Original subtitles

Ryan's family was devastated knowing that he was missing.

They started to get really worried.

They would have been frantic about where could he be?

There had been no communication

and now they're really afraid

that maybe something terrible has happened and he could be dead.

We've never had this.

We're not seeing them in any of our sonars.

We're not seeing them in any of our dredges, or anything like that.

It's... it's unusual.

Officials in Green Lake County

are looking for a missing kayaker.

The Sherif's office said it would give more information

as the investigation continues.

On the outside, all the public knows is that he's still missing,

while, behind the scenes,

the police, they're going in a completely different direction.

Sometimes you are confronted with evidence

that requires you to kinda really step back

and you immediately then have to think

about what the other possible explanations are.

An accident is one of the top four themes

used to stage a homicide.

Now, suddenly, it's becoming very clear.

Everything is starting to add up.

He had a goal.

He had a mission

and that supplied the energy needed

to put this plan into place.

I think that the pain he caused is pretty irreversible,

the grief and horror that he put upon his entire family.

They had no clue.

They were hit with a bombshell

that... God almighty!

...the weight of the world is on your shoulders, looking at that

and seeing what they must be going through.

Ryan Borgwardt and his wife Emily

lived in Watertown, Wisconsin,

which was really just a kind of classic all-American town.

They lived there with their kids.

Everything about their life seemed like a kind of all-American family.

Ryan and his wife Emily

had known each other since they were quite young.

They had been married for 22 years

and, you know, seemingly, from the outside, had a very close bond.

Their family was particularly outdoorsy - especially Ryan.

He was definitely someone who was always out

doing some type of outdoor activity.

Hiking, kayaking, canoeing - he was doing it all.

I've lived in Wisconsin since I was a young teenager

and got into the dive business

back in 1996.

It's a very beautiful area, beautiful lake.

The lake is just crystal-clean, you know.

Clear as can be, down there.

That's what Green Lake is known for...

and you have people coming for whether it's yachting, fishing...

It's tourism in terms of that lake.

What is not known about the Green Lake area

is that Green Lake itself

is the second-deepest lake in the entire state itself...

...and you quickly realise it's a very friendly society,

very tight-knit communities,

people who typically care about each other.

One night, Ryan tells Emily

he's going to go kayaking that night.

He wants to catch the Northern Lights,

so it will be late at night

and, you know, she says she won't wait up for him

and just goes to bed thinking, you know,

"This is just a normal thing that Ryan does on any given day."

So then, that morning, Emily woke up

and Ryan still hadn't come home,

so she got pretty worried.

She's calling him, texting him...

Nothing, so that's when she decides to finally report him missing.

This was very unlike Ryan.

He did all kinds of activities

and, you know, it wasn't like him

to not let them know what was going on, to not come back home,

so the idea of him being missing like this, you know,

they were definitely thinking the worst.

Green Lake, where Ryan had been kayaking in,

was an especially lush and beautiful area,

a place that was really cherished and admired by the whole community.

Law enforcement will get involved

looking for the missing person

as soon as he's reported missing,

investigating, talking to people that know the person.

Green Lake County Sheriff's Office

reported around 8:30 this morning on social media

that it was searching for a kayaker on Big Green Lake.

There's not an assumption of foul play here.

The first priority is to find this person

and, ideally, find them live,

so you want to find them as quickly as possible.

Typically, with missing person cases,

the first hours are crucial

when finding someone,

especially in ensuring that they're going to be alive.

Typically, the mark is 72 hours,

so after 72 hours have passed,

chances of finding someone alive are significantly lower.

His wife and kids, they would've been frantic

about where could he be? There had been no communication.

They couldn't get him on the phone

and now they're really afraid

that maybe something terrible has happened

and he could be dead.

The first thing that confronts investigators

is, essentially, the size of the incident scene.

A huge lake surrounded by trees,

a vast area to search that would take a very long time.

Normally, when we get out to these events,

we're actually looking at things:

we're looking at blood

and we're looking at forced entry, etc, so we have a scene to look at.

In this particular case, there was no scene to look at.

If he's in a kayak, he might have launched it from a jetty,

so if there's a jetty, they might go there first

to see if there's anything there...

...where he might have parked his vehicle...

...but eventually, in this case, they were confronted by the fact

that they would have to search the whole lake.

The Sheriff's office is continuing to search the water

for a missing kayaker on Big Green Lake.

Initially, the investigators

are going to be looking around the edges of the lake where he was,

to see if maybe he's washed up

or he's found some kind of shelter somewhere

and just doesn't have a way to let anybody know.

They're going to see if they can find any witnesses.

They want to know from the wife,

does he frequently go off by himself in a kayak?

Is he a... experienced kayaker?

What were his plans? Was he going to camp out?

Because kayaks turn over.

They end up finding his kayak and his phone

and some of his belongings

and, you know, even though the police did track down these things,

um, there's no body,

so the idea that Ryan had drowned and died in this lake

was just a really terrifying thought for the community.

The fact that they find these items

moves it from just a missing person's inquiry

into, "Was this an accidental drowning,

or was there some external forces involved?"

Maybe the kayak overturned, he hit his head

and can't remember who he is.

So there'll be all kinds of scenarios that'll play out

and then try to follow up with an investigation.

Once the news came out

within the community that Ryan was missing,

everyone was on high alert,

because the community was so close.

Everyone wanted to pitch in and help looking for him.

The last location that his phone had been in,

because his phone had tracking software on it,

was right in the middle of the lake

and that was the last-known location he was seen in,

so that was particularly frightening to his family.

The police make a decision to bring in specialists

who have the right equipment to do this.

Most police agencies, they have limited resources.

I mean, they can't send the entire department out to look.

They have to rely on volunteer groups that are out there

that do this on a routine basis.

If he has gone over and he's drowned

and the body's down there,

they need to be able to handle the body in a particular way,

cos bodies in water, when they're brought to the surface

can start to change,

and so they absolutely need specialists

in underwater search and rescue.

So the police decide to bring in Bruce's Legacy,

which is a nonprofit organisation that, you know,

specialises in helping locate missing people.

My brother Bruce was on the Fire Department

as a firefighter EMT volunteer

and, in August of 1995,

they got a pay job for a drowning

and it was a missing canoer.

So when they got there,

they were gonna work upstream in the creek.

They're just walking up

and feeling around the trees and stumps with their feet

to see if they could find the guy.

What happened was, they got deep enough,

so now they lost their footing, all three of them,

and the water hydraulics sucked them upstream.

The current would release one.

The firefighters grabbed them and started CPR on them

and... yeah, that was my brother.

It was the next morning that the family

had to make that decision

to pull him off life support.

They tested him and he was brain dead.

That same year, we started Bruce's Legacy.

My goal when I started this is,

I wanted to be able to offer this service to the families

without charging them.

Bruce's Legacy have a lot of resources. They do a good job,

so you're figuring, at some stage,

Ryan Borgwardt is going to be found.

When this case came up,

I got a call on a Monday morning

from Sheriff Podoll from Green Lake County.

He had told me of the situation they had.

He had indicated that the wife

had "360 app" data - you know, where he was out on the lake.

It appeared that he was in the middle of the lake.

That's where this tracking device

would suggest he was.

My first actions, honestly, were,

"This will be an easy search."

I was here the year before

and did a successful search within a day

and I know the lake bottom is... it's a pretty clean lake.

My first initial thought was that, you know,

"This will be a one-day search. I'll be in and out of there."

There is evidence that perhaps he had an accident,

he drowned...

or maybe there's other unexplained or suspicious circumstances.

Well, the process of when we first arrive

is to set up a four-point search area.

We have a four-foot-long torpedo-type sonar

and that needs to be towed approximately 15ft off the bottom.

Requires the sonar data,

brings it up into a computer monitor

that I sit in front of

and it shows me everything that's on the bottom.

I have autopilot in my boat, so once I line up,

I can drive a straight line.

I don't know, some people call "mowing the grass".

We just keep working our way across that search area.

Once those 72 hours had passed,

Ryan's family was pretty devastated,

just knowing that he was still missing.

They had very little clues as to where he could be.

There was truly nothing that indicated where he could be found.

They started to get really worried.

Your training

and just experiencing these sort of cases tell you

that the longer this goes on,

the... ..the outcome is not gonna be a good one.

There's a lot of pressure and when we come in on these, you know,

the families don't even know about us, and things like that,

and they read everything on the news and stuff about us.

If they Google us, then they get all excited,

cos they only hear about the ones we recover.

You know, with this case, you know,

I felt really confident that we'd find him fairly quick.

It's very difficult for a family

when their father is missing like that,

because they're kind of, in a sense, in a grieving purgatory.

They don't quite know yet if they should be grieving,

cos they're holding out hope that he's still alive,

so that's such a difficult space to be in

as a spouse,

but also as children, especially,

keeping everyone together,

having to go about their lives...

It was just so difficult for all of them.

There comes a time when everyone realises

that this is not going to be a rescue.

Now it's going to be a recovery

and you have to be honest with the family and let them know,

but by this point, the family already knows

that something like this is going to be a possibility.

You understand this is a family man

with a wife, three children.

People are really not feeling good about this situation.

The community is really sad.

The Sheriff's office did a fantastic job

of keeping the local media up to date.

You're starting to think, maybe worst-case scenario,

at some point they are going to find him

and your reports are gonna move

from a missing kayaker to unfortunately...

maybe you're gonna have to write about a deceased kayaker.

From the public's point of view,

from the community's point of view

looking in, you know, they're just seeing this missing persons case

that, you know, Ryan has, tragically, probably passed away

and the family, you know, isn't able to move on

and is having a tough time coping.

They have no idea that he could potentially still be alive.

There was two cellphone-tower lights on the lake

and we knew that Ryan was parked

by one of them, OK? And so...

why wouldn't he swim to the closest shore?

There's houses over there, you know? Why didn't he swim that way?

So I asked the Sheriff's department, I said,

"We need to do a test."

So he took a couple of deputies in a boat, at night

and did a test

to go out there and find out what it's like to be

at dark, roll over,

fall into the water, come up

and then try to figure out where you're at.

And he told me that, yeah, their deputy said

that it was extremely difficult to get oriented.

The thing, though, that was interesting about that test was,

is those two red lights.

Those two tower lights...

Those stood out.

So we wondered if Ryan had focused on the wrong light.

The one light would have took him towards his car in the shallow water

and the other light would have taken him a mile across all the way,

in the 200-and-some feet of water, all the way across.

This was later part of the summer, early fall,

so the water's very warm - probably in the 70s.

So in warm water,

the body will typically process gas

and the gas will form in our bodies

and that's what lightens our body up

to allow us to float to the surface.

So we figured it, you know:

certainly within four, five days, at the most,

he would have came to the surface,

if he was in the weeds where we couldn't see him.

I wasn't ready to give up on the case,

because I just felt he was there and it's just a matter of...

He must be laying up against something

or he's not jumping out like he should.

Every day that the search goes on,

for me, I'm doubting myself: "God, did I miss this guy?"

The days were going on.

I wondered if I was losing my touch, I guess...

...because I just couldn't find him, and I should've.

The worst thing I have to deal with

is when I have to tell a family member I can't find them.

You know, that's always the toughest.

Just the phone conversations that I have

are enough to rip you apart.

There sometimes comes a point in an investigation

where you're working on a hypothesis

and it almost becomes a belief,

and the possible belief in this one

is that Ryan is in this lake...

...but sometimes you are confronted with evidence

that requires you to kinda really step back

and realise that that might not be true...

...and when this lake was systematically searched

and it was carefully and properly searched

and established that he was not in the lake,

then you immediately have to think

about what the other possible explanations are

and that's when you begin a phase

of a different kind of operation,

because it doesn't sound like a missing person's inquiry

any more. It sounds something more complicated than that.

The story of the missing kayaker from Watertown

gaining global attention.

Ryan Borgwardt's wife and children are still here

waiting for word on where he is.

In this case, it's the rescue organisation

that finally came forward to the Sheriff

and said, "This is unusual. We've never had this.

We're not seeing him in any of our sonars.

We're not seeing him in any of our dredges, or anything like that.

It's... it's unusual."

It wasn't until Day 19 and 20,

when one of the detectives that was working the case,

very much involved,

he was driving my boat.

I remember him and I got into a pretty good conversation

about what he's been finding and, you know, just nothing.

He's not finding anything out there.

He could see what we were doing.

He could see, you know, that we were not missing anything.

He could see we were seeing twigs and branches down there

and if we could see twigs and branches,

certainly we could see a body.

So on that last couple of days,

we got into the conversation about, you know, "Guys, what...

you know, what's the possibilities of this guy not being here?

I mean, he should have...

we should have found him."

And they all agreed to that.

At the end of the 20th day,

the Sheriff, as he always did,

met me at the gas station

and that's when we talked

and I said, "Mark, I just... I think you gotta look elsewhere."

I says, "You guys need to look into this, guys,

make sure he's not drinking margaritas in Mexico,

cos I just can't believe this guy, that we haven't found him."

They're the ones that have the expertise,

so now you have to say, "Well, wait a minute.

Where could he have been?" Or, "Where could he be?"

We do not know where he is.

We know that he's not in our lake,

but there's a family that wants their daddy back.

What that provoked them to do

is to send a couple of deputies to the family

and they interviewed the family members.

The evidence they came back with,

they told me, they said, "Man, this all it looks legit."

They can't see any issues

that would, you know, tell them any different,

and so we thought, "Well, OK, we just gotta keep working on it."

The investigation shifts drastically

from looking for him to looking AT him

as a suspect in his own disappearance.

Once their theory

that Ryan could actually still be alive

started to get some legs,

the police quietly opened an investigation to try and find him.

To me, when I look at this,

all the signs of staging is there.

What we saw is what he was trying to establish,

and that is that, "Boom! Here's my stuff. I'm in the lake.

You should believe I drowned myself or I was drowned."

First of all,

it's an accident. An accident is one of the top four themes

used to stage a homicide,

but in this particular case, it's not a homicide,

but it's still a staged scene. Top four - accident.

The public was not made aware

that the police suspected.

On the outside, all the public knows

is that he's still missing,

while, behind the scenes,

the police know what they're looking for

and they're going in a completely different direction.

The reason they would do something like that

is, it's very important to protect the integrity of the investigation,

so as not to tip him off

and let him know that he's being looked for.

If it was me, I would be interested:

does he have a computer?

Does he have any Internet access?

I would wanna look and see if he's been looking for something.

Has he been communicating with somebody else?

Because he's certainly not in the lake.

I can't remember how many days it was,

but I did the usual. I got a hold of Mark and said,

"Hey, Mark," I said, "you know, I got some time coming up here.

I could come over such-and-such a day,"

you know, through a text, and it was in that text that he said,

"Why don't you hold off for now?"

And... and I was, like, "Bingo!"

I says, "They did find something."

He said that they had some information

that they were gonna share with the family.

He says, you know, "We want you here for that,"

and I thought, "Oh, boy, what the heck is this now?"

Having eliminated the fact that his body is in the lake,

the obvious thing to do is go back

and look at this individual

and see what their life was like

and the sort of things that might be relevant here are

whether the person was in debt

or there is domestic abuse,

or his work colleagues think he was a thief,

and all of these begin to link into... Now, of course,

none of these things might be uncovered

and you might find out a perfectly kind of normal family,

but often you uncover secrets

that are not well known.

So they would look for any ties that he has

to people in different countries,

to people in different states...

...and also they look into a motive of,

"What kind of a benefit would it be to him

to fake his own death and go away?"

So as they start looking into Ryan's personal life,

they come upon the fact that he has thousands of dollars in debt

and they start to piece together, you know,

"Maybe he did have a reason to disappear.

Maybe there was kind of a motive for him

to want to escape his current life."

That was the first time that I'd met Emily in person.

I met his two sisters, a brother, his parents...

We kinda briefly talked outside the Sheriff's office.

Went inside for this briefing - you know, how the search was going.

What I think the family was expecting is to get an update

and they had no clue what they were stepping into.

He took photos of his passport.

We found out that he moved funds to a foreign bank.

Changing his email, he took out

a $375,000 life-insurance policy in January

and he purchased airline cards

in communication with a woman

in Uzbekistan.

Brian had thousands of dollars of credit-card debt

that he had hidden from his family.

He had taken out a life-insurance policy on himself

and he had also transferred funds

into a foreign bank.

All of these things leading up, one on top of the other,

point to... this man faked his own death,

and then the question becomes, "Why?"

People who would want to put an end to the life they have

and start something new somewhere else, or with someone else,

typically, it's about financial issues

or they just had it with the life they have.

It's not everything it was cracked up to be,

or they have a new relationship

and they just want to cut off the past

and move on with the next one.

As they're continuing their investigation,

they come upon some other pieces of the puzzle.

They find that

he applied to renew his passport

and he was flagged trying to cross the border in Canada.

Then the case becomes,

"How do they find him and how do they get in contact with him?"

In this instance, it appears

that Ryan had attempted to wipe his hard drive.

Now, it's not very easy to wipe a hard drive completely.

Deleting a file doesn't delete the file from the hard drive,

it just takes a link off it,

which makes it not possible to be found

with the computer's search engine.

That data is still there. It's quite easy to find,

if you know anything about computers.

Experts who know about this will,

when they wipe a hard drive, will wipe it multiple times

to make sure it is actually blank.

There was a folder that police were able to find, a deleted folder.

It was titled "Promise".

In that folder, they found numerous communications

between Ryan and a woman in another country

and that indicated that they were planning a life together.

Sometimes what happens when people get on social media

and they meet other people

and they develop this... this kind of imaginary relationship

with another person, and especially if they're in another country,

and that person kind of is a draw

and maybe makes promises: "Oh, yes,"

you know, "Come and... come and join me. We can be together,"

they start envisioning: "How could this work?

What would I need to do

to just stop living like this

and go off and live with that person?"

He even went as far as having a medical procedure

to have his vasectomy reversed

before this,

so it's very clear that he wants to start over in a new place.

It's extremely self-absorbed.

The person doesn't seem to understand

the impact they'll have on other people,

or does not care about the emotional toll it's going to take.

They're in it for themselves

and they just think they're entitled to it.

As they're trying to search for Ryan to get in touch with him,

they're going through emails,

through every piece of contact information

he could have possibly used

and, through that search,

they end up connected with a woman who speaks Russian

and they ask her about Ryan

and she is actually able to put them in touch with Ryan

and, at that point, they are absolutely gobsmacked

by the fact that Ryan is still alive

and here he is, living in a different country.

Ryan, if you're viewing this,

I plead that you contact us...

...or contact your family.

Well, the biggest clue is, he's talking to someone

in Eastern Europe. That's probably where he's at right now...

...and eventually, they'd got contact

with someone who purported to be

our missing husband,

so now it's a case of, "OK, now how do we determine

whether it's him?"

In order to really prove that it's him that they're talking to,

they ask Ryan to send them a video message with the date,

so that they can verify

that he is, in fact, still alive

and, once he does that, the news really sets in:

"Here he is. He's alive. Oh, my God."

I'm in my apartment.

I am...

...safe, secure. No problem.

Ryan's family woke up one morning, you know,

they woke up with the same sense of sadness and grieving

that their father, their husband, was gone,

that he was never going to be found,

that he was probably dead

and, hours later, the police come

and let them know, in fact, Ryan is alive

and he is starting a whole new life somewhere else.

We all went into this conference room

and we had the family, you know, probably 20 feet away

in one row of chairs all the way across the front of us,

not really knowing

what the information was they were going to get hit with.

That alone is a lot of pressure...

...and the Sheriff is going through

kind of a series of things of what's been going on

and then, at some point,

he told the family that Ryan, basically, staged his drowning

and they located him in a foreign country.

That news hit them like a bowling ball.

They couldn't imagine anything like this.

They never thought that he could do something like that to them.

It was a bombshell for everybody.

Holy BLEEP! This dirtbag

staged his death, you know that? That... God Almighty!

And then to sit there and look at the family,

seeing the responses on their faces...

They were hit with a bombshell. They had no clue.

That was tough. That was really tough.

When detectives break the news

to Ryan's wife and kids that he's alive

and he's in another country

and he's with another woman,

it's a devastating betrayal

and violation of the family trust

and it had to be horrifying for all of them

that their father and husband would do anything like this.

They would probably have tried to figure out,

"Why didn't we see the signs?

Why didn't we understand that he was so unhappy?"

They might have felt guilt that maybe they had driven him away.

It would have been emotionally devastating on a lot of levels.

You can only imagine the level of shock

that they're feeling when they hear this,

that... their father, their husband who they loved,

who they've known their whole lives,

is actually just living somewhere else - just left.

Just picked up and... and left them behind.

That's a horrible thing to have to comprehend.

Legally speaking,

he has deceived investigators.

He has obstructed an investigation

and he's also wasted an incredible amount of public resources.

So now it's up to the detectives

to convince him to come back and get all the stuff settled.

Police have to incentivise him somehow

to come back.

Ryan was already in another country,

knew he would not be extradited...

...and had he not ever come back to the United States,

he would have gotten away with this.

We got a press release.

We were told he came back on his own volition,

that he was, indeed, in custody

and you know that he has a court appearance then,

so everything moved quickly from that.

Whether it was guilty feelings

or talking to the detectives to come back,

he does come back to the United States.

When investigators finally talked to Ryan,

he seemed to have no sense of the chaos he'd created

and the grief

and the cost to law enforcement.

Even when he's finally caught,

he doesn't seem to understand, "Why is this any big deal?"

The only thing we could really charge him on

was a misdemeanour - "interfering with an officer".

There may have been a fraud with the insurance,

if his wife had filed, etc, like that.

There was an expense to the Sheriffs and to the rescue,

but, other than that, there's no really law that was violated.

But I think he should have had much stiffer charges

and I think there should have been more accountability.

The first factor is the seriousness of the offence.

To be clear, the defendant is NOT being sentenced

for faking his death.

That is not a crime in the State of Wisconsin.

He pleads guilty to the misdemeanour

and, essentially, he can go on with his life.

I deeply regret the actions that I did that night

and all the pain that I caused my family and friends.

Ryan did apologise and feel remorseful

for disappearing for those three months of time

and, you know, trying to fake his death...

...but does "sorry" really make up

for the grief and horror

that he put upon his entire family and the community

and all of those people that tried to search for him?

I don't think so.

Ryan was ultimately sentenced to 89 days in jail,

which was a symbolic, you know, sentencing,

because 89 days was the number of days

that the community and his family spent looking for him

and they were the days that he was missing.

Does 89 days in jail really make up

for all the pain he caused?

The sentence was not appropriate.

I think it was actually silly.

He cost the community financially and emotionally.

He should have been held accountable.

He spent a lot of time preparing, a lot of time staging

and did a pretty good job of it.

It's very possible that he could have gotten away with it,

had the police not continued on

and then gone back to his computer

and started doing that search when they realised something was wrong.

He plainly didn't foresee

how carefully the police would search the lake

and eventually come to the conclusion

that he was not in the lake,

nor did he realise that they could find evidence,

they could find data on his computer.

He still left gaps that could be found by investigators

and that's because he wouldn't have known these things.

It wasn't just his family

that was involved in searching for him.

It was the whole community.

It was so many people who were mourning his loss,

who were mourning for the family

and were highly affected by his disappearance.

The people who had volunteered to help,

who wanted to, you know, expend their time and resources

in any way they could to help find this man

would have felt horribly betrayed,

especially if they were friends with him.

It would have been really a devastating thing to experience.

Ryan wanted to be remembered

for the good things he had done in his life.

He didn't want these mistakes he had made

to mar his reputation,

so he really felt that faking his death was the way out.

That shows the kind of passion

he had for reinventing himself.

He had a goal. He had a mission

and that supplied the energy needed

to put this plan into place.

The premeditation

and well-thought-out staging of this scene,

it makes it seem even worse

than if he had just gone missing.

He definitely put everybody through hell.

Not only me, but his family, and he's gotta live with that now.

I think it really made for a story

that the international press could really jump onto.

You're focusing on a man returning home for his family,

but facing divorce proceedings.

I mean, he betrayed his wife.

He lied. He did this really childish, stupid thing.

Why would she want to be

with someone like that? It's not surprising.

For four months,

he inflicted the worst kind of pain

on those that were closest to him.

Not just his immediate family, but to his in-laws,

to his parents,

any of his siblings,

any of his cousins,

anybody else in his family

that would have been devastated for his loss.

They clearly don't want him

back in their family.

Things will never go back to what they were

and those relationships will forever be marred.

You can't take back those actions

and, you know, those relationships with his children

are affected for ever.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services