CLAIM: Do you know that a U.S. serial killer doctor was once exported to Zimbabwe, came here and killed a bunch of people? When he was caught, his lawyer to save him from the consequences of serial killing was David Coltart. Coltart earned about $2500 for his services.
SOURCE: X
VERDICT: Misleading
The past does not always stay in the past and this has been proven once again on the X streets.
A couple of accounts have been posting about Bulawayo mayor, David Coltart’s involvement in Michael Swango’s case.
@mmatigary posted, ‘Do you know that a U.S. serial killer doctor was once exported to Zimbabwe, came here and killed a bunch of people? When he was caught, his lawyer to save him from the consequences of serial killing was David Coltart. Coltart earned about $2500 for his services.
The killer was none other than American Dr Joseph Swango.’
This is not the first time Coltart has been accused of having had a part in Swango’s killings, ‘DO YOU KNOW about Michael Swango & how @DavidColtart, the current Mayor of Bulawayo, VIGOROUSLY defended the man who ended up killing 60 hospital patients & colleagues? His story was turned into a Movie’.
Those born after 2000 might ask, who is Michael Swango?
Swango was an American doctor who fled his country in 1994 to work in Zimbabwe.
Born on October 21, 1954, Swango moved to Zimbabwe in November 1994.
Swango is thought to have first started killing patients when he was a medical student at Southern Illinois University.
After five patients under his care died mysteriously, he became known as “Double-O Swango—licensed to kill.” However, he was not charged.
Swango later worked at Ohio State University where he had an internship. In 1986 he had his licence to practice medicine suspended when he went to prison for attempting to poison his colleagues. On his release in 1987, however, he was able to enter a residency in internal medicine in South Dakota.
When his past caught up with him there, he went on to secure a psychiatric residency in New York state, before fleeing to Zimbabwe, where he was again suspected of poisoning patients—and again dismissed.
In Zimbabwe, Swango practised at an Evangelical Lutheran Church of Zimbabwe run institute, Mnene Hospital in the Midlands.
He is suspected of having killed at least five patients at this hospital, with at least two other patients surviving.
Despite numerous complaints from patients and nurses at Mnene Hospital, it took more than a year for Swango to be dismissed. It was only after a pregnant woman almost lost her life that hospital authorities took action. A police report was made and Swango dismissed. But no charges were filed.
Enter David Coltart.
After his dismissal from Mnene Hospital, Swango moved back to Bulawayo. It was here that he hired Coltart to represent him in a wrongful dismissal case. It is important to note that this was a labour case and not a murder case.
Coltart commented on X, regarding the allegations, ‘Read the excerpt. I was instructed in a civil matter – with instructions initially coming from other (innocent) doctors at Mpilo, not Swango himself. I never represented Swango in a criminal defence. Facts are important. Jesus said the “truth shall set you free”.
It was after this that Swango fled the country, resurfacing in the US in 1997 and was arrested at O’ Hare Airport in Chicago on fraud charges. Not murder. It was not until July 2000 that he was indicted on 3 murder charges from 1993 in New York. He pleaded guilty after being threatened with either extradition to Zimbabwe or the death penalty in New York.
Swango is currently serving 3 consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole for the New York murders
Conclusion
The claims that when Swango was caught, ‘his lawyer to save him from the consequences of serial killing was David Coltart. Coltart earned about $2500 for his services’ and that ‘the current Mayor of Bulawayo, VIGOROUSLY defended the man who ended up killing 60 hospital patients & colleagues’ are misleading. Coltart defended Swango in a labour dispute case, not against murder charges. Swango was never arrested and charged in Zimbabwe for the killings at Mnene Hospital and, therefore, there was no need for legal defense. There is also no evidence that Swango went on to kill anyone after Coltart represented him in the labour case. Evidence shows that Swango’s killing of patients and colleagues happened before he was represented by Coltart and at that point, Swango had not been charged with murder, in Zimbabwe or the United States. Rather than with Coltart, the blame lies in the medical establishment turning a blind eye.
A chronology of major events in Swango’s medical career:
- 1983: Swango graduates from Southern Illinois University’s medical school in Springfield, Illinois and begins a one-year surgical internship at Ohio State University’s hospital.
- 1984: After Ohio State denies his request for a residency in neurology, Swango returns to his hometown of Quincy, Illinois to work as a paramedic while awaiting medical licensing in Illinois and Ohio.
- 1985: Swango is charged with and convicted of the nonfatal poisonings of five fellow paramedics in Quincy. He is sentenced to five years in prison. The case brings Ohio authorities to investigate Swango in the deaths of at least six Ohio State hospital patients under his care during 1983 and 1984. No charges are filed because of a lack of evidence. Swango’s medical licenses are revoked in Illinois and Ohio.
- 1987: After serving two years, Swango is released from prison.
- 1989: Swango is investigated in the nonfatal poisonings of three co-workers in Newport News, Virginia. No charges are filed.
- 1990: Swango is certified as a paramedic in Virginia after trying to get jobs in several states, including West Virginia and North Dakota, and in Washington D.C.
- 1992: The University of South Dakota’s internal medicine residency program dismisses Swango after officials discovered he had lied about his criminal record.
- 1993: The State University of New York at Stony Brook accepts Swango into its one-year psychiatric residency program at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Northport, NewYork. Swango then disappears amid lawsuits alleging he fatally poisoned three patients at the hospital. A federal investigation fails to link Swango to the deaths.
- 1994: Swango begins working in Zimbabwe. Authorities in New York issue a warrant against him on a fraud charge, alleging he lied about his criminal past on a 1993 Stony Brook job application.
- 1995: Zimbabwe authorities suspend Swango from practicing medicine at the Mnene Mission Hospital, where he is suspected in the deaths of five patients.
- 1997: Swango flees Africa and is arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport en route to begin a medical stint in Saudi Arabia.
- 1998: Swango pleads guilty in New York to the fraud charge and is sentenced to 42 months in a Colorado prison.
- July 2000: Just days before he is to be released from prison, Swango is charged in a nine-count federal indictment with the 1993 murders of the three patients at the New York veterans hospital. The indictment also accuses Swango of a history of patient assaults and homicides, including the 1984 death of a 19-year-old gymnast at Ohio State’s hospital and the nonfatal poisoning of another patient there the same year. He pleads innocent to the New York charges.
- Sept. 6, 2000: As part of a plea deal, Swango pleads guilty to the murder charges in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without parole. He could have faced the death penalty.
- Oct. 18, 2000: Swango pleads guilty in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to killing McGee and is sentenced to life in prison with the chance of parole after 20 years, the most severe penalty in 1984, when McGee died.
(Source: AP research.)