A Wisconsin man who faked his death in August and fled to eastern Europe, apparently to be with a woman, has been in contact with authorities but is so far refusing to come back to the United States.
Ryan Borgwardt, 44, doesn’t yet face any charges for his elaborate and months-in-the-making scheme to flee his family, but he could face local obstruction charges and be forced to pay restitution for an expensive search after he was reported missing while on a kayaking trip, KARE reported. He may also face federal charges, since he fled from Wisconsin to Michigan and then into Canada before catching a flight to Europe.
Green Lake County Sheriff Mark Podoll said on Thursday that Borgwardt happily explained his entire plot and provided a video to prove he was still alive.
“He stashed an e-bike near the boat launch,” Podoll said. “He paddled his kayak and a child-sized floating boat out into the lake; he overturned the kayak and dumped his phone in the lake, paddled the boat to shore and got on his e-bike and rode through the night to Madison [Wisconsin].”
From Madison, Podoll said, the hoaxter took a bus to Detroit and then crossed into Canada.
Borgwardt was reported missing on August 12 when he didn’t come home from a fishing trip. Searchers found truck, his overturned kayak, and a tackle box with his keys and identification inside in the course of an extensive search of the area around Green Lake, as CrimeOnline reported.
But then, in October, the investigation took a sharp turn when border officials said that Borgwardt’s passport had been scanned at the Canadian border the day after he was reported missing.
A forensic examination of a laptop found that he had replaced the hard drive and cleared his browsers on the day he disappeared and had manually synced the laptop with the cloud the day before. They also found he moved funds to foreign banks and changed the emails associated with all his financial accounts on the day he disappeared.
Futher discoveries include communications with a woman from Uzbekistan, a new $375,000 life insurance policy, and the purchase of airline gift cards. Since he isn’t dead, that life insurance policy won’t help the family he abandoned.
Podoll said that investigators tracked Borgwardt through a trail of electronic evidence and eventually got to him through a Russian-speaking woman who is traveling with him.
“We are expressing the importance of his decision to return home and clean up the mess that he has created,” Podoll said. “Primary concern is that he safely gets back to U.S. soil.”
So far, Borgwardt shows no signs of any intention of coming back to his wife and children in Wisconsin, Podoll said. He has not spoken with them since he abandoned them, and Podoll said Borgwardt appears to believe he did the right thing. Investigators are still communicating with him, the sheriff said, declining to provide any details of those conversations.
Podoll said investigators don’t know exactly where Borgwardt is but believe he is in eastern Europe, likely Uzbekistan, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States, according to the Fond du Lac Reporter.
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[Featured image: Ryan Borgwardt/Green Lake County Sheriff’s Office]
