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The Disappearance of Brandon Swanson
53 Plays1 year ago
The story of Brandon Swanson is a story of separation and sadness, but also of hope. One family’s response to tragedy lights the way for others who suffer loss in today’s episode of True Crime and Punishment.
Sources:
https://www.house.mn.gov/sessionweekly/art.asp?ls_year=86&issueid_=43&storyid=1297&year_=2009
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/01/18/grace.coldcase.swanson/index.html
https://www.house.mn.gov/sessionweekly/art.asp?ls_year=86&issueid_=43&storyid=1297&year_=2009
https://www.jonfrancisfoundation.org/
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2007/07/26/hikerfound
https://www.twincities.com/2015/10/13/brandon-swanson-search-resumes-in-western-minnesota/
https://thecrimewire.com/true-crime/Missing-Since-2008-Brandon-Swanson
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Transcript
The Return of Sierra and Kaylee
00:00:01
Speaker
We're back, baby. I'm Sierra. And I'm Kaylee. This is True Crime and Punishment. This week, before we get into our case, which will be about the disappearance of Brandon Swanson, we're going to explain the disappearance of Sierra. The face of the earth. That is entirely my fault. Basically, we had an episode three ready to go up. I thought I posted it. We had it recorded. Yeah, we did. We had it recorded. And then we had to
00:00:31
Speaker
We were going to record it. We record it. Did we record it? We did record it. We recorded it like before I left. So we had to record it twice. But basically, I went home to visit my family, and I didn't bring my mic. And so I had to order a new mic, and then we had to record it. And then it was late. And then I was not in my hometown. I was in my hometown. I wasn't in the state I live.
00:00:59
Speaker
Basically, I was out of town. I didn't edit it until I was in an airport, which, by the way, you don't know how stupid you feel editing a murder podcast. We have to listen to your stupid voice through your own AirPods in an airport, just waiting to fly back home and just like, please,
00:01:16
Speaker
I know. And then I edited it and didn't post it. And I thought I'd posted it. And then I couldn't find a thing that I know I edited it. That I know I edited. So I had to re-edit it when Sierra got back and was like, hey, you didn't post the third part because Sierra was like off the face of the earth for a couple months.
00:01:37
Speaker
She's off the grid. She's off the grid. So that was my bad. I should post something. I didn't. I have a tendency to like, instead of posting it and then listening to it, which is what I'm going to have to do now to make sure it's gone up. I just would post it and like close the tab, close my laptop and walk away.
00:01:53
Speaker
And that works great for my anxiety when I actually post the episode. But yeah, that's on me. But we're back now. We're back and that episode is up. So if you haven't heard part three of the West Memphis Three, you should go give it a listen because it's good. I think I honestly don't remember when we
The Mysterious Case of Brandon Swanson
00:02:10
Speaker
recorded it. I remember editing it the second time and being like, man.
00:02:14
Speaker
We sound so smart sometimes. So anyway, we're back. We're back and we're going to be on a more regular schedule. I can't make any grand grandiose promises. Cause even when we do, it doesn't always work. Well, even when I do it, it doesn't always work out. Um, but we are going to stick to the posting on Sundays. Cause I just works for our schedule. But yeah, that's where we've been. Now let's talk about where someone else has been.
00:02:40
Speaker
Sierra is doing our first episode of this season. So without further ado, take it away Sierra.
00:02:48
Speaker
All right. For this one, we actually don't know where this person has been. It's been several years since the disappearance of Brandon Swanson. So let's go back to the day of the disappearance, or actually the day before. On May 13th of 2008, 19-year-old Brandon Swanson finished his first year at Minnesota West Community and Technical College.
00:03:11
Speaker
He was celebrating, obviously, because it was the end of the semester, the start of summer, and he was hanging out with friends at various parties until well past midnight. So it was May 13th, then it transitioned over to May 14th. After midnight, around 1.54 AM, he called his parents saying that he had driven into a ditch in Lind, Minnesota, which was a town near to his hometown. And he wasn't able to get home, and he asked them to come and find him.
00:03:42
Speaker
His father said later that he was absolutely positive that he knew where he was. They stayed on the phone. They drove out to find him, but they could not find him at the location he said he was at. They searched. They tried their lights. They were still talking with him on the phone to try to get more information, but nothing was working, and Brandon was actually getting frustrated with them because they couldn't see him. According to different sources, the father drove Brandon's mom back home, and then he went back out to search for Brandon and enlisted some help from friends.
00:04:11
Speaker
He had been talking with him on the phone, carrying on a very long conversation with him. Brandon had decided that instead of staying at the car, he was actually going to walk to the parking lot of a nightclub and meet his father there. As Brandon was walking toward this nightclub or thought he was walking toward this nightclub, he was on the phone with his dad when suddenly he shouted an expletive and Brandon's father heard nothing more from him. Brandon's father said later that they tried to call him back five or six more times
00:04:40
Speaker
but there was no answer.
00:04:42
Speaker
At this point, they were really freaked out. They enlisted the help of friends, according to one article, to look for him. And then finally, at 6.30 AM, Brandon's mother Annette called the Lind County Police, or the Lind Police Department, and asked for their help. It took them a while to join the search. Their response was delayed because there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding Brandon's disappearance. There appeared to be no sign of criminal mischief. It seems like he had just gotten lost.
00:05:12
Speaker
And he was over the age of 18. He was no longer a child. So it wasn't like a case where a child is endangered. And so, yeah. Yeah. So the response was delayed.
00:05:23
Speaker
And one of the police officers actually told Annette that her son had a right to be missing. See, this is the hard part about when over 18s go missing. There's this thing that I think we get from TV and popular true crime cases is the 24 hour mark that you have to wait 24 hours to report someone missing. That's not true.
00:05:47
Speaker
It's not true in the sense that if you have reason to believe, like you see someone get snatched off the streets, you call the police immediately. If you come home and your house is covered in like debris, there's obviously been a struggle. You call the police immediately. You don't have to wait 24 hours just because they're over the age of 18. You can contact police immediately. And if you have reason to believe that whoever has disappeared would not disappear of their own free will,
00:06:13
Speaker
or if they did disappear of their own free will but they were not mentally in a stable situation or they weren't mentally in a good place to make the decision to disappear. In the case of someone who's suicidal or has struggled with drug use or something like that, you can call the cops right away and they're not going to tell you we'll call us back in 24 hours.
00:06:35
Speaker
But then you have cases where people do disappear mysteriously. And since they're over 18, they're just going to say, well, we can't really do anything about it. They're of legal age. So that's rough. Yeah.
00:06:48
Speaker
They did join the search eventually, and they were able to track his cell phone to find the car. Now, his cell phone was not in the car, but they did discover the car, and the interesting thing about this was it was not where Brandon said he had gone into the ditch. He told his parents he had gone into the ditch near Lind, Minnesota. However, his car was discovered near Porter, Minnesota. Other sources also say Taunton, but Taunton and Porter are very close to each other.
00:07:18
Speaker
They were not able to find much in the car, but they did find his glasses, which was interesting because he was legally blind in his left eye. But as far as I know, they didn't see any signs of a struggle. They also didn't see many footprints. There was grass and gravel around, so an officer reporting later about the case said it would make sense you wouldn't find the footprints.
00:07:42
Speaker
You wear glasses, Sierra. I do wear glasses, yes. Question. I mean, I do. I don't wear them regularly and I don't need them at night. That sounds stupid. I need them for computer-based activities and reading and stuff. Would you ever set out on foot at night without your glasses? Is there any reason that you wouldn't want them?
00:08:05
Speaker
I have left my home before without my glasses, but I would never drive without them. And I wouldn't take them off if I had crashed somewhere. I needed to walk somewhere in the dark in the wee hours of the morning.
00:08:21
Speaker
He's also very frazzled. Here's something that's an important detail to note. Brady's friends said that he had not drunk enough to be intoxicated, but he had been drinking at the parties. His parents said that when talking on the phone with him, he seemed to be lucid. He didn't seem to be intoxicated, but we don't know. He might not have been 100%
00:08:44
Speaker
functioning. It's also super early in the morning. He just had a big night, so even if he wasn't intoxicated, his brain's probably not fully functioning because it's super late. He's getting frustrated, potentially anxious. But still, leaving his glasses does seem like an odd thing to happen. I'm asking that question purely to see
00:09:06
Speaker
not see because I'm not a psychologist. I wasn't there. I don't have enough details to
Brandon's Legacy and Legislative Change
00:09:10
Speaker
try and make any sort of like assessment of like where he's at mentally because as far as I know, I wouldn't want to walk away without my glasses. But I guess if you're stressed, legally blind, like that's even worse than my eyesight. So I can't imagine him just leaving his glasses. Interesting.
00:09:25
Speaker
Um, it was concerning. They continued the search. They spread out. They could not find anything. They couldn't find him. They couldn't find signs of his clothes and they didn't find signs of a body. Now concerns were growing because he was near a river at this point. He was near mud Creek, north of Porter. They actually eventually pulled out search dogs that had caught his scent near that Creek. And so some people had wondered, maybe he had been wandering around in the dark.
00:09:53
Speaker
and fallen into the river. But no matter where they searched, there was just no sign of Brandon, no sign of his belongings, and eventually his cell phone as well went dead so they couldn't track its location any longer. That was actually also part of the hang up in starting the initial search was they didn't want to infringe on his privacy.
00:10:11
Speaker
so they weren't going to track the cell phone at first, and then eventually they did. But there was no sign of the body. The search continued on, like multiple searches continued on for a few years after Brandon's disappearance. I think the last one was, the searches continued on for a few years after the disappearance. According to one article I looked at, the most, the last major one was in 2013, but the,
00:10:39
Speaker
but Ken Anderson, the president of emergency support services in 2015 in the area at that time, so that they were continuing to evaluate and look into different tips. Now there are different theories revolving his disappearance, and I know we're going to talk about that toward the end. Canines that were searching for him did seem to have traces of the scent that led up to an old farmhouse and farm equipment. However, the police were not able to search the farm property.
00:11:09
Speaker
There were different issues with planting season, farmers not wanting the police on their property. According to this article that I looked at, Ken Anderson said that the farmers weren't necessarily being purposely hard to get along with police. They did make a schedule. They tried to work around harvesting times and different things. They also didn't want the dogs on their property, which I guess it makes sense, especially if they have different animals and stuff. I'm really not sure
00:11:36
Speaker
I'm not a farmer, so I'm not going to try and say why. Yeah. Do you think maybe perhaps a little bit of human, I don't want to say arrogance, but human arrogance would play into that and thinking, well, if someone was on this farm, I would know.
00:11:49
Speaker
They're possibly, and they even, and Mr. Anderson in the article even said, he said, they know their property well, they've gone out and looked as well. So they weren't working to some extent with law enforcement and with the people searching, but it was still difficult to work around. They couldn't actually get the dogs on the property to search for Brandon. Gotcha. Okay. Well, it's disappointing, but understandable. Yeah.
00:12:11
Speaker
Here I have a quote, specifically speaking about the landowners and different issues with trying to search the farm properties. Yellow Medicine County Sheriff Bill Flayton said that the problem usually arises when law enforcement doesn't have probable cause. Although most property owners try to be accommodating, he said they know their property and they search it and look around as well.
00:12:32
Speaker
but that still didn't allow them as much freedom as they wanted to explore and nothing turned up regarding Brandon. Yeah, and he's a kind of stupid example. Even if you know that the farmers have looked over their land and not found anything, think of every time you've accused someone of sitting on a TV remote. Even though they should know, you would still want to be able to confirm
00:12:58
Speaker
I guess silly as an example that is, but I can see why. I can see what the farmers would say, well, we've looked, but then also why law enforcement, and I'm sure Brandon's family wanted that verification, that validation that someone in official capacity has looked.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah. This was an interesting search because several different law enforcement groups
Reflections and Personal Insights
00:13:20
Speaker
were involved in it. It spanned different counties as well. Lincoln County Sheriff Jack Visicki talked about the possibility of Brandon falling into the river and drowning, but he didn't think that it was very likely because his body should have been washed downstream and eventually discovered.
00:13:39
Speaker
and Brandon's mother also didn't think that her son had fallen in and drowned. Nothing has turned up. Visecki, according to this article, said that he didn't eliminate the idea of foul play or criminal mischief. He said the only thing would have been if someone was in the shadows and they got him that way. I can't say there wasn't someone else there, but I can't find any evidence of it.
00:14:06
Speaker
He said that cadaver dogs and searches should have found a body or some evidence if Swanson had succumbed to the elements. So not even a river, but just dying out from exposure. Yeah. And then I guess if he fell into water, his dad was on the phone with him. He would have thought, oh, I heard a splash. And then you said he was able to call the phone back.
00:14:25
Speaker
Right. And they've used his phone to search. So that should have wrecked his phone. You're right. I don't know what kind of phone he would have had then. I know right now that if my phone fell in some water, like ain't no way that sucker is ringing through. So yeah, I feel like if you fell into water, they would have heard that or they wouldn't have been able to call him back or track his phone. I guess if he went into the water and his phone stayed on the bank, but then they should have been able to find the phone or unless he was on someone's property.
00:14:56
Speaker
I don't know. I think the police are probably right on that one. And his mom, it doesn't sound like water is likely, especially if it was washing out to a lake or something that could be more easily searched. It's not like this creek was going to go out to an ocean somewhere. Yeah, it should have turned up. And Visecki also said, I can't explain why clothing and belongings wouldn't surface. I can't explain why after searching for three weeks, the dogs could not smell anything.
00:15:25
Speaker
No. You know, they really, at the end of the day, they could find nothing. They could find no evidence of foul play, but they could also find no evidence of just Brandon. Yeah. That's interesting that he's just gone, especially during a phone call. That's what makes this case so difficult to wrap your head around. A disappearance is a disappearance.
New Season Teasers and Lighthearted Moments
00:15:50
Speaker
Like they're always scary and crazy, but to think that someone disappeared while trying to be found
00:15:56
Speaker
or allegedly trying to be found. I don't know, we'll get into conspiracy later. It's very interesting. It's sad because even to this day, there is no resolution to the story. There's no sign of Brandon. We don't know what happened to him. The family doesn't know what happened to him.
00:16:16
Speaker
someone interviewed his mother years later. This was from an article in 2015 from Twin Cities, which is a Minnesota news source.
00:16:30
Speaker
And they quoted Annette Swanson, his mother is saying, maybe I'm a terrible mother for this. I don't know. But I felt very early on before the first 24 hours were up that something terribly wrong had happened. It's a weird place to be because there's always a little glimmer of hope. But then I think that's my heart, but my mind knows it's not going to happen that way. I talked to my daughter about it this summer, 2015, and I said to her, you know,
00:16:57
Speaker
I'm not sure Brandon is going to be found in my lifetime. And she said, mom, I don't think he's going to be found in my lifetime. Oh, very, very heartbreaking. That would have been seven years after his initial disappearance, right? Yep. Cause 2008, so yes, seven years after, and I couldn't find any article really more recent than that, quoting the parents, like more recent thoughts on that. I can't imagine like thinking about my, like if I had lost my brother like that.
00:17:25
Speaker
No. No, I can't imagine the not knowing and then having to confront the thought of, I may never know. The article, I also want to read what the end of this article said, and I will link it down below, especially since I'm reading directly from it, but the article writer said, the family has never held a memorial service for Brandon. His mother said she's not sure they ever will, but they do keep their porch light burning as they have since the day he disappeared seven years ago. Wow.
00:17:55
Speaker
It's beautiful in a way, because like even like she was saying in her quote, there's this glimmer of hope. And I think that's their porch light. Like she knows in her head, he's not coming home, but they keep her waiting for him if he ever were to. Now that's from eight years ago. I don't know if that's still the case, but
00:18:17
Speaker
What I do want to focus on with this story, because with Brandon's story itself, like there are some details, but there's really not that much. We know they searched. The body was never found. We don't know if he's alive or dead. We don't know if he's out there today. But what I do want to take a look at is the legislation that resulted from this. Because again, there was some delay in the police joining the search because Brandon was an adult.
00:18:44
Speaker
And it wasn't a sign of, you know, there was no confirmed, someone was trying to hurt him. It just seemed like he had just gotten lost after a night of partying. It wasn't an emergency. But because of Brandon's disappearance, new legislation was passed by the Minnesota House of Representatives.
00:19:02
Speaker
that's actually called Brandon's law. And it expanded the state's missing children's law to include adults who go missing under dangerous circumstances. So not necessarily criminal circumstances, but dangerous. And they expanded it even beyond young adults like 18 and 19. They also considered adults with dementia as well, because they often will wander off and it's not an emergency per se, but it's dangerous because you don't know where they'll end up. Yeah.
00:19:34
Speaker
It sounds like it's a good law to have. According to this law, law enforcement agencies have to take all missing persons reports and begin investigating right away, just like they would do for children under the age of 18. It doesn't matter if it seems to be criminal or suspicious circumstances, it just has to be there's a concern that this person will be in danger.
00:20:00
Speaker
And this came in part because of his mother's of Brandon's mother's efforts and talking with her representative and saying we need to have something to fix this we need to have people who can if someone goes missing, we need to have law enforcement looking for them right away.
00:20:19
Speaker
So Annette and Brandon's family was influential in helping bring attention, bring awareness to get this law passed. And then they were present as well as his sister were present during the governor's signing ceremony. Another group that was influential in getting this law passed in Minnesota was the John Francis Foundation.
00:20:43
Speaker
Now, the John Francis Foundation was interesting to me. I was wondering why they would put in the money, because essentially with this law, they also designated that a working group would be convened to create standardized form for law enforcement to use when taking a missing person's report and to develop a model policy that would incorporate standard processes, procedures, and information to be provided to interested persons regarding developments in a missing person case.
00:21:10
Speaker
and that working group had to have their work completed by September 1st, the John Francis Foundation paid the $10,000 cost for this group to operate to get those standards in place for law enforcement to follow. The John Francis Foundation was started by David and Linda Francis, who were the parents of a man named John Francis.
00:21:34
Speaker
And I looked into him. He was a 24 year old man from Minnesota who also disappeared. Now his circumstances were different than Brandon's. He hadn't been driving and then walking and getting lost. He had actually been hiking alone in the mountains and he had disappeared in 2006.
00:21:52
Speaker
They didn't find his body until a year later. But here was another case where a family had lost their adult son. It took them a long time to find him. And so Linda and David, knowing the pain that it could cause to lose your adult son, they really helped push getting Brandon's law accepted
00:22:12
Speaker
because then they knew that families who do lose an older child, they could still have a resource. They could still have someone looking for their child. So I thought it was this sad, but beautiful connection where these two sets of parents who had lost an adult son and they have that pain, they could still use their pain and put it toward helping others and getting laws put into place that would help other families that might be going through those same circumstances in the future.
00:22:41
Speaker
It's always amazing to see people who can rise above terrible circumstance and use personal tragedy selflessly or to take that pain and say, I don't want this to happen to someone else. What can I do to fix that? And for two families to have suffered such a loss to have been able to come together and assist in that way. That's one of the good parts about being human is seeing how humans are
00:23:10
Speaker
They like to help each other and they like to fix things.
00:23:16
Speaker
In a way they kept the porch light burning for other families too. They said, here's our loss, but here's some hope. Here's that glimmer of hope for the future. And apparently not every state has expanded their missing persons law in the same way that this one has. The last source I looked at said four states have similar laws. I couldn't figure out which states were those, but it is something interesting to think about because you do have, you have young adults like Brandon who could disappear just, you know,
00:23:41
Speaker
they got lost, maybe they were at a party, maybe something happened. And then again, thinking back to people who pushed through Brandon's law, not pushed through, but they made the law, considering individuals with dementia and who would just be prone to wander off. Other people who could be at risk for disappearing. There's a lady that I work with, even in the sense of people who willfully disappear,
00:24:09
Speaker
So that is the crux of the story. It is a sad story with not much resolution for us, but even in the midst of the tragedy, good came out of it. I looked up the missing. There's the website for. If you look at the website for missing and exploited children, which I'll link down below, they still have the poster for Brandon Swanson. They have his picture from when he originally disappeared.
00:24:39
Speaker
in 2008 or close to that timeframe. And then they have with the missing and exploited children, they have artists who will age up the children. So to what he would look like today. And I was looking at the picture and reading the statistics and everything. His photo has been age progressed to 30 years. And looking at it, you know, it looks very similar to his picture from 2008, but I was just thinking, you know, if he is still alive,
00:25:07
Speaker
would he look like that anymore? Or what would he look like? What has he gone through in that amount of time? It's just very sobering to think about. And even just thinking about this database with so many kids that are missing, so many families that don't have their kids. And even thinking like 2008, in 2008, that was the year after one of my younger siblings was born. Like she entered the world and then just a year after
00:25:34
Speaker
another family lost one of theirs. It's just interesting thinking about these are stories, but they're also happening in real time and they're happening, some of them in our lifetime and just thinking of all these times where we have these good circumstances and just another state, a few states over, then another family is going through one of the worst times of their lives.
00:25:56
Speaker
So I think for me, the story was just very eye opening and helping me look at remembering that there's a bigger picture than I just, than just me and my family in our small circle. Like there's a lot of stuff going on. It's a sobering thought to think what someone else could be going through, even if you, what you're going through in life. And then you think of someone else who's going through this other tragedy and how something may seem terrible to you and someone else could be going through this. It's just, it's a,
00:26:23
Speaker
It's a long line of just the ends with be kind to everyone. You don't know what they're going through. And I don't know. It's, again, sobering. A little stupid. It can be cut out. Wow.
00:26:37
Speaker
going back to the disappearance. I know there are different theories, and I know you know a lot about this case, probably more than I do. I've already mentioned there's the theory that maybe there was an abandoned building that one of the canines led them to, but they weren't able to fully search it. They didn't find anything. Do you know of any other theories?
00:26:57
Speaker
there's a couple of different theories um the farm equipment theory goes even further into um maybe he fell in a field and passed out and then farm equipment ran over him oh and that could be this is again these are all theories um not putting any specific farmer on blast or saying this is definitely what happened but it's a plausible theory for the time i've seen um
00:27:23
Speaker
that posited where maybe he fell and passed out in a field and then was run over by some large piece of farm equipment.
00:27:34
Speaker
and it was either covered up, I don't think you would miss that, or something along those lines where that's what happened and they just don't get closure because someone hit it. But again, for that to be true, you have to believe that someone was willing to hide it, despite the fact that I'm not sure legally where they'd stand. If they didn't know he was there, he was hidden in crops.
00:28:02
Speaker
Um, another one that I've seen is there are theories of like body snatchers or someone being out in the field who grabbed him. Uh, one thing that I always think when I think of this case, the reason I know about this case, um, in college, I had to do a presentation as if I was pitching a series of articles and I picked this case. Um, because quite frankly, I'd heard a podcast about it or I'd read about it somewhere and it was interesting to me. And.
00:28:30
Speaker
Sorry, my lungs don't work so I feel like I'm really out of breath. Another theory was that somebody grabbed him in the field. One thing I always think about is, like Sierra said, we don't curse on this podcast. So we're just going to say like a curse word, but he cursed or he cussed and then his dad didn't hear. Another thing I wanted to add
00:28:52
Speaker
As you don't see this in every source, the source Sierra was citing earlier, completely reputable. You'll see it linked in the show notes. But one thing that was said, I believe in an interview with his parents, is that they were all on the phone with him and then he cussed and they couldn't hear him anymore.
00:29:08
Speaker
And so they called out to him for a couple minutes, trying to get his attention. Maybe he dropped the phone. They were worried that he'd passed out or tripped and lost his phone. And so they hung up and called him back, thinking, well, maybe if he passed out, it'll wake him up. Or maybe if he lost his phone and it's dark, it ringing, he'll be able to find it. So I always wondered, how did he say that? Like, what was his tone?
00:29:35
Speaker
And again, we're not gonna curse it, don't laugh at us when I change this to crap. But was it, oh crap, I'm falling? Or, oh crap, because you see somebody? Or was it you tripped over a tree root? And you're like, oh crap, as you fall? Or was it, what was his tone? Was he startled? Was he like scared?
00:29:54
Speaker
Right. And it doesn't say that. It doesn't say. So we don't know. I saw it didn't anyway. That's another thing. The indication of where his mind was at. Because if he they said he like whispered it or seemed surprised or like went. Oh crap. That to me isn't he felt that someone spooked him. Something spooked him. Or he saw something that spooked him. But if it was like I just tripped over something and I'm hitting the ground.
00:30:19
Speaker
again, tone can be largely indicative of that. And that's kind of a pointless path to go down because we don't know what he sounded like. And that's not really going to tell us what happened. It's not like he went oh crap and then just said, there's a man in the field, you know, like we don't know. Another thing that is a theory that's thrown out rather often. Did you see anything during your research about the sinkhole theory? I think so in one article, yes.
00:30:43
Speaker
Well, that's just a theory that says that. Where was it? There's somewhere that was known as like the sinkhole capital near there. Minnesota being known as like the sinkhole capital of the world. There were sinkholes known to be forming 30 miles away from where he was at. So what if a sinkhole opened up and he fell into a sinkhole? I've seen it posited that sinkholes can be 10 feet deep. They can be a thousand feet deep. Kind of like a tree well. You don't know how far down you'll go if you ski the snow with the
00:31:13
Speaker
Sorry, that's unrelated to sinkholes. It just reminded me of... No. Good association. If I was more cultured, I might have known what you meant. But if it was a sinkhole, if it was a long drop, maybe that's why he swore and fell into a sinkhole. Or maybe he came to the edge of it, tripped into it, dropped his phone. And if it was super deep, they wouldn't hear it. Or they wouldn't have heard him fall. I don't know how much I'd buy into the sinkhole theory. I think that would have been discovered.
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah. Unless there were sinkholes like on the farm property that they couldn't explore. I don't know. And what about dogs? That was one thing I saw that it was harder to do searches years after because you needed to have dogs that were trained to sniff out aged scents. And so that was something eventually they just couldn't do because they didn't have the canines that could follow the scent that long after.
00:32:06
Speaker
But could canines even sniff out something like a sinkhole? That honestly would be a fun tangent Tuesday. Talking about canines like police dogs. Yeah, that'd be really cool. Because they come so often, you're like, wow, these magic dogs just do all these things. They're kind of cool. Let's see exactly what they can do. But yeah, you have the sinkhole theory. You have the water theory. If you look up pictures of the Mule medicine river. Yeah. And it was Mud Creek. There was Mud Creek going into the...
00:32:33
Speaker
It's not very wide. There's one picture I'm looking at right now. There's a massive embankment on one side. One thing we didn't actually mention is when they were looking for him, how his parents had their headlights flashing, and he had his headlights flashing as well, and they couldn't see each other. It's kind of difficult to do over a podcast medium, which is kind of why I recommended that we didn't to try Google Maps our way through.
00:32:57
Speaker
but where he thought he was versus where he actually was is is kind of crazy different. He chose not to take and this is something that I don't I'm not saying for sure because this is all this is all the theories part. This is not fact. I don't mean to say anything negative about him as a person but he had been drinking and instead of taking mine highways he took back roads. So that might be that he was a little intoxicated and didn't
00:33:26
Speaker
He might've been fine to drive, but he didn't want to risk it on a highway. So maybe he got himself turned around because while he should have been familiar with those main highways, maybe he wasn't as familiar with the back roads or maybe he wasn't as familiar with the back roads at night. I mean, I'm, Sierra and I go to coffee before we record the podcast and I missed our turn for the second week in a row today. And I've lived here for five years.
00:33:49
Speaker
And broad daylight. I could easily see him getting turned around late at night on roads he's not as familiar with. Especially being early in the morning. Yeah, you're tired, you've been drinking, you've been socializing, you've been out partying, it's the end of the term. You're jazzed and then you're down. And finals week before that, most likely. So he was probably also living off that exhaustion. Whenever my sister's an undergrad right now,
00:34:12
Speaker
whenever i was done with my semester as an undergrad i'd go out i'd celebrate with some friends come home and then i'd just crash she does the whole like i'm gonna spend the day hang out my friends the next time i have my friends and then when it's time for her to go home since i live in the area she comes and she stays with me uh and then usually when she's done with the term we go back home for like i'll go for a week and she goes back home for like
00:34:31
Speaker
the season, like Christmas or summer or whatever. But with my work schedule, I usually have to work an extra day. During that day, she is dead. Like she's on the couch all day asleep. I called and checked on her. She says two words. She like reads my fridge and she's sleeping. So she was probably pretty dang tired. And so it's understandable.
00:34:55
Speaker
trying to, I can see why he thought he was in one place when he wasn't, but just the entire, all the theories of the sinkhole or farm equipment, or I'm not sure if another theory is that he was abducted, but unless he was being followed, I don't see how that's plausible unless he happened across like one farm where a very specific farmer snagged him or something.
00:35:25
Speaker
I almost been wondering about your, the farm equipment theory as in where he got run over. I would almost see that being the most plausible because it would just make sense. Like he had fallen and if they had done something like on accident, it was still an accident, but I could see people wanting to cover that up and again, no trace of him at all. Like if he had died from the elements.
00:35:46
Speaker
Something should have turned up especially so many years after never found his phone. They never found his clothes He was just not found and so you also have the willful disappearance like maybe he just Decided to go but the way he went about it. Yeah calling his parents. I don't think that's a
00:36:04
Speaker
disappearing while you're on the phone with your parents and They said that he was walking towards a city to meet them at a nightclub, but he just saw lights in the distance What was he walking to a farmhouse? Like what happened? Yeah There's also the theory that he fell into a hole or something On someone's property and they didn't know it was there It's literally like
00:36:28
Speaker
There's so many different things that could have happened. I think his mother, unfortunately, I think is right. I don't think we'll ever know because it's a massive expanse of land and they looked for him. So unless he willfully picked himself up and said, I'm done, I'm going to leave the car. I'm going to leave my glasses, but take my phone. All in all, the entire story is just, I think it's one of the reasons it sticks to you. It's unsettling. We want to think in this world, especially now,
00:36:57
Speaker
in 2008 even, you don't think someone can just disappear. And whenever someone does, it's unnerving to think that even when you're trying to be found, you could get so lost that now, 15 years later, no one knows what happened. And that's just the crazy thought.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah, there's a couple of like disappearance cases like Briceless Pisa and he disappeared after like some some pretty substantial red flags.
00:37:34
Speaker
And I think it's actually, I know a lot of people believe that Bryce is still alive and living in like a homeless population somewhere, but I don't know. What do you think? If you had to hazard a guess, what, what, I'm not going to say what do you think happened because that's unfair to ask, but what do you find to be the most logical explanation? Like, did he fall into some water? Do you think he like wandered onto the wrong property?
00:37:55
Speaker
for Brandon. I think either someone hurt him and hid the evidence or there was an accident and someone hid evidence. I do think people had to be involved because it just seems highly unlikely to me that all of his belongings and all traces of him would not be there. I'm gonna I would rule out willful disappearance because like you said like he was trying to contact his family which I mean I guess you could do that if you wanted to have a really theatrical disappearance but the fact that he had been partying so
00:38:26
Speaker
He may or may not have been somewhat inebriated, the timing of it all, trying to conduct his parents. I don't know. I just don't think he was in a mental state to conduct a good disappearance. Yeah. And he'd been with friends that night. And I feel like it was the last time, I don't know. I feel like it was the last time your friend was ever planning on seeing you. Somehow you would maybe pick up that there was some sort of heaviness there. So.
00:38:51
Speaker
And it's clear his parents cared a lot about him. So wishing someone's always going to stay with their family just because they have loving family. But from what it seems like to me.
00:39:00
Speaker
he had no reason to just choose to disappear. Right. And clearly, I mean, he calls parents at 2AM to come find him. Yeah. Like that speaks to at the very least some sort of parental, you trust your parents. I mean, you have some sort of relationship. Like you're calling them at 2AM and like, can you come find me? I want a back road. Like, I don't know. I think the most likely explanation personally is someone either willfully or accidentally harmed him. Or sometimes I think maybe he just like,
00:39:32
Speaker
I don't know if it's, I think this because it scares me. Um, well, maybe he like fell in a hole somewhere and it just, he never was found and it was on someone's private property and they never found him and police dogs are never allowed on the property. So they never found him. It's just, there's no number to no number of explanations and no, no good solid leads. So, yeah.
00:40:01
Speaker
Maybe one day we'll wake up and they'll have found him. But I think it's going to stay a disappearance. And I think the only thing we'll ever see come from this is the work that his family's done. Yeah. But at least there's that. Again, it's inspiring. They have this tragedy, but they thought, how can we help other families that might go through this? It's really good. Yeah.
00:40:27
Speaker
That is the disappearance of Brandon Swanson. It is. Now, for this season, it is a season, right, for podcasts? Is it the same as TV? I think we can call it a season. I think we can call it whatever we want. In this season of life, for everything there is a season. We decided we wanted to start ending the episodes with something a little bit more lighthearted. If you don't care for that sort of chit chat and stuff, then you can click out right now. We'll see you next time. But otherwise, we wanted to end it on a more positive note, just to kind of, since things were so low and so serious, let's bring it back a little bit.
00:40:56
Speaker
And to also avoid us ending by saying, everything is so sad. Which we said, I didn't have it gone back. We probably said it like every week. I don't know. I'll have to ask my mom. She does listen to our episode. Well, she's only to the Tylenol case right now, but she does listen. She says that we say the word interesting a lot. We do. We do it every time I say it. I'm like, oh crap. Oh great. I'm not going to stop. What's the synonym for interesting?
00:41:26
Speaker
Hm. Intriguing. Fascinating. I think we probably also say I- Fascinating. Intriguing. I do like intriguing. I feel like the- I know, I say, huh, quite a bit. Um, maybe we cut that out a lot. I think I say yeah a lot. Now I'm just seeing through every single word I say. Okay.
00:41:43
Speaker
Hey, my lighthearted thing is brought to you courtesy of my students because I asked them what their favorite words were and they had some very fun ones. Some of them were nice like, you know, a love, you know, because it's a beautiful word. It means all these things or ascension to rise above it all. It's a beautiful word that came from a finance major.
00:42:00
Speaker
Um, my favorite was that I have, I'm teaching three sections of this class. And in two sections, these two people whom I'm pretty sure do not know each other, both said that their favorite word was defenestrate or defenestration, which is the act of throwing someone out a window. That was so random that these two freshmen, freshmen from two different sections said their favorite word was defenestrate.
00:42:26
Speaker
Well, I feel like it was probably a tweet or something. We're just not cool enough to have seen it. Maybe, but I was like, wow. Okay, that's fun. And so then I used, in our review, I made a sentence where defend a straight was used and they thought that was fun. That is pretty fun to throw someone. I don't know if it's exactly positive and uplifting because you are throwing someone out a window, but it's a funny word. It is a funny word. It's funny that we have a word that specific. I wonder like, history to finish it. You give us the etymology of that word.
00:42:56
Speaker
Um, I'll have to think of a positive side. That's the rare definition. It could also mean remove or dismiss someone from a position of power or authority, which if you defenestrate them in the literal sense as well, like you're doing both. The act of defenestration.
00:43:15
Speaker
Is it Prague? Prague Castle in the year 1618, which became the spark that started the 30 years war. Oh, this was done in good bohemian style. Referring to the defenestration, which had occurred in Prague's new town hall almost 200 years earlier. And on that occasion led to the Hussite War. The war comes from the Neo Latin D, down from Ivanistra, window or opening. Oh my goodness. Interesting.
00:43:40
Speaker
That's fun. I see why I both took Aladdin in college, so I'm glad that that's coming back to pay off for us. Wow. Oh, they have, like, this picture. Oh, a demonstration of a demonstration? This man with a fabulous mustache is getting yeeted out a window. Oh, yeet. That's lovely. I'm trying to think of a positive thought. Sorry, guys. That wasn't very positive, but I thought it was interesting. I'm not a very positive gal.
00:44:11
Speaker
one of my brother's favorite words is flaminwurfer which is apparently i probably said that wrong flaminwurfer flaminwurfer it's term for flamethrower whoa we have violent we know people who have violent favorite words i guess so what are you thinking with our true crime podcast excellent german accent which is very funny like he's a funny guy um
00:44:37
Speaker
What's a positive? I'm not a positive person. It's been a weird week, gang. Like, um, oh, it's not a positive thought, but it can start a positive conversation. Yesterday I found, I didn't find it, my sister found it. A limited edition equals vinyl, the Ed Sheeran album vinyl.
00:45:02
Speaker
at a vinyl record shop, like a hole in the wall place. And it was the limited edition red vinyl. So now I'm slowly growing my Edith Sheeran vinyl army. I don't see how that's not a positive. That doesn't seem like a negative to me. I spent money. That's fine. It's not really like a positive thought. It's not like an uplifting thought, but it's like that's a positive thing that happened to me this week.
00:45:24
Speaker
When I was a teenager, I was all my chemical romance and emo punk music, and I still am, but I'm also an Ed Sheeran fanatic now. Is that lame? I feel like that's lame. You like Ed Sheeran now? Yeah. My sisters would tell you it's lame, but I don't think it's lame. He's a positive person, I would say.
00:45:45
Speaker
I used to be so cool. I mean, my Spotify wrapped is usually like modern rock, like punk and ba-ba. Now it's going to be whatever Ed Sheeran is. You go to one Ed Sheeran conference and suddenly life is changing tides. I have grown up, I am a podcaster now. Listen to Autumn Variations, it's wonderful. It's magical.
00:46:13
Speaker
Oh my goodness. Um, I will not apologize for being a Jiren fan. Although if I met my 14 year old self and said that I was really into Ed Sheeran, she'd be like, the A-team dude? I'd be like, shut up 10 years ago, me. I think it's a positive way to end the episode. Defenestration and red vinyls.
00:46:34
Speaker
defenestration in red vinyls, indeed. Next week, next week it's my case and we're going to be doing the podcast first, Cannibal. We'll let you wonder who it is. It's actually a recommendation from my mother who is absolutely not a true crime person.
00:46:56
Speaker
And ironically, like we said before that I was the true crime. I don't want to say fanatic. It makes me seem creepy. You're the expert. I'm here for the right. Kelly's the expert.
00:47:07
Speaker
i'm a true crime connoisseur um especially since we're talking about cannibalism but i've been into true crime for several years and one thing that i i avoid is i do not like cannibalism cases but i handle gore even worse which i'm a vegetarian if that tells you anything
00:47:32
Speaker
Kaylee, you've already dispensed by that. No one thinks you're a cannibal. I was supposed to find that I don't even eat animals, so the thought of eating a person makes me want to die. Cut that out please. Or don't, do whatever. So, not only did my non-true crime enthused mother find a case that grossed me out,
00:47:54
Speaker
I get to talk about cannibals, which I think is the one thing I said I wouldn't do when I started this podcast. So join us next week for the story of a Scottish cannibal. That's your only hand. Scottish? Scottish. Whoa. Who may or may not have been as real as history says he is. Oh. But that wraps us up for this week. So remember, defenestration and red vinyls, but also. Be aware. Take care. We'll see you next week. Goodbye.