Infamous America - MANHUNT Ep. 5 | Don Nichols: “The Mountain Men”

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

As Kari Swenson recovers from her near-fatal ordeal, the FBI and local sheriff’s departments begin the long and difficult manhunt for Don and Dan Nichols. The fugitives have all the advantages, their luck eventually runs out thanks to a keen-eyed rancher. Take advantage of the SimpliSafe holiday sale! For a limited time, get 40% off your new system at SimpliSafe.com/infamous Get 20% your first purchase of Papa & Barkley CBD products at papaandbarkleycbd.com/infamous Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Montana rancher Roland Moore drove his truck cautiously down the highway. The roads were covered with snow and ice, but the conditions weren't the reason for his caution. Moore was looking for someone, two someone's, actually. A couple hours earlier, he'd been out on his range doing chores when he saw tendrils of smoke in the distance. At this point in the winter, smoke would only come from a man-made fire. Moore's first thought was that he'd spotted hunters. It wasn't hunting season, and this was private land.

Moore called the authorities and told them about his discovery and his suspicion of illegal hunting. But then he had another thought. The smoke might not be from hunters. It might be from the kidnappers who had been on the run for five months. Moore decided to go back and have another look. Now he pulled his truck over and stepped out. He raised his binoculars and panned slowly across the landscape

until he saw something that nearly made him jump. In the distance, Moore saw a man staring right back at him, and there was another man standing nearby. The staring contest lasted only a few moments, and then the two men in the distance turned and ran into the woods. Roland Moore was now sure of it. He had just spotted the most wanted men in the West, Don and Dan Nichols. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America.

I'm your host Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling two stories of American man hunts across six episodes. This is story number two, episode two, the Mountain Men. On the day Carrie Swenson disappeared, July 15, 1984, the people who lived and worked at the Lone Mountain guest ranch in Big Sky, Montana, began to worry around dinner time. Carrie was well-liked by everyone, and she was something of a local celebrity after she and she and,

two other women claimed the bronze medal in the biathlon relay at the World Championships in France four months earlier. It was the first time women competed in the event, and it was the first medal in the biathlon for any American athlete. She was just 22 years old, and it looked like a great start to a promising career. The summer after the competition, she worked at the Lone Mountain Ranch and used nearly every opportunity to go hiking or running on the trails in the the area to stay in shape. So it was not surprising or suspicious when she left the ranch in the early afternoon on July 15th to run a trail at a nearby lake. The suspicion arose when she wasn't back by dinner time. Carrie had been busy all morning, working in the kitchen and in the

dining hall of the ranch. When she took a break in the early afternoon, she drove to Ulary's Lake. It was only about 15 minutes from the ranch, and there was a trail that looped around the lake. For Carrie, this wasn't a leisurely jaunt. She wasn't there to take in the sights and sounds and the smell of the pine trees. She was going to run the trail and then be back at the ranch for the evening dinner rush. It was part of her job at the ranch to serve the meal to the guests who paid a premium to have a Western ranch experience. And she took her job seriously. When she hadn't returned by dinner time, people began to worry.

But like most situations of concern, it didn't go from a little bit worried to full-blown panic right away. The delay could have been for any number of reasons. Maybe it was car trouble or a simple case of losing track of time. But as time passed, the more benign theories were replaced by scarier options. Carrie could have injured herself. She could have been attacked by an animal. There were bear sightings in the area. and although bare attacks were relatively rare, they couldn't be discounted.

As the clock kept ticking, it didn't really matter what happened. Something had happened, and the people at the ranch needed to find her. The community formed a search party. Kerry's brother Paul also worked at the ranch. He called their parents in Bozeman, Bob and Janet, to tell them what was going on. Janet and a friend drove down to Big Sky. Bob called a friend who had a plane. The man offered to fly Bob over the area to see if they could spot Carrie from the air.

The first discovery was Carrie's car, though that was only marginally helpful. It was right where it was supposed to be, in the parking area at the trailhead. But at least it proved that she had been there, or still was there. The car wasn't damaged or otherwise suspicious, so the search teams fanned out across the area. But both the aerial search and the ground search ran into problems immediately. Number one was that it was quickly growing dark. Number two was that the trail was in a wooded area, with wild grass and fallen tree trunks covering the ground.

Finding her in the daytime would be difficult. Finding her at night would be almost impossible. But the searchers kept going. At that point, the group was made up of locals from around the area of the ranch, and at about midnight, they decided it was hopeless to keep wandering around the woods with severely limited resources. They returned to Lone Mountain Ranch to pour over maps and plan a more coordinated effort at first light the next day.

In the early morning hours of July 16th, law enforcement officials began to arrive at the ranch. The Big Sky Wilderness Area stretched across two counties, Madison and Gallatin. Carrie had disappeared as far as anyone knew in Madison County, but the sheriff's departments of both counties responded to the crisis. There was very little sleep at Lone Mountain Ranch that night. Bob, Janet, and Paul were worried sick. It was as if Carrie had simply vanished. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind.

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They couldn't find anything that belonged to carry. The searchers didn't know it, but she had tried to leave clues as she was marched through the woods. by Don and Dan Nichols. She tried to sly drop her headband and her watch, but Dawn caught her and picked up the items. There was also no obvious signs of a struggle, either with other people or wild animals. And as the anxiety of the searchers increased, they heard gunshots deep in the woods. A pair of searchers heard the first shot and reported it by radio. Then there was another gunshot. Soon another voice came through the radio. It was one of the team members warning everyone that people with guns were shooting at the searchers. The searchers were

then ordered to silence their radios and return to base. When they rendezvoused at the base camp, one of the searchers named Jim had urgent news. He and his search partner, Alan Goldstein, one of Carrie's good friends from the ranch, had found Carrie. She was in a clearing. She apparently been kidnapped because she was chained to a tree. She started screaming when Jim and Alan approached. She shouted that her kidnappers would shoot them, and then one of the kidnappers turned his gun on Carrie. He shot her in the chest to keep her from talking. Jim ran to Carrie to check her wound. Alan pointed his rifle at the kidnappers and demanded Carrie's release. The argument grew hot and loud, and then one of the kidnappers shot and killed Alan.

At that point, Jim felt he had no choice but to run, or he would be dead in the clearing too. By now, the Madison County Sheriff's Department had joined the search, and the two sheriffs quickly decided to keep the civilians out of the woods. From now on, the search would be conducted by law enforcement only. Sheriff Johnny France led the Madison County team, and Sheriff John Onstad led the Gallatin County team. The Swenson family and the rest of the local volunteers returned to Lone Mountain Ranch, and the sheriffs and their deputies prepared to head back into the woods. But they had a problem. Jim couldn't tell them the exact location of the clearing where Carrie was chained to a tree. He remembered certain geographical features, but that was it.

A sheriff's team boarded a helicopter and flew circles over the area in an attempt to find the clearing. After half an hour, they located a spot that matched Jim's description. The team landed, relayed the location to the rest of the lawmen, and then everyone set off on their mission. It was approaching noon, and it had been at least two hours, if not three, since Carrie Swenson had been shot. No one knew of the kidnappers were still in the area, so the lawmen had to move with caution. As they closed in on the clearing, they saw no sign of the mountain men. The area looked deserted, except for a strange object in the ground. grass. From a distance, it was hard to identify, but as the lawmen crept closer, they saw it was a

sleeping bag. And as the teams inched forward, they discovered Carrie inside the bag. She had crawled in to keep herself warm, even though it was in the middle of the day in mid-July. She was weak and losing blood, and her body temperature was dropping, but she weakly called for help. The searchers saw that her situation was desperate. They radioed for the chopper. The helicopter zoomed into the area and then hovered high above the clearing. It lowered a rescue litter down to the ground. The lawmen strapped Carrie to the stretcher and then told the chopper to lift her out of the clearing. As the chopper climbed, the stretcher collided with a branch. The jarring collision caused a moment of panic, but then Carrie was clear.

The chopper flew her to a waiting ambulance and she was rushed to a hospital in Bozeman. Doctors stabilized her, and she was reunited with her family. She'd suffered an entry wound to the chest, an exit wound to the back, and a collapsed lung in between. But she was strong. Just a few hours after the ordeal,

she was awake and talking, and the two sheriffs needed to know everything she could tell them about the kidnappers. Carrie described the assailants. The older of the two men looked middle age with gray hair and a beard. The younger looked like he was in his early 20s, and he had blonde hair down to his shoulders. They both wore green army fatigues.

With the help of an old high school yearbook, Carrie identified the younger man as Dan Nichols. A local woman who had been fishing on the lake the day before the attack helped fill in the identity of the older man. She had spoken to both men as they saw. stood on the shore of the lake. The older man's name was Don Nichols, and he was Dan's father. The pair were known quantities throughout Madison County. They had been spotted before, walking through the wilderness. It was known that Don could walk dozens of miles in a single day.

That was a serious obstacle for the authorities. The big sky wilderness area was huge, so the lawmen tried to narrow the search parameters. They flew over a stretch of the Spanish peaks where the kidnapping had taken place with a thermal imaging device. The goal was to pick up the heat signatures of campfires. The device worked as planned and got a reading a little north of the clearing where Kerry was found. The next day, three officers went to the spot to investigate, but found nothing to suggest the Nichols had been there in the past few hours. The reading on the device was a fluke. Next, the searchers brought in a 12-man SWAT team to hunt through the larger area around the clearing. But after hours of looking,

the SWAT team found nothing. The men learned later that they had been almost right on top of the suspects. At one point, the SWAT team had been just inches from the two men. But the Nichols boys had hidden so successfully that they remained undetected. Knowledge of the terrain was an even bigger obstacle than the ability to cover great distances in a short period of time. The Nichols duo lived in the woods. They probably knew every rock and tree and bush. They had camps and dugouts all over Madison County. They'd said as much to carry, and also mentioned that the camps were at least somewhat

provisioned for the winter. Hunters and ranchers across the county reported seeing the camps as well. In addition to the hiding spots, Don also planted small gardens in various places. They could hunt and fish. and grow their own produce. From the outside, the strategy seemed simple. They could just outlast the authorities. And both men were suited for the task.

Don had spent the past 12 years of his life in the wilderness, only occasionally coming down to work in mills and machine shops in different towns. Don and his wife were divorced. In every summer, their son, Dan, joined Don in the mountains. According to everyone who knew Don Nichols, He preferred living outdoors, and Dan was happy to be with him. All that combined to make the manhunt a nearly hopeless chore. The active search lasted about a week.

By that point, it was pretty clear that the lawmen were going to have to settle in for a siege. They reduced the round-the-clock effort to a series of regular patrols. They would have to be patient and wait for a break. Or they would have to manufacture one themselves. In the first phase of the search, the lawmen had thought like hunters. In the second phase, they needed to think like trappers. In theory, Don and Dan Nichols could hide indefinitely. Investigators had to draw them out.

They needed to bait a trap and let the Nichols boys come to them. And ironically, the idea for the strategy came from the actions of the Nichols themselves. That part of Montana was cattle country. For generations, ranchers, and cowboys had driven cattle across the range. And to ensure the drives went smoothly, some ranchers built little supply camps at various points along the way. One spot was called Cowboy Heaven. And when it was robbed a few weeks after the kidnapping, it gave the lawman an idea. Cowboy Heaven was essentially just a tent that contained some basic supplies.

But later in the summer of 1984, a rancher arrived at the tent and discovered all the supplies were gone. It was more than a single cowboy could have taken. Additionally, the knot that secured the tent's front flaps was tied differently than before. Whoever took the supplies made a poor attempt to cover their tracks on the way out. The rancher alerted the authorities, on the chance that the Nichols might have been the thieves. To the police, the idea had merit. It made sense that the father and son duo would take advantage of easy supply deputies. pose, even if they already had their own stashes. And that gave the lawmen an idea for their next strategy. They would bait the Nichols Boys with supplies. The Sheriff's Department acquired electronic

monitoring devices from the FBI and set up a few dummy camps in what they believed was Don's path. If the pair hit any of the camps, a silent alarm would notify law enforcement. In theory, it was a good idea. In practice, it was a failure. The device is continuously malfunctioned to the point where the plan was scrapped. Investigators tried any idea they could think of. They mounted expeditions to suspected campsites, as well as caves and mine shafts. The family of Alan Goldstein, the man who'd been murdered by Don Nichols, hired a tracker from the East Coast. The man joined a team from the Madison County Sheriff's Department and went into the woods to find the suspects. And that plan didn't work either. The tracker thought he found signs of the suspects,

and he insisted the team was just a few hours behind the fugitives. But the search didn't produce any definitive evidence, and the Sheriff's Department cut ties with the tracker. Once again, the investigation looked bleak. More reports came in of stolen supplies, so the lawmen were pretty confident that the Nichols duo was still in the area. But it was simply impossible to follow up on the reports fast enough to find the fugitives. Investigators couldn't be everywhere at once. From mid-July to the end of autumn, the person who came the closest to the fugitives was a hunting guide named Tom Hintz. Hintz and a pair of hunters were riding horses on the range when Hines saw smoke in the distance. Hines rode to the source of the smoke and found

two men around a campfire. He immediately recognized them as Don and Dan Nichols. Both were thin, but not sick. They had a brief exchange, and then Heinz rode away. Heinz led his two hunters out of the area and then rode back to the campsite. According to Heintz, both fugitives were armed, but neither was aggressive. In fact, Heinz was able to carry on a full conversation even after he announced that he knew their identities. Heintz updated them on the state of the investigation and let them know that Kerry Swenson survived. The men asked if Heinz had any food, and he said he didn't. The conversation lasted about 30 minutes. After that, Heinz got back on his horse and returned to his home base. But he didn't immediately report the incident to the Madison

County Sheriff. First, Heinz evacuated the area of the hunters and campers. he'd led onto the range. Then, a few days after the encounter, he went to the sheriff's office. And of course, by that point, it was too late to catch the suspects. In December 1984, everything finally fell into place for law enforcement. A rancher named Roland Moore was finishing some chores before the worst of winter set in. His spread, the Cold Springs Ranch, was northwest of big sky. Like Tom Hines, Moore was on horseback and he spotted smoke in the distance.

He assumed it was from a campfire and he rode toward it. His first thought was that he'd found hunters who were operating illegally on his land. He rode around the wider area and didn't see any tracks leading to the potential campsite, so he assumed the occupants had been there for a while. Moore rode home and called the police. By the time he made the call, he thought there was. was another possibility. The people at the campfire might be Don and Dan Nichols. When Roland Moore called the Madison County Sheriff's Office, he learned that Sheriff Johnny France was out on official

business. Moore left a message that said he'd discovered a campsite on his land and it might belong to the fugitives who'd been on the run for five months. He didn't know when he'd hear from the sheriff, so he hopped back in his truck and drove back out toward the campsite. He parked on the side of the road and got out with his binoculars. He scanned the landscape, looking for the smoke from the campfire. Instead, he ended up looking directly at Don Nichols. The fugitive stared at him. Dan Nichols stood near his father, and for a few moments, they all looked at each other, and then Don and Dan turned and ran toward the wilderness. Moore rushed home and called the sheriff's office again. The sheriff was still out of the office, but Moore spoke.

to a deputy. The deputy listened to Moore's report and then called the FBI field office in Butte. By the time Moore finally spoke to Sheriff Johnny France, the Sheriff's Department and the FBI were each assembling teams for a potential encounter with the fugitives. They called the operation Barnstorm, and they used Moore's Ranch as headquarters. The Gallatin County Sheriff's Department was on its way with a helicopter, which would make it easy to follow the track in the snow. But the helicopter was delayed. And because it was a winter afternoon, daylight was fading quickly. Madison County Sheriff Johnny France wasn't willing to wait. He jumped on a snowmobile and headed toward the campsite alone. As he approached the site, he spotted some

tracks in the snow. But he quickly hit a rocky section of ground that caused the snowmobile to give out. France would have to proceed on foot, and it was getting dark. Thankfully, the next snowfall hadn't yet begun, which meant the sheriff could still follow the tracks. France moved slowly through the snow to a high point on the land. From there, he saw mountain ridges ahead and a deep draw below, and down in the draw, he could see Don and Dan Nichols bent over a small fire. Neither man had seen the sheriff. Instead, it looked like they were settling in for the evening, as though they thought they'd given everyone. the slip again. France approached and readied his rifle. He leveled it at the fugitives and announced

himself. Don reached for his rifle and the sheriff warned him to leave it alone. The sheriff said he was prepared to kill if he had to. Don had vowed he wouldn't be taken alive, but now he didn't move. He asked how the sheriff would guarantee that he wouldn't use lethal force. The sheriff repeated he would only kill if he had to, and then he went into negotiator mode. The sheriff said he could offer the Nichols Boys warm beds and warm meals if they surrendered peacefully. Don asked what he would be charged with in court. The sheriff responded, homicide, and then added that there was a chance that Don could argue self-defense. After some thought, Don was convinced. He and Danny handed over their weapons. Sheriff France,

March the father and son at gunpoint to the rest of the search team. The team took the suspects to Virginia City, Montana, where they were arraigned. Then they were transferred to the county jail in Bozeman, and the manhunt for the mountain men was officially done. Next time on Infamous America, Don and Dan Nichols go to trial, and tempers flare throughout the proceedings. Carrie Swinson navigates the media frenzy as she begins the long recovery process with a single goal in mind to compete in another biathlon.

That's next week on Infamous America. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships began at just $5 per month. This season was co-executive produced by Steve Walters in association with ritual productions. Research and writing by Dante Flores. Original music by Rob Villal. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website

blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, Once Upon a Crime, and many more. Thanks for listening.