Scott Swanson and Carolyn MacLean were so madly in love that they believed the most important thing in life was each other.
When they ran away April 2, they were so successful that they avoided detection by police for nearly four months.
It was a longing for their families, though, that finally caught up with the Wheaton College couple.
”We didn`t leave out of an act of rebellion,” Carolyn MacLean said Wednesday in a telephone interview from a San Diego hotel room where she had just been reunited with her parents. ”Scott and I loved each other so much that we wanted to give up everything for each other.
”We`ve become so much closer, but we need our family`s support and strength. We are who we are because of the parents who brought us up and nurtured us with love. . . . It was just we couldn`t take it anymore. We`ve always been so close to our families.”
On Tuesday, Scott, 23, and Carolyn, 22-secretly married the weekend before their disappearance-sent a seven-page letter from San Diego by Federal Express to the MacLean family in Haddonfield, N.J. They wanted to let them know they were alive. They wanted forgiveness and reconciliation.
The letter was delivered Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday evening, the MacLeans were in San Diego, happily greeting their son-in-law for the first time since the marriage and assuring their daughter, who had dyed her blond hair red, that nothing could change their feelings toward her.
In the letter, the couple expressed remorse for the pain they had caused, and they described their actions as ”purely selfish.”
But they said running away had nothing to do with rebelling and everything to do with preserving their love-from Scott Swanson`s military commitment and from family turmoil about the wedding.
The sight of Carolyn`s handwriting was all her parents, James and Kathy MacLean, needed to see to know their prayers had been answered.
”Is this a happy moment?” asked James MacLean, speaking from the hotel room. ”It`s a relieved moment.”
Scott Swanson arrived at the hotel after Carolyn and was met in the lobby by his father-in-law, who was waiting to show him upstairs.
”Son, it`s good to see you,” said James MacLean, as he gave his son-in- law a bear hug.
”You look good,” Swanson responded.
The couple`s letter also was sent to the Swansons in Elgin, but they are on vacation this week. Carolyn and Scott called the Swanson home later Tuesday and spoke with Scott`s grandmother, who gave them a number for the parents.
”I spoke with them last night,” Carolyn said, ”and I asked if I could call them Mom and Dad, and they said, `Yes.` They were so understanding. They have a lot more questions than Mom and Dad have. Maybe that`s because they haven`t seen the letter.”
The question nagging family members, friends and police has been why the couple, both of them religious and family-oriented, would run away and why it took so long for them to let everybody know they were alive. The letter Tuesday and interviews on Wednesday with a Tribune reporter in San Diego gave some insight.
Though their secret marriage in Lake Geneva, Wis., had been in the works since December, their decision to run off had not always been part of the plan.
Ahead of them was Swanson`s graduation on May 15, which would also begin his commission in the aviation branch of the Army. The couple feared that the long hours of an officer-a second marriage, as they put it-and the ”military attitude” would put a strain on the special togetherness they felt, their
”oneness.”
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Once he was commissioned, Swanson would be AWOL if he fled the Army and would face stiff consequences. By leaving before his commission, his status and any punishment are more uncertain, though likely to be less severe.
Reading the letter, James MacLean immediately recognized the fear of separation from passages in a book called ”A Severe Mercy” that he had come to believe was key to understanding the couple. The book had been a favorite of Scott and Carolyn. ”It`s right out of there, in my opinion,” MacLean said, comparing the letter and the book.
The book, described on the jacket as ”A Real Life Love Story. Full of Wonder and Hope,” tells in its early chapters of a young couple concerned about preserving their love. The couple, who are secretly married, decide
”the killer of love is separateness.”
”We rejected separate activities . . . ,” the author, Sheldon Vanauken, wrote later in the book. ”We would not have children. Nor would we allow any career, unless we pursued it together, to become dominating.” They also rejected materialism in the book.
Carolyn MacLean said the couple had little material wealth in their new life in a $400-a-month beachside studio apartment without a phone in Mission Beach, Calif., just outside San Diego. They worked in various delis to pay the rent.
They chose San Diego, Scott told reporters, because ”we didn`t know anyone. No one knew us and the climate was conducive to bumming it.”
”We have no means,” Carolyn said. ”We can`t go anywhere. We`re not going by our real names.”
She said they ran off because of ”an overwhelming love for each other.” ”We just felt everything-all the glitz and all the glamor of life and society and what the American dream was-was getting in the way of us getting together,” she said. ”We didn`t want that. We just want a completely unadorned love. None of the other things. We felt if we strip ourselves of everything, we`re all that`s left. If we`re at the bottom, we can only go up.”
She said the marriage was working, but that it wasn`t certain whether they would remain in California. ”It could have gone one of two ways: It could have shattered our love or strengthened it. It`s definitely strengthened it,” she said.
The book; Carolyn`s notebook, which included a passage about running away together even though it might hurt their families; and other writings by Scott and Carolyn had persuaded James MacLean that the couple probably were alive.
”They thought they were doing the right thing,” he said. ”They thought they were making a perfect love. . . . They didn`t run from us but ran toward a perfect life.”
But, he added: ”I`m not justifying it.”
The letter also mentions the reaction of Swanson`s parents when the couple decided to tell them of the wedding. Though not unhappy that the two would wed, Roger and Nancy Swanson told them that they were disappointed and slightly hurt by not being included.
That the parents` ”joy and excitement” were ”less than anticipated”
was hard for the young couple to accept, the letter said. The couple said Wednesday night that they had discerned ”a sense of reluctance” about the marriage.
They originally had intended to keep the marriage a secret and then have a traditional marriage with their families present. They decided to reveal the wedding only because of their excitement.
At the time, they faced an emotional Easter weekend with the Swansons in Elgin. It was on the way to the Swansons` home, after visiting Carolyn`s grandmother in Flint, Mich., that they disappeared. Before leaving Flint, Scott Swanson read from Psalm 91 in the Bible. The last confirmed sighting of the couple was at a Flint gas station the morning of April 2.
In their letter, the couple said that they needed to put distance between themselves and the two families and that they hoped time would allow the families to get used to the marriage. Despite the hurt their disappearance would cause, they wrote, more important was the development of their relationship.
”At the time, we thought it was the right decision,” Scott said, ”and we were clear-headed.”
Carolyn said that when they left they had figured they would never come back. But when they began to have second thoughts, she said, the possibility of contacting their families was complicated by the unanticipated and intense publicity surrounding their disappearance.
The couple left Carolyn`s car, a bright red 1985 BMW owned by James MacLean, near the police station at 113 W. Chicago Ave. They put the keys under the mat and hoped that the car would be returned to MacLean.
Instead, they wrote, it probably was stolen, which explains how it ended up in the alley behind Orchestra Hall, 220 S. Michigan Ave., with the keys in the ignition. The engine was warm when it was found.
The couple took a cab to O`Hare International Airport and flew that evening to San Diego, where they have been living ever since. Earlier that week, Carolyn had bought warm-weather clothes in Wheaton. The couple kept track of the search by reading Chicago papers at a college library.
Though employed at separate places, Scott`s and Carolyn`s hours were similar, James MacLean said.
”What this sounds like,” said Robert Fletcher, a spokesman for the Illinois state police, ”is an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, where you have a couple that decides to go off on a lark. The only thing that got them into the paper is the fact they came from money.”
Fletcher said it is not especially difficult to elude a police search if a person does not leave a paper trail and does not get into trouble with the law. Scott and Carolyn left their credit cards and pieces of identification behind. Swanson also acknowledged leaving confusing pieces of evidence.
James MacLean, in a letter given to The Tribune Wednesday, praised the police work on the case. In an interview, he said that he never hired a private investigator for the case because of his belief that the two were alive and because he didn`t want to be the one who dragged them back home.
”I left it with police and law enforcement agencies,” he said. ”I believed that God would work actively in their lives. God`s powerful, and God`s everywhere.”
Asked whether he was upset that the couple had left everybody in limbo for so long, he smiled and replied only: ”I`m a father.”
Earlier in the day, though, he had explained his lack of discernible anger.
”The difference between a lot of love and a parent`s love,” he said,
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”is that a parent`s love is like God`s love: it`s unconditional.
”I feel very comfortable. I feel that what`s happened is consistent with what I thought would happen. I`m just going to see my daughter and see if she`s okay.”
Carolyn said she had dreamed of a reunion. There were many times that she and her husband talked about going home, she said. They had not realized how big a story their disappearance would be, and they grew more frightened with each passing day.
Wednesday`s reunion was more than she had hoped for.
”I was afraid they weren`t going to accept me back,” Carolyn said.
”Their response has just been wonderful and completely undeserved and unexpected.”
Asked if she would do it again, she talked about the looks on her parents` faces and then broke into tears. ”I can`t stand the hurt I`ve caused.”