Life with Father "Mountain Men" Go on Trial

'They were dirty looking, scroungy . . . He grabbed me by both wrists." Tall, tan Kari Swenson, 23, a member of the U.S. biathlon team, was testifying about what happened to her when she encountered two strange men last July while on a training run not too far from the Big Sky resort in Montana. "The old man said they just wanted to talk for a while. He said, 'We don't get many women up in the mountains that we can talk to.' "

When word of the episode first came out of Montana ten months ago, it seemed a bizarre yarn that belonged in the pages of some old Wild West pulps. Two unshaven, rifle-toting renegade mountain men, a father and son, abduct a young woman to take with them into the trackless Spanish Peaks wilderness where they live. Overtaken by searchers, they kill one pursuer, accidentally wound their captive of 18 hours (she has now recovered completely), then flee alone to the high country, only to be tracked down five months later by an unrelenting sheriff.

The same story, as explored last week in a Virginia City courtroom, seemed to belong not in a paperback novel at all but in a casebook of parental pathology. As the younger of the so-called mountain men went on trial in the abduction and wounding of Swenson and the killing of Alan Goldstein, neither of the accused--Dan Nichols, 20, and Don Nichols, 54--disputed the facts. Instead, both testified to an almost grotesque relationship in which the son had been manipulated into a state of worshipful dependency on a father who despised and defied conventional society. Dan's foster mother testified that his father became "his hero, his ideal, his superman." Defense Lawyer Steven Ungar asserted that the elder Nichols in effect "hypnotized" the son into utter obedience.

Pale, thin and nervous, Dan Nichols testified that his father had taken the initiative in the alleged crimes as in all else. He offered little that explained how he had become a slave to his father's will. The old- er man, now thin and beardless, offered at least some illumination when he described one of his techniques for persuading his child to follow his own antisocial ways. Said he: "I hit him on the forehead with my fist. I thought that was the safest way--that I'd break my hand before I had hurt him." Nichols admitted he was slow to realize this amounted to "abusive" behavior. When the weekend recess began at the completion of all testimony, the jury was left with few facts to argue but a great many unpleasant things to brood about.