Hollywood star and true crime fanatic Alison Sweeney joins the show to discuss the mysterious disappearance of Brandon Swanson. One moment he's on the phone with his parents. The next? Gone forever. What happened? And be sure to watch Alison's latest, Reality Bites: A Hannah Swensen Mystery, on Thursday, February 6, at 8 pm ET on Hallmark Mystery. Check out our new True Crime Substack the True Crime Times at: https://t.co/26TIoM14Tg Check out our other show The Prosecutors: Legal Briefs for discussion on cases, controversial topics, or conversation with content creators Get Prosecutors Podcast Merch: https://www.bonfire.com/store/prosecutors-podcast/ Join the Gallery on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/4oHFF4agcAvBhm3o/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProsecutorsPod Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prosecutorspod/ Check out our website for case resources: https://prosecutorspodcast.com/ Hang out with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@prosecutorspodSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What happened to Brandon Swanson?
And we are The Prosecutors. Today on The Prosecutors, a 19-year-old disappears while talking to his parents on the phone. What happened to Brandon Swanson? Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett and as most of you know, Alice is still recovering from having her beautiful baby. I was able to see him recently and he is doing great, but
Chapter 2: Who is Alison Sweeney and why is she on the podcast?
Because of that, we have a very special guest today. I am joined by none other than friend of the podcast, huge true crime fan and noted star of the stage and screen, Alison Sweeney. Hello.
How are you doing Alison? I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me.
Now you have, you've insisted I call you Allie, so I'll call you Allie. Yes.
Please call me Allie.
Unless you're mad and then you can. Okay. Yeah. If you say something, I'm completely disagreeable. Like Alison.
Yes. That's how I know. That's how I measure myself. Well, I'm so thrilled to hear about Alice. Cause like, that's amazing. I'm so impressed with her and everything she does, but I'm so glad she's taking time. She must need to sleep too.
She is very impressive. We're very impressed with her. You know, she does, at this point, she has four children and four podcasts. So I'm not, and a lot, and a job. She has a full-time job too.
Like, yeah, she's doing everything.
So I don't know exactly how she does that, but somehow she pulls it off. But we have really interesting case for you guys. But first, before we get into that. Allie, I want to thank you so much for joining the show. We've been trying to work something out for a while. I've been watching you since Days of Our Lives, back when I would watch with my mom and dad.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances of Brandon's disappearance?
We have heard your crazy stories, Brett. You have some great stories.
I do. I do. And I feel like that adds to the podcast. It does. But I think we can say he wasn't like that because nobody remembers that. I think you're 100% right. But I don't think we can say that he wasn't intoxicated. That he, he maybe wasn't at a point where he shouldn't have been driving for instance, but he does, he leaves the party and he goes to can be while he's there.
We know he had at least one shot of whiskey. And he leaves around midnight for his home in Marshall. Now this entire area is an area he is familiar with. And I will recommend that if you're listening to this podcast, when you get a chance, pull up a map, there'll be one on our website. If you're watching on YouTube.
You may be seeing it right now, but look at a map because it's important to know sort of the geography here. And I'm going to attempt to describe it to you, but this is always difficult over, you know, radio. So Lind is about 10 minutes from Marshall. So he lives in Marshall and Lind is about 10 minutes south, south, west, right? Not far at all from where he lives.
So Canby is about 40 minutes from that. So he would have had to have driven 40 minutes away from Linde west and away from his home in Marshall to get to Canby. Now coming back from Canby to Marshall, you're essentially completing the third leg of this triangle. So you've gone south from Marshall to Linde, west from Linde over to Canby and then back east from Canby to Marshall.
Make yourself a little triangle. And the longest leg of this triangle would be the trip from Canby to Marshall. So the trip from the last place he was where he took the shot back home in Marshall. This is about a 35 minute drive, but it's actually should be the easiest drive of them all because it is directly connected by Highway 68.
And if Brandon had just jumped on highway 68, which is a two lane highway, but a larger road, all of y'all have these highways. It's not an interstate, but it's a large highway, probably, you know, 55 mile per hour speed limit. It is a straight shot. He could have jumped on there and gone straight back to Marshall, but he did not do that.
And they do, just to reiterate what you said, is that they really made it clear that this is all area that he's familiar with. I think we want to note 2008, like, I don't think people were on their phones for GPS, right? We didn't have maps quite the way we do now, like that every kid who's learning to drive now just plugs in an address and never learns where they're going.
They just look at a map. I think back then it was really like he knew it. He knew where he was going. He had done it a bunch of times, right?
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Chapter 4: What led to Brandon's last phone call to his parents?
Your visual map is actually very, your verbal map was very helpful. But yeah, okay, so Taunton, let's go back to the map and talk about it. If we were on the triangle that we were talking about, right, that third leg, the hypotenuse, right, would be, that's where Taunton was. So not where he said he was, but where, like, what actually makes sense, right?
Right. And so as Allie's saying, once again, you have this triangle, right? And the hypotenuse, that was great. I just called it the longest one, but that works too. So we're on the hypotenuse. So just imagine you got the longest stretch between Camby and Marshall. Now, Brandon... He'd been driving for a while by the time he got hung up, and he thought he had made it much further than he had.
He thinks he's all the way down near Lind. Now, remember, Lind is south of Marshall. He's trying to get to Marshall. Lind is south of Marshall. He thinks that basically he has worked his way down these back roads so far that he's now pretty close to home.
He's pretty close to home, but because he knows he's going the back roads and he knows that Marshall's on the main road, he figures what he's seeing is land, which is south of Marshall, not Marshall. That's where he thinks he is. But he hasn't made it anywhere near as far as he thought he had. Porter isn't that far at all from Canby.
If you were on the Highway 68, you would basically Porter's the first town you run into when you're coming from Canby. It's probably ten minutes. from Canby. Taunton is just a little bit further down from Porter. So he's been driving around this whole time, and it seems like he's basically been going in circles. And Lind, as we've said several times, is south of Marshall.
Right.
It is south of Highway 68. Taunton, Porter, and where his car is, north of Highway 68.
So the amazing thing is that they did get those cell phone records because if they had looked where he said he was, they might never have found that car. But finally, because of the cell phone records, they find the car quite quickly. The search begins at 1230. Brandon's Chevy Lumina sedan is found about a mile and a half north of Taunton. And this is the part that kills you.
There is no physical damage to the vehicle or evidence of any sort of injury. There's no blood. You know, he didn't hit his head or if he did, it didn't leave any blood or evidence of that. And there didn't look like there's any damage to the car. It was off the side of the field approach. So the vehicle was hung up. This has actually happened to me.
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Chapter 5: How did police respond to Brandon's disappearance?
They actually went through the river and continued following this scent after the river. And this suggested to searchers that maybe Brandon did fall into the water.
but he didn't drown he got out and he kept walking the problem here you have these search dogs you have cadaver dogs later on the cadaver dogs start picking up the scent of human remains and in fact this happened several times and it's in the area sort of north of porter that we talked about earlier near one of these bodies of water mud creek but no body has ever been found and in fact the scent
It's kind of all over the place. And as we're going to see later on, one of the problems with this area is it's actually really difficult for dogs because you have these scent pools. And we've seen this before. You guys may remember the Jason Landry case and how the dogs kept hitting on various places to the point they're draining bodies of water looking for him and they can't find him.
And sometimes you just have these scent pools and they're not there telling you something is somewhere. but where that sin is actually coming from can be massive. And the problem is because of how far he walked and where he was, we're talking about 122 square mile search area. This is a massive area to search.
On the 10-year anniversary of Brandon's disappearance, Yellow Medicine County Sheriff Bill Flatted told the Marshall Independent, it's a huge area. If you take that immediate area where the car was and then the timeframe, because he was walking for so long with his parents on the phone, right? And young athletic kid, I mean, who knows what direction he went, how far he traveled.
You know, they kept searching. Brian and Annette Swanson sponsored a bill with the House Minority Leader, Marty Scheifert. It's Brandon's law, and it was signed by Minnesota's governor on May 7th, 2009.
And it requires law enforcement to take a missing person's report without delay after notification of someone being missing under dangerous circumstances, no matter the person's age, and immediately conduct a preliminary investigation to determine if the person is missing or if the person is endangered. and promptly notify all other law enforcement agencies of the situation.
So Brett, I will ask you now, I think it's great that they made it a law. I think it's amazing when parents and family can take something like this and try to bring it into a positive. But my understanding was that it isn't actually a thing that like, oh, we can't file a missing persons report for 24 hours. That's just like, that's kind of BS that they make up, right?
Like that's not actually a rule anywhere, right? They just say that to get rid of you.
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Chapter 6: What methods were used in the search for Brandon?
So part of me feels like if he didn't have cars on that main thoroughfare telling him which side of the road he's on, if he wasn't seeing that to give him a frame of reference, maybe it's just so dark in the middle of the night. And if there's no one there, maybe it's not lit well enough for him to know which side he's on.
Yeah, and I think that's what happened. I think he just was disoriented from the beginning and he was actually south, or he thought he was south of the road, but he was actually north of it. And I think that's when you start to see why he thought where he was. Like he had to believe that, right? He had to believe that he was south And then he was slowly making his way down.
And that might even explain why he didn't make it that far down the road. Because in his mind, he might be thinking, I need to go left, you know, instead of right. Because I'm south of the road, not north of the road. And he's basically just going in a circle right in that area because he doesn't make any progress, really. Right, for a long time.
And there's something weird about that too, because again, and maybe this does speak to a little intoxication in that his commitment to like where he was, and then the flashing of the lights, and he's like, there's never a point in his mind where he thinks, maybe I'm not where I'm saying. I would second guess myself like, okay, maybe it's not, you would think that, right?
I think it would be normal to second guess yourself, especially with all these other things. Like how long have you been driving? How could that be? And then when they say they're there and they're flashing their lights and you don't see them and then you're flashing your lights and they don't see you.
I wonder, you know, it does make you think that there must have been some alcohol involved in this story because otherwise you would think to yourself like, okay, this doesn't add up. Let me rethink everything I thought was true. You know?
Yeah. I think alcohol and being a 19 year old boy. You have a lot more, you're a lot more confident in what you're doing than maybe you should be. And I feel like he was there because you're right. There's never any indication of, well, maybe, I don't know, you know, I'm not sure where I am. None of that. Like he is convinced. Right. I am near. Yeah.
And he was mad at them, like they're in the wrong place.
Exactly. Yeah, they're like, what are you doing? Why can't you find me? I've told you exactly where I am. So we talked about this a little bit already, but it seems pretty obvious why he did not take Highway 68. He had been drinking, and even if he hadn't been drinking much, he was below 21. And in most states, any alcohol in your system when you're under 21 is a DUI. And in fact,
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Chapter 7: What is Brandon's Law and how did it come about?
So when the incident happens, when he gets hung up, he's driving down essentially a maintenance road. And this is the ultimate rural road. It is a road between two crop fields on either side. And the purpose of the road is obviously so like, you know, the water trucks and the, all the other vehicles that service the fields can travel down it, but it's not really meant to be a thoroughfare.
It's not the kind of place you should be driving down. At some point, he tries to turn south onto another gravel road. And it seems like what he's trying to do, as we said, is basically do maybe a three point turn and turn around because he realizes something's wrong. But then he goes into this ditch and it wasn't much of a ditch and it seems like he wasn't going very fast, but it didn't matter.
His undamaged car gets hung up in such a way that the wheels are no longer making contact with the ground and he can't go backwards, he can't go forwards, he can't go anywhere. And this is about 1.15 when this happens and then this ordeal begins.
Right, right. And then, you know, I mean, I do think it says something that he tries to call his friends first because that says to me, it's not that bad. I'm not in real trouble. I'm just stuck and I'm not hurt. You know what I mean?
Like, I feel like if you thought it was really bad, I mean, like you said, I'm not, and I've never been a 19 year old boy, but I feel like I would call my parents if I was in real trouble. You're like, screw it. I'm just calling my parents. But calling your friends is like, I can get away with this. And that means there's not a scratch, there's not a bruise.
Maybe someone has a truck and they can pull my car out and my parents won't even know the car's messed up. It feels like it just wasn't that bad.
And he also is thinking somewhat rationally, right? Because he's thinking through this, like, well, I don't want to call my parents because I could get in trouble. So I'll call my friends first. I'm going to work towards that. Okay. I can't get my friends. I do need help. I'm going to call my parents.
And I think that's important because one thing you always have to think about is no matter how minor the accident, did he hit his head and could that have caused some disorientation, but much like the intoxication, it does not seem like he's disoriented. He talks to his dad for almost an hour. No sign of that. I really do think he was in his right mind.
I don't think he was that drunk and I don't think he was injured. I think he just got into a really bad situation.
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