Lethal Conversations: AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?

Lethal Conversations: AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?: AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA? One of the most fun vacations one can take is a cruise. It is a floating restaurant, hotel, and entert...

Lethal Conversations: AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?

Lethal Conversations: AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?: AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA? One of the most fun vacations one can take is a cruise. It is a floating restaurant, hotel, and entert...

AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?

AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?

One of the most fun vacations one can take is a cruise. It is a floating restaurant, hotel, and entertainment center that occasionally drop you off in an interesting destination. But for the Bradley family, Ron, Iva, their son Brad and daughter Amy Lynn, their family cruise turned into a nightmare when their daughter just disappeared.

                On March 24, 1998, Amy Lynn Bradley was last seen asleep on the balcony of the family’s stateroom at about 5:30 a.m. by her father. He decided to let her sleep. When he went out to the balcony a half hour later, she was gone. The only items missing with her were her cigarettes and lighter. All her shoes were left behind. How far could she go barefoot? The family went on a search of the ship to locate their daughter.

                Four days before, the family boarded the Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas. The night before she went missing, Amy was seen at the night club with her brother. She wanted to stay while Brad returned to the stateroom leaving Amy with a band member named Yellow.

                The family asked the captain to not let anyone leave the ship when they docked that morning, but he did not want to upset the guests.  After the guests left, the ship was searched, but only the public rooms, not the individual staterooms.

                The Bradley’s felt that some of the crew had given “special attention” to Amy throughout

the cruise and perhaps she had been smuggled off the ship and sold into sexual slavery. Before the disappearance, three of the waiters made friends with Amy and when they arrived in Aruba, they asked Amy to go to Carlos & Charles, the last place that Natalee Holloway was seen. Amy told her father that these waiters gave her the creeps and she refused to go with them.

The night the waiters had asked Amy to go with them, the next day, all the photos that had been posted of Amy were missing, even though the photo supervisor remembered seeing them there.

The cruise line made very little effort to find Amy. Royal Caribbean said she was probably drunk and had fallen overboard. Eventual the Bradley’s had to go home, but Mr. Bradley and his son returned to Aruba.

                . He called the Bradley’s and described the tattoos and said he was 100% sure it was Amy. Later, the tourists identified the man with Amy as “Yellow” from the cruise ship.

Unsolved Mysteries
There were numerous sightings of Amy during the following years. Five months after the disappearance, two Canadian tourists saw a woman who looked like Amy on the beach in Curacao. She had the same tattoos as Amy, a Tasmanian devil, the sun, a Chinese symbol, and a lizard. They said Amy tried to talk to them, but her companions rushed her away. Amy walked into a nearby café, still looking back at the couple. One of the tourists saw Amy on

                In 1999, a naval ship docked in Barbados and one of the seamen went to a local brothel. He claimed to have seen a woman who told him she was Amy Lynn Bradley and had been kidnapped and needed help to get away from the people keeping her at the brothel. The seaman left and did not tell anyone since he was not supposed to be at that brother. It was not until he retired that he contacted the Bradley’s with his story. By the time they got to the brothel, it had burned down.

                Also, in 1999, a man named Frank Jones contacted the Bradley’s claiming a Columbia gangster was holding Amy in Curacao. Jones said he was a former Special Forces and offered to help find Amy for free. But as we know, there is no such thing as a free lunch!

                Jones said a female cook described Amy’s tattoos and repeated a lullaby Amy taught her. Jones sent two Navy seals to determine her location. At this point, Jones asked for money for the rescue. The Bradley’s requested to see proof that the Seals had found her. Jones supplied a photo, and the Bradley’s eventually gave him a total of $210,000.

               

He had Ron Bradley go to Florida to wait for the call that they had Amy. He sat in that motel room for a week waiting for that call. He finally got a call from one of Jones’s associates and determined that he and his family had been duped. Jones was arrested and plead guilty to mail fraud and got a 5-year sentence and restitution.

                Six years later, a woman, Judy Maurer claimed to see Amy in a bathroom in Barbados. Amy told her name, but two men came into the bathroom and talked loudly at Amy. They threatened Maurer and frightened, she hid in the stall until the men left. When she left the stall, Amy was still there, hunched over the sink. She said she was Amy from Virginia. At that point, the two men returned and crudely took Amy out of the bathroom. Maurer identified Amy to the FBI.

               

In 2005, the family received an email with a photo of a woman lying on a bed in underwear. An organization that locates victims of sex trafficking, thought it looked very much like Amy.

                In 2010, the turmoil from Hurricane Tomas unearthed a human jawbone on the beach in Aruba. It was tested to see if it was Natalee Holloway. It was not her, and  all testing stopped at that point and it was never tested to see if it was Amy or the nine other woman who had disappeared in the Caribbean.

                Amy has never been found but her family has not given up, hoping that she will come home eventually. Anyone who has sighted Amy Lynn Bradly or has information on her location, please inform the FBI.

REFERENCES

Bibliography

Gibbons, P. (n.d.). Shocking facts about Amy Lynn Bradley, the woman who disappeared at sea. Retrieved from Unbreakable Crimes.

Serena, K. (2018, March 7). The mysterious case of Amy Lynn Bradley, who vanished from a cruise ship. Retrieved from All That's Interesting.

MICHAEL SWANGO: KILLER DOCTOR

MICAHEL SWANGO: KILLER DOCTOR

“He could look at himself in a mirror and tell himself that he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world- he could feel he was a god in disguise…” portion of the personal notebook from Michael Swango: medical serial killer.

This quote might give us a glimpse into why Michael Swango killed at least 60 people…all those whose care was left in his hands. , but it is hard to understand the how-how did he get away with killing for so long? Was it due to a “broken system of background checks and the failure of hospital administrators to believe one of their own might be a killer”?

Michael Swango is what is called a medical murderer. His access to patients gave him easy access to victims. And being in the medical establishment assured him that he would not be that closely scrutinized.

            Michael grew up in a military family with a strict and alcoholic father. There was a great deal of tension at home, not only from the father who was a hard taskmaster when he was at home but also the mother who created her share of tension. She saw Michael as exceptional, compared to his other brothers. She felt Michael would be underchallenged in the local high school, so she sent him to Christian Brothers High School. His brothers were sent to the local public high school; this certainly sent a message to the other brothers that somehow they were lesser minds than their brother. This couldn’t help but create tension among the brothers.

            Michael not only excelled academically, but he read music, sang, played the piano and

clarinet and eventually played in the Quincy Notre Dame Band and the Quincy College Wind Ensemble. He graduated as the 1972 class valedictorian and went on to Milkin University, in Decatur, Illinois, on a full music scholarship.

            He made top grades his first two years, but then, when his girlfriend dumped him, he withdrew from his academics, and the summer after his second year, he quit school altogether and joined the Marines. When he returned from the Marines, he had decided to become a doctor, so he returned to Quincy College to take classes in chemistry and biology. In his record, he lied and included a Bronze Star and Purple Heart that he did not have. He also developed a fascination with poisons and did heavy research on the subject.

            One has to wonder what happened to him in the Marines that not only made him want to be a doctor but to develop such an interest in poisons. From then on, his focus was to get into medical school and gain access to patients; in addition, he spent most of his time researching poisons. This is the time period when he developed an interest in violent deaths and began to keep a scrapbook of stories from the newspaper on car accidents and violent deaths.

            As side employment, Michael got a job as an ambulance driver, which gave him access to the real thing, violence in the flesh. He never missed a chance to go out on a run to car accidents, even if it meant missing classes and postponing studying.

            At Southern Illinois University Medical School, there were mixed reviews from his professors. He took unscrupulous shortcuts in projects and tests. It seems he was more interested in becoming a doctor than learning to be a doctor. The other students saw him as lazy, incompetent and strange, calling him Double O Swango, license to kill. What a prophetic nickname.

            He took a job as an EMT, having been previously fired from his job as an ambulance driver. The other EMTs noticed that when Michael made the coffee or brought in donuts for the crew, the staff got violently ill. His fellow EMTs set up a sting where they put a pitcher of iced tea in the break room and left it alone. After they were sure Michael had been in the room, they had it tested and found it laced with arsenic.  He was arrested, and arsenic and other poisons were found in his car. He was convicted of aggravated battery and received a sentence of five years.

When the law school dean reviewed the case, he concluded that the medical school should have more closely investigated Swango, but Michael had never been accused of any crime before, so this seems more like 20/20 hindsight. Attempted murder charges were considered but there was just not enough evidence. One would assume, though, that Michael’s medical career was over—right?

           

Well, when he was released from prison, he got a job at The State Career Development Center in Virginia, but lost it because he couldn’t resist working on his scrapbook of disasters on work time  His next job was as a lab tech at ATICoal where employees suddenly developed  numerous stomach pains. Michael was suspected, but he quit before anything could be done about it.

            In 1991, he changed his name to Daniel J. Adams and began working at Sanford USD Medical Center in Sioux Falls with forged documents, one being a fact sheet from the Illinois Department of Corrections changing his crime from a felony to a misdemeanor fistfight, another being a letter from the governor restoring his right to vote and letters from friends and colleagues saying he was now leading an exemplary life. All this allowed him to practice medicine; he was back in business, giving him the access to drugs and patients he needed.

            Things were going well at Sanford until he made the mistake of trying to join the AMA, whose background check was more detailed and came up with his conviction for poisoning, Sanford fired him.

            That Thanksgiving, the television program Justice Files ran an episode that included Michael. This certainly meant an end to any medical career for Michael, right? No, again he found a way back in.

            The AMA lost track of Michael, and he ended up at the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Medicine. The first place he was posted was the VA Hospital in Northport where patients began dying at a distressing rate. The first one was on the very first day Michael arrived at the VA.  The mother of a girlfriend who had committed suicide began a campaign again Michael which eventually ended with his being fired from Stony Brook. The Dean of Stony Brook also got fired and alerted all 125 medical schools and 1, 000 teaching hospital about Swango.

            Since the last incident was in a VA hospital, it was considered a federal crime, so the FBI got involved. They found Michael working in Atlanta as a chemist and a warrant was issued for using false credentials to gain entry to a VA hospital. But before they could arrest him, he fled the country and ended up in Zimbabwe.

            There he got another job at a hospital again with forged documents. It seems like Michael could have made a healthy living as a forger since these documents were never questioned. Patients, again, began to die. The nurses were the first to become suspicious. Swango had a private stash of drugs and always had two syringes in his pockets, one hidden (not very well since all the nurses seemed to know about it) and the other in his hand.

            One patient had had his left foot amputated and was healing well. He was just there at the hospital waiting for a prosthesis donated by a charity. “Dr. Mike” came in one night and injected him with something. The patient grew numb but was still able to call the nurses who intervened and were able to save his life, but not his leg. The patient told the nurses who had done this to him, but Swango denied it and whined that he didn’t know why people were always accusing him with things like that.. The patient’s life was never the same and said he didn’t understand why he was not compensated for what “Dr. Mike” had done; after all the hospital had hired him.

The deaths at the hospital were traced to him, and he was terminated. He then hired a human rights lawyer to sue the hospital for wrongful termination. This could only be called the greatest case of hutzpah in the history of the world. A throng of Christian believers who had seen Michael as a gift from God there in Zimbabwe believed this termination was a witch hunt, not knowing the slaughter he had left behind in the states. This publicity was the last thing the Missionary Hospital wanted.

            Three years later, Michael applied to the Royal Hospital in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, again using forged documents… let's just assume anywhere he goes from now on he uses forged documents.

            Back in the states, VA OIG Criminal Investigator consulted with a forensic psychologist to create a profile of Swango. The DEA combined focuses on the VA focusing on the crime of lying on an application in order to be able to prescribe narcotics.

            After a meticulous investigation and keeping a careful track of the airports, Michael was finally arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Chicago-O’Hare airport on his way to Saudi Arabia. The hospitalized people of Saudi Arabia just became the luckiest patients on the planet.

            Because Michael knew they had evidence again him from the VA hospital and not wanting them to look into what he had done in Zimbabwe, he decided to plead guilty to defrauding the government. Sentenced to 3-5 years, the judge said he should not be allowed to prepare food or distribute drugs while in prison.

            During his sentence for misleading the government, the government was busy gathering evidence against him. They exhumed bodies and found poison. He had paralyzed one patient who later died.

Just as Michael thought his time in prison was over, the feds on Long Island charged him with three counts of murder, one count of assault, one of fraud and making false statements, and conspiring to commit wire fraud. Simultaneously he was charged in Zimbabwe with poisoning seven patient, five died.

            He originally pled not guilty but changed it to guilty to avoid the death penalty and extradition to Zimbabwe. He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences.

            The story of Michael Swango should have been a wake-up call to the authorities around the world to do more meticulous background checks before any doctor get access to drugs and patients.

References

Dr. Joeseph Michael Swango. (n.d.). Retrieved from Murderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/swango-michael.htm

Gelten, L. (2018, SeptemberNew York Post.

8). How a murderous doctor was allowed to keep killing patients.

LeDuff, C. (2000, September 6). Man to admit murdering 3 L.I. patients. Retrieved from Murderpedia- The New York Times: https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/swango-michael.htm

Leduff, C. (2000, September 7). Prosecutors say doctor killed to feel a thrill. New York Times.

Profile of Joseph Michael Swango: A License to Kill. (n.d.). Retrieved from ThoughtCo: www.thoughtco.com/profile-of-joseph-michael-swango-973127

The angel of mercy who turned out to be an angel of death. (1998, February 6). Retrieved from Murderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/swango-michael.htm