MADISON, Wis. — A kayaker in Wisconsin faked drowning so he could leave his wife and kids and meet a woman in Eastern Europe. On Thursday, his wife filed papers to end their marriage in court.
According to online court records, Emily Borgwardt asked the Dodge County Circuit Court to legally separate her from Ryan Borgwardt. The suit says that the marriage is “irretrievably broken.” The paper doesn’t go into more detail.
Thursday, a woman who answered the phone at Andrew Griggs’ (Emily Borgwardt’s lawyer) office said he would not have anything to say. Online court records don’t show that Ryan Borgwardt has a lawyer.
From the divorce suit, we can see that they have been married for 22 years and Emily Borgwardt wants to have full custody of their three teenage children. It also says that Emily works at a private school in Watertown. Ryan is described as self-employed and living at an “unknown address” at the moment.
The case will be heard in April.
Ryan Borgwardt, 45, was last seen on August 12; he had told his wife the night before that he was kayaking on Green Lake, which is about 160 kilometers (100 miles) northwest of Milwaukee. At first, his absence was looked into as a possible drowning. But new information, like the fact that he got a new passport three months before he went missing, made detectives think that he might have faked his death to meet up with a woman he had been talking to in Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia.
In November, investigators got in touch with Borgwardt and persuaded him to come back to the U.S. On Tuesday, he turned himself into the Green Lake County sheriff’s office. On Wednesday, he was charged with blocking the search for his body.
The criminal charge says that on August 11, he went 50 miles (80 kilometers) from his family’s home in Watertown to Green Lake. He flipped his kayak over in the lake at night, paddled back to shore in an inflatable raft he brought with him, and dumped his ID in the lake along the way. He then rode an electric bicycle 70 miles (112 kilometers) to Madison, where he took a bus to Toronto, a plane to Paris, and then a flight to an unknown country in Eastern Europe.
The guy told police that a woman picked him up and that they stayed in a hotel for a few days before he moved to Georgia, according to the complaint.
Borgwardt got out of Green Lake County jail on Wednesday after posting a $1,000 bond. He told the judge on Wednesday that he would be his lawyer because he only had $20 with him. The judge told him that the court could give him a lawyer, but as of Thursday, online court records didn’t show that one had been chosen.
Source: The wife of a Wisconsin kayaker who faked his own death moves to end their marriage
