A doctor with an obsession with sickness and death.
- People who were not supposed to die were dying.
- On a scale of one to ten in terms of dangerousness,
the chart has to go even higher than ten.
- He left a trail of victims in his wake.
- My father was screaming and yelling, "Stop the burning!"
- He's injecting patients and then watching them die.
- To quench his thirst for killing,
he hid his deadly secrets
and led authorities on an epic, international manhunt.
- It was a fugitive investigation
and we're running out of time.
- Always one step ahead,
could this killer ever be stopped?
- I arrested him. he made bond,
and he's out.
We didn't know what he was gonna do next.
[dramatic music]
- As a doctor and certified expert
for the California Medical Board,
I know firsthand that most medical professionals
will go to any length to help their patients,
but in some cases there are those with a deranged mind
and a license to kill.
♪ ♪
It's a classic story with a deadly twist.
An all-American Midwest boy grows up to become
one of the most prolific serial killers of all time.
How did he get away with it?
Because this murderer was in one of the most
trusted, respected professions you can find.
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
- I just graduated from high school,
and you know, I got to make a decision.
Do I go through the path of college or
do I choose my childhood dream of being a paramedic?
So I decided to work as a paramedic
there at Blessing Hospital.
- We had a crew of 16 paramedics.
We would get along well.
We would always stick around and drink coffee
with the oncoming crew and just sit and rap
and talk about the calls we had and--
So yeah, we were close. We were a close family.
- So my first day of working full-time
I walk into the paramedic quarters.
In the middle of the table was a box of donuts.
So I grabbed one,
started eating it, and I would say about
20 minutes later, I'm starting to get
this little oozy feeling in my stomach
and I just felt like I was gonna get sick.
I go into the bathroom and
that's when I started vomiting.
Everything that I had in my stomach
at that point in time was vomited out.
Once I vomited, I did feel better
and I went back down to the paramedic quarters
and there I hear somebody else vomiting in the bathroom.
Out walks another paramedic and he just describes
an incident that just occurred to me.
There's about five of us that experienced
the nausea and the vomiting.
And so that just seemed to be odd
how we were fine one minute
and now here we are vomiting the next minute.
The director is alarmed by what was going on
and he calls in a team
from the Adams County Health Department
to come in and analyze the coffee, the tea,
some of the food that may have been in the refrigerator.
There were also looking for the donuts,
but the donuts were gone.
- We went to where the donuts were made
to see if anyone else had reported sickness
and there wasn't,
so they didn't know what it was.
- I'm working, state of Illinois requires
an ambulance to be on standby at high school football games.
So I'd signed up, and it's about halftime
when my partner, he says to me,
"Do you want anything to drink?
"I'm gonna go up to the concession stand.
I can buy you something."
I said, "Sure, I'll take a soda."
So he comes back and I started drinking it,
and I would say about the start of the third quarter
is when I'm starting to feel nauseated again.
Like, I can't believe this.
I feel like I'm gonna get sick again.
And as soon as I get to the parking lot,
there I started vomiting.
And it was the most horrific vomiting
you could ever imagine.
I am vomiting to the point where, you know,
there's nothing in me.
I had no idea what was going on.
I was just thinking perhaps I had the flu.
- In just 48 hours,
there were two incidents of extreme nausea and vomiting
among the paramedics.
And even though they were seasoned medical professionals,
they couldn't explain why.
Then when a third wave of unexplained sickness happened,
fears began to emerge that it was more
than just a coincidence.
[tense music]
- My partner and I were working together.
We make iced tea,
and my partner and I both had our glasses,
which had our initials on 'em,
and we filled 'em with tea.
Well, we got a call and we left.
- When they got back,
his partner started drinking the tea again,
and he noticed there was a sweet flavor to it.
His partner was diabetic, doesn't put sugar in his tea.
So he asked Greg, he goes, "Greg, taste this."
- So I picked it up, took a little drink of it
and I thought, "Something's not right.
There's something in that."
So we put the tea in a container
and we took and we locked it in my partner's locker
'cause we wanted to have it analyzed.
So then about two, three minutes later,
one of our other off-duty paramedics made the comment,
he said, "Boy, I just seen the weirdest thing.
"Brent's partner was leaving in his car
"and he looked down the street and apparently
"seen you guys coming in the ambulance,
and he threw it in reverse and he went down an alley."
And the paramedic said,
"It was if he didn't want you to see him."
By this time, we'd put things together.
The donuts that made everyone sick.
Brent went to the football game.
Soda was purchased. He drank it.
He was sick.
The tea that my partner drank was sweet
and he never sweetens his tea.
- This is completely crazy. We're all in shock.
You know, we're only speculating,
but all the fingers are starting to point towards
my partner, Michael Swango.
- Things were adding up, but at the same time
I didn't think he would ever do anything.
We had no fallouts, no bad feelings towards each other
that I was aware of.
I had none toward him.
- On the surface, he looks like a good ol' American boy.
[sirens wailing]
But yet one morning when I'm working with Mike,
he started talking about ambulance calls
and he says to me,
"My ultimate fantasy ambulance call
"is when a busload of children
"are hitting head-on with a tanker truck
full of gasoline and it blows up."
And he describes seeing the scene with kids
hanging over barbed wire fences,
the charred bodies hanging out of the windows.
And I thought to myself,
"Here we are trying to save people's lives
and he's describing a scene where there is no life left."
That, you know, leads me to believe that he loves death.
- With all these circumstances
and all the different incidents that happened,
we thought we got to get substantial evidence.
So a few days after that, Mike went out on a call.
And one of the other paramedics opened up Mike's duffel bag
and looked in it and seen full bottles and empty bottles
of Terro Ant Killer.
- Now we think we have found the bullet which he was using.
- And so we decided it was time to go to the authorities.
- We obtained the suspected tea sample
collected by the paramedics themselves.
And I took it to the state crime lab,
and then they come back and confirm that
actually that tea sample had contained arsenic.
I looked up the symptoms of arsenic poisoning,
and that was consistent with the reports
from the paramedics of them becoming violently ill.
And I confirmed that the major ingredient
in Terro Ant Poison is arsenic.
- Also during the investigation,
they took samples of my fingernail,
they took samples of my hair,
and they found high levels of arsenic in my hair samples.
So at this point in time, Mike was still working
as a paramedic there at Blessing Hospital.
So I'm not accepting any food or beverage from Mike
because I do think he's a dangerous person.
[soft dramatic music]
The assistant state's attorney met with us
and said that I think we have enough evidence
that we can go forth with trial
and we can go with assault charges.
I wish we had enough evidence
to charge him with attempted murder.
- We can prove that he had placed some kind of poison
on the food products or in the drinks,
but we could not necessarily prove
that he wanted to kill anybody.
So I was able to obtain
an arrest warrant for Michael Swango
for aggravated battery.
After I arrested him, he made bond and he's out,
and then a trial date is set.
- So I hear that Mike is out free.
I'm nervous as heck
because I know what he's capable of doing.
Is he mad at us to the point where he's gonna come at us?
- And we couldn't take the change with this guy
running loose in our community.
We didn't know what he was gonna do next.
So we obtained a search warrant
in order to get more evidence,
and make a beeline for his apartment.
As we walked in Mr. Swango's apartment,
I got a sense that I was in an evil place.
I was in the presence of evil.
[dramatic music]
- Coming up...
- My father would tell us that there was a doctor
that came by and would point at him and tell him,
"You're next."
- He injects the pregnant woman.
She immediately starts going into convulsions.
- The killer had been in there minutes
wreaking havoc on the hospital.
- At this point, it was a manhunt.
We're very aware that the clock is running.
- Anybody that has this sort of compulsion to kill
if you don't catch them right away,
they're gonna continue killing.
- When Michael Swango
was charged with
aggravated battery for poisoning
his fellow paramedics,
investigators secured a warrant to search his apartment.
They were looking for evidence to support their allegations,
but what they found was nothing short
of a one-man chemical weapons lab.
[dramatic music]
- It was something certainly
that I've never seen before in my life.
I was totally shocked and amazed at the same time.
It appeared to be one giant chemistry lab.
It was just something beyond my wildest imagination.
Mr. Swango's apartment was mostly filled with
various poisons.
There was Terro Ant Poison bottles,
some with liquid, some empty.
And there were recipes cards in plain sight
with information on how you make
ricin, botulism toxins,
potassium cyanide.
Then we noticed he had articles cut out,
and they were tragedies,
horrible crimes, and shootings,
and stabbings, and he seemed to be making
a scrapbook out of all this stuff.
So now we had
a good circumstantial evidence case against him,
not counting the direct scientific evidence
of the hair samples and the tea sample
from the paramedic headquarters.
- With all the circumstantial evidence,
investigators desperately needed
to find out information about Swango's past
in order to help build their case against him.
- Michael Swango grew up in Quincy,
went to the local schools.
He played the clarinet. He'd done well in school.
He came from a family that lived there for generations.
The father was in the military
and he was absent for much of Michael Swango's youth.
And then he had a mother who favored him.
He was doted upon.
She really had put all of her hopes
and ambitions onto him.
- I'd found out Mike had gone to a medical school
down at Southern Illinois University.
- He had virtually no friends in medical school.
He had acquaintances.
He was very self-absorbed. He buckled down.
He did everything he was asked to do,
and he got his degree and went on
to a prestigious residency and internship.
People thought he was very odd and peculiar.
He had a nickname, "00 Swango,"
which meant "License To Kill," after the James Bond character,
but it was kind of a joke.
Nobody seriously thought that he had killed.
- He was right at the point of becoming
a full-fledged doctor
when he had to complete his internship,
and he went to Columbus, Ohio to finish up.
- The alarm bells went off at Ohio State
because his internship had been terminated
after some very, very suspicious deaths
and quite a bit of evidence
that he might have been directly involved.
There were eye-witnesses in many cases
who saw him inject something into the patient.
Moments later, that patient is paralyzed,
dies.
The records show that there were more emergency calls
where people are on the brink of dying
in the weeks that he had been there
than there had been in the entire previous year.
But no charges had ever been filed.
The investigation was cursory, it was fumbled.
The last thing they wanted was word that a potential killer
had been in their midst, wreaking havoc
on the hospital and killing his patients.
So he finished his internship
and they then said, "No, you cannot come back
as a resident."
But they were willing to give him
these glowing recommendations
just as long as he went somewhere else.
♪ ♪
- With knowledge of Swango's suspicious past,
prosecutors in Quincy were under pressure
to make the charges stick.
So six months after Swango's arrest,
the DA began presenting their case at trial.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- I believe there were 68 physical exhibits
offered into evidence.
♪ ♪
Some of the evidence that Billy Myer had
was that Mike Swango was seen going into the local store
wearing his paramedic uniform,
and bought all of the Terro Ant Poison
that they had in stock,
which would be enough to poison one heck of a lot of ants.
That was a fascinating part of the case,
because if he's so smart,
why was he leaving a trail like this?
- At trial, Michael tried to come up with an explanation
why he had all the Terro Ant Poison.
He claimed that he had a severe ant problem.
And so he had called our local exterminator
who went out and looked at these ants
that were running all over his apartment,
which weren't there when we executed the search warrant.
- The exterminator testified about the ants, and he said,
"Those ants are not indigenous to the Midwest.
They're only found in Florida."
I'd learned that he had surreptitiously,
while free on bail, went to visit his mother,
I believe in Fort Myers, Florida,
and brought ants home with him in a box.
He thought he was smart enough to use ants in his apartment
as an explanation for the Terro Ant Poison,
but he didn't consider those ants
don't belong in the state of Illinois.
So it was things like that that made him unbelievable,
and I ultimately concluded that he was lying.
- So I was in the courtroom
when the verdict was handed down by Judge Cashman.
And to our relief,
the judge convicts him of assault.
So all the paramedics that were involved,
we were relieved.
All of our work paid off.
- It was just like, "Oh, finally. Got him."
I was happy, very happy. We all were.
- He was charged with seven counts of aggravated battery
by administering a toxic substance.
- And he gives him five years, so at that point in time
I know that he's gonna be in prison.
- And while he was in prison, he sent me a Christmas card
wishing my family a safe Christmas.
He didn't wish me a safe Christmas.
He wished my family a safe Christmas.
And he was in prison,
but I knew he wasn't going to be there forever.
- Unfortunately, the satisfaction
over Swango's conviction was short-lived.
Just 21/2 years into his prison sentence,
he was released and a new nightmare was about to begin.
- Michael Swango served time
for poisoning his co-workers
and had his medical license revoked in Illinois,
but incredibly, that didn't stop him
from practicing medicine elsewhere.
He was able to land a job as a doctor
at the University of South Dakota
by telling a half truth.
He acknowledged his aggravated battery conviction,
but lied saying
he had been unjustly convicted for a bar fight,
which was terrifying because at that point
he was working in a different state
where no one knew he poisoned his co-workers.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- He was hired to be a full-fledged doctor again.
And obviously the hospital did not know
about Michael Swango's past.
After working there a little over a year,
a TV show ran a piece about him.
- Why all the poisons in your house?
- And it revealed the whole poisoning episode in Quincy.
- Back in 1986, while Swango was in prison,
he was interviewed by "20/20"
about his poisoning conviction.
An excerpt from that interview
re-aired while he was working in South Dakota
which blew his cover.
- There was the ant poison, and the gopher poison,
and then the arsenic.
- All I know is I had an ant problem
and I took care of it as best I could.
I did not do these things.
- It's hard to believe you.
- Well, I'm sorry.
- And that created a furor in Sioux Falls.
- Are you-- take this to court if you...
- I really can't say why.
- The bad publicity was horrendous.
- I can't live this way. I can't--
Please, come on.
- And so he had to be terminated from
the University of South Dakota,
and he left.
- After suffering such incriminating press,
a high-profile firing, and an assault conviction,
surely Michael Swango would never be allowed
to step foot in another hospital again.
Yet just six months later,
he obtained a medical license in New York,
this time by exploiting a weak spot in the system.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- He does apply to a psychiatric residence at
the Veteran's Hospital on Long Island in New York State.
And that was clever because
it's hard to recruit people for psychiatric residences.
Doesn't have the pay, the prestige
that some branches of medicine have.
So he found that vulnerability.
And amazingly after all of this,
the people in Long Island were even less thorough
in vetting him than they had been in South Dakota.
- On his job application, he claimed his sentence
where he went to jail was commuted by the governor
and all of his rights and privileges
and everything else had been reinstated.
Basically, he lied.
- He didn't say he had been convicted
of poisoning people in Illinois.
Bu you know, he was smart. He was articulate.
He could be very charming when he wanted to be,
usually when he had some goal
he wanted to accomplish for himself,
like working with patients.
- My father was a patient at the VA hospital.
[somber music]
He was known as Tom, or Tommy.
He had a lot of friends.
He was a very personable person.
And he was in the army all during World War II.
He was a flag waver.
One day, Dad was on a ladder and he fell.
He couldn't move his legs anymore.
He ended up going to the VA hospital.
- After several months in the hospital,
rather than improving,
tom developed some inexplicable complications.
- One time we went up to the VA hospital to see him.
We see them wheel this bed out.
And his arms were failing,
and he was screaming and obviously in pain.
He kept saying, "Stop the burning."
They just told us that he had
a staph infection in the brain.
"We're doing everything we can."
He ended up in the Intensive Care.
I'm like,
"There's something wrong here. What's going on?"
We didn't see anything life-threatening
when we went into the hospital.
And...
from Intensive Care, we kept seeing this doctor
who would ask my mother to sign the "Do Not Resuscitate."
And this went on for quite a few days.
And finally I had turned around and I said,
"Wait a minute, why do you need a 'Do Not Resuscitate'?"
Because I knew when you sign a "Do Not Resuscitate,"
it is signed.
You don't have to repeat it every day.
So this doctor just did not give me a good feeling.
His name was Dr. Swango.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
He was in ICU for two weeks
when he started saying things that were very strange.
He would tell us that there was a doctor
that came by every night and would point at him
and tell him, "You're next."
And we would just brush it off like,
"This man's hallucinating."
He was like, "They're gonna kill me."
I was like, "Dad, nobody's gonna kill you.
You're here to get better."
[somber music]
♪ ♪
And the one night that we did not go up there,
it was about 8:00 at night, we got a phone call
that he'd passed away.
Nobody expected him to die. He was in good health.
I couldn't believe this was happening
'cause he was my father.
♪ ♪
- By the fall of 1993,
Michael Swango
had been working at the VA Medical Center
on Long Island for four months
when out of the blue, the administration
received an alarming phone call.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- The head of the medical school in South Dakota
where Swango had been terminated
called the dean of the Veteran's Hospital
and briefed him on Swango's true past.
- And so the director of the medical center
made the decision he should be terminated
for misrepresentation on his application.
And I escorted him off the campus.
♪ ♪
By this time, panic had set in at the medical center.
So we started going over patient charts
for every one of the patients that Swango had treated.
We did see some irregularity.
- Several patients who had been under Swango's direct care
had inexplicably died
from causes unrelated to their original diagnosis.
Officials at the VA Hospital needed to question Swango
and collect more evidence to prove his involvement.
But, sensing the heat, Swango skipped town.
So the decision was made to call the FBI.
While Dr. Swango was at the VA Hospital,
he came to the authority's attention
because again, people who were not supposed to die were dying.
- The allegation was that he was potentially responsible
for all of these suspicious deaths.
I really wanted to get a-- an understanding--
who is this guy? What's motivating him?
And so I started to get the sense
that this was somebody that doesn't feel good
unless they're actually victimizing somebody.
He's poisoning other people just to watch the reaction,
to sort of relish in their misery.
I think it's clear that he shares a lot of traits
with psychopaths:
egotistical, no conscience.
On a scale of one to ten in terms of dangerousness,
the chart has to go even higher than ten,
because murdering patients, it's almost a fixation.
So there's an urgency in finding this guy
because anybody that has this sort of compulsion to kill,
if you don't catch them right away,
they're gonna continue killing.
[dramatic music]
- At the time, there really was no hard proof
that Dr. Swango was a killer.
So the best we could do with the early parts of the case
were charge him with lying to federal officials.
In that when he made his application
to come into the residency at the VA,
he had lied about his previous felony conviction.
- Not many people read the fine print
on the bottom of a federal application,
but it says, if you lie on this thing
you're guilty of misstatement,
and the exposure time is five years.
So while we're trying to find out and gather proof
that he's killed people, to buy time we may be able
to charge him with a violation.
- And the warrant is issued,
but the basic first step was to find him.
No one knew where he was.
- He seemed like he had just vanished.
- My feeling is this guy is gonna surface somewhere again,
and it's gonna be around more dead bodies.
- So at this point, it was a manhunt,
it was a fugitive investigation.
- With the feds in hot pursuit,
Swango was running out of places to hide.
His solution, he fled the country.
The authorities didn't yet know it,
but Swango made it all the way to Africa.
Why Africa?
It offered a market desperate for doctors
where Swango could avoid a thorough background check
and do what he loved most,
attend to patients as a full-fledged physician.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- He wasn't even there too long
before all of a sudden, patients started to die.
He targets, in one case, it's a pregnant woman.
And he injects her.
She immediately starts going into convulsions.
And she-- she actually survives,
but she tells the nurses that it was Swango,
and he denies it.
[lightning crackling]
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
The nursing staff saw him coming into the ward
at all hours of the night,
and standing over patients that weren't even his.
- The nurses there were very, very frightened of him.
- For the first time in this case,
the medical authorities
notified the police immediately,
and Swango's privileges were suspended,
and they started their own investigation.
- While the police were trying to investigate him,
it appears that he fled.
So it's telling me that maybe this guy
is even more prolific than any of us imagined.
[dramatic music]
- Swango was accused by Mnene Hospital
of poisoning seven patients, five of whom died.
Once again, he fled before authorities could detain him.
And once again, his plan appeared to be
to find a new venue for his murderous ways.
[suspenseful music]
- We received a call from the agent
down at the Chicago O'Hare Airport.
And he said, "Jim, I've caught a fugitive you're looking for.
"His name is Michael Swango.
And he just got off a plane from Africa."
And he said, "I see you want him for a minor felony, for
a false statement regarding his federal application."
And I said, "I've been looking long and hard for this guy
and he's very dangerous despite the low charge."
[tense, dramatic music]
So he was arrested,
and they transported him back to New York.
♪ ♪
- He was prosecuted after about six months or so.
He entered a guilty plea.
He was sentenced to 42 months incarceration.
In a federal system, you do about 85% of your time,
so we knew he'd be in for about 3 years.
- So now that he's gone for 36 months,
that gives us that time period to investigate
everywhere Dr. Swango had been
and try to find at least one homicide in any jurisdiction
that we could prove.
- You know, we have a short period of time to do this,
with the full knowledge that if we can't and he's released,
that he's going to continue what he's been doing
for the last 10, 15 years.
You have to be right because if you aren't,
the circumstances are that other people
are probably gonna die.
- After an international
manhunt, the FBI finally had
fugitive Michael Swango behind bars,
but not for long.
Even though officials suspected him
of being a serial killer with an appetite for poison,
they couldn't prove it.
So they brought him down on a lesser charge,
hoping it would buy them time to build a murder case.
But could they amass enough evidence to convict him
before his impending release date?
[pensive music]
♪ ♪
- This particular case raised substantial challenges
in a number of ways.
First, the stories we were hearing
about Michael Swango poisoning people dated back to 1983.
We're sitting here now in 1998,
so if we're going back 15 years on cases,
he was in multiple jurisdictions.
And we sent our team members,
you know, to every jurisdiction.
They went to Ohio.
They went to South Dakota.
They went to Quincy.
They went to Africa.
We had every single file
from every hospital that he was in.
We had medical examiners looking to see
whether the persons that ended up being deceased,
was it a natural death or was there some suspicion
here that we should look further into?
In the Northport VA,
we concentrated on three people.
- One of the persons was an individual
by the name of Tom Sammarco.
Tom Sammarco had gone to the VA for a routine procedure.
Based on the admission reports
and we know the ultimate demise,
it shouldn't have happened.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
I'd contacted his daughter.
I said that the VA had several, what we feel may be
suspicious deaths that took place,
and that one of the-- one of her father's
treating doctors, Michael Swango,
may have been involved.
- It was like, "Oh, my God. I remember him."
Dr. Swango was the doctor that came by every night
and asked my mother to sign a "Do Not Resuscitate."
You know when you get that gut feeling
that something's not right?
It was like that gut feeling.
There was just something that would get under my skin
when I see him.
- Tom Valery explained to us that they wanted
permission to exhume my father's body.
So my mother said, "Okay."
And she looked at me and I said,
"Whatever you want, Mom."
♪ ♪
- We did exhume three bodies, and our medical experts
did the medical testing on them and gave us the proof
that they did not die from natural causes.
They did not die from the illness
they were brought into the hospital, but in fact,
had died because they were injected with a drug.
Our experts found two different drugs in the body.
One was succinylcholine. The second one was epinephrine.
- Succinylcholine is a skeleton muscle relaxant
that causes short-term paralysis
and is used during surgeries as part of general anesthesia.
It's not natural to the body,
so investigators knew it had been injected.
Epinephrine, the other drug that was detected,
is naturally produced in the body,
but not to the high degree that was present in these cases.
- So once we exhumed the bodies and did the scientific testing,
that was the first time that we knew we had
real, tangible evidence of a murder case.
- We got a call, and Tom told us
that they did find a chemical in my father's body
and that this is what may have caused my father's death.
So I began to start questioning things.
Maybe it's possible my father was murdered.
[melancholic music]
♪ ♪
And we didn't believe him when he told us
that he was going-- he was gonna be murdered
by someone in the hospital.
We thought he was hallucinating.
And the guilt, it just keeps living on.
Maybe if we had believed my father,
he wouldn't have been dead.
- Detectives had proven
the patients were poisoned at the VA hospital,
but in order to charge Swango with those murders,
they still needed to either
directly link him to the poisons used on the victims,
or get a confession.
- We're very aware that the clock is running.
In two weeks, the door opens, he gets out.
And we had such a hard time finding him the first time.
I'm very concerned that if he does get out,
we'll never see him again and they'll be
many more deaths associated with him.
Tom Neer and I decided we would go out,
try to talk to Dr. Swango
and see what he would give us.
- As we go in for the interview,
Swango is escorted in and I was unprepared to see
how disheveled and how drawn his countenance was.
He did not look like the brash,
arrogant person that I was expecting.
Another inmate tried to slash his throat,
missed, and he's got a scar right across his face.
- He has a defeated look in his eye,
and we could tell, of course,
that he's very frightened to be around the other inmates.
So Tom Neer decided on a good interview strategy.
- Collectively, we've learned in
the behavioral analysis unit
that with people that have
the kind of characteristics that he has,
no real remorse over other people,
very egotistical, very arrogant,
they're not gonna confess on something
based on emotion.
They're gonna confess to something
based on self-interest and preservation.
And so we said, "Well, Mike, actually,
"we didn't come here to interview you.
"We came to give information. We want to tell you something.
"You're about ready to be released in the next few days,
"but actually, you're not gonna get released.
"We're gonna extradite you to Africa
to answer the attempted murder things over there."
- And I slide their warrant and the extradition treaty
which had just been ratified with Zimbabwe,
and I said, "I'll make sure the Zimbabwe authorities
get everything they need to conduct a fair trial."
What a sociopath will always do
what's right in the moment for him.
In Zimbabwe, he'd probably be executed.
So if he wants to save his life,
he should probably talk to us.
- It's either Africa
or you're gonna take a plea here.
So it's your choice.
And he comes across the table and goes,
"You know and I know!
The only way I'm coming back from Africa is in a body bag."
- Dr. Swango is due to get
out of prison
at some time by the end of July.
So we maybe have two weeks to get a confession.
So we went to the prison to talk to Dr. Swango.
And we told him, "we're gonna put you on a plane,
and we're all gonna take you back to Zimbabwe."
[dramatic music]
So Dr. Swango said, "They'll hang me."
He goes, "They'll hang me very quickly
if you send me back to Africa."
And I just said, "Well, you picked your venue."
- By the end of the conversation,
what we worked out was Swango said,
"I'm not saying I did anything,
but if I did do something, I'll do time here."
I said, "Well, Mike, what if you took a plea here
"for some murders here and we were to get you
your own cell and you had your own TV here in America."
- He didn't want to be sent back to Africa
where he would eventually be executed
and he didn't want to serve his prison time
in a general population situation
where there'd probably be another attempt on his life.
So Dr. Swango pretty much
negotiated with us there on the spot.
I was very excited. Tom was very excited.
While I didn't get a confession,
I really thought we had generated a plea.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- One week before his scheduled release,
prosecutors filed an indictment against Swango.
- This was not an indictment where we were just charging
murders at the VA.
We formulated an indictment
that went back to 1983,
encompassed everything that, you know,
he did in the last 15 years or so.
Michael Swango was willing to admit
that he had killed people in the Northport VA and elsewhere.
And he had two requests,
that we take the death penalty off the table
and that he not be extradited back to Zimbabwe.
It was a good deal in my eyes and I believe,
you know, why everyone agreed to it is
we did have some fears if we went to trial,
we didn't know what the outcome of that trial would be.
Here we had certainty.
He was going to serve life without parole,
so there was complete certainty
that he would never get out of jail.
And then lastly, it was closure for the families,
where they didn't have to relive this
by coming in and testifying.
[tense, dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Swango was in the well of the courtroom,
and he goes very quiet
and he admits to murdering three of the veterans.
He would serve three consecutive life sentences
at the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado
with no chance at parole.
Then I thought for the first time in 20 years
what everybody suspected,
that Dr. Swango was a serial killer,
has finally been proven.
- It's one of those good-feeling moments
in law enforcement where we prevailed in the end.
I think that's what every law enforcement person wants,
is to feel like they've helped, they've given justice.
- I'm just glad that he was taken off the streets.
We've locked somebody up.
No other way to put it, but he was a monster.
He was a medical doctor, somebody people look up to,
who was going around killing people.
- My brush with death was very close,
and I'm fortunate that Michael Swango didn't kill me.
And hopefully, he'll never see the light of day again
and be behind bars where, I think,
that's where he belongs for the rest of his life.
- My father, Thomas Sammarco,
he's a big part of our life that's missing.
[melancholic music]
♪ ♪
And he was a good man
and he never did anything to hurt anybody.
Michael Swango was just pure evil.
He destroyed a whole family.
- In the end, this diabolical maniac was brought to justice.
Swango was convicted of killing three patients
including Tommy Sammarco
at the VA Hospital at Long Island, New York.
And in a separate hearing, he was also convicted
of killing one patient at Ohio State University.
In total, he's suspected of poisoning
as many as 60 people.
For more on "License to Kill," go to oxygen.com.