On Friday, August 20 2010, officers from the Holmes County Sheriff's Department were called to Vortex Spring, a commercially operated dive park just outside the Florida town of Ponce de Leon. A 30-year-old scuba diver from Tennessee by the name of Ben McDaniel had failed to resurface after diving into the narrow cave network under the basin of the spring two nights earlier, and nobody had seen or heard from him since.
When a recovery mission failed to find any sign of Ben, his loved ones and members of the cave diving community were left in shock. Was Ben stuck in an unexplored part of the cave somewhere, or was something else entirely at play?
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Casefile Archives is a series of special bonus releases revisiting the earliest years of the show. The re-run episodes have been completely edited, polished, re-recorded and freshly produced from start to finish to match our current production standards. They are not complete rewrites - our goal wasn’t to alter the cases or reshape the writing, but to preserve the original storytelling while giving the production the refinement it didn’t have when we started the show back in 2016.
Where appropriate, updates have been added, but the core structure and storytelling remain faithful to the originals. Because of this, these re-releases may sound a little different to our recent episodes, but they allow us to bring some of the earliest episodes up to the technical quality listeners expect today.
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Narration – Anonymous Host
Research & writing – Elsha McGill
Production & music – Mike Migas
Audio editing – Anthony Telfer
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For all credits and sources, please visit https://casefilepodcast.com/casefile-archives-10-ben-mcdaniel
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