabwe interviewed patients who had survived Swango and the family members of those who had not, things started to become much clearer.

and correspondence with authorities in America filled out the picture of a deranged killer. When an August 1996 hearing came around, Swango was nowhere to be found. He'd escaped justice yet again. Swango spent another year on the lam, living in Zambia and Europe. Then, in 1997, he was flying to the Middle East to once again work as a doctor, but he needed to stop off and get a visa in America.

federal officials were ready for him, arresting him as soon as he landed in Chicago. Authorities brought fraud charges for practicing medicine without a license at the Virginia Hospital in Long Island. A far cry from murder charges, the fraud charges gave the authorities time to build a case against Zwangow. He pleaded guilty to the fraud charges and was given the maximum sentence allowable under federal law.

The judge made sure that Swango wouldn't be anywhere near the preparation of food while he served his time in a federal prison in Colorado. Just as the end of Michael Swango's sentence for fraud charges approached, federal prosecutors brought more charges against him. They included three murder charges for patients who died under Swango's care in 1993.

Meanwhile, back in Africa, murder charges against Swango were also being brought up. Michael Swango had a choice: fight the murder charges in the US, which would risk the death penalty and possible charges in Zimbabwe, or take the plea deal and spend the rest of his life in prison. Swango chose to spend the rest of his life in prison. As part of the plea deal, Zimbabwe agreed not to bring charges.

He pleaded guilty to the three murder charges, admitting that he took the lives of Thomas Samarco, George Siano, and Aldo Serene. Later, he was also charged and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Cynthia McGee, a teenager he'd killed during his time at the Ohio State University Medical Center. Nothing will bring back the people that Swango killed, but the fact that he was only charged with four murders leaves many families without closure.

After all, one FBI agent reportedly told Judge Cashman, who sentenced Swango to prison for poisoning his coworkers in Illinois, that they estimate Swango's kills to number around 60. The fact that Swango was identified early in his career by his peers, given the nickname 00Swango, but was allowed to go on working for many years in the field is indicative of the self-policing nature of the medical industry.

Knowing what we know now, it's easy to see why Swango was drawn to the medical field. He wrote in his diary that he liked killing. "It was," he wrote, "the only way to remind himself he was still alive." Michael Swango knew what he was doing was wrong. He felt contempt for his victims, and the power of life and death he held over them was clearly intoxicating.

With an estimated 60 victims, Swango is considered one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. And he's certainly one of the most disturbing.