Former doctor pleads guilty in poisoning death

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A former doctor who prosecutors say enjoyed killing people admitted Wednesday to fatally poisoning a woman at Ohio State University's hospital in 1984.

Investigators believe the death of Cynthia Ann McGee, 19, began a string of poisonings in the United States and Zimbabwe by Michael Swango, who pleaded guilty in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to aggravated murder. He admitted injecting McGee with a deadly dose of potassium when he was an intern at the hospital.

Judge Lisa Sadler gave Swango the maximum penalty - life in prison with a chance of parole after 20 years. That was the most severe penalty for the crime in 1984, when McGee died.

Swango, 45, made no statement in court.

''While we are happy to see justice having been pursued and achieved in criminal courts, we are saddened by the reopening again of old wounds,'' McGee's parents said in a statement read by their attorney, Brian Miller.

Swango pleaded guilty last month in U.S. District Court to killing three patients at a veterans hospital in New York in 1993 and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors there read from Swango's handwritten journal, citing it as evidence that he killed for pleasure.

In one journal entry, Swango wrote about ''the sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide.'' Another suggested that murder was ''the only way I have of reminding myself that I'm still alive.''

A book about him, ''Blind Eye: The Story of a Doctor who Got Away with Murder,'' suggests that Swango might have killed as many as 35 patients as he moved from hospital to hospital, lying about his background.

Prosecutors said that because they had only circumstantial evidence, they needed Swango's admission to McGee's death so he could be charged in Ohio. Swango admitted to McGee's poisoning when he pleaded guilty in the New York killings so he could avoid the death penalty.

McGee had been recuperating at the hospitalized after being hit by a car two months earlier. After her death, the 17-year-old driver was convicted of reckless homicide and sentenced to 30 months' probation.

Authorities considered suspicious the deaths of at least six patients, including McGee's, while Swango was at the Ohio hospital in 1983 and 1984.

Federal prosecutors charged Swango with the New York killings days before he was to be released from prison after completing a 42-month prison sentence for lying on an application at a New York hospital. He failed to disclose that he had spent 30 months in jail and lost his medical license in 1985 for poisoning six co-workers in Quincy, Ill.