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World-class athlete Kari Swenson was on a trail run in the mountains of Montana in July of 1984 when two men forever changed the course of her life.
Kari Swenson was born in 1961 to parents Bob & Janet Swenson & she was the middle of three children; she had a younger brother, Paul & an older sister, Johanna. Janet worked as a nurse & then moved on to be a ski patrol volunteer while Bob was the head of the physics department at Philadelphia’s Temple University. The family ultimately settled in the small town of Bozeman, Montana when Kari was eight because Janet & Bob wanted to raise their children to be at home in the wilderness.
By Montana standards, the town was big, but still had less than 20,000 residents. The Swenson’s home sat on a dirt road that was surrounded by open fields. Janet & Bob often took their children out boating, fishing, hiking & skiing. Bob moved on to be a physic’s professor at Montana State University & in his free time he taught his children how to fly-fish & spot constellations in the night sky. Janet continued to work in nursing, was an avid hiker & volunteer for ski patrol.
After their move, Kari found a love for cross-country skiing & began learning how to shoot, with a preference of using a .22 caliber rifle. While she was studying pre-veterinary medicine at Montana State University in 1980, she joined the Nordic ski team & was recommended for the U.S. Biathlon Association’s women’s team.
By the early 1980s, Kari was actively training for biathlons which involved training in two winter sports, cross-country skiing & rifle shooting. The sport dates back to Nordic military exercises from the 18th century & Kari was one of the few female or American competitors. It had been in the Olympics since the 1950s, but for only men at that point. In the earlier part of 1984, Kari traveled to France for the Biathlon World Championships & was part of the U.S. relay team. Here, she & her team won the bronze medal which surprised everyone since this was the first medal of any U.S. biathlon team in history. Kari stood out in her performance in the 10k final where she got fifth place & at that time, this was the best-recorded performance of an American athlete of any gender in the history of the event.
Kari felt that the gorgeous landscape of Montana with the mountains, trails & rivers were her safe space to enjoy & share with family & friends.
In July of 1984, Kari was 22-years-old & living in Big Sky, Montana, living amongst the Rocky Mountains. Here, she was working at Lone Mountain Ranch, a tourist ranch. The area within the gorgeous Spanish Peaks is coated in snow from November to April. Because she was living in an area of high elevation, she took advantage of this fact & began to train daily to maintain her fitness levels. She worked out seven days a week to improve her endurance by running, hiking, weight-lifting & roller-skiing. She was very familiar with all of the trails & often ran by herself or with her brother.
On Sunday, July 15, 1984, Kari helped with breakfast at Lone Mountain Ranch & then got lunch ready. She quickly ate & then left the ranch in the afternoon & drove 8 miles northwest of Big Sky, driving partway up the trail near Ulerys Lakes. She wanted to try out a trail that she’d heard about so she parked her car & headed out for a long training run. It was a hot day so she wore shorts, a t-shirt & running shoes. As Kari made her way deeper into the trail, she was just about halfway through her run when she came over a rise in the trail & saw two men standing there.
Kari immediately felt something was off & sensed that there was something different about the pair. They wore dark clothing with a camo pattern that appeared to be very dirty. Instantly, she got the feeling that they weren’t good people. Everything happened very quickly & she doesn’t recall having the time to make a decision to turn around so she chose to go by them. As she did, one of them stepped in front of her, preventing her from going by. In an attempt to play it cool, she asked them about the trail & they didn’t really answer her, so she just said thank you & tried to move by. As she did, one of the men grabbed her by the wrists & refused to let go.
The older of the two men said that they wanted to take Kari into the mountains for a while to see if she liked living with them. She began to scream & tried to escape the man’s clutches & this is when the older man hit her in the face, knocking her to the ground & then laid on top of her. At this point, he instructed the younger man to get a rope & she began to put the pieces together that they were father & son. They tied her wrists together & told her she would probably love being in the mountains with them & hoped she would choose to stay with them.
Kari could only imagine that they would likely rape & kill her, unable to understand why else they would be taking her. She wracked her brain, trying to figure out a way to escape as the younger man held the rope that was tied to her wrists; he marched ahead as the other man marched behind with his gun trained on Kari. She continued to explain that people would come looking for her when she didn’t come back as expected to serve dinner at the ranch where she worked. They told her that if anyone found her, they would kill them.
The two men who had taken Kari were father & son duo, Don & Dan Nichols. 53-year-old Don was born in 1931 & his son Dan, who was 19 at the time, was born in 1964. Dan was estranged from his mother & had been living off the grid for years with his survivalist father. The pair spent constant time together & Don was able to exert his influence over his son who eventually grew to believe in his father’s doctrine.
Occasionally the father & son duo would take breaks from living as survivalists & stay in isolated mountain towns during the harsh winter months, taking up temporary work. In 1983, they made the decision to fully turn their backs on American society & took to living fully off the grid within the mountains. They had several camps situated in various locations within the mountain range. This included caves, dug-outs & other makeshift structures that allowed them to take shelter when the weather was especially snowy & brutally cold.
These mountain men, who had shunned modern society, lived off of squirrel meat, stolen livestock & red beans. Because of their chosen way of living, it was their belief that laws & rules did not pertain to them. Don had the deranged belief that it was his right to abduct a bride for his son Dan so they could begin their own ‘mountain tribe.’ When they spotted Kari running by herself along the waterline of one of the lakes, they tracked her until she was isolated in the forest clearing.
As the day wore on to evening, Kari’s brother, friends & co-workers began to worry when she didn’t return to work the dinner shift at the ranch. Despite her dedication to training, she wasn’t the type of person that wouldn’t show up to work & fail to notify someone.
A friend was able to retrace Kari’s steps & located her car where she had left it at the mouth of the trail, but there was no sign of Kari. When she returned to the ranch with the news, a group of 20 volunteers that had been arranged amongst the ranch workers, began to search for Kari after the ranch manager notified Kari’s parents of her disappearance. Bob & Janet immediately traveled to Big Sky to help search for their daughter. A local pilot took Kari’s dad, Bob, on an aerial search of the forest as darkness fell. Little did they know, but they came within a mile of where Kari had been camped that night.
When the police were contacted, they informed them that they had a policy not to conduct searches at night.
The decision for the local sheriff’s office to deny searching for Kari at night was a controversial one & Bob & Janet would later criticize authorities for several errors within the investigation. By Monday morning, local police & volunteers began a grid search in hopes of finding Kari; they divided themselves in groups of two, each pair were given a walkie-talkie radio to communicate with the rescue base.
Many of the volunteers were Kari’s co-workers & this included Alan Goldstein & Jim Schwalb, who paired up to find their missing friend. 30-year-old Jim was a landscaper from Wisconsin while 36-year-old Alan was a retailer-turned-rancher. Kari enjoyed visiting the barns where Alan tended to the horses since it was clear that he loved his work & had the gentle nature that worked well with the animals. Alan had recently remarried & moved from Flint, Michigan to Montana two years earlier & fell in love with the countryside. When his teenage daughter, Jami, came to visit him the previous winter, they cross-country skied, rode on horse-drawn sleighs, skied up the mountain to a buffet, played games & enjoyed each other’s company.
Searchers initially theorized that Kari must have gotten injured while out on the trail & figured they would have to transport her for medical attention when she was located. Because the trial is isolated & inaccessible to vehicles, no one in the ground search imagined that she had run into foul play.
Kari tried everything she could to continue to reason with her captors, begging them to just let her go. They told her she would have to stay with them for a few days & they were sure that she would ultimately grow to love their lifestyle & wouldn’t want to leave. Kari was fully aware of the danger she was in & had no idea what her deranged captors were capable of. She was completely isolated on a desolate mountainside, far from human civilization with the chances of another hiker stumbling across them, slim. Her hands remained bound but Don & Dan allowed her to walk around freely, but always with Dan leading the way & Don walking behind her, ensuring that she wouldn’t try to escape.
As she walked, she tried to disturb items on the trail, breaking branching or tearing off leaves, in hopes that someone would notice & find her. Don soon noticed what she was doing & she was no longer able to try & leave clues for her potential rescuers. When darkness fell & the trio took to camp, Don & Dan exchanged Kari’s rope binding with a heavy padlocked chain that was secured around Kari’s waist & tethered to a tree. Kari learned that they had obtained the lock & chain six years earlier with the intention of using it on a woman.
At that point, Don left the campsite, likely to hunt for squirrels & Kari remained behind with Dan who appeared to be just about her age or a little younger. He showed her drawings of naked women & she was terrified he would sexually assault her. When Don returned, night was falling & she begged them not to rape her. He explained that they wouldn’t & they just wanted to keep her for a couple of days.
Kari was able to hear everyone searching for her; she heard people yelling her name, she could hear vehicles as well as the plane flying over.
When Kari set out on her trail run that Sunday, she clearly hadn’t imagined that she would be in the wilderness for a prolonged period of time so she wasn’t dressed for the dropping nighttime temperatures & at-risk for hypothermia. The men had given her over-sized clothing to drape over her to serve as a makeshift blanket & sleeping bag at night.
Because Kari was chained to a tree & unable to move, she was freezing cold & exhausted by morning, not having slept at all. She recalls that there was a full moon & she watched it through the night. Meanwhile, the searchers decided to stop at about midnight & regroup at dawn. Like Kari, her mom, Janet spent a few sleepless hours, staring up at the same moon as her daughter, wishing that they would find her.
At about 7:30 am, Kari heard a rustling & noticed her co-workers from the ranch, Alan Goldstein & Jim Schwalbe, approaching their camp. Kari noticed them before Don & Dan did & called out a warning since Don had threatened to shoot anyone who tried to help her. She continued to scream & Don told Dan to shut Kari up & this was when Dan walked over with his pistol & shot Kari in the chest at point blank as he stood over her.
Kari remained conscious as she struggled to breathe, unaware at this time that the bullet had punctured her lung. Jim rushed over to her side as Alan yelled at her captors to surrender. At this point, Don raised his rifle & fired a single shot, tragically hitting Alan in the face & fatally wounding him. Alan immediately dropped to the ground, falling out of view from Kari while Jim sprinted away.
Don & Dan began to panic & quickly packed up camp, knowing that one of the searchers got away & it would only be a matter of time until help arrived. They removed the padlock & chain from around Kari’s waist, dumped her out of her sleeping bag & left her to die, bleeding from the wound to the chest. Each & every breath she took, she was able to hear her wound gurgling & the pain was excruciating. She couldn’t see Jim & only hoped that he was on his way to get help.
As Kari lay in the dirt bleeding, she could hear voices over the walkie talkie, but was unable to reach it. Suddenly, the voices stopped & she assumed the batteries must have died, however, it was because Jim had left the location & scrambled down the mountainside to inform the rescue team of what had happened.
At this point, the rescue team made the decision to cease all communication over the walkie talkies, unsure if the perpetrators had possession of one & were using it to track their movements. Kari tried to keep herself calm, knowing that it would help slow the bleeding & used relaxation techniques she had learned during her athletic training. She tried to keep herself awake, fearful that if she fell asleep, she wouldn’t wake up.
The sport she grew to love required contradictory skills with an exhaustive push in the skiing portion & a tightly controlled breath to accurately shoot a target that sat 50 meters or 164 feet away. Some described her sport as running around the block as fast as you can & then trying to thread a needle. These breathing skills helped her to survive. She managed to crawl into a nearby sleeping bag & nibble at a chocolate bar. Four hours passed until she heard the sound of a helicopter in the distance at 11:55 am. Eighteen hours had passed since she was abducted.
Kari was airlifted from the mountain to the nearest hospital where she was reunited with her parents & taken into surgery. Here, it was confirmed that the bullet had passed through her body after it entered her chest, just below her collarbone, passed through her lung & exited below her shoulder blade.
Alan was sadly found dead at the scene, leaving behind his wife Diane, his daughter Jami & his two younger brothers. When Jami was told about her father’s murder, it was her fifteenth birthday & she was living in Columbus, Ohio at the time. She had been upset with her dad earlier that day since she hadn’t gotten a birthday card from him. After she found out about her dad’s death, she felt an immediate sense of guilt & felt even worse when his card arrived two days later.
After spending eight days in the hospital, Kari was discharged & left to grapple with the emotional & physical scars left behind from her horrific ordeal. She became fearful of crowds & strangers, particularly men. Her recovery took time & as an athlete, it was her goal to get back to competing. By November, four months after her abduction, she began to train again, but found she was unable to get back to her prior levels of strength & fitness. She shied away from media contact & chose to live a private life.
Don & Dan, who were very familiar with the landscape & terrain, managed to evade authorities for the next five months after they disappeared into the mountains. After a lengthy manhunt in the mountains of southwestern Montana, they were finally found & arrested in December at their camp near Bear Trap Canyon southwest of Bozeman by Madison County Sheriff Johnny France.
Before their capture, the public became fascinated with the idea of these self-made ‘mountain men’ who had rejected society & chose to live within the inhospitable terrain. Rather than focusing on the brutality of their crime, the media molded the story into a Western saga. Because of this, the Swensons felt that the monsters who abducted their daughter were being glamorized by the media while Kari’s ordeal was being minimized.
Jami Goldstein, Alan’s daughter, also felt that much of the attention was focused on Don & Dan rather than the victims involved. She wants people to know that her dad was a good man with a family who loved him & saw him as a hero & the type of person who would stand up & do most anything for anyone.
Janet Swenson went on to write a book in 1989, Victims: The Kari Swenson Story, in order to tell her daughter’s story with Kari’s close involvement & input.
Two separate trials took place in Virginia City, Montana & Dan’s trial was the first to happen in May of 1985. During this time, vendors were selling ‘Nichols Boys’ merchandise outside the courthouse that included t-shirts & photos while tourists showed up in an attempt to get an autograph from Don & Dan. The prosecution ended up putting legal restrictions in place to prevent this.
During his trial which lasted six days, Dan claimed that he had accidentally shot Kari which was something that Kari vehemently denied. After the jury deliberated for seven hours, Dan was convicted of kidnapping & assault & sentenced to 20.5 years in prison; ten years for kidnapping, another ten for a crime involving the use of a firearm & six months for misdemeanor assault.
Don’s trial began in September 1985 & he was convicted of kidnapping, assault & deliberate homicide in the murder of Alan Goldstein & he was sentenced to 85 years in prison. He maintained that he & his son had done nothing wrong; he hadn’t kidnapped Kari, only made her “accompany us for a while” & in regards to shooting Alan, he claimed it was self defense.
Don became eligible for parole in 2012 & in response, Kari wrote a letter to The Bozeman Daily Chronicle asking that he remain behind bars. She referred to Don & Dan as ‘crazy misfits’ & further described the ordeal she had lived through. She explained that they were not true mountain men & only lived in the mountains part-time & only maintained their existence by poaching from others, breaking into area cabins & stealing supplies, leaving the mountain for months at a time so they could purchase modern equipment. She said that they had grabbed her by the wrists, hit her in the face, thrown her to the ground, chained her to Dan & threatened her life with both guns & knives. They marched her through the woods & chained her to a tree like an animal while she spent a terrifying night also chained to Dan.
She described the fact that shrapnel from the bullet remains lodged in her chest, continuing to cause her pain even decades later. She also wrote how the effects prematurely ended her once promising athletic career. Thankfully, Don Nichols was denied parole.
Dan Nichols was released from prison in 1991 after serving only six years & went on to have minor interactions with the law. In 2012, federal drug & weapons charges were placed against him in connection with an alleged marijuana distribution ring.
Don ended up serving 32 years in prison after he was granted parole in April 2017 & went on to be released in August of that year, was required to wear GPS monitoring & was registered as a violent offender.
Kari went on to compete in the World Biathlon Championships in 1985 in Egg, Switzerland & again in 1986 in Falun, Sweden before retiring from the sport to study veterinary medicine at Colorado State University, graduating in 1990. She practiced animal medicine for many years before returning to Bozeman, Montana where she still lives. It took another 33 years for an American woman to medal at the world championships.
In 2015, Kari & her 1984 teammates were inducted into the U.S. Biathlon Hall of Fame & while she no longer competes, she remains an active mentor in the biathlon community in Montana. In 1987, a made-for-TV movie was released, titled The Abduction of Kari Swenson & starred actress Tracy Pollan, who later married Michael J Fox & played the role of Kari.
Kari continues to love the outdoors, but is more cautious since her horrifying abduction. She now counts the cars at the trailhead, pays attention to how many people she’s met on the trail & monitors shoe prints in the mud to see who might be going in what direction. The sound of a helicopter brings her right back to the day she was rescued, if someone even playfully grabs her wrists, she tries to flee & it’s only recently that she’s embraced the sight of the full moon which illuminated the worst night of her life.
References:
- Medium: Of Mountains & Men: The Kari Swenson Story
- Daily Beast: Kari Swenson survived abduction, a shooting & a media nightmare. Now she’s reclaiming her story
- 30for30 Podcasts: Out of the woods
- UPI: Mountainman Dan Nichols was sentenced Friday to 20 years
- Deseret News: Mountain man tells his side
- Chicago Tribune: Mountain man, 20, guilty of kidnapping
