A Wisconsin man who faked his own drowning death in August and fled the country is in police custody several months after he disappeared, the authorities said on Wednesday.
Ryan Borgwardt, of Watertown, Wis., returned to the United States of his own accord, according to the Green Lake County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Mark A. Podoll said on Wednesday that Mr. Borgwardt, 45, flew back from an undisclosed country on Tuesday and had been booked in the county jail.
“He came back on his own,” Sheriff Podoll said at a news conference on Wednesday morning.
Mr. Borgwardt was expected to appear in court on Wednesday afternoon. Sheriff Podoll said he would likely face a number of charges, including obstruction. Officials are also seeking restitution for the money that was spent on the search for Mr. Borgwardt’s body.
The announcement that Mr. Borgwardt was in custody brought to an end a monthslong saga that began as an intensive search of the depths of a lake that involved sonar boats and a dive team, and ultimately became an international missing-persons case that included a number of federal agencies.
In August, Mr. Borgwardt, a 45-year-old married father of three, made it appear as though he had drowned while fishing in Green Lake, about 65 miles southwest of Green Bay, leaving behind a capsized kayak and his vehicle, Sheriff Podoll told reporters last month. Investigators also found Mr. Borgwardt’s fishing rod and a tackle box with his keys, wallet and driver’s license inside. He was reported missing on Aug. 12.
The authorities spent weeks searching the lake for his body before a digital forensic analysis of a laptop his wife had given to investigators revealed in October that Mr. Borgwardt had moved money into a foreign bank account and had been communicating with a woman in Uzbekistan, Sheriff Podoll said, leading the authorities to believe that he had fled the country.
“The search for Ryan ended, and the investigation efforts took a new direction,” Sheriff Podoll said Wednesday. “When we learned that Ryan had left the United States and he most certainly was not in Green Lake, that was our biggest thing — that we knew he wasn’t in our lake.”
Data on the laptop also showed that Mr. Borgwardt had bought an airline gift card and had taken out a $375,000 life insurance policy to benefit his family, Sheriff Podoll said. Mr. Borgwardt had removed his hard drive, wiped his browser history and changed his email address in an effort to cover his tracks, the sheriff said.
Using phone numbers and email addresses found on the laptop, investigators located a Russian-speaking woman, who put them in contact with Mr. Borgwardt, according to Sheriff Podoll. He would not confirm whether it was the same woman in Uzbekistan with whom Mr. Borgwardt had been in touch before he fled.
Sheriff Podoll said in November that the authorities did not know exactly where Mr. Borgwardt was, but believed he was somewhere in Eastern Europe.
When the authorities reached him, Mr. Borgwardt told investigators how he had carried out his scheme in August. Carrying a small, inflatable boat, he paddled his kayak out onto Green Lake, where he “overturned the kayak and dumped his phone in the lake,” the sheriff said. He paddled to shore in the smaller boat, grabbed an electric bike he had stashed near a boat launch and rode to Madison, Wis. From there, he boarded a bus to Detroit and crossed into Canada, where he boarded a plane.
The sheriff did not offer details about what had motivated Mr. Borgwardt to concoct the elaborate ruse, referring only to “personal matters.” Sheriff Podoll said that Mr. Borgwardt had expressed remorse for having put his family through such an ordeal, and for the time and resources that were spent searching for his body.
At a news conference last month, the sheriff’s office played a clip from a video Mr. Borgwardt had made to prove to the authorities that he was safe. In the clip, which Mr. Borgwardt appeared to have recorded himself in a sparsely decorated space, he said, in a quiet voice: “I’m in my apartment. I am safe, secure, no problem.”
The authorities were in touch with Mr. Borgwardt almost daily after discovering he was alive, Sheriff Podoll said at the conference, urging him to come home and to “clean up the mess that he has created.”
Mr. Borgwardt was not initially receptive. “We keep pulling at his heartstrings,” Sheriff Podoll said, adding: “We’re not going to give up. We’re going to continue because he needs to come home to his kids.”
It was not clear on Wednesday if Mr. Borgwardt had spoken with his family. “I can only imagine how they feel,” Sheriff Podoll said.
The sheriff said Mr. Borgwardt had cooperated with the authorities in returning to Wisconsin.
“We brought a dad back, on his own accord,” he said.
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