Johnny France - Incident at Big Sky: The True Story of Sheriff Johnny France and the Capture of the Mountain Men

Incident at Big Sky

Sheriff Johnny France & Malcolm McConnell

Kidnapping. A person commits the offense of kidnapping if he knowingly or purposely and without lawful authority restrains another person by either secreting or holding him in a place of isolation or by using or threatening to use physical force.

Montana Criminal Code

P ROSECUTOR: Theres no question is there, that on July 15th, 1984, that you restrained Kari Swenson?

D ON N ICHOLS: No.

P ROSECUTOR: And theres no question that you did that by secreting her or holding her in an isolated place?

D ON N ICHOLS: I dont know what you mean by isolated. All everywhere we ever go is isolated.

P ROSECUTOR: Okay, so where you were camped that night, as far as you are concerned, was a place of isolation?

D ON N ICHOLS: Yes.

Trial of Donald Boone Nichols

July 10, 1985

Virginia City, Montana

Preface

Remembering a tragedy is painful; recalling the exact words and details of a violent and tragic crime is a challenge for victims, participants, and witnesses. Therefore, when the authors faced the challenge of re-creating the events that began with Kari Swensons brutal kidnapping in July 1984 and ended on the snowy ridge above the Cold Springs Ranch five months later, we were fortunate to have available a body of evidence, court testimony, and official records to consult when human memory failed.

Kari Swenson and Jim Schwalbe provided a wealth of detail on her kidnapping and Alan Goldsteins murder during their sworn court testimony. Obviously, the terrible events of that crime were seared into their memories because their vivid re-creations of actions, emotions, and conversations hardly vary from one testimony statement to the next during their multiple court appearances.

The details of the long, often confusing manhunt and eventual capture were less accessible. But all major crime investigations leave a trail of records; in this case, law enforcement communications logs, investigation reports, and operational plans supplemented the memories of the principals involved, allowing us to re-create events with confidence. Incredibly, Dan Nichols himself kept a diary during the early weeks of the manhunt, and this document served as the basis for discussions of these events between him and Sheriff Johnny France. Don Nichols also provided details of the manhunt months and capture to both authors, particularly to Sheriff France on the long car trips to and from court appearances during the eight-month legal process that ended in Deerlodge Prison last fall.

Finally, of course, the authors spent weeks at the vital, unglamorous drudgery of interviews, tape-recording participants as we studied maps and police reports with them, sifting valid detail from faulty memory.

The end product of this effort, we hope, is an accurate record of one of modern Americas most bizarre crimes.

Johnny France, Malcolm McConnell

PART 1

A Place of Isolation

PART 2

Manhunt

Madison Range, Montana

July 15, 1984

The Madison County Courthouse is old by Montana standards. It has stood on a lean, treeless slope in Virginia City for over a century. The graceful red brick and white portico are topped by a fretted cupola, evocative, perhaps, of a more settled civilization thousands of miles to the east of the violent mountain frontier where the structure was built.

But to the citizens of the sprawling county, the courthouse represents more than a colorful landmark, dating from the Alder Gulch gold boom of the 1860s. The cathedral-like building is a tangible symbol that the rule of law firmly governs the affairs of men. Road agents and cattle thieves, vigilantes and ambushes in the muddy streets are flamboyant history.

In the spring and summer of 1985, the handsome courtroom on the buildings second floor was the scene of two widely publicized criminal trials. A middle-aged man named Donald Boone Nichols and his twenty-year-old son, Dan, were charged with the most serious offenses in Montanas criminal code, kidnapping, armed assault, and deliberate homicide.

During the course of emotionally charged testimony, the witnesses, the surviving victim, and the participants in these crimes detailed the bizarre and tragic events of the previous summer.

In the words of the states key witness, a striking young woman with auburn hair, the crime began on the hot afternoon of July 15, 1984.

Kari Swenson ran alone through the dry heat. Above her left shoulder rose the heavy angles of Lone Mountain. The dark tree line, giving way to stone and, above, vestigial snow. Ahead stood the massive Spanish Peaks. The dazzle of a glacial lake cut through the lodgepole pines. Then the trail rose into thick timber and the lake was gone. Sudden green shadow, cicadas, and aromatic pitch in the windless afternoon.

Coming up on one mile. The Forest Service trail dipped to join Jack Creek logging road. Karis cleats pounded on hardened truck ruts. She skidded on bark trash and gravel and lengthened her stride for the level.

A mile and a half. The sun was a weight on her neck and arms. Her long braid slapped below her shoulders. The terry cloth headband kept the sweat from her eyes. To the left, Lower Ulerys Lake had disappeared in the jumble of blowdown lodgepoles. Her feet struck the ruts. The slope rose before her. Almost two miles. Camp robber jays squawked in the bright Montana sky. She shortened her stride, pumping with her elbows.

Sunday was a long day for the summer restaurant staff at Lone Mountain Ranch. Brunch lasted from ten till two, and set-up for dinner began at five. Some of the other waitresses napped in the afternoon. But today Kari ran through the dry mountain heat, up the logging roads of Jack Creek, away from the Jacuzzis and satellite dishes of the Big Sky resort and into the Pleistocene wilderness of the Spanish Peaks. As Kari often told her friends, she did not simply go jogging in her free time. This was a training run, six miles at altitude, a circuit of rugged trails around the two pothole lakes hidden in the steep forest. Six miles was almost exactly ten kilometers, her best distance.

Four months earlier, at the womens world championship biathlon at Chamonix, Kari had placed fifth overall in the ten-kilometer final. Her performance was the best ever for an American biathlete in postwar international competition. At age twenty-two, Kari had suddenly become Americas strongest Olympic contender in the brutally demanding composite sport that combines Nordic trail skiing with rifle marksmanship.

Biathlon evolved out of Scandinavian army training and has been dominated since the war by the military amateurs of Eastern Europe. Before the war, the endurance and martial skills needed for the sport were considered by some Olympic officials impossible for a woman to master. Now Kari Swenson, a recent graduate of Montana State University in nearby Bozeman, ran through the heat of these isolated mountains toward the goal of a biathlon medal at the next winter Olympics.

Coming up on two miles. The trail cut to the right, along an alpine meadow bright with asters and columbines. Kari was now cut off from the Gallatin Valley below to the east. The Jack Creek drainage, as this canyon was called, divided the southern Madison Range from the Spanish Peaks wilderness area ahead to the north. When she had parked her car at the trailhead she could still distinguish the miniature log lodges of Big Sky. That was Resort Montana, an all-season recreational preserve for wealthy Easterners and the tanned Calvin Klein set some of the old ranchers called Californicators. Down there, the meadows were cut with tractor mowers and gardeners tended even the quaking asps.