Let’s talk about it: Four patients in the same medical practice

Between 1996 and 1997 four people, all of them in roughly the same age group, disappeared from the Los Angeles area: Robert Vincent Black, 64, on March 12, 1996; Patricia Laxer, 63, on August 11, 1997; Goldie A. Swanger, 75, on August 29, 1997; Richard Dean Davison, 70, on October 29, 1997. Mysteriously, not only were all four of these individuals patients of the same doctor (I never found out anything about him), but they all supposedly disappeared while going either to or from appointments with him.

The first answer that strikes me is “serial killer connected with the medical practice,” but what little I knew about the cases didn’t seem to indicate foul play; in fact the police not only suggested they were alive, but that each “may be a patient in a hospital or nursing home.”

In 2004, I found out Goldie Swanger’s case had been resolved, but I did not learn her fate at the time, whether she’d been found dead, or what. I blogged about this in 2011, and in 2014 a commenter, claiming to be Swanger’s biological son, left a comment on that blog entry. I quote from it below. He, his daughter Andria and another of Goldie’s granddaughters traveled to Los Angeles in 2000 or 2001 and

did a little investigation, got medical records from a doctor that Goldie was seeing before she became missing. That doctor told me that she saw him about once a month and then just never showed up and that he wondered what became of her! We found out where she was last at, alive, during her being “missing”. I believe it was a nursing home or something to that effect. I believe the government department that we today call the SRS had something to hide as they threw roadblocks in our search of Goldie.

I’m not sure what he means by SRS. Google turned up “special retirement supplement” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, and “supported residential services” which does, but supported residential services isn’t an American government department, only a service provided by the state government in Victoria, AUSTRALIA. My guess is he meant something similar to supported residential services that the U.S. or California government provide, but got the acronym wrong. Anyway, on with what Goldie Swanger’s son said:

It seems strange that as soon as my wife and I determined that her last name was Swanger and informed the SRS we knew her last name, the “SRS” had one hissy fit, and we determined that Goldie was still alive! But when we got to California she had passed away! Now that is strange! We found out where she lived previous to this facility and saw the place (apartment) and met and talked with a person who knew Goldie (an apartment neighbor). The administrator of the facility she was last at clammed up when we started to question the circumstance as to why Goldie was at this facility. Andria talked with a person who worked in that facility and knew Goldie as a patient(?). Andria has the info on this place. Goldie’s biological family believe that what we discovered may possibly be something to do with medicare fraud. The other missing persons in that area may just have been admitted to that same facility. We don’t know. We couldn’t find out.

The plot thickens indeed. This is most peculiar. I’d love to learn more about this case — some questions that come to mind are who was this doctor, what was his speciality, is he still practicing, what the MPs were seeing him for, and what were their general states of physical/mental health at the time they went missing? The facility administrator may have “clammed up” because there was something sketchy going on, but it could have been for confidentiality reasons (HIPAA).

I suppose it’s possible the other three could be still alive, particularly if they’re in a reasonably good care facility. (Key words being “possible” and “reasonably good”.) By now Black would be 85, Davis would be 89, and Laxer would be 83. But I wonder if anyone is even looking for them by now. If I was looking to imprison some people in a care facility against their will for the purposes of committing medical assistance fraud, I’d be targeting people with no living relatives, or at least no close relatives, and few ties to their community — people who would be easily missed.

So what happened to these people? Let’s talk about it.

Two case connections today

Once in awhile it happens that I’m writing up a case and discover that, lo, it’s connected to another one. Sometimes the MPs are relatives; sometimes they have some other shared feature, like how Mary Margaret Cook and Peggy Wynell Byars-Baisden both lived on the same street, although there’s no indication those two cases are connected. Most often, though, the connection is through a third party, usually a suspect in the case.

Today I added two of those: Valarie Sloan and Janis Sanders. Both of these women had been mentioned on the site already in the casefiles of others — Stacey Morrison and Janeice Langs respectively — but I didn’t have any photos or anything for them to have their own files. The same suspect, a serial killer named Joseph Miller, has confessed to killing Valarie and Stacey but hasn’t faced charges and probably never will. In the case of the Two Jans, the same guy, Gerald Libertowski, was actually charged with the murders of his ex-girlfriends Janeice Langs and Janis Sanders, but he got off both times. I tried to find out what he got up to after that, whether he’s still alive, but couldn’t find anything on him.

Possibly the most unusual connection noted on Charley is that of Robert Black, Richard Davison and Patricia Laxer. Those three, plus a woman named Goldie Swanger, all disappeared going either to or from an appointment with the same doctor. Goldie turned up in 2004, but I have no info as to the circumstances. There seems to be no indication of foul play in the Case of the Disappearing Patients, but the whole thing is very Twilight Zone. I only wish I knew more about those cases, though I suspect that at closer look they would turn out to be disappointingly much less mysterious.