Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He's Supposed To Be Dead // THe Ryan Borgwardt Story

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Wisconsin kayaker who faked his death and fled overseas says plan was a 'crazy, emotional dream' Ryan Borgwardt left his family behind in an attempt to meet a Ukrainian woman he had secretly been courting online in the country of Georgia.

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Why don't people just get a divorce? Like, why are people out here committing all kinds of crimes just to get out of a marriage? For example, this guy, Ryan. And Ryan is 43 when the story starts and he's living in Watertown, Wisconsin, and life isn't going so well for him right now. He's over $200,000 in debt.

And on top of that, he's been married for 22 years, but he's no longer happy with his wife. wife. It's just not working out. Plus, he feels like his own three kids no longer want anything to do with him. So one day in 2023, he starts looking for something to spice up his life. And that is when he joins an international dating site where he can meet foreign women abroad. And there he matches with this woman, Katya. And Katya is a Ukrainian woman living in the country of Georgia. And so they match and Ryan thinks she got a fine and she's into him too and they hit it off and they start chatting and soon they're communicating as often as they can and of course they end up falling in love

and they start talking about finally meeting in person so that they can be together now at this point ryan could you know just divorce his wife like a normal person and go be with katia it's perfectly legal no one's going to stop him but for whatever reason he decides he not going to go that route. He decides he'd rather abandon his whole family and just disappear completely. And the best way to do that is by faking his own death. But see, Ryan, he's not a total asshole. I mean, he's not a monster. He wants to make sure that before he disappears, his family will be financially taken care of. So he goes and he takes out a $375,000 life insurance policy on himself. Then once that's done, he gets on his laptop and he starts doing research.

And he Googles things like how to successfully disappear and how to fake a drowning. And he takes note of some of this information. And from there, he comes up with the perfect plan. His plan is to stage his death during a kayaking trip. That way, it'll look like he drowned. And after that, he'll secretly make his way across the border to Canada, then he'll fly to Georgia to start his new life with Katya. So one night in 2024, he puts his plan into motion. He leaves his house without telling his wife or kids where he's going, and he travels about 50 miles over to a lake called Green Lake, which is one of the deepest lakes in Wisconsin, perfect place for someone to get lost. And when he gets to Green Lake, he sends his wife a text

saying he's gone on a kayaking fishing trip to see the northern lights and that he'll be haul him as soon as he's done. Then he paddles way out into the lake and once he's far enough from shore, he pulls out an inflatable raft that he brought with him and he inflates it. Then he climbs onto it and he tips his kayak over. After that, he throws his phone into the water so someone can eventually find it and he quietly paddles his raft to the shore. Then he walks over to where he hid an e-bike and he rides that e-bike nearly 70 miles until he reaches a bus stop in Madison. And from there, he takes a bus to Detroit and then into Canada and he travels all the way over to Toronto. And he eventually arrives at the airport there and he boards a flight to the country

of Georgia where I assume he meets up with Kacha. Meanwhile, back in Watertown, Ryan's wife wakes up in the morning and he's not there. So she's starts getting worried. I mean, he's been out all night, he hasn't come home, and he's not responding to her messages. So she's thinking something terrible must have happened to him. So she reports him missing to the police. And pretty quickly, the sheriff's office sends a team over to Green Lake, and first responders send rescue boats out, and they eventually discover Ryan's abandoned, overturned kayak floating adrift on the water, and they're like, oh, I guess he drowned. And they think his body must be on the bottom of the lake, and this is one of the deepest lakes in Wisconsin, so this search is going to be tough. So they launch a massive search to find this body, and they have dive teams underwater looking for him, and they got cadaver dogs combing around the shoreline, but there's no sign of Ryan.

And this story, it's all over the news, especially in this area around Wisconsin. I mean, everyone's looking for this guy. And about 54 days pass. And at this point, they've decided that they're never going to find him. So they officially call the search off. While Ryan, he's somewhere in Georgia, I guess, chilling with his new woman, Katja. So it's starting to look like he's going to get away with faking his own death. Welcome aboard via rail.

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Get a quote at bellairdirect.com. Until. After going so long without finding a body, police began wondering if he actually really did drown. So they shipped their mission from a physical recovery to a. a criminal background investigation, and they request a historical record of every time a law enforcement agency had run his name across a nine-state database. And that is when, boom, they get a hit. Ryan's passport had been scanned at the Canadian border just one day after he disappeared. So, thinking he might still be alive, they get search warrants for his electronic devices, but most importantly,

that laptop he was using. So his wife hands over his lap, laptop and police, they search it and they find a bunch of stuff in his cloud sync data, including searches on how to successfully disappear and how to fake a drowning, etc. And also they find his many, many communications with his girlfriend in Georgia, Kachya. So police piece all this together and they start thinking, not only did this Ryan guy abandon his own family, but it looks like he had been planning his disappearance for months.

Meanwhile, over in Georgia, I guess Katya has no idea that Ryan did any of this. I mean, to her, he didn't have a family back home. He's just a regular American man who fell in love with her online and moved to go be with her. I mean, she doesn't know he faked his own death. So police get her contact info, and they email her, pretending to be one of Ryan's friends, and they ask how he's doing. And Katya writes back that he's alive and he's doing fine. So now police finally know the truth.

He is alive. He's just kind of a shi-person who abandoned his family. While back home, his poor wife, she doesn't wait long. I mean, she files for divorce almost as soon as she learns that he faked his own death. Good for her. However, there's a problem with all this, though. Police, they can't really bust him because, you know, he's living overseas now. Not to mention that under Wisconsin state law, faking your own death,

or abandoning your family, those aren't technically crimes, believe it or not. But he does face an obstruction charge since he intentionally misled law enforcement. But that particular crime is just a misdemeanor and it isn't serious enough to qualify for extradition. So there's very little that police can do to force him to come back to Wisconsin. So police, they start emailing him daily, trying to talk him into it, telling him that his three kids deserve to see him because they deserve answers because, you know, they thought he was dead. And also, like, Christmas is coming, and what better Gip could you get your kids than to be there for Christmas? And also, like, if you come back, we won't involve Katja on any of this. And eventually, Ryan gives in, and he agrees, and he flies back to the United States to Wisconsin. And so, bam, he gets arrested. Here's his mugshot. And eventually, he pleads no contest to an obstruction charge, and he gets sentenced to 89. days in jail, which just happens to be the exact number of days.

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