U.S.

Killer Doc Charged In Ohio Murder

September 21, 2000 / 10:01 PM EDT / CBS/AP

A former doctor who has admitted to killing three patients in New York and is suspected of poisoning dozens of others in the United States and Zimbabwe has been charged with killing a woman at an Ohio hospital 16 years ago.

Michael J. Swango has agreed to plead guilty to the charge of aggravated murder, prosecutor Ron O'Brien said Thursday.

He is accused of injecting Cynthia Ann McGee, 19, with a fatal dose of potassium in 1984, when he was an intern at Ohio State University Hospitals and she was recovering after being struck by a car.

Two weeks ago, Swango pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in New York to killing three patients at a veterans' hospital there in 1993. A plea deal means he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Swango, 45, was suspended from practice in New York in 1993 for having lied on his job application. He found work as a doctor in Zimbabwe from 1993 to 1995, where he was also suspected of poisoning patients.

He was arrested in Chicago in 1997 as he was boarding a flight to Saudi Arabia for a new medical job.

A book about him, Blind Eye: The Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder, suggests he might have killed as many as 35 patients as he moved from hospital to hospital, lying about his background.

Ohio prosecutor Ed Morgan has investigated Swango for 15 years in the suspicious deaths of at least six patients at Ohio State Hospitals between 1983 and 1984.

"I've always felt that he's been involved in a lot more deaths at Ohio State, but I didn't have — and still don't have — the evidence to prove it," he said.

After McGee died, Scott Bone, the driver of the car that struck her bicycle two months earlier, was convicted of reckless homicide. Bone, then 17, was sentenced to 30 months' probation and 1,000 hours of community service and lost his license for several years.

His mother, Judy Bone, has said she hoped her son's record would be cleared if Swango was found to have killed McGee.