Michael Swango

Joseph Michael Swango was born on October 21, 1954 in Tacoma, Washington to Muriel and John Virgil Swango. As an officer in the U.S. Army, his father served in the Vietnam War and was listed in Who's Who in Government 1972-1973.

The family constantly relocated because of his father’s job, but finally settled in Quincy, Illinois in 1968. A few years later, his mother divorced his father, who had become alcoholic and suffered from depression upon his return from Vietnam.

Michael Swango attended Quincy Catholic Boys High School, where he was valedictorian of his 1972 class and played clarinet in the school band Quincy Notre Dame. He then joined Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois with a full music scholarship and maintained top grades for the first two years. However, after his girlfriend broke up with him, he became reclusive, left college and joined the Marine Corps.

While graduating from recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, Michael Swango went through extensive physical training, which he continued even after returning to college. He saw no action overseas and received an honorable discharge in 1976.

He decided to pursue chemistry and biology at Quincy University, where he provided wrong information about himself, stating that he had earned a Bronze Star and the Purple Heart in the Marines. He later graduated summa cum laude from the University, and was awarded the American Chemical Society Award.

Michael Swango struggled to find residency due to poor evaluation of him in a letter from his dean at SIU, but managed to get a surgical internship at Ohio State University (OSU) Medical Center in 1983. The nurses soon noticed that patients frequently died mysteriously when he worked as the floor intern in Rhodes Hall at OSU.

Following complaints, OSU performed a casual investigation on him and gave him a clean chit. However, his residency offer was cancelled in June 1984, which prompted him to take up the job of an emergency medical technician with the Adams County Ambulance Corps in Quincy a month later.

Within a short period of time, many of his paramedic co-workers realized that whenever he offered coffee or any other food to anyone, that person fell violently ill without any apparent reason. He was arrested by police in October that year and was convicted for poisoning co-workers on August 23, 1985, following which he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment.

Upon his release in 1989, he started working as a counselor at the state career development center in Newport News, Virginia, but was fired after being caught with one of his scrapbooks during work hours. He next got a job as a laboratory technician for ATICoal in Newport News, where many employees had to be treated for stomach pain during his tenure.

He fell in love with a nurse at Riverside Hospital, Kristin Kinney, who strangely began suffering from violent fits of migraines and committed suicide four months later with traces of arsenic in her body. In 1991, he resigned from ATICoal, legally changed his name to Daniel J. Adams, and attempted a residency at Ohio Valley Medical Center in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Michael Swango has been featured on the American crime show ‘Unsolved Mysteries’, the Oxygen series ‘It Takes a Killer’, and the National Geographic Channel episode ‘Angel of Death’.