Authorities said they’re considering charging Ryan Borgwardt with obstruction after a costly investigation into his disappearance.
Sheriff Mark Podoll holds a news conference about Ryan Borgwardt, in Green Lake, Wis., Nov. 21, 2024.GREEN LAKE, Wis. — A Wisconsin man who faked his own drowning this summer so he could abandon his wife and three children has been communicating with authorities daily from Eastern Europe, even telling them how he did it, but has not committed to returning home, a sheriff said Thursday.
Borgwardt, wearing an orange T-shirt and not smiling, looked directly into the camera in the video, which appears to have been taken on his phone. Borgwardt said he was in his apartment and briefly panned the camera but mostly showed just a door and bare walls.Borgwardt told authorities he fled because of “personal matters,” the sheriff said. Podoll did not elaborate.
After leaving the lake, he rode an electric bike about 70 miles through the night to Madison, the sheriff said. From there, he took a bus to Detroit, then boarded a bus to Canada and got on a plane there, the sheriff said.The sheriff suggested Borgwardt could be charged with obstructing the investigation into his disappearance, but so far no counts have been filed. The sheriff’s office said the search for Borgwardt’s body, which lasted more than a month, cost at least $35,000.
Borgwardt’s disappearance was first investigated as a possible drowning after he went kayaking on Green Lake, about 100 miles northwest of Milwaukee, in August. But subsequent clues—including that he obtained a new passport three months before he disappeared—led investigators to speculate that he faked his death to meet up with a woman he had been communicating with in Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia.
Deputies located his vehicle and trailer near the lake. They also found his overturned kayak with a life jacket attached to it in an area where the lake’s waters run more than 200 feet deep. The search for his body went on for more than 50 days, with divers on several occasions exploring the lake. The laptop’s hard drive had been replaced and the browsers had been cleared the day Borgwardt disappeared, the sheriff’s office said. Investigators found passport photos, inquiries about moving money to foreign banks, and communication with a woman from Uzbekistan.
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