Sheriff Mark Podol
Appearances
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
I'd like to thank the dedication of my sheriff's office. But most of all, I want to thank the family. I want to thank his wife. That is one strong lady. Whenever we called on her, she always responded and she gave everything that she could for us. I cannot imagine what she's going through and they're going through. It's really hard. Because one, they felt that their dad was drowned.
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
A day ago, they found out that he wasn't. And this is the Ryan. Brian, if you are viewing this, I plead that you contact us or contact your family. We understand that things can happen, but there's a family that wants their daddy back.
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
And he decided in one of his communications that he was going to tell us how he did that. He stashed an e-bike near the boat launch. He paddled his kayak in a child-size floating boat out into the lake. He overturned the kayak and dumped his phone in the lake. He paddled the inflatable boat to shore and got on his e-bike and rode through the night to Madison. In Madison, he boarded a bus
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
and went to Detroit and then the Canadian border. He continued on the bus to an airport and got on a plane. We are continuing to verify this information, trying to put the dots together, but we feel that this was Ryan's way that he could tell the entire country how he did it. One of the things that he did say was he didn't expect us to go more than two weeks in searching for him.
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
Well, I hate to tell you, he picked the wrong share from the wrong department. And one of the reasons why he picked Green Lake was because it was the deepest lake in Wisconsin. He did research. He did. And he thought his plan was going to pan out, but it didn't go the way he had planned. And so now we're trying to give him a different plan is to come home, to come back home.
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
So we continued our search throughout the And it continued through 54 days. I think it was eight weeks. And during that time, it was unbelievable the amount of support that our community gave my department. It was unbelievable. From food to gift cards for Bruce's legacy to a thank you. And they were proud of us. They were proud that we were not giving up, and we were not. We continued.
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
And on October 4th, which was a Friday, I met with Keith from Bruce's Legacy. And he said to me, he said, Sheriff, he says, I've done a lot of searches, and I can't find them. He said, we searched and we searched. And if you see that picture that's on the screen behind me, all the yellow is where Keith searched. That was every spot of that western water of our lake.
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
With that being said, he also told me that, Sheriff, don't worry. I'm not giving up. He called the company and was asking for another piece of equipment, a top-notch sonar, and it was a new one, but it was going to be a couple weeks out. So October 7th, I got my crew together, my three detectives and my chief deputy and myself. We met and we talked, and we said we got to go a different direction.
True Crime with Kendall Rae
The Man Who Faked His Death for a New Life With His Mistress
And they did. The direction we went. Was offline. And we found out. That his name was Ron. On August 13th. Wow, yeah. That was something we didn't expect.