Brandon Swanson

The last thing anyone ever heard Brandon Swanson say was two words, shouted into a cell phone in the dark.

He had been talking to his father for forty-seven minutes. He’d been calm, mostly. A little annoyed. Walking across farm fields in the middle of the night, trying to find his way to a town he thought was just ahead. And then, mid-sentence, he cried out — Oh, shit! — and the line went silent.

His father said his name. Then he said it again. Then he started calling back, over and over, and the phone rang and rang.

Brandon was never seen or heard from again.

The Last Day of Classes

Brandon Victor Swanson was nineteen years old in the spring of 2008. He lived with his parents, Brian and Annette, in Marshall, a small city in the prairie country of southwestern Minnesota. He was a slight young man, about five-foot-six and 125 pounds, with curly brown hair, blue eyes, and wire-rimmed glasses. He was legally blind in his left eye. He was finishing his first year at Minnesota West Community and Technical College in the town of Canby, where he was studying wind turbine technology.

On May 13, 2008, he finished his last classes of the year. That evening, he went out with friends to celebrate. He went first to a gathering in Canby, about forty-five minutes northwest of home, and then later to a second spot. Friends would later say he had been drinking a little, but did not seem drunk.

Shortly after midnight on May 14, Brandon started for home. He took back roads — gravel roads, the kind that crisscross the farmland of southwestern Minnesota in a vast grid, every mile or so another identical intersection between identical fields. He was driving a 1999 Chevrolet Lumina.

Somewhere along the way, the car slid off the road and into a ditch. It got hung up on a slope. Brandon wasn’t hurt, but he couldn’t get it out.

The Call

At about 1:54 in the morning, Annette Swanson’s phone rang. It was Brandon. He had tried calling some friends first and couldn’t reach anyone.

He told his mother what had happened. He said he was fine. He said he was near the small town of Lynd, about seven miles southwest of Marshall, on a gravel road. He asked if they could come and get him.

Brian and Annette got dressed, got into their pickup truck, and drove out to the area around Lynd. They kept Brandon on the phone. They drove the gravel roads near the town looking for the Lumina. They couldn’t find it. They tried flashing their headlights. Brandon said he was flashing his headlights back. Neither side could see the other.

It was a frustrating, confusing conversation. At one point, Brandon got angry and hung up on his mother. She called him back. They agreed on a plan: Brandon would leave the car and walk toward the lights he could see in the distance, which he believed were the lights of Lynd. His parents would wait for him in the parking lot of a tavern in town.

Brian Swanson stayed on the line with his son as he walked.

Into the Fields

They talked for a long time. Brandon told his father what he was seeing. He was cutting across farm fields. He climbed over a fence. He was walking through dark pasture. At one point, he said he could hear running water — a creek or stream somewhere near him.

It was the middle of the night in May, cool, the fields mostly bare or freshly planted. There was nothing out there but darkness and the far-off lights.

Brian would later say his son sounded fine. He didn’t seem frightened. He didn’t seem drunk. They were just talking, the way a father and son talk on a long walk.

Brandon said something about walking along the edge of a stream. He seemed to be trying to get around it, or across it.

And then, roughly forty-seven minutes into the call, at about 2:30 a.m., Brandon exclaimed, loudly and suddenly, “Oh, shit!”

Then nothing.

The call didn’t drop with a click. Brian kept saying Brandon’s name. He heard nothing. Eventually the call ended. He and Annette tried calling back again and again. The phone rang every time. Brandon didn’t answer.

Where Was He?

Brian and Annette searched until dawn. At about 6:30 in the morning, Annette called the Lynd police and reported her son missing.

The family would later say that the initial response was not what it should have been. Brandon was nineteen — an adult. Adults have the right to go missing. Police told the Swansons it wasn’t unusual for a young man to stay out all night after a party. But Brandon’s parents knew their son. He had called them for help. He had been talking to his father when he cried out. Something had happened.

Later that day, Brandon’s cell phone records came back, and they changed everything.

The call had not been routed through a tower near Lynd. It had gone through a tower near the town of Porter, more than twenty miles away, in a completely different direction from where Brandon believed he was. That afternoon, with the help of the phone data, authorities found Brandon’s car. It was sitting in a ditch on a gravel road on the line between Lyon and Yellow Medicine counties, near the tiny town of Taunton — about twenty-five miles from Lynd.

Brandon hadn’t been near Lynd at all. He had been lost, in the dark, in the wrong place entirely, describing lights he believed were the town and walking toward them. His parents had been driving around the wrong town all night.

No one has ever explained what lights Brandon was walking toward.

The Search

What followed was one of the largest search operations in the history of the region.

The car was found intact and undamaged. The search area centered on the countryside around it — the farm fields, the shelterbelts of trees, and especially the Yellow Medicine River, which ran nearby. In the spring of 2008, the river was running high, cold and fast from rain and snowmelt. The running water Brandon heard on the phone was very possibly its waters, or one of the creeks feeding it.

Hundreds of volunteers walked the fields in long lines. Search dogs from several states were brought in. Some of the dogs picked up Brandon’s scent, followed it along a gravel road from the car, then along the river, and to the water’s edge. Others seemed to lose it. Divers searched the river. Aircraft flew over the fields. The searches went on for weeks, and resumed seasonally over the years that followed as the crops came in and the land opened up.

Nothing was found. Not Brandon. Not his phone. Not his glasses, his jacket, or a single shoe.

What Happened?

There are three main theories, and none of them is fully satisfying.

He fell into the river. This is the theory most investigators have leaned toward. Brandon was walking in the dark, in unfamiliar terrain, near a river swollen and fast in spring. He said he could hear water. If he stepped off a bank and fell in, the shock of the cold water, the darkness and the current could have overwhelmed him in seconds. Oh, shit is exactly what a person might say as the ground gives way. But if he drowned, why has his body never been found, even after years of searching, in a river that drops low and shallow in late summer? Why did his phone keep ringing when his parents called back, as if it were somewhere dry?

He was injured and disoriented. Perhaps he fell, hit his head, and wandered off into the fields or a shelterbelt, where he succumbed to his injuries. But the land around there is farmed every year, plowed and planted and harvested by heavy machinery. Farmers know their fields. It’s hard to imagine a body going undiscovered in such open country for this long.

Someone took him. This is the theory that haunts people most. Brandon was alone, in the dark, on a remote road. Maybe someone saw him. Maybe his exclamation wasn’t about falling at all — maybe it was a reaction to something, or someone, appearing in front of him. The phone wasn’t destroyed; it rang when his parents called. Was someone holding it, letting it ring?

There is no evidence for that, but there is no evidence against it either. That’s what makes it so difficult. Brandon Swanson didn’t leave a single trace.

Brandon’s Law

Out of the worst night of their lives, Brian and Annette Swanson made something lasting.

They believed that the precious early hours after Brandon vanished were lost because police were reluctant to treat the disappearance of an adult as urgent. They lobbied the Minnesota state legislature. In 2009, Minnesota passed what became known as Brandon’s Law, which requires law enforcement to take a missing person report without delay and to begin an investigation immediately — regardless of the missing person’s age — and to treat certain cases, including those involving people under twenty-one or circumstances suggesting danger, as especially urgent.

It has been used in many cases since.

The Porch Light

Annette Swanson has spoken about a phrase that describes what families like hers live with: ambiguous loss. It is the grief of not knowing. You can’t mourn because you can’t be sure. You can’t move on because there’s nowhere to move on to. You live in a permanent state of waiting.

On the night Brandon vanished, Brian and Annette turned on the porch light of their home in Marshall, so their son could find his way home in the dark.

It is the kind of thing a parent does without thinking. It is also the kind of thing that becomes impossible to undo.