::raises hand::
OK, since enough people seem to be interested: it’s Michael Swango. I’ve mentioned him here before but not that I’ve communicated with him.
After reading Blind Eye and being enthralled by the bizarre story, I was disappointed to find barely any attempt at a psychological profile of the man - nor any quotes or interviews with his own words. Figuring I’d just find out for myself, I wrote him a letter, and started communicating back and forth with him.
It’s been a very interesting experience.
:rolleyes:
I also pen pal with a prolific serial killer (though mine is even MORE well known!). I’ll only tell if enough people quote this post and give me attention first.
That’s not what I was tryin’ to do - I just wanted to judge whether there was interest in it, before I wasted my time sharing.
My best friend is a mild-mannered individual who can quiet a room down just from the expression on his face. People say that he gets a look like he’s just choosing whom to behead from the group.
He says I scare the shit of him. Go figure.
One of my exes had an ex herself who was scary in a disturbing way. Six foot eight, wiry with dorky glasses, also severely bipolar and fond of intimidation.
There was a bit of a disagreement in her kitchen one evening that ended with him grabbing me by the lapel and slamming me against the stove, inadvertently turning on one of the burners and giving me a burn on my left arm. Best part of that story? Even though he assaulted me, the cops assumed that because I was younger than they were that it must have been my fault (one of them said he would have thrown me down the stairs). Plus, the jerk used the incident as an excuse to stop paying into his kid’s college fund despite having a five-figure income and tens of thousands in savings and assets.
Also, one night this girl came to see me perform on a night when ex-husband was in charge of the kid, and he wasn’t happy about her plan. He blocked her driveway by standing in front of the car and pounding on it, shouting profanity and insults. After she finally escaped, he left her literally dozens of angry voicemails and text messages. Strangely enough, I got him to back off me eventually by exposing his faults verbally, which I wouldn’t have expected to work, but what can you do.
And then there was the kid who, in the same conversation, told me that due to a misunderstanding he almost ordered a hit on me in high school, and then asked when would be a good time for him to visit Montreal and what he should do (I had never spoken to this guy before). I found out later from a friend of his that he’s a sociopath with a history of being institutionalized.
Wouldn’t it have only taken you a few seconds to type the guy’s name into your first post? If anything, it took more time to post asking if people were interested.
Okay, Freudian Slit, we see your point, but you’re becoming part of the problem. I, for one, would like to hear more details from Argent Towers if that’s alright.
The scariest guy I knew (He died several years ago) was Erland van Lidthe de Jeude. We were in a couple of musical theater productions together. Erland was so big that they had to get a professional football player for him to practice against. he weighed 300 pounds. When he played Miles Gloriosus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum*, the guy playing Pseudolus could do chin-ups on his outstretched arm.
After he graduuated (he was a computer science guy), he was spotted by Philip Kaufman singing opera in Greenwich Village, and Kaufman persuaded him to shave his head to play the leader of the Fordham Baldies (a real 1950s gang) in his film The Wanderers. Erland’s in the trailer here at about 1:20 :
The top picture is from The Wanderers:
(The others are from Stir Crazy and Running Man
After that, Erland played a Big Bald Geek in Stir Crazy and later in The Running Man. He didn’t particularly like playing Big Bald Geeks 9he turned down the chance to do so in the Bo Derek Tarzan), but he was incredibly good at it – he was awesomely tall and intimidating, and you knew he could crush you without half trying.
Nice guy, though.
That’s not his voice in Stir Crazy – I know, I’ve heard him often enough. He wasn’t in the union, or something, so they had to dub his voice. He DID get to sing in The Running Man (which was released after he died), but you really can’t hear it over the explosions.
*Erland was the BEST Miles Gloriosus ever. The lines, which are simple boasting and rote for most actors, worked for someone of his size: “Stand back! I take LARGE steps!”
I’ve known many folks who were scary in the ‘just how crazy are they?’ sense.
But for sheer intimidation- George Scithers.
Mr Scithers was an EXTREMELY accomplished science fiction and fantasy editor. He was close friends with Isaac Asimov and a member of the Trap Door Spiders. He may have invented the term ‘sword and sorcery’. He was also a former lieutenant colonel.
Scithers looked, and mostly acted, like Happy of the Seven Dwarfs with glasses, newer clothes, a haircut and no beard. He was a genuinely nice person. But, when displeased he could make grown men wet themselves and packs of starving wolves run. I have no doubt he literally gave drill sergeants lessons on how to be more frightening.
ETA
I forgot to mention how I knew the man. Through a friend of a friend, I ended up being a slush pile reader for Weird Tales for a summer. I’d show up at Mr Scither’s place, go down to the basement and dive in to the pile of stories.
My ex-BF from my semester in Russia, who served in Spetsnaz in Afghanistan. I don’t think he ever would have raised a hand against me, but he sure was a badass. Once we were just horsing around, and he had basically hogtied my arms and legs behind my back in about 10 seconds flat. (Not that I’m really much of a challenge, but it did kind of freak me out.)
I have no idea where he is anymore - I lost contact in about 1992, which is a whole other saga.
OK, I’ll give some more details:
Michael Swango, if you haven’t read his Wikipedia article, was a doctor who killed his patients. It is not known exactly how many murders he committed, because he only confessed to four, but estimates range from 30 to 60. Even after being imprisoned (for a separate incident in which he poisoned his co-workers with ant poison mixed into their food), he was able to continue to get jobs as a doctor in hospitals by forging documents, falsifying his records and changing his name.
This case intrigued me because it was different from almost all other serial killers. Swango didn’t kill because he was crazy and had religious revelations telling him to do it, like Charles Manson or Son of Sam. There wasn’t any sexual element to his killing, like BTK or Gacy - he killed men and women alike, in a non-sexual way. And whereas most killers murder violently, by stabbing, strangling or shooting, Swango just calmly put his victims to sleep with lethal injections. What a passionless, cold way to kill.
I kept wondering what would drive someone to do this…and could not find any kind of in-depth attempt at psychologically profiling Swango, nor any interviews with him. So I figured I’d just write to him and try to get an impression of his personality myself, by reading what he had to write.
His letters are interesting. Interesting and weird. For one thing, he’s obsessed with violent incidents in the news, whether it’s violent weather, massive car accidents, incidents of terrorism - he often writes about how he’s “riveted” by various calamities that he sees on his TV, which is his only source of connection with the outside world besides mail. To emphasize words, he underlines them, and the number of underlines reflect his enthusiasm for something - three underlines means he’s really crazy about it.
His biggest interest seems to be the subject of political intrigue, and he is absolutely fascinated with the Cold War and the various proxy conflicts that it spawned, especially political assassinations, guerrilla warfare, and nuclear brinksmanship. When he writes about stuff like apartheid-era South Africa’s development of nuclear bombs, or North Korean-trained death squads in Zimbabwe, he really goes nuts with the underlining, capitalization, and exclaimation points. It is truly palpable just how excited he is by this stuff.
Swango’s father was a career Army colonel and, later, a Foreign Service operative who worked closely with the CIA during the Vietnam War. It’s rumored that he was part of the Phoenix Project and that he was involved in all kinds of political intrigue in Vietnam. Though I’ve never discussed his father with Swango, the impression that I get from the book about him is that he was in awe of his father’s career, and yet very frustrated that the man was rarely ever present in his life. I guess he sort of gets lost in this Walter Mitty-like political fantasizing as a way of trying to connect with his father or something, or more accurately, gain the connection that he never had.
At no point do I ever forget that the guy I’m communicating with is a cold-blooded killer. I guess I should feel disgusted at what he did, but it’d be like feeling disgusted at a venomous snake for killing its prey. Just like there are born predators in the animal kingdom, so too are there born predators among humans. Thank God, they’re rare - but someone like Swango is just born to kill. He was powerless to help himself; he needed to kill the same way you and I need to drink water and eat food. The best we can do is to try to identify these people as soon as possible, and get them the hell away from society.
I don’t know the reason, but I do recall in either “People” or “Us” magazine in the early 1980s a letter to the editor written by his sister Philine which pointed out the dubbing (form an earlier article, obviously). She said something like "My brother does indeed have a beautiful singing voice, that that is not his in “Stir Crazy.”
Swango sounds very similar to Harold Shipman, the British serial killer (most prolific ever for this country), except that most of his victims were elderly women. But it wasn’t for money; he was caught after one of his patients ‘willed’ money to him, but he hadn’t taken money from most the other dozens of men and women he killed. It’s bizarre because, like your penpal, there’s no obvious motive.
I think the biggest motive was a sense of power, the power over life and death. I think the only reason Swango became a doctor was so that he would be in a position to wield this power, because there’s really no other job you can do where you have it.
The biggest theme running through all of Swango’s writing is his desperate desire to be part of this vast storm of destructive power that is constantly blowing all over the world. It’s like there’s this “dark energy,” comprising all of the violence, destruction, and death in the world - not for any specific reason, just an elemental force, like water or air. And more than anything else in the world, Swango wants to swim around in that current of destruction.
I think of him as a Ballardian figure, after the writing of J.G. Ballard, who wrote extensively on themes of destruction and violence as a sort of elemental force in life. And - wouldn’t you know it - Swango happens to be a huge fan of Ballard.
This reminds me of Nietzsche’s metaphor of the lamb and the birds of prey:
[QUOTE=Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality]
It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good?” then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal’s establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, "We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb
[/QUOTE]
Nietzsche is saying that just because the lambs don’t like it, and call the birds of prey evil, does not mean they are actually bad or that what they do is bad, they just do what they are born to do, and that is, to cite another of Nietzsche’s works’ titles’, beyond good and evil. Do you really subscribe to this view? If you believe that Swango is born to kill, do you think there is a moral ground for considering his actions as reprehensible and evil?
Things like this are, I think, beyond good and evil - the moral thing to do is to protect society from natural predators, and learn as much as we can about these types of people so we can identify them, separate them from the population, and hopefully, someday, fix what is wrong with them.
So would I.
If you don’t mind me asking, did you confront Swango with, let’s say, some of the moral implications of his deeds? Is the man remorseful, or resentful for being put in prison? When you say that he was ‘powerless to help himself’, are those his words or your impressions - and insofar as he said this or might agree to it, to what extent do you reckon he would say ‘I wish I was able to help myself’ (something that Nietzsche’s birds of prey sure as hell are not saying).
I hope you don’t mind me bombarding you with questions, I am genuinely interested in your views and your insights.
Of the two most charming people I have ever met: one is a convicted murderer, the other is a convicted pedophile.
I have learned to distrust anyone who has an excess of charm.
As far as intimidating, an old drill sergeant had that ‘I’ve done things I won’t talk about’ aura about him, but he wasn’t particularly scary - probably because he didn’t have to be.