Ryan Borgwardt’s Disappearance: Why a Wisconsin Father Faked His Death

Emily Borgwardt was about to go to bed in her Watertown, Wis., home on August 11, 2024, when she realized she did not know where her husband was.

“So many nights I have no idea where you are when it’s late,” she texted him.

Ryan Borgwardt had left his home, his wife and three kids that afternoon, telling them he wanted to go fishing on Green Lake, about an hour’s drive northeast. He’d taken the family minivan and, with an inflatable raft on board, paddled his kayak toward the middle of the lake. Green Lake is the deepest natural lake in Wisconsin, with a relatively clean bottom over 200 feet deep.

“It sucks going to bed not having any idea where you are,” Emily texted him. She wanted him to communicate better. He told her he would work on it.

But Ryan was lying. The truth was that Ryan didn’t want to work on it. The truth was that he was in love with another woman. For months, he’d worked on his escape, and that night it began.

Ryan wasn’t on the lake to fish. He was on the lake to fake his own death.

By December 2023, Ryan was already unhappy. He’d been working long hours since fall and was struggling to stay awake while driving. He thought he might have a heart attack. He and Emily weren’t communicating. But that month, he met Ekaterina Vladislavovna, who he called “Katya,” online.

She told him she was from Ukraine, and he asked her about the conditions there since the Russian invasion. Trading translated messages in Russian and English, he felt himself falling in love. But he couldn’t manage to bring up divorce to Emily. His own parents had divorced when he was young.

In the spring, Ryan started to consider faking his death. If he could, he wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout of a divorce. Katya, for her part, was hesitant in her messages with Ryan. She didn’t like the idea of him faking his death. But still, she agreed to meet him in the country of Georgia, where he planned a new life with her.

He applied for a second passport (after claiming he’d lost his first one), transferred money overseas and reversed his vasectomy. By August 2024, everything was ready. After saying goodbye to Emily and the kids, he drove to Green Lake. He brought his kayak to a deep portion of Green Lake, flipped it over and returned to shore by raft, where an e-bike was waiting for him. He rode through the night, far away from his life.

Green Lake County Sheriff Mark Podoll’s office received the call about the missing kayaker at dawn the next day. He hadn’t returned after going fishing, and his wife was worried. When Green Lake County deputies arrived on the lake, they found the car on the shore and the kayak on the water. Later, fishermen recovered a fishing pole and a tackle box, but there was no sign of Ryan.

The sheriff’s office considered filing Ryan as a missing person. However, adults are typically filed as such if they’re “endangered,” such as if they need to take life-saving medicine, Deputy Matt Vande Kolk said in an interview with A&E Crime + Investigation, and the deputies reasoned that all evidence showed Ryan was dead in the lake.

Instead, the police recruited a search-and-recovery crew, Bruce’s Legacy, to find Ryan’s body in the lake.

That’s where the search efforts would stay for eight weeks. It was exhaustive, having gone over the deep end of Green Lake multiple times. Along with Bruce’s Legacy, the sheriff’s office deployed divers and dogs to the search party. The community poured all kinds of support to Emily and her children. When Emily’s mother found that Ryan had left the family with about $80,000 in credit card debt, she and Ryan’s family secretly paid it off. Still, there was no Ryan.

It wasn’t until Keith Cormican, head of Bruce’s Legacy, sat down with the sheriff, Mark Podoll, on October 4, 2024. Cormican had previously suggested to Podoll that Ryan might be alive “drinking margaritas” on a beach somewhere, but this time he was serious. 

“Sheriff, I’ve done a lot of searches, and I can’t find him,” Podoll recalled Cormican telling him. “And we searched and we searched.”

So on October 7, Podoll and his team ran Ryan’s name into their system. The search ended. Ryan had crossed the Canadian border on August 13, on his way to start a new life with Katya in Georgia.

The sheriff’s office spent a month holding onto their secret while collecting evidence and trying to contact Ryan. With Emily’s assistance, they found his money transfers and a cryptocurrency account. They also found his messages with Katya.

First, the only person they told was Emily, but as she struggled with the secret, they also told the pastors at her church. Then finally, on November 8, 2024, Podoll told the entire story at a press conference.

“Wow, yeah,” he said after telling reporters that Ryan was alive. “That was something we didn’t expect.”

For weeks, deputies kept in touch with Ryan, trying to convince him to return home and face his family. He refused to tell them where he was. They appealed to his Christianity, sending him a gospel song and offers from his church to pay for his flight home.

In emails to the deputies, Ryan agreed that he needed to “clean things up as best as possible” as long as it didn’t involve Katya.

“I gave it all to God the moment I tipped the kayak,” he wrote.

Ryan returned to the United States on December 10, 2024, and he was quickly arrested on obstruction charges. (Faking one’s death is actually not a crime.) To protect her family from any potential civil or criminal liability, Emily filed for legal separation.

Ryan moved back in with his mother and stepfather in Appleton, Wis., while the case proceeded. On August 26, 2025, just about a year after his initial disappearance, he pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor obstruction charge. Prosecutors wanted Ryan’s sentence to be 45 days in jail, but the judge gave him 89–the same number of days he had been “missing” from the United States–and charged him $30,000 to pay for the costs of the investigation.

Ryan completed his sentence in December 2025. That same month, he filed a motion to “delete certain digital materials.” That court hearing was scheduled for February 3, 2026.

But when the court appointment arrived, Ryan didn’t show. It wasn’t clear where he was.