Blind Eye by James B. Stewart

Sometimes people placed in positions of public trust turn out to be the bad guys - rogue cops, pedophile teachers, baby-stealing nurses. When we hear stories about these individuals, perhaps we pause a minute in wonder or just pass it off as a failure somewhere in The System.

What we don't often hear about is a doctors. Except for patient fondling by a few dentists and a handful of shrinks, doctors enjoy a pretty respected position high above other trusted figures. Maybe it's the commitment to so many grueling hours of school - who would risj all that? Or perhaps the bad ones wash out early and find other, easier professions.

So when one hears about a doctor who not only kills patients, but kills them at random, and then hides behind his position of trust and service, it seems particularly evil.

James B. Stewart, the Pulitzer Prize winner, hunted down enough dirt on Dr. Michael Swango to put together a complete and scary book. Blind Eye takes the reader through Swango's early years in high school through a career as a physician-serial killer. If H.H. Holmes (see Depraved by Harold Schechter) was America's first serial killer, Michael Swango could very well our most prolific. And both were physicians, curiously.

Stewart's estimate that Swango killed 60 people. This beats out Donald "the Angel of Death" Harvey, the Cincinnati nurse's aid who admitted to killing 52 people over his 16-year career; Henry Lee Lucas, a hero of Swango's evidently, who claims as many as 600 murders (police deny this is possible); and even Ted Bundy, thought the count of 26 victims is considered very conservative.

What makes Stewart's book so good, though, isn't the "ooh, isn't this gory" aspect, but rather his excellent research and tight writing that puts the reader there. You see "Dr. Mike" injecting lethal poison into the IV lines of his trusting patients. You see him denying involvement in tampering with food his co-workers later become violently ill from eating. The guy is scary.

He describes what I'd call the White Wall of Silence. Like the Blue one the cops enjoy, it appears that doctors build an even higher, more impenetrable one. And it's this that allows Swango to go on practicing as a doctor in one state after another until he's finally brought down.

Read this book. It's sobering and riveting.

Sites of interest:
Mind of a Killer
The World Wide Serial Killer Home Page

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