Law&Crime Sidebar - Missing Dad Faked Death To Be With New Lover: Cops

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Ryan Borgwardt was reported missing in August when his kayak was found floating without him in a Wisconsin lake. Now authorities believe the married father actually faked his own death to start a new romance. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber discusses the bizarre twist with former homicide detective Fil Waters.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Get 50% off of confidential background reports at https://www.truthfinder.com/lcsidebarHOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger and Christina FalconeScript Writing & Producing - Savannah Williamson & Juliana BattagliaGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. They felt that their dad was drowned. A day ago they found out that he wasn't. Brian, if you're viewing this, I please. that you contact us, there's a family that wants their daddy back. A Wisconsin father just vanishes after a fishing trip, suspected of drowning, and now he suspected of faking his own death. Yeah, I'm going to be speaking with a former homicide detective as we get to the bottom of this very strange case. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by law and

crime. Jesse Weber. I want you to picture this. 45-year-old Ryan Borgwart, husband, father of three, disappears. And he disappears during a kayaking trip on Wisconsin's Green Lake. This happened back in August. Police believe he drowned. I mean, his kayak was found overturned in the lake. He must have drowned.

He must have disappeared. Nobody found eerie. Sad. Tragic circumstances, right? Well, now, new evidence has emerged suggesting that he may have staged his own death and fled the country. Yeah. Now, why? Possibly to begin a new life with a new woman.

I am not making this up. This is a real story that is happening right now. Green Lake County Sheriff Mark Podall announced this shocking update in a press conference. Due to these discoveries of the new evidence, we were sure that Ryan was not in our lake now police uncovered a whole bunch of evidence that Borgwart was alive and that included suspicious activity online and before we even get to that

I want to get you up to speed on how we even got here so Ryan Borgwart reportedly left his family to embark on a solo fishing trip in August even texted his wife while he was supposed to be on the lake that he was coming back on shore. This was the night before. But after he didn't come home, his family then reported him missing on the morning of August 12th. So what happens? There's a massive search. A search turned up a bunch of boardworked's belongings near the lake. His kayak, his life jacket, tackle box, fishing pole, a water bottle. His car was also parked nearby. So naturally, his family and authorities immediately feared the worst. Many assumed he had drowned. Emergency services,

volunteers they began these search efforts to recover Ryan Borgwart's body but after weeks of searching no trace of him was ever found they come up and there is nothing we could find so we continued our search throughout and it continued through 54 days it was eight weeks I met with Keith from Bruce's legacy And he said to me, he said, sheriff, he says, I've done a lot of searches. And I can't find him. He said, we searched and we searched. So the search was eventually called off in October, and Ryan Borgwart was presumed to have died in a tragic kayaking accident.

You might think that's the end of the story, but no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Why? Because during the course of their investigation, authorities uncovered very troubling signs that perhaps Ryan Borgwart, His disappearance was no accident after all. I got my crew together, my three detectives and my chief deputy and myself. We met and we talked and we said we got to go a different direction. And they did. The direction we went was offline and we found out that his name was run.

on august thirteenth wow yeah that was something we didn't expect so the day after he's reported missing authorities discover that his passport was run by canadian border officials so that suggests that he may have crossed into canada right after he disappeared by the way we also checked out ryan borgwart

on truth finder it's a powerful background checker that we often use when researching our stories and revealed some information like possible addresses possible family connections but it seems that Mr. Borgward has no criminal history. But I tell you what, long crime. We partner with TruthFinder. We use it to get details on the people involved in the stories we cover. But even if you don't work in true crime, what's amazing about this is it is an excellent resource to give you some peace of mind.

Why? It's one of the largest public record search services in the United States. And with a paid subscription service, right now you can get access to unlimited reports about almost anyone. So if you're interested, you can get 50% off of your first month of confidential background. of confidential background reports. You just got to go to truthfinder.com slash LC sidebar. So there's a lot more to get into with this. But before even do that, I have to bring on a special guest to break all this down,

retired homicide detective Phil Waters, who is, you know, I would say no stranger to the show, but we haven't seen him in quite some time. He has been on a long vacation, enjoying his time, his retired time, as he should. You know how I know you haven't seen you in such a long time? You said, oh, what a new set. That's how long it's been since we haven't had you on. Yeah, it's great to be back with you, Jesse. And yeah, I am impressed.

You've got your law library all set up behind you there. So read every book. Read every book. I'm very proud of that. No doubt. No doubt. So before we can get into the specifics of this case, have you ever worked on a case before where someone faked their own death, allegedly fake their own death?

I have not. That's an anomaly, you know, I think in investigations when you have somebody that goes out there does this. And we hear about these kinds of cases. I mean, this is not the first one where somebody has done this, but I have not. I've worked those missing person cases that were transferred into homicide because they were suspicious. They turned out to be homicides at the end of them. But I've not had one that has set up the fake murder, the fake death. We're going to get into a lot of these details, but what do you make of this initial investigation into his disappearance when police first believe, you know, he was likely dead at the bottom

of the lake, easy to presume based on what they found there, right? Well, sure. And you go with where the evidence leads you. That's exactly what happens here. I give a lot of credit, a lot of kudos to that agency that got into what they thought of someone who had overturned in the lake there and presumably were dead based on the evidence that they had in front of them. And then as they progressed to the investigation, the evidence leads them to a staged scene. And they've done their due diligence to dive into it and start to track this guy and find out where his footprints have led them to. So, you know, good work on the part of that agency.

So let's get into this. After authorities discovered that his passport was run by Canada, the police, they dig deeper into his digital footprint, only to discover that he apparently tried to cover. his tracks. A digital forensic analyst of a laptop that we were given through the wife searching that the disappearance that we have found that he was in some place in Europe. Through that forensic analyst, we recovered that he replaced his hard drive on the laptop. He cleared the browser on the day of his disappearance. He sank the laptop into the cloud on August 11th.

Yeah. Now despite those perceived efforts to wipe his computer, investigators, they were still able to uncover some pretty shocking evidence of alleged plans for what seems to be an overseas escape. And before we even get to that, I want to take you through this, Phil, because when we're talking about searching through someone's computer, what are some of the ways in which you go about uncovering things on that digital device? Or maybe, you know, it's an iPad or their cell phone. That's a wealth of information. How do you go about searching those kinds of pieces of evidence? Well, at HPD, we had great resources.

We had a forensic digital lab that those things go to those people. And even now, in my business now, I have some folks that are first and experienced in that part of extracting that type of information from the digital devices. But these folks that think that they can wipe off the footprints that they leave on these digital devices, laptops, iPads, iPhone, so forth and so on, they're really misinformed. There's a way to get into those devices that get deep, deep into them. And a lot of the information they think that they've scrubbed and be retrieved. So even if you scrub, which seems to be the allegation here, you scrub your entire search. history that can be recovered oh yes that and that's that's just a minimal i mean you know these efforts that are made to try to cover up and and disappear these things that you're

searching for i i tell you it's just if you if you're doing it if you're putting it on that device it's going to be captured somewhere yeah and it just takes somebody that's uh It knows what they're doing to get into it, mind it. And I think the bigger thing is if you, if they can show that he scrubbed the searchist or scrubbed it at a certain period of time, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever he scrubbed is one thing. The act of scrubbing or the act of deleting right before he disappears, that's evidence of enough that something's up. So going back to the evidence that was uncovered from this laptop, though, take a listen to what investigators found. He took photos of his passport. We found out that he moved funds to a foreign bank, changing his email, and communication with a woman in Uzbekistan.

He took out a $375,000 life insurance policy in January, and he purchased airline cards. Changing email addresses linked to his bank accounts, trying to move funds into foreign bank. accounts, taking out a life insurance policy months before, and these communications with a mysterious woman from Uzbekistan? Phil, what do you make of that? Well, obviously, he has been captured by the emails that I think probably all of us get in our spam about women in Russia, women in Uzbekistan, women where Ukraine. You know, wanting to be your wife and those kinds of things. And this guy, for whatever reason, has decided to respond to this.

I'm, you know, you look at his family and a beautiful family. And he's got kids that are not understanding what happened here. So we're not talking about a bunch of toddlers or infants. These are, these are kids that look like they're anyway from ages 12 to 15, 16 years old. So, and his wife, I just, uh, it. It always puzzles me, amazes me, astonishes me when somebody like this gets obsessed with whoever it is that he's met online through one of these websites. And now he has compromised his entire life to fulfill this need that he thinks he has. I don't know if he met her.

I mean, I don't know for sure if he met this person online on a chat. Maybe you saw something I didn't. But I think the idea of all of these transactions and all of these acts taken in advance of it is. so suspicious. But I got to tell you, I mean, I feel, I feel terrible for the family. We'll get to that. But I don't even understand how he got away. What do I mean by that? He left his belongings at the lake. You know, police found his kayak. They find his car. How is he able to get to Europe? I mean, that's the part. Do you have a theory about how he might have been able to, taking the allegations is true, stage the scene, get all this money out and make his way to Europe.

without his family clearing, clearly knowing, or anyone else seeing it, or maybe they're getting to gather information about his travel plans. But how did he do it? How did he leave that lake and go to, uh, and go to Europe? Well, it's the cover up, right? It's always sometimes worse than the actual act. So he, he planned it. Well, my sense is, is that he's an organized individual who has an understanding of how to do what he did he's very very proficient in setting all of this up so in terms of going into Canada he's obviously got some sort of transportation I mean for all we know he may have been hitchhiker I mean who knows how he got to the border and he got across the border but my sense is is that whenever he has

purpose of going to Canada was to fly out of Canada to get to Uzbekistan. So he's trying to cover his travel footprints. And, you know, the problem is in the world we live in, when you put your card down or you purchase something, you do something where you're in a travel aspect of things and almost everything, there's some sort of registry somewhere that you've made this purchase. So it's going to be very tough for him to hide those kinds of things. He's paying cash for everything. That's true. That's true.

And we don't know exactly where he is. They say he's in, they might believe he's in Eastern Europe somewhere. I do think it's fascinating. He takes out this life insurance policy, $375,000 in January, buys an airline gift card. Not only, I mean, I think that suggests pre-planning, but how do you keep it from your wife? How do you keep it from your family? Oh, God. Well, again, the guy seems to be a.

planner. And he has done the things he needs to do. So all he has to do is put on a facade and nothing has changed and just go out and he's got a plan, start to put those steps in place. And then when you pull the trigger on this kind of an operation, flip the kayak, do all these things to set this stage, you've already got your travel plans are already in place. And And the fact that he's been able to pull this off without the wife. I would be curious to interview the wife to see if she had, if she had any suspicions that something, something was going on. Something had changed in just his countenance.

These types of things, unless he's just a really, really good pathological guess, or this types of things are hard to cover up from those that are closest to you. What happens now, in the sense, investigators, they're now focusing their efforts internationally. They believe that he's somewhere in Europe. What is that interaction like with international authorities? Because they don't even know what country he's in. What goes, what's the next step? Well, I think they'll be able to certainly trace his steps based on whatever the travel plans that he put it in place.

So I would imagine that at some point, and it's early on into this. I would imagine that they're going to be able to, if they've got him traced to the border, pick up where he went into Canada, and then, you know, it's just a matter of finding those affirmative links to where he has gone to and how he got there. But I think they're on that. The problem is something like this is first they're going to have to determine what kind of a crime has he committed, you know, what a false report, you know, that kind of thing. Well, if he didn't, if he didn't, yeah, he didn't like, he didn't, as far as we can tell, provide a false report to police, maybe forgery, maybe hacking, maybe, I mean, let me a phrase, usually in these kinds of cases when we see it, we see things of false reporting to police, forgery, hacking into an electronic device, theft, embezzlement, identity theft, you know, perhaps here, I don't know if any of that applies, but perhaps here, he had reported his passport lost or stole.

stolen, but his family said, we found it. We found his original one pretty easily. And also, I guess if anybody helped him try to do this, I don't know if it's necessarily a crime to leave your family like this. Well, it's certainly on a moral level. It's a moral crime. Yeah, it's terrible, right? But again, in fact, I was watching the sheriff and he was talking about, they're trying to figure out what's he done that that would cause them. to pursue him and the one thing that he has done that he caused a lot of resources to be spent in trying to find his body and the response to the fact that he was in that lake and so forth so on so I don't know if there's a if

there's a law that can be used that that he in some way defrauded the county out of resources. I just don't know. So I think the Sheriff's Department, they're looking into it. I mean, it's like, yeah, my first one I read the article was what, what crime is he committed? Yeah, because it's not like he called 911 and said, it's not like he called 911 and said, oh, there's a case of a missing person or a case of a drowning. He just picked up and left.

And that in and of itself is not a crime. There are crimes, as I mentioned, that could be connected to it or certain actions that you take. But I have to ask you, you mentioned before, we're talking about all the evidence as family we have to think about. And Borgwart's wife, Emily, and their three children, you know, the idea of first having to try to accept that he might have died, now having to feel with this new, cope with this new reality that he might have just abandoned them. It's interesting because just weeks before his disappearance, he and his wife, they celebrated their 22nd wedding anniversary. And she told NBC News through a text messages, I cannot make any comments at this time

since it's still an active investigation. If you were a part of this investigation team, what would you tell that family, Phil? Well, I don't think it's anything that I would tell them. I think it would be the questions that I would be asking. I mean, they want answers. I would want answers to find out what was going on prior to this thing and how did this, how did this manifest itself into this type and of an event i am curious about the fact that he got an insurance policy for 350 grand so i'm curious about 375 375 so uh i'm i'm interested to find out whose name is on the policy i'm assuming it is his name who's the beneficiary on the policy and did he orchestrate that because he thought it was going to get paid off

because he was dead and that it's going to be funneled into some account that he set up. I mean, I'm very, very curious about the insurance policy. Now, Phil, the sheriff actually said this, Sheriff Podall. He said, Ryan, if you're viewing this, I plead that you contact us or contact your family. We understand that things can happen, but there's a family that wants their daddy back. And if anybody out there has any information, they are encouraged to contact the Green Lake County Sheriff's Office at 920-294. 4134 extension 1162, this is now not only a crime, not a crime, this is not only a situation here in the United States, it's now moved abroad.

What are the chances that someone will have information and contact the appropriate authorities? What do you think, Phil? Well, I'll be interested to see the reaction if this person in Uzbekistan is out. actually a person who exists that would be the that may be a big wake-up call here when he gets to wherever he's going and he finds out it's not you know slovania from Uzbekistan it's bruno from russia and uh you know when we don't and we don't know how many how many uh you know how much cash he's got with him i mean we don't know what the setup here is this is almost like these scams that used to be run on the internet where you know send me uh you know a

billion dollars and i'm a prince in my country and you've got a million i've got two million dollars that i will send you if you'll deposit it for blah blah blah so there's no telling what what i am curious to what started this thing what yeah yeah an email and online you know something but i am curious to see if if when he gets to where he's going that if it's what he envisioned it to be. Imagine he just shows back up and he was like, sorry, made a mistake. I don't know. This is not to make light of it because it is a sad situation for the family.

And what a shocking situation nonetheless. But we'll keep an eye out, see what happens. Phil Waters, good seeing you. Thanks so much for coming back here on Sidebar. Anytime, Jesse. You got it, brother. All right, everybody. That's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar.

Thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. Speak to you next time.