Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder

Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder by James B. Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder by James B. Stewart Read Free Book Online
Authors: James B. Stewart
Tags: General, Medical, True Crime, Political Science, Murder, Physicians, Serial Killers, Current Events, ethics
house. He had paid for one night at a downtown hotel, after which Bob would receive no financial support and would be on his own.
    Bob vacated the house as ordered. His brothers seemed stunned into silence. Michael didn’t even say good-bye. Muriel showed no emotion at his departure, saying only that it had been his father’s decision, and it was his duty to accept it. The next morning, less than twenty-four hours after arriving, Virgil left for Vietnam.
    Bob lived with friends in Quincy and then with his half-brother Richard in Florida for the summer. The following fall, Muriel relented and, without telling Virgil, let Bob live at home temporarily while he continued his studies at Quincy College. She also paid his tuition. But after his sophomore year he dropped out and hitchhiked to Oregon, leaving home this time for good. Bob never saw his father again, nor did he see Michael until Virgil’s funeral.
    In the tumultuous waning days of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Virgil was placed in charge of evacuating the cities of Nha Trang and Qui Nhon. North Vietnamese troops had cut off the road from Nha Trang to the airport, so Americans, anticommunist Vietnamese, and foreign nationals had to be moved by military helicopters, which were mobbed by panicking refugees. In his nomination for an Award for Valor, Swango was cited for “courage, coolness and discipline . . . that brought the crowd under control and prevented deaths, injuries, and damage to the helicopters.” He was nonetheless unable to evacuate the woman with whom he had been living; she stayed behind in the Delta. “I left Vietnam in 1975 with only my boots, pants, shirt, and glasses,” he later said.
    After the evacuation, Virgil retired from the State Department and returned home to an America bitter about the war and indifferent to its veterans. Despite the nomination, no medal ever materialized. Virgil confided in his sisters, Ruth and Louise, that he was bored with being a husband and father. Relations with Muriel remained strained, and the tensions culminated in the fight that caused Muriel to order him out of the house. Within a year of Virgil’s return from Vietnam, she was granted a formal separation, though divorce proceedings were later suspended. Michael made some attempts at getting his parents to reconcile, but to no avail. Virgil moved into a mobile home that oddly replicated his quartersin Vietnam. One of his close friends from the war called him there from his bachelor party in Washington, D.C., to include Swango in the festivities. Virgil seemed touched by the gesture but wrapped in loneliness.
    Swango spent his last years drinking Jack Daniel’s whiskey, chain-smoking cigarettes, and reading books about Vietnam. He was mugged at gunpoint one night outside the Plaza, a popular Quincy restaurant and bar. Increasingly infirm from cirrhosis of the liver, he moved into the Illinois Veterans Home the year before he died. He was bitter over the American defeat and his reception as a Vietnam veteran. When the Herald-Whig interviewed him for a 1979 retrospective on the conflict, he maintained that “the war was lost in Washington . . . the enemy was aided and abetted by the anti-war attitude and knew it would eventually lead to victory . . . . We came home the losers when we could have been the winners.
    “In World War II,” he continued, “the GIs came home to open arms. Their jobs and sweethearts were waiting. They were heroes. In Vietnam, nothing like that happened. They came home to people who somehow blamed them for the war.”
    A FTER Virgil’s funeral, Muriel discovered a box of books and papers that had belonged to her husband, and in it she found a scrapbook of articles and photographs of car crashes, disasters, and other incidents of violent death. Knowing he would be interested, Muriel later gave the scrapbook to Michael. “I guess my dad wasn’t such a bad guy after all,” he said.
    Michael had had a fascination for

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