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This case is infamous in the True Crime space – it seems like it should so easily be able to be solved, but now 17 years later, no trace of Brandon Swanson has been found.
Brandon, who was 19 years old, drove his car into a ditch in Marshall, Minnesota after a night out in May 2008. He was not injured and called his parents to pick him up after the accident. He stayed on the phone for 47 minutes with them before he said ‘Oh, shit!” and has not been seen or heard from since.
Brandon was born on January 30, 1989 in Porter, Minnesota. His parents are Brian and Annette Swanson. Online records indicate that Brandon has a younger sister, Jasmine.
Brandon grew up in Marshall, Minnesota. He graduated from Marshall High School in 2007 – the year before he vanished.
After graduation, Brandon decided to study wind turbines at the Minnesota West Community and Technical College campus in Canby, Minnesota for a year. He had plans to enrol in the Iowa Western College after that year was up – this would have meant he moved 250 miles away from his family.
Brandon had worked at the Hy-Vee Food Store for four years prior to 2008. His mother said that he loved reading.
Just a note of potential interest – Brandon was almost totally blind in his left eye. He wore glasses and apparently had depth perception issues.
Classes finished for the academic year on Tuesday, May 13, 2008.
Brandon decided to go to several parties that night, to celebrate with friends. The first party was held in Lynd, around 7miles away from his home in Marshall. This party was described more as a ‘get together’ and only around 6 people attended. Brandon’s friends have said they saw him consume one alcoholic drink at the time.
Brandon left that party and drove around 35 miles to a party in Canby. His classmate was moving away and was holding a farewell party that night. When Brandon arrived there, he again drank alcohol. His friends say they saw him having one or two drinks. People at the party said that Brandon was not visibly intoxicated.
Brandon left Canby to drive home at around midnight. His friends said that he seemed fine to drive home. The drive should have been around 30 miles/48kms. Google maps says the drive should have usually taken around 35-40 mins.
It is literally one straight road. Brandon had driven the route many times, sometimes even multiple times per day.
At one point, Brandon drove his car off the road and into a ditch accidentally. He had drifted a little and the curb was low, so he was unable to get his Chevy Lumina out of the ditch.
He called his friends for help. None of them either answered or were able to assist him, so he called his parents just before 2am.
Brandon told them he was not hurt and asked them to come and pick him up.
Both Annette and Brian got into their car to go and help Brandon. They stayed on the phone with him – the call was said to have dropped out a few times but they got back in touch with him.
“We got in the pickup to go to this spot where he felt he was,” Brian recalled. He thought he knew exactly where his son was, about 10 minutes from their home in Marshall.
“He was absolutely positive he knew where he was,” Brian said.
Brandon told them he was staying with the car. He flashed the vehicle’s lights on and off in an attempt to signal his parents.
When Brandon’s parents arrived at the spot where they thought he would be, there was no sign of their son. They turned around and flashed the lights on their truck.
“We were saying, ‘We’re flashing our lights!’ ” Annette said. Over the phone, they could hear their son working the light switch in his car. Click-click, click-click.
“Don’t you see me?” he asked.
“There was nothing,” his father said, “absolutely nothing.”
Everyone began getting frustrated. Brandon ended the call between him and his parents at one point. “At one point, he hung up on me, so I called him back and apologized,” his mother said.
Nobody seemed to be getting anywhere. Brandon told his parents he was going to leave his car and walk back to Lynd. Some reports say that he said he was going to walk back to a friend’s place, while other reports say he was going to head to the parking lot of a bar, where he asked his father to meet him.
Brandon said he was going to take a shortcut through a farmfield to get to the town quicker.
Some reports state that Brian took Annette home and drove to meet Brandon. Annette seems to later speak though as if she was there the whole time. Either way, the father and son stayed on the phone the whole time. Brandon said that he was walking toward the lights that he believed were the town of Lynd.
Shortly after 2.30am, 47 minutes into the phone call with his dad, Brandon said ‘Oh, shit!’ and silence ensued. His father tried to get his attention.
There are some varying reports as to what happened next. Some reports say that his father believed maybe the call had been dropped, he hung up and made multiple attempts to call him back.
“We called at least five or six more times,” his father said. “He never picked up the phone again.”
There is another interview from Annette where she says they did not hang up the call straight away.
We didn’t immediately hang up the phone – you know, we called his name, we tried to, you know, thinking that he still had the phone, that it was very near him, that he could pick it up, or that he could hear our voice… and we called out to him several times… we realized he’s… he’s not there. So we did, we called him back several times thinking, you know, he’ll see the phone light up. Even if he didn’t have it on ring, he’d see the phone light up when the call came in and he’d find it.”
The Swansons then searched all night for Brandon. They drove down dirt and gravel roads, and through farmland. They found nothing.
At 6.30am on May 14, 2008, his parents reported Brandon missing to the Lynd police. In a story that we have heard way too many times before, police refused to take the case seriously straight away. Authorities told his family that it was normal for a 19 y/o to stay out all night after finishing college classes. An officer said that at his age, Brandon “had a right to be missing.”
Annette would say “I’m his mother and I knew something was horribly wrong.”
When officers eventually joined the search, they were unable to find any trace of Brandon. His phone records were examined and that showed that he had been nowhere near Lynd on the night he vanished. His cell phone calls were traced to a tower 20 miles away. Lyon County Police would find his car in Porter, Minnesota – 25 miles from Lynd.
“It was off the side of a field approach, and the vehicle was hung up,” Lincoln County Sheriff Jack Vizecky said. “It’s sort of a sharp incline, nothing major but enough that the car would get hung up so the wheels are too high off the ground to get any traction.”
Nothing else unusual was found at the site. Authorities could also not determine which way Brandon had traveled when he left the car.
No alcohol or illegal drugs were found in the vehicle. Nothing unusual was found in or around the vehicle; there was no significant trace evidence, no signs of blood, and no indication of a struggle.
“There’s grass in the ditch and gravel on the road, so it’s possible to leave that vehicle and not leave any tracks,” Sheriff Vizecky said.
From the area where the car was found, a red light on a grain elevator could be seen. Authorities believe that this may have been the light that Brandon was walking towards, thinking it was the town of Lynd.
Investigators brought in search dogs, and they led investigators to woods by the bank of the Yellow Medicine River. The river’s depth ranges from knee high in certain areas to 15 feet in others. At the time Brandon went missing, it was flowing high and fast.
“There are two miles of the river in that area, and it took six hours to walk it,” Sheriff Vizecky said. He said he personally walked the river every day for 30 days.
“At the time, the dogs indicated, and it was believed, that he must have fallen in the river in that area,” he added. “So we searched that area, on the premise that he’d be washed downstream.”
Brandon had mentioned passing fences and hearing water while he had been on the phone to his father.
Sheriff Vizecky did say that Brandon should have eventually been found in the river if he had fallen in.
Brandon’s mother also does not believe he fell into the river.
“There really is nothing to indicate that he’s in the river,” she said. According to her, one bloodhound followed a scent from the stranded car down a gravel road to an abandoned farm.
The dog actually jumped in the river, jumped back out, worked the trail …
“It was a long trail … about three miles,” she added. The new trail path also led to the Yellow Medicine River. “The dog actually jumped in the river, jumped back out, worked the trail up to another gravel road and then lost the scent,” she said.
Brandon’s cell phone has never been found. His parents tried to call his phone for days after his disappearance and it continued to ring and go to voicemail, before eventually losing power.
Sheriff Vizecky has spoken about the possibility that Brandon met foul play.
“The only thing would have been if someone was in the shadows, and they got him that way,” he said. “I can’t say there wasn’t someone else there, but I can’t find any evidence of it.”
Cadaver dogs and searchers, he explained, should have found a body or some evidence if Swanson had succumbed to the elements.
“I can’t explain why clothing, belongings wouldn’t surface,” Sheriff Vizecky said. “I can’t explain why after searching for three weeks, [the dogs] could not smell anything.”
The Swansons left their porch light on all night, every night in the hope that Brandon would return home.
After the initial searches concluded, searching began late in the fall. This happened after fields had been harvested.
Later in 2008, Brandon’s Law was passed in Minnesota. The law mandates that police begin an immediate search for adults aged under 21, as well as older adults who are missing under suspicious circumstances.
In March 2010, almost two years after Brandon disappeared, Jeff Hasse of Search Rescue and Recovery Resources of Minnesota gave an update on the difficulty of the case.
“This has been an exceptionally difficult and frustrating search. While there have been consistent and reliable indications that human remains are present in the area, we have yet to pinpoint the source (Brandon’s remains).
There are several possible explanations for this.
One of the main reasons why this is such a difficult search lies in the fact that the region receives nearly constant winds which can come from any direction. These winds move scent from the source and deposit it into “scent pools” such as wind breaks around farmsteads, tall grass in CRP land, and along ditches and creeks. When the dogs alert on an area of “hot” scent, it is often very difficult to differentiate whether we are near the remains or searching yet another scent pool.
We also may be facing the difficulty of locating remains that have been moved and/or scattered over a wide area. It is possible that predators such as coyotes, raccoons, and the like have scattered the remains. It is also possible that they have been inadvertently scattered or moved by human activity such as farmers tilling their fields or baling hay or cornstalks.
We also have some access issues. We can’t search everywhere we would like to search. We are very careful to protect landowner’s property and have generally avoided searching fields with crops in them even though there is a fair chance that Brandon ended up in a field. This leaves spring and fall available to us to search the many fields in the area. With the wet weather we had last fall and our early start this spring, we ended up searching very wet fields. This is miserable work. To effectively search a single 160-acre field, the team must walk in excess of ten miles in difficult footing.
In addition, we haven’t been able to search many pastures because of the cows. Even though the dogs are well trained to be around other animals, we avoid working around cows, especially during calving season. This leaves gaps in our search coverage and makes it difficult to eliminate an area from further consideration.
It is also possible that Brandon attempted to seek shelter from the wind near the end of his journey and crawled into an outbuilding or under old machinery and perished there. Because we are trying to avoid disrupting landowner’s lives as little as possible, we have only searched a few farmsteads.”
These are only a few of the issues that make this a very difficult search.”
In March 2010, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) became the lead investigating agency on the case. The BCA has received 75 tips from March 2010 – May 2013. The last official search was conducted in October 2011.
By 2011, 122 square miles (320km2) had been searched.
On the five year anniversary of Brandon’s disappearance, another search was held.
Twin Cities.com discussed the scale of the search for Brandon. “More than 500 volunteers, including 34 dog handlers from nine different states, spent more than 120 days searching for Brandon and covered part of 120 square miles, said Jeff Hasse, the search manager.”
‘It’s by far the biggest search I’ve ever been involved in terms of length of time, number of missions and number of searchers involved,” he said.
He added, “I think time favors the search,” Hasse said. “I think eventually something will be found. I am hopeful.”
When he vanished, Brandon had brown hair and blue eyes, was 5’6″ and weighed 125 pounds. He wearing blue jeans, a white or black hat twisted to the side, and a white short-sleeved shirt
Anyone with information that could lead to the whereabouts of Brandon Swanson is asked to call the Lincoln County sheriff at (507) 694-1664.
SOURCE LIST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Brandon_Swanson
https://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/01/18/grace.coldcase.swanson/index.html
http://immelman.net/brandon-swanson
https://footprintsattheriversedge.blogspot.com/2008/05/051308-brandon-swanson-19-marshall-mn.html