Wisconsin Dad Who Abandoned His Family & Faked His Own Death To Flee To Uzbekistan Has Returned To The United States, Now In Custody Facing Criminal Charges

Beloit Daily News - A Wisconsin man who faked his own drowning and left his wife and three children and was believed to have been in Eastern Europe willingly returned to the U.S. after roughly four months and is in custody, a sheriff said Wednesday.

Ryan Borgwardt “came back on his own” because of his family, Green Lake County Sheriff Mark Podoll said.

“We can stand here feeling relieved,” Podoll told reporters.

Borgwardt, 45, landed Tuesday and was being held at the county jail, pending an afternoon court appearance. The sheriff said his office has recommended a number of charges, including obstruction.

Borgwardt told authorities last month that he faked his death because of “personal matters,” the sheriff said in November.

He told them that in mid-August he traveled about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from his home in Watertown to Green Lake, where he overturned his kayak, dumped his phone and then paddled an inflatable boat to shore. He said he picked that lake because it’s the deepest in Wisconsin.

After leaving the lake, he rode an electric bike about 70 miles (110 kilometers) through the night to Madison. From there, he said he took a bus to Detroit, then boarded a bus to Canada and got on a plane.

An analysis of a laptop — it was not clear whose — revealed a digital trail that shows Borgwardt had planned to head to Europe and tried to mislead investigators.

The laptop’s hard drive had been replaced and the browsers had been cleared on the day Borgwardt disappeared, Podoll said in a news release in November.

Investigators found passport photos, inquiries about moving funds to foreign banks and communication with a woman from Uzbekistan. They also discovered that Borgwardt also took out a $375,000 life insurance policy in January.

Good try, good effort, Ryan. It's takes an exceptional lack of balls to abandon your family via fake death. To be so terrified of conflict that instead of sitting them down for a conversation, or even calling them on the phone, or leaving a handwritten letter, or sending a simple, "I'm leaving you" text. But Ryan Borgwardt was such a phenomenal pussy, so scared to face adversity head-on, that he concocted an elaborate scheme to fake his own drowning.

I know hindsight is 20/20, Ryan. But I think we can agree this was a poor decision. You could have left your family in a million different ways. You didn't have to fake your own death to move to Uzbekistan and be with Yasmina. You would have had to work some things out in court back in the states. You'd have had to pay some child support. But there are ways you could have done it.

You even could have lied. Tell your family you're going on a work trip. Say you need to go to Europe to clear your head. See how living with your internet crush goes for a while. If it turns out life in Uzbekistan is everything you dreamed of, then come clean. Or just keep on lying forever. Pile lies on top of lies for as long as you can until it all blows up in your face. You're be a piece of shit no matter which way you do it. But anything would have been better than resorting to fake kayak death.

But that's what you went with. You decided put an extraordinary amount of effort into abandoning your family in the most cowardly way possible. Until inevitably Yasmina got sick of living with a yellow-bellied scaredy cat fugitive of the United States and kicked your ass to the curb, and you're forced to come back to America "on your own" with your tail between your legs.

Now you're in custody... now you'll probably be a felon.

Looking back, I bet that difficult conversation with your wife doesn't seem so difficult. Not as difficult as the conversation is now. Probably much less difficult than whatever you'll be dealing with (in reality and in your head) on a daily basis for the foreseeable rest of your life.

Also, did we ever get confirmation that the random TikTok interview (in video below) with the man on the bike who looked exactly like Ryan and was contemplating bailing on his family and moving to Uzbekistan to be with a woman was actually him? When it came out, everybody said it was someone else. But it was him right? It has to be. It looks exactly like him. No way two men who look that identical were having the same mid-life "should I move to Uzbekistan" crisis. 

Should have listened to TikTok girl, Ryan. She was wise beyond her years.