Man who faked kayaking death and fled US gets 89-day jail sentence

Ryan Borgwardt, 45, faked his own death and ran away from his family in Wisconsin. Photo / via Green Lake County Sheriff's Office

A Wisconsin father-of-three who faked his own death last year and fled the country to meet a woman he had met online was sentenced today to 89 days in jail — the number of days he had led authorities to believe he was dead.

Mark Slate, a circuit court judge in Green Lake County, handed down the sentence moments after the man, Ryan Borgwardt, 45, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour charge for having led authorities to believe that he had drowned while kayaking in Green Lake on the night of August 11, 2024.

Borgwardt had faced up to nine months in jail. He had reached an agreement with prosecutors to serve 45 days, but Slate rejected that agreement and imposed the 89-day sentence instead.

Slate said that 89 days passed from the date Borgwardt was declared missing, on August 12, 2024, to November 8, 2024, when investigators established that he was not dead and began communicating with him by email while he was overseas.

Last week, Borgwardt also paid US$30,000 in restitution for the cost of the search for his body in Green Lake, which lasted for 58 days and involved boats with sonar scanners and a dive team.

In brief remarks in court today, he expressed remorse for his act of deception.

“I deeply regret the actions that I did that night and all the pain that I caused my family and friends,” Borgwardt said.

The Green Lake County district attorney, Gerise LaSpisa, said that Borgwardt had faked his death “so that he could disappear from his everyday life of being a husband and father in Wisconsin” and travel overseas to meet a woman he had met online months earlier.

As part of his plan, he transferred money overseas and regularly communicated with the woman, “professing his love and desire to create a new life with her”, LaSpisa said in court. He reversed his vasectomy and researched ways to successfully disappear, she said.

On the night he faked his death, he capsized his kayak in Green Lake, about 120km southwest of Green Bay, and threw his cellphone, a fishing rod, and a tackle box with his keys, wallet and driver’s licence into the water, authorities said.

Then he rode an e-bike through the night to Madison, Wisconsin. From there, he took buses to Toronto, Canada, and boarded a plane to Paris, France, authorities said.

He then travelled to the country of Georgia, where he “began to create a life with the woman he met on the internet, getting a job and an apartment”, LaSpisa said.

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 2024 that Borgwardt had moved money into a foreign bank account and had been communicating with a woman online.

Using phone numbers and email addresses found on the laptop, investigators located a Russian-speaking woman, who put them in contact with Borgwardt, authorities said last year.

Investigators began communicating with Borgwardt and eventually persuaded him to return to Wisconsin, where he was charged in December with a single misdemeanour of obstructing law enforcement.

Regardless of the outcome of the criminal case, LaSpisa said, “the destruction to his family can never be undone”.

Borgwardt’s lawyer, Erik Johnson, noted in court that his client could not have been extradited from Georgia on the misdemeanour charge.

“He didn’t want to come back,” Johnson said. “He didn’t need to come back. He did. He wanted to make amends, and that’s why he returned.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Michael Levenson

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