Mystery Grab Bag

There’s an old saying that if you hear hoofbeats, you should think horses, not zebras. It means that in most situations, the simplest, most likely explanation is probably the right one. But you know we deal in “stranger than fiction” here, folks, and sometimes you turn around expecting horses and you get a stampeding herd of zebras instead. Things are not always what they seem at first glance. And today, we’ll tell you two stories where digging down below the surface pulled investigators through the looking glass, and into the strangest cases they’d ever seen.

Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE

Source:
https://fox11online.com/news/local/man-accused-of-faking-his-own-death-to-face-another-status-conference-ryan-borgwardt-green-lake-county-kayak-europe-charges-obstruction-restitution-search-missing
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2025/06/04/another-status-conference-scheduled-wisconsin-man-accused-faking-his-death/
https://www.milwaukeemag.com/what-happened-to-the-kayaker-who-faked-his-drowning-in-green-lake/
https://spectrumnews1.com/wi/milwaukee/news/2024/11/21/ryan-borgwardt--wisconsin-kayaker--fake-death
Investigation Discovery's "Forensic Files" episode "Grave Danger"
NBC's "Dateline," episode "Bodies of Evidence"
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/man-burned-alive-no-limbs-33703446

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction. Or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
There's an old saying that if you hear hoof beats,
you should think horses, not zebras. It means that in
most situations, the simplest, most likely explanation is probably the
right one. But you know, we deal in stranger than
fiction here, folks, And sometimes you turn around expecting horses
and you get a stampeding herd of zebras instead. Things

(00:41):
are not always what they seem at first glance. And
today we'll tell you two stories. We're digging down below
the surface, pulled investigators through the looking glass and into
the strangest cases they'd ever seen. This is a mystery
grab bag. See if you can guess the theme case

(01:07):
One grave mistake. So campers for this one were in Leander, Texas,
just a short drive from Austin June eighteenth, two thousand
and four. The sky was showing the first signs of
dawn when the Burnett County Dispatch got a call about
a car on fire, though by the time the firefighters
got to it, you could hardly call it a car anymore.

(01:28):
It had gone off the road down a little hill
and crashed into a tree, and the fire had torched
it so badly it was basically just a smoldering, blackened shell.
The paint was burned off, the tires were melted to
the ground. The firefighters had seen car fires before, obviously,
but this one was different, way worse than any they'd
seen before. This thing was toast. They'd never seen anything

(01:50):
like it, and once they had the fire out and
were able to approach, they were horrified. The car was occupied,
a charred body still set in the remains of the
driver's seat, and that was about all you could tell
about it right then, that it was a human body.
There was obviously no hope of saving the driver, so
as the medical examiner got to work on an autopsy,

(02:12):
the investigators set about identifying the victim. Fortunately, there was
enough of the car left to figure out that it
was currently on loan to a young married couple named
Clayton and Mollie Daniels. Turned out, Mollie and Clay's mom
Laurie had been frantically trying to find him all night.
He'd never come home, which wasn't like him. He knew
Molly was going to need the car to get to work.

(02:35):
Laurie had called the police to report him missing not
long before the car fire was discovered. The body in
the car had been burned beyond recognition. You could barely
tell it was a body, but a few things had
survived the flames. A Harley Davidson pin, a silver necklace,
remnants of a pair of sneakers. Laurie and Mollie tearfully
identified the things as Clay's. I figured that Clayton had

(02:59):
been drinking at a party somewhere, or just driving fast
and lost control, Laurie said later. Clay and Mollie had
two young kids who were now without a father. But
to some people that was probably a good thing. Molly's mom,
for example, she'd never really thought of Clay as husband
or father material He's a loser, she told the show

(03:20):
Forensic Files. In the past, Clay had worked as a
car mechanic, but at the time of the crash he
was unemployed. He liked to think of himself as a
stay at home dad, but to the casual observer, it
looked more like he spent all day laysing around playing
video games while Molly busted her ass at work. Now,
he's a loser is a pretty common sentiment coming from
a mother in law, but interestingly enough, it wasn't just

(03:43):
coming from Molly's mom. In fact, it didn't take the
investigators long to figure out that Clay Daniels was probably
the least popular guy in Leander. Nobody liked the stude,
except possibly his mama and his wife. Obviously. His sister
in law told Dateline he'd always give or the he
be geebees. People said he had a temper you could
set off just by looking at him. Funny his best

(04:06):
friend got up at the funeral and called Clay an
asshole in front of God and everybody. Holy shit, right,
And he wasn't the only one where. Most funerals are
sad affairs, with grieving loved ones sharing their favorite memories
of the dead. Clay's funeral was full of people who'd
mostly just showed up to make sure he was dead.
Harsh but true. See, Clay had recently been convicted of

(04:28):
a disgusting crime, the sexual assault of a seven year
old girl when he was sixteen. Yeah, it had taken
the girl years to get up the courage to speak out,
but once she did, the courts moved pretty quickly. He'd
been put on the sex offenders registry and sentenced to
thirty days in prison, followed by ten years of probation.
Pathetic sentence. If you asked me, just give him the

(04:50):
ten years.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
For God's sakes, they always go light on these sentences,
and it's infuriating. She was seven, For God's sakes.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
I know. I can't fathom it, I really cannot. Anyway,
this opened up an intriguing line of inquiry for the
detectives investigating the car fire. There was a family out
there who justifiably must have had some serious rage against
Clay Daniels. They'd been vocal about how much they resented
his piddly thirty day sentence. They thought he should have

(05:21):
gone away for decades. It wasn't too much of a
leap to imagine them taking justice into their own hands,
ensuring that Daniels could never hurt another little girl. And
there were definitely some things about the crash that were
making the investigator's antennae twitch. One weird thing was that
there weren't any skid marks on the road where the
car had veered off down the embankment. Normally, you'd expect

(05:43):
to see that from the driver frantically trying to get
the car under control. So the fact that those marks
weren't there suggested that either the driver was passed out
asleep or having a medical episode, or the driver was
already dead. Was this really an accident or could it
have been a murder?

Speaker 3 (06:00):
In fact, when the medical examiner did the autopsy, they
discovered that Clay Daniels didn't have any smoke in his lungs,
suggesting that he'd stop breathing before the fire got underway.
The EMMY classified Clay's cause of death as undetermined. The
body was so badly burned that you couldn't tell much
at all. There was nothing to fingerprint, no teeth left

(06:23):
to compare against dental records. The entire body only weighed
twelve pounds. That's how charred it was.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Jesus Murphy, I mean, I've heard of that, but twelve
pounds is bananas. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Another notable thing was the amount of heat it takes
to do the kind of damage done to the body
and the car. This fire had burned much hotter than
an average car fire, so we're thinking accelerate right. But
preliminary testing didn't find any traces of gasoline or motor
oil or anything like that. The car's gas tank was
still intact. They planned to do more testing, but it

(06:58):
would take some time to get the results back. Meanwhile,
Molly Daniels was a mess. She told the police how
distraught Clay had been about his conviction and the fact
that he was going to be separated from her and
the kids for thirty days. He was dreading prison and
worried about what the other inmates might do to him
if they found out what he was in for. Oh

(07:19):
I know, sorry, mall, I mean similar similar sentiments over here.
Mollie didn't want to believe it, but she had to
admit it was possible that Clay could have taken his
own life. The good thing about the community and Leander
was they didn't hold Clay's sins against his widow and kids.
Mollie was younger than Clay. She was only twenty at

(07:41):
the time of his death, and her friends felt like
she'd fallen for the first guy who showed her attention.
I'm sure a lot of them were hoping she'd get
the hell out of there now that his dirty secret
was out. Much to Molly's relief, the town rallied around her,
bringing food and donating money to supplement her income. She
worked a receptionist for a construction company, and money was

(08:02):
always tight. Clay had a life insurance policy about one
hundred K, but it would take time to pay out.
When Molly put the word out that she desperately needed childcare,
a woman reached out to offer her babysitting services at
a big discount, despite the fact that she'd never even
met Molly or Clay. People felt bad for Mollie. First,

(08:23):
she'd been forced to confront her husband's horrific crime. Imagine
what that would be like finding out that your kid's
father did something like that. People recognized that what Clay
did wasn't her fault. She barely had time to process
his arrest and conviction to confront the fact that her
husband was a sex offender and now he was dead.
Her kids were heartbroken, especially the older one who was four.

(08:48):
But while the community seemed to feel nothing but sympathy
for Mollie. The investigators were beginning to feel something else entirely.
They couldn't help but notice that when they spoke to
Molly about her husband's death, she showed zero emotion. She
was as casual as if they were talking about a
minor fender bender, and she seemed to want to rush

(09:08):
the detectives along, like she wanted them to drop the investigation,
just rubber stampit accident or suicide and leave her alone.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
And then there was that one hundred thousand dollars life
insurance policy, and the results of those chemical tests on
the car which showed that the fire had started in
the driver's seat, helped along by lots and lots of
lighter fluid. Not to mention the rage a wife might
feel on finding out her husband had sexually abused a
child years earlier. Mollie was sweet, but her friends knew

(09:37):
she could turn on you fast if you got in
her way. She could bite your head off. To the detectives,
Mollie had motive oozing out of her pores. They weren't
the only ones who were surprised at how well Mollie
seemed to be handling Clay's death. Her boss and co
workers noticed too. She came back to work really quickly,
and her work didn't miss a beat, no dip in

(09:57):
quality at all. Some might say that showed real bravery
and strength under pressure. That was one way to look
at it, But there was another. About a month after
Clay's death, his sister Melissa came to visit Molly and
the kids. One morning. She popped her head into Molly's
bedroom looking for something and got the shock of her life.
The closet door was about half open and Melissa could

(10:19):
see a pair of men's legs sticking out of it.
She couldn't believe what she was seeing. There was a
man lying on the floor in there. As you can imagine,
Melissa was a tad startled by this. She ran to
Molly and said, there's a man asleep in your closet. No,
there's not, Mollie said, there is, I just saw him,
Melissa insisted. Molly was incredulous. She was like, look, let's

(10:41):
go in there and I'll show you there's nobody there.
Mollie was talking really loudly, almost yelling, and lo and
behold when they got to the bedroom, to Melissa's shock,
the guy was gone. All there was was a pair
of jeans and a pair of socks lying on the
floor in the approximate shape of a sleeping man's legs.
Do Melissa might have felt like a dufist, but she

(11:04):
probably shouldn't have, as Molly's babysitter, Jenna could have told her.
The first off thing Jenna noticed was Molly's four year
old son talking about his mom's new friend, Jake. Jake
was fun, he said, he liked to wrestle and watch
NASCAR races. Curious, Jenna asked Molly about Jake. Oh, he's
just a friend of the family, she said. But then

(11:25):
one morning, Molly's car wouldn't start. She and Jenna were
fiddling around trying to find a set of jumper cables,
and suddenly the bedroom door opened and out came a
dude wearing nothing but his boxers. He'd take care of it,
he said. Oh, Jenna thought that must be Jake, and
he was definitely more than a family friend. Molly's friends

(11:45):
suspected something was up too. Just a few weeks after
Clay's death, they'd taken her out for dinner and drinks
and she'd said, Hey, when do you think it's acceptable
for me to start dating again. Damn, Mollie. They thought
it hadn't even been a month. At some point, Oh wait,
Mollie must have realized the cat was gonna pop out
of the bag sooner or later, and she started telling
her friends and family about Jake. He was a truck driver,

(12:07):
she said, so he wasn't around a whole lot. He'd
been a really good friend of Clay's. Her mom and
sister were flabbergasted and worried. Well, her sister was worried.
Her mom was pissed. I didn't raise you like this,
She told Molly, you know better than to move on
this fast and introduce this man to your children. What
are you thinking? One afternoon, Molly's sister snuck a look

(12:28):
at her phone and found some intense texts from Jake
I love you's and everything. Damn. She thought, this is
moving at light speed, and it didn't seem to be
doing the kids any favors, especially the four year old boy.
Babysitter Jenna later said that not long after Jake came
into the picture, the little guy started acting out, pushing
and shoving other kids, trying to push one down the stairs,

(12:50):
trying to hurt the babysitter's pets peeing all over the
wall in her bathroom. This kid needs counseling, Jenna told
Mollie he's fine when he's at home. Molly said she
didn't seem even a little bit concerned, and she refused
to get the kid counseling until Jenni finally threatened to
cut off her babysitting services.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
Otherwise, all this was super suspicious, Detectives, and as their
investigation continued, they decided to put some surveillance on Mollie,
and one evening, they watched Mollie come out of her
house with a dude. Ah, so this is Jake. The
detective followed Molly's car, eventually turning into a Taco Bell

(13:29):
behind them. He parked at discreet distance away and gave
them a chance to go into the restaurant in order.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Then he went.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
Inside and sitting there at a table tucking into some
tacos Bell Grande, where Mollie and Clay Daniels. Oh. Sure,
his hair and beard were a lot darker than they
used to be. Clearly a crappy dye job, but it

(13:56):
was him. The detective walked up to the table, Hi, there, Clay,
He said, Oh shit, said Clay.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Oh my god, that is one hell of a shamal
on twist.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
It sure is.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
God.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
The detectives weren't actually surprised to see old Clay sitting there,
alive and well and snacking on tacos. See. Mollie had
been pressuring the hell out of the life insurance company
to pay out the one hundred k, but the Life
in Trance company wasn't going to greenlight a payment that
size without crossing all their t's and dotting all their eyes.
So just to be safe, they ordered a DNA test
on the body found in that burned out car. Clay's

(14:36):
mom provided a sample for comparison, and it took weeks
to get the results back, but when they did, the
verdict was clear. The body in the car was not
Clayton Daniels. They didn't know who it was, but they
knew it was a woman.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah. He couldn't really get any clearer than that, I could, y'all.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
We've seen some dipshit criminal on this show, Like remember
the lady who watched practical magic and decided to poison
her husband with some homeopathic belladonna. She got a whole
foods and then she told everybody on her street she
was gonna do it. She was pretty dumb. But this
guy takes home the prize if you ask her.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
I know, right, Like, on what planet can you just
dye your hair black and expect nobody to recognize you
at the Taco Tico in your hometown where you've lived
your entire life, and when everybody's been thinking about you
a lot anyway, because you're supposed to have just died
in a fiery car crash, Like, dude, come on, man, no, no,

(15:38):
I'm not Clay. My name is Jay. Yeah, that's it Jay.
I guess he was operating under the Clark Kent theory
that you know, you can just put on a pair
of glasses and nobody's gonna figure out your Superman. He
was putting a lot of faith in that box dye.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
The difference is is like, you know, it's like going
to work and thinking like the guy next to you
in the cubicles like a superhero. That's hilarious, right, But
like he's a pedophile loser who sits around and plays
video games all day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he is a

(16:21):
pedophile loser who continued to be a pedophile loser played
video games all day like it's it's yeah, there's no Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
He just goes into the phone booth and dyes his hair,
and he comes out exactly the.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
Same dude, exactly like like Clark Kent, like changed his
like demeanor, you know, at least like.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
God.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
So the detective took Clay into custody. Well, Molly melted
down in the middle of taco bell, screaming and swearing
and generally acting like a brady three year old aw puppy?
Did our master plan go tits up on us? What
a bummer? Someone needed a gentle parent, Molly. Curiously, God,

(17:07):
they arrested her too, by the way, for trying to
hinder Clay's arrest. Meanwhile, a search of the Daniels' house
turned up all kinds of juicy stuff in a folder
marked Mexico. Great job, guys. A plus stuff on changing
your identity IDs in the name of Jacob Greg Clay's

(17:29):
chosen new identity, fake school transcripts and credit reports. A
ton of Internet searches on Molly's computer, stuff like how
to fake a death and how to burn a body.
So there's nothing left my god.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah. They also found a half empty can of lighter fluid,
So go figure, these people are not the brightest bulbs
in the box. So who was the woman in the car.
Had Clay and Molly murdered somebody? This was the million
dollar question. But the investigators didn't have to wonder for
long because, in the grand tradition of many barely sentient

(18:04):
mouth breathers before him, Clay decided to confide in his
new jail bestie, and the story he told was something
straight out of a classic horror movie. He'd stolen a body,
he said, from its grave. See. Clay had been due
to report for his thirty day prison sentence about a
week after the crash. As Mollie later told Dateline, his

(18:26):
conviction was going to upend their lives. Even after he
served his time, They'd have to move out of their
house because it was too close to a school. Clay
wouldn't be allowed to be a stay at home dad anymore,
and he'd have a hard time finding a job, and
people would stare at them whisper about them. So Mollie,
who in her own words, has always liked to fix things,
came up with a plan. They would kill Clayton Daniels.

(18:49):
Mollie would collect on his life insurance and they'd use
the money to move to Mexico and start a new life.
Clay Daniels would become Jacob Gregg. Mollie did some research
on decomposition rates cremation car accidents involving fire, and they
spent some time prowling the local cemetery looking for a candidate.
Eventually they settled on the grave of eighty one year

(19:11):
old Charlotte Davis, a much beloved woman who had been
a light in the life of everybody who knew her,
and who had died six months before. She had some
developmental delays, so she was in a wheelchair and lived
most of her life in care homes. But she had
a bright, curious spirit, and she loved life. The people
who cared about her had chosen her burial dress with
care and shared their favorite memories about her at her

(19:34):
memorial service. People still missed her very much. Of course,
Clay and Mollie didn't know any of that, and they
couldn't have given less of a shit to them. Charlotte
was just a tool for them to use in their
ridiculous little pinky in the brain esque scheme. Anyway, Later
that night, Clay went back to the cemetery with a shovel,

(19:54):
and after hours and hours of digging, I cannot even imagine,
Stolelet's body from her casket and then he badly filled
the hole back up again. So yeah, grave robbing, for
God's sake, I'm actually surprised, Like that's a pretty high effort,
high commitment crime. I mean, you'd have to dig forever.

(20:15):
I wouldn't have even thought it was possible for one person,
not to mention, have the stomach for it. I would
not have expected that level of effort from our boy Clay.
And of course this was the only part of the
plan they put any real thought or sweat into, and
obviously they still managed to cock it up royally by
stealing a female body. Did you not know that DNA

(20:36):
can tell the sex of the victim? It's just it's
dumb beyond believe. This might be the dumbest person we've
ever covered, for real, like the for real bonker, for real.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
This fun fact that this uh, they won an award
in the insurance fraud Hall of Shame. And you know,
only the cream of only the cream of the crop
could get those.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, because you know they've seen some dumb shit like
you know they had.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
Yeah, yeah, they are so funny.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
So AnyWho, Clay's jail buddy ratted him out immediately, of course,
and the investigators went to the cemetery to corroborate the story,
and yep, sure enough, they found the disturbed grave site.
The flowers somebody had left for Charlotte had been scattered
around in the dirt. Ugh He and Molly both tried
to deny everything at first. Molly said she had no

(21:30):
idea her hubs was still alive until a month after
the crash when he just popped in on her. But
her internet searches gave her a way, and she finally
gave in and confessed. Said she got the idea from CSI.
Oh my god, you people have much to answer for.

(21:50):
She ended up pleading guilty to insurance fraud and hindering
apprehension and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Clay
pled guilty to insurance fraud, arson and desecration of a corpse.
He got thirty years in prison. Some of the investigators
served as pallbearers when they reburied Charlotte Davis. In a
prison interview, Molly had the gall to tell Dateline how

(22:13):
much it annoyed her that people got so mad at
them for robbing Charlotte's grave. They need to understand it
was just a body. She said, Oh bitch, are you serious?
Oh my god. She also shrugged off the trauma she
and Clay inflicted on their little boy. Yeah, he'll be fine, right.
Fortunately she did serve a pretty long sentence, like twelve years.

(22:36):
They let her out in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
I have to go back to her statement, because here's
the thing is it's it's just a body. Is an
okay statement to say when it's your body, like it's
just a body, you can you can throw me in
a trash can, whatever, it doesn't matter. But when it's
not your body, that's that loses all, loses all because
it's not your body.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
But he's love the fuck, absolute asshole. Yeah that's horrific.

Speaker 3 (23:03):
She's oh she she deserves to be thrown out of
the TCC trabue shadus for that. I think, aside from
desecrating Charlotte Davis's memory, that the worst thing Molly and
Clay did in this case was put their four year
old son through absolute help this poor kid. First, they

(23:24):
tell him his dad's dead. Then his mom brings his
dad right back into the house with his hair a
different color and tells him, no, no, this isn't your daddy,
this is jod. This kid was being gas lit all day,
every day by his own parents, no wonder he was
freaking out. I really really hope both he and his
sister got some really good counseling and are doing well.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Time. Yeah, and there's another really sad story that I
forget which source it was in, but Melissa, the sister,
was taking care of the kids afterwards, and said that
she went to the salon to get her hair colored
one time and the little boy freaked out. He hated it.
He was really upset when she got her hair colored.
And she realized, oh, it's because of what happened, you know,

(24:08):
because Clay dyed his hair. So she had to sit
him down and explain like, I'm still the same auntie.
You know, this is just my hair. It's not me
poor kid.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
M M, it's so sad. It's so sad. There's a
there's a there's a bunch of videos on like reels
or wherever you watch short form videos where like dads
will shave their hair or if they have long hair,
they'll cut their hair and like kids will freak out.
And I think those videos are kind of dead because

(24:38):
the kids are really upset. Like it's not like they're
like like surprised or like shocked or acting like it's funny.
The kids are genuinely terrified and horrified. And I I'm
just like, poor babies. That's that this kid was going
through every day. It's like, that's my dad. And then
it like basically reversed how he reacts to hair color changes.

(25:02):
That's horrible, little heart. Okay, So moving on to case two.

(25:32):
We're calling this one best laid plan, so campers for
this one. We're in the cute little town of Green Lake, Wisconsin.
August eleventh, twenty twenty four. Forty four year old Ryan
Borgwart had the kind of life that most people hope for.
A pretty wife, three teenage kids, and a solid career
as a carpenter. The Borgwarts, and that is definitely a

(25:56):
real German name and not some creature Jennifer Connolly met
in Labyrinth. The Boorgwarts lived in a beautiful part of
the country, the town of Watertown, about an hour south
of Green Lake, all green fields spreading along the banks
of the Rock River. Sure it was a small town,
but Waukeshaw was just forty minutes away if you wanted

(26:17):
the thrills of a big city. If by thrills of
the big city you mean Olive Garden and bath and
body Works, and I do because I went to college
in a small town and I used to drive an
hour just for Chipotle and Starbucks. So listen, I feel
your pain, small town livers. Okay, that Sunday started out

(26:37):
as normal as you could imagine. Ryan and his wife
Emily went to church with their kids in the morning.
That evening, Ryan drove his van and trailer to his
woodworking shop where he kept his kayak, and loaded up
for some fishing up in Green Lake.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
Oh, you know, it was late in the day, but
you know you have to wait till dusk for the
crapp us to really start biting. Woy. Yeah, I apologized
all Wisconsin nights for that.

Speaker 4 (27:02):
You're gonna get You're gonna get us canceled. Oh you
didn't even you didn't even stop for a breath before
you issued.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Your formal I just you know how sometimes you immediately
know that you stepped in it, Like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
You were like, oh, this is this is not good.
Here's the thing is, like, I know that your accents
aren't that thick, but it sounds that thick when you're
talking to us.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Okay, I think it's absolutely wonderful. I love that accent.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
It is adorable.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yeah, it's one of my favorite.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
Some of my some of my teammates uh in college
had those accents and the way they would say certain stuff.
They would say coach cotch. They would say coach with
like two syllables, coach, and it was wonderful. I just
loved it. I would I would repeat it and they
hate it.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
But I love affectionate. I promise it's very much. Yes.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
At ze and forty nine pm, Ryan texted Emily that
he was done fishing and it was going to start
paddling for shore, but he never came home. A frantic
Emily called the police and they started searching the lake
the next day. It didn't take them long to make
an unsettling discovery. Ryan's kayak overturned with a life jacket
attached to it. His water bottle was found floating too.

(28:22):
Later in the day, a couple of guys out fishing
on the boat found Ryan's fishing rod. There hadn't been
storms or anything the night before, but there had been
a stiff wind blowing enough to set waves rolling across
the lake. It wasn't hard to imagine someone out on
the water after dark getting into some serious, deadly trouble.
In Dodge Memorial County Park, by the southwest shore of

(28:44):
the lake, they found Ryan's van and trailer parked there
while he went out fishing. The authorities thought they needed
to recover Ryan's drowned body from the water. The police,
along with the Department of Natural Resources and a charity
specializing in recovering drowning victims, set out into the water.
They used sonar in the deeper part of the lake
where Ryan's kayak had been found, and that was no joke.

(29:08):
At around two hundred twenty feet, Green Lake is the
deepest natural lake in Wisconsin. The lake is about a
mile and a half across, which I'd put at a
distance you wouldn't want to try and swim, but you'd
believe that other people could swim it.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah, like not you, right, not you, but somebody who's
actually physically fit.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
Right, people can definitely drown there, But it wasn't so
huge that you'd expect a body to stay undiscovered for long,
but there was no sign at all of Ryan Borgwart.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
The next day, fishermen found Ryan's tackle box washed up
on the shore. Inside where his wallet, keys, and driver's license.
It certainly looked like everything Ryan had taken out with
him had been found, just as you'd expect to find
the detritus of a capsized boat, everything except for Ryan's body.
I don't think we can convey ly string out the

(30:01):
suspense here much longer. You probably figured it out by
now that this is a grab bag of people who
faked their own deaths. So here's what actually happened. Ryan
had been busy making some purchases that were definitely not
suspicious at all. First, a few months before he vanished,
he got himself a new passport without telling Emily. He
said he'd lost his original passport and needed a replacement,

(30:24):
so now he had two, one extra that he could,
for example, leave at home so no one would think
he'd left the country. He bought an e bike, which
he stashed in his woodworking shop in Watertown, and he
bought a child's inflatable raft, the kind of thing you
get a kid for messing around in a swimming pool.
So back to Sunday. Ryan left his wife and kids

(30:45):
and went to his woodworking shop with his van and
trailer to pick up his kayak to go fishing. He
also stashed his e bike, raft and a backpack with
a change of clothes in the trailer, then drove the
sixty five miles up to Oshkosh to pick up a
few extra things at the walmart there. Then he went
to a buddy's place and hung out for a while,
because that's definitely something you want to do when you're

(31:07):
trying to disappear completely, ditch your wife and kids without
a word. Sure, but you can't do your homies like
to at I mean, come on, you gotta go visit
the friends. As the sun started to set, Ryan finally
headed down to Green Lake, getting there around ten pm.
He paused on his way around the lake to get
the e bike and backpack out of the van and

(31:27):
hide them in some brush at the side of the water,
then carried on down to Dodge Memorial Park, where he
unloaded his kayak and fishing gear and set out onto
the water just like any other fisherman. It wasn't coincidence
that he'd chosen this night to go out. Ryan's computer
and phone records showed that he checked the weather at
Green Lake obsessively. That in itself isn't that weird for

(31:49):
a keen fisherman looking for a good night to get
out on the water, But for most people, stiff winds
and choppy waters would be a negative. They were what
Ryan had been waiting for, and was Jhnson had no
shortage of lakes. Ryan chose Green Lake precisely because, like
we said earlier, it's one of the deepest pieces of
water in the state, and he figured no one would
be too suspicious if a whole human body just vanished

(32:12):
into the depths. He didn't do any actual fishing. A
fat trout flopping around in his kayak wouldn't have made
the execution of his plans any easier. What he did
was pull out the deflated kid's wrap from wherever he'd
hidden it probably just stuffed inside his shirt, and huffed
and puffed at it until it was full. At ten
forty nine, he called Emily to say he was headed

(32:34):
back to shore. These were the last words he ever
intended to say to his wife of twenty two years.
After he hung up. He tossed the phone into the water,
along with the tackle box that held his wallet in
driver's license. Now, fishing people, is that normal, by the way,
keeping your wallet in your tackle box and not just
in your pocket like you usually do. It seems to
me like this was a step to try and make

(32:55):
Ryan's death more convincing, Like, well, obviously he didn't run off,
he left his wallet behind. A man might give up
on his family, you know, but he's not given up
that Costco card. Come on. Ryan put the raft onto
the water and slid onto it, paddling with his hands
to turn around and capsize the kayak. He paddled slowly
through the darkness low to the water, and I'm sure

(33:17):
he felt very James Bond. I'm equally sure, however, that
the raft he was on was bright blue and covered
with starfish and happy sea horses.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
And he had to sit crisscross applesauce, and the raft
made squeaking noises every time he moved.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Almost certainly. At the shore, Ryan trudged through mud and cattails,
pulling the raft with him. He deflated it and found
the e bike where he'd hidden it earlier.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
The electric engine and the power of Ryon's pedaling combined
for an awesome fifteen miles an hour. It took him
all night, six hours on back roads to get down
to Madison, and this strategy of moving unseen seems to
have paid off. But I'm just saying, a big guy
on a tiny bike zipping through the back country at
o dark thirty in the morning is something I'd probably

(34:10):
remember seeing. Yeah, in a Madison park, Ryan ditched the
e bike behind some bushes, changed clothes, and walked forty
five minutes to the Dutch Mill Park and ride there,
Having not slept all night and after hours of physical work. Well,
he probably didn't look too different to anyone else. Getting
on a Greyhound bus for a trip through Milwaukee, Chicago,

(34:31):
and Detroit before finishing in Toronto. In the early hours
of the morning, the bus crossed the Detroit River from
Michigan into Ontario. This of course meant border control, and Ryan,
sleepless and nervous, caught their eye enough that they took
him aside for questioning. He had nothing on him except
his passport, a prepaid Western Union card, and about six

(34:54):
grand in cash, and he had only the vaguest answers
about what he planned to do. In Toronto, he looked
pretty suss, but nothing came up when they ran his
name through their database, so the border officer scanned his
passport and let him through along with everyone else. Ryan
apparently didn't anticipate that there would be an electronic record
of him traveling from one country to another. I mean, duh,

(35:18):
it's twenty twenty four, Ryan, They don't just put a
stamp on it anymore. Kind of puts the kaibash on
the whole I'm dead in a lake in Wisconsin story. Oopsie,
I cannot it's honestly so stupid. In Toronto, he headed
straight for the airport and used his Western Union card

(35:40):
to buy a ticket to Paris. And from Paris he
flew to what authorities just described as a country in Asia,
but which was almost certainly Uzbekistan. Now we all, of
course have a deep and intimate knowledge of Uzbekistan, the
former Soviet republic to the north of Afghanistan, vast, mostly hot,

(36:03):
and mostly dry, home to thirty seven million people, the
most venomous cobra on Earth, and a spectacular variety of
wildcats snow leopards Kara call palace cats, sand cats, We
don't have to know any more than that to love you.
It's Pakistan. But those of you trying to figure out

(36:24):
just what the hell Ryan was doing probably won't be
too surprised to learn that those were not the pussies
that brought him there.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
I see what you did there. I mean, I hate it,
but I see it.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Thanks. I appreciate your acknowledgment. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
Fifty days after he disappeared, authority still searched for Ryan's
body in Green Lake, although not as intensely as they
once had. Other things happened, other people needed their attention.
Some bodies are just never found. His wife and kids
grieved terribly, their lives an apparent misfortune. We don't know

(37:04):
quite how it shook down, but I would guess a
Canadian border official happened to see a story about Ryan's
parents and thought, oh, yeah, that sketchy guy. Regardless, in October,
Dodge County investigators got a call to let them know
that their water logged corpse had actually been on a
bus for Toronto.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Now, obviously this didn't so much shake up the case
as turn it completely upside down. A confused Emily let
officers look at their computers. Ryan, like many a dumb
ass before him, thought he was being clever, but in
fact might as well have been following a checklist called
I'm about to fake my own death. Shortly before he vanished,

(37:43):
he backed up his laptop to iCloud, then replaced the
hard drive on the assumption that this would erase his
entire electronic presence. That is not how it works. A
little more digging showed that on the day he disappeared,
Ryan changed the email addresses link to his bank accounts.
He'd looked into how deep a body has to fall
in water that it won't resurface. They also found he'd

(38:06):
just gotten a new three hundred and seventy five thousand
dollars life insurance policy with Emily as the beneficiary, which
I guess shows he was still capable of at least
some shame and guilt. He also searched on how to
move money to foreign banks, so it seems clear he
was planning to steal a chunk of Emily's money when
he left, and of course there were a whole bunch
of communications with a lady from Uzbekistan. The Sheriff's office

(38:31):
hasn't revealed the exact nature of these communications, unfortunately, but
pictures were shared, and the end result was Ryan throwing
out his whole life and traveling halfway around the world.
So you can probably take a guess. Thus far, at least,
we know frustratingly little about her other than that after
he landed, she and Ryan spent days together shacked up

(38:52):
in a hotel room, you know, hunting the Caspian cobra.
I can make dirty jokes too. We'll call her Saliha,
the most common female name in a Zbekistan, which is
definitely a thing I just happened to know and didn't
google at all, because I'm smart. After a little while,
Ryan and Saliha moved to another former Soviet republic, Georgia,

(39:14):
on the Black Sea coast, with a pleasant Mediterranean climate.
If you had to pick somewhere formerly Soviet to live,
you could do a lot worse. Until he starts talking,
Ryan's life here is essentially a blank. He was a carpenter,
which is something that can get you work anywhere in
the world, but he was also kind of a loser,
so it's easy to imagine him sponging off of whatever

(39:35):
work Saliha was doing, just like he'd sponged off of Emily.
Sometimes police work is lots of deep psychological consideration, and
sometimes it's just doing grunt work. Forever. Investigators got a
list of every single phone number and email address on
Ryan's laptop and just started reaching out to all of them.
Eventually they reached a Russian speaking woman, most likely Seliha herself,

(39:59):
and from her they got Ryan's current email address, which
doesn't exactly suggest Ryan's new romance was a beta roses
does it. Whenever you hear about somebody flying off to
foreign lands to meet a love interest they met online,
there's always a suspicion of some degree of catfishing. It's
only speculation. But in this case, I kind of suspect

(40:21):
Ryan was the one setting himself up to be more
than he actually was. It's easy to imagine Saliha, whoever
she was expecting to get more than a dead beat
cheesehead with fifty five hundred dollars in his pocket. Of course,
true love can easily overcome that, but nothing we've seen
in this story suggests that Ryan Borgwart was all that
charming anyway. Whoever the police got in touch with, she

(40:44):
passed on Ryan's george in deeds with no hesitation, and
so the sheriff's office sent him an email. On November eleventh,
they received a video Ryan took on his phone. The
sheriff wanted to see him to make sure this really
was Ryan alive and well and not some extended identity
theft scam, a self taken proof of life video. I'm

(41:07):
safe and secure, no problem, Ryan said in the video.
Although he looked absolutely miserable, He said he was in
his apartment and swung his camera around. Although it just
showed bare walls.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
It could have been anywhere and no matter where you
were in the world, it looked like the dwelling of
a dude living alone without a girlfriend. He told the sheriff.
He fled the country because of personal matters, which is
hard to argue with. Wanting to stick your dick and
a news becky girl definitely qualifies as a personal matter.

(41:42):
He thought his plan was going to pan out, but
it didn't go the way he had planned, said the sheriff.
I mean, who could have imagined it not working out.
Faking your own death and abandoning your family to fly
off to a land completely alien to you and hook
up with someone you've never met in person and so
now we're trying to give him a different plan to
come back, the sheriff said. He said, planned like eighteen

(42:06):
times and then since Jesus. At least at this time,
the sheriff was just working both for Ryan's well being
and the well being and peace of mind of his family.
No criminal charges had been filed related to his disappearance,
and all Ryan was ever likely to face was misdemeanor obstruction.
He was ready to quit his brief tour of the
post Soviet world and come back to America's dairy land,

(42:28):
but the big barrier was how people would react, meaning
everyone would know he'd done something colossally stupid and shitty.
He was embarrassed.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Should be embarrassed, Ryan, You're an asshole.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
The sheriff's plan was to tug at his heartstrings. Christmas
is coming, he told Ryan, and what better gift could
your kids get than to be here for Christmas.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
They can kick the shit out of you for doing
this to them.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
It worked. On December tenth, four months after his supposed
death by drought, Ryan Borgourt flew back to Wisconsin and
handed himself to the Green Lake Sheriff's apartment. He was
charged with obstructing an officer, but bonded out for five
hundred dollars. He ran back home to the loving embrace
of his wife, filing to have their marriage an old.

Speaker 2 (43:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
Emily cited their marriage as irretrievably broken, which is hard
to argue with, and sought full custody of their kids.
A hearing on that was scheduled for April twenty eight
this year, but we can't find anything on it. I
can't imagine Emily will have too much trouble getting out
of that marriage. Court proceedings continue for Ryan's criminal case
with no sign of a trial date yet. This looks

(43:38):
like the kind of low stakes matter that'll be settled
one way or the other without a trial. But we'll
see so.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
Yet another asshole willing to put their children through hell. Unbelievable.
I'm sure you'll remember John Darwin from an earlier episode.
Remember we called him Loserus. He faked his death too,
and his adult children spent years mourning their father as
dead before he just pop back up alive and well,
that level of selfishness is hard to understand, isn't it.

(44:06):
Mollie annoyed at the people who resented her for disturbing
a grave Ryan telling the copse he was safe and
secure while his wife and children were living in hell
back at home. You'd think these cases would happen once
in a blue moon, but we've seen a ton of them.
Look at Sherry Peppini, a gal who is definitely due
for the TCC treatment in the near future. She didn't

(44:27):
fake her death, but she did fake her violent kidnapping,
leaving her husband and young kids terrified for her for
weeks and wasting an obscene amount of law enforcements, time
and resources. It's hard to wrap your head around, but
some people genuinely do not care about anybody but the
person they see in the mirror. The only silver lining
is that these people tend to be pretty dumb, so

(44:48):
their best laid plans will probably blow up right in
their face, and then the rest of us get to
laugh at them, and we never get tired of that.
So that was a pair of wild ones, right. You know,
we'll have another one for you next week, but for now,
lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until
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(45:10):
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(45:32):
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