Kayaker Faked His Death To Ditch His Family For Life In Europe, Cops Say

I get it: we all want to escape sometimes. But faking your own death to abandon your family for another country? That’s perhaps going a bit too far.

A Wisconsin man allegedly did just that. According to police, Ryan Borgwardt of Watertown faked his own drowning over the summer so he could flee to Europe. Since his disappearance in August, authorities and family members of Borgwardt assumed he had gone missing while kayaking on Green Lake. Ultimately, they ruled that he had likely drowned. 

Borgwardt even texted his wife at 10:49 p.m. on August 11, stating that he was headed back to shore. From there, he seemingly staged his own death by abandoning his vehicle, his overturned kayak, and a fishing rod.

While police searched for his body for over 50 days, they never found it. Now, it’s pretty clear why that was the case.

Green Lake County Sheriff Mark Podell recently revealed that Canadian law enforcement authorities ran Borgwardt’s passport just one day after he went “missing.” Earlier that spring, the Wisconsin man reported his original passport as lost or stolen before obtaining a new one.

From there, police began further investigating the incident—eventually learning that Borgwardt planned to flee to Europe and attempted to mislead authorities. In fact, he even took out a $375,000 life insurance policy in January.

“At this time we believe that Ryan is alive and likely in Eastern Europe,” Podell said in a news release.

While it isn’t clear why, exactly, Borgwardt fled the country, he was reportedly communicating with a woman from Uzbekistan before his disappearance. Podell intends to dig deeper into the situation with federal and international law enforcement.

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