M⁴: Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem... and Sometimes Murder · M4 Podcast

No One Knows What It’s Like

·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

A paramedic jokes, “Poison us?” after coworkers get sick from donuts Swango brought to work.

1. M⁴: Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem... and Sometimes Murder opens a case titled “Medical Mishaps or Malfeasance by Surgeon Michael Swango.” 2. Hosts Andrea Marziano and Crystal Miller identify themselves as RNs with 35 years and 13.5 years of experience, and their nursing backgrounds matter because they frame the case from clinical and emergency care. 3. The episode asks how Michael Swango moved from respected trainee to a man linked to repeated poisonings and multiple hospital deaths. 4. Judge Dennis Cashman’s 1985 trial in Quincy, Illinois, mattered because Swango had already been convicted of poisoning five coworkers at Quincy’s Blessing Hospital. 5. Cashman said Swango looked like “the leave it to beaver kind of personality,” which made the allegations feel incongruous. 6. Swango’s defense was weakened when he chose to testify for himself and the evidence against him stayed strong. 7. The alleged poison in the coworker case was arsenic, and the episode says Swango wanted to see the victims’ reactions rather than kill them. 8. Cashman sentenced Swango to the maximum five-year term, and he was paroled in 1987. 9. The story then moves to Swango’s early life: he was born in 1954 at Fort Lewis, Washington, and later lived in Quincy, Illinois. 10. His father John was a military officer, served in Vietnam, became estranged from the family, drank heavily, and died in 1982. 11. Swango’s school record was strong enough to include class officer, student council, yearbook staff, a music scholarship, and a 3.89 GPA at Quincy University. 12. After two years at Millikin University and two years in the Marines, he transferred through community college and later entered Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Carbondale. 13. Medical school brought complaints that he was a “gunner,” withdrawn, sloppy, and suspected of cheating. 14. A faculty review board found enough problems that eight of nine members voted for dismissal, but pathologist John Murphy voted to give him another chance. 15. Murphy later said, “I saved him from dismissal,” and later admitted, “I was duped.” 16. Ohio State University accepted Swango into a neurosurgery residency in 1983, then terminated his appointment after the first year. 17. Back in Quincy, Swango worked for Adams County Ambulance Service and was often eager for extra hours and accident scenes even when off duty. 18. The most unsettling details come from coworkers who described donuts, opened sodas, sweetened iced tea, and a duffel bag containing Taro ant killer and other poisons. 19. The episode uses a conversational, skeptical style, with Andrea reading research-heavy passages and Crystal reacting in real time to the details. 20. Listeners who follow medical true crime and workplace warning signs will get the most from this episode, while people who want a short, low-stakes medical discussion may skip it.

As heard by us

An unsettling medical-mystery account centered on an opened soda and the suspicion it leaves behind.

The episode leans into a medical-mystery thread built around an opened soda, Swango, Greg Myers, and the suspicion that follows after Myers drinks from it.

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Why you'd press play

A soda, a bathroom, and a poisoning suspicion that gets under your skin.

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