A well-known Missouri emergency room doctor’s body was found in a lake in northwest Arkansas 11 months ago. On Thursday, Arkansas authorities said that the death was a suicide. This led to a lot of talk on social media about whether his disappearance had something to do with his cryptocurrency business.
Nearly a year ago, Dr. John Forsyth, 49, was last seen near the RV he parked at the hospital where he worked in Cassville, Missouri. On May 21, 2023, the father of eight who was going to get married didn’t show up for his shift at Mercy Hospital. This led to a search. A kayaker found his body on May 30 in Arkansas’s Beaver Lake, which is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the hospital. There had been no sign of him.
On Thursday, detectives from the sheriff’s office in Benton County, Arkansas, said that Forsyth had been shot in the head. The head medical examiner at the Arkansas State Crime Lab did an autopsy and found that the death was caused by suicide.
“Detectives have not been able to find any information or proof that would make us disagree with the medical examiner’s findings,” the sheriff’s office said. “If physical evidence that is objective and relevant comes in, those leads will be looked into one by one.”
A statement also said that as part of their probe, the sheriff’s office found videos of Forsyth riding his bike to Beaver Lake. The bike was found close to where Forsyth’s body was found, they said.
Forsyth’s death seemed to be a secret, and few details were made public. This made his case famous across the country. He was engaged after splitting his first wife twice, and his brother Richard said he was excited about getting married and having a child with his fiancée. He also had a plane ticket to go see one of his daughters.
Online news sources that cover cryptocurrencies quickly reported his death. After his death, his brother said that John Forsyth had said something vague about being in danger.
Richard Forsyth did not answer the phone right away when I called to ask for his thoughts on the Benton County sheriff’s statement.
John and Richard Forsyth started Onfo LLC in 2018 as what they called a “network mining” business. The website for Onfo at the time said that account users could get credits without having to pay anything by telling others about the business.
After his brother died, Richard Forsyth said that he and his brother wanted to give a lot of people, including poor people in developing countries, a chance to trade in free, digital currency. In their words, the brothers thought that crypto was driven by greed, “about Lamborghinis and tax evasion.”
But the crypto business of the brothers wasn’t the only thing that got people talking about the case. A Facebook discussion group with more than 1,000 members grew quickly.
A judge had completed John Forsyth’s second divorce just 10 days before he went missing. He was ordered to pay his ex-wife an extra $15,000 a month and four of their children $3,999 a month. Family friends and the ex-wife’s lawyer say that the divorce was friendly.
Police in Cassville, Missouri, said they last saw the doctor going toward his RV in the parking lot of Mercy Hospital. Cassville is 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Branson, Missouri, a popular tourist destination in the Ozark Mountains.
That being said, he was last seen in the parking lot of a public swimming pool in Cassville, which was about a mile from the hospital where he worked and wasn’t even open for the summer yet. The open car of Richard Forsyth’s brother was found there with two cell phones, a laptop, and important papers inside.
