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In August 2004, a man was found unconscious behind a Georgia Burger King. Initial reports described him as naked and bloodied. When he woke up, he claimed he had no memory of who he was. Now, two filmmakers are attempting to uncover what happened during the decades when he was missing.
On May 25, Investigation Discovery (ID) premieres the four-part docuseries “The Many Lives of Benjaman Kyle,” which follows Eric and Shannon Evangelista as they attempt to help the mysterious man, who claimed to suffer from a rare form of amnesia, piece together his lost identity. But after the man was identified in 2015 as William Burgess Powell, the investigation takes an unexpected turn.
It’s unclear whether Powell, who appears in the docuseries, disputes the filmmakers’ conclusions.
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Powell hasn’t been arrested or charged with any crime. He also doesn’t appear to have any criminal record, People magazine reported. According to the docuseries, his whereabouts are currently unknown, and the filmmakers are encouraging anyone with leads to reach out to their Hot Snakes Media production company.
“We’ve never stopped, and we’re still investigating,” Shannon told Fox News Digital. “I think the big question that’s still looming, the driving force for us, is where he was from 1983, when his Social Security earnings stopped, until 2004, when he was found at a Burger King. We’re hoping the public will help us answer that.”
Hospital staff nicknamed Powell “B.K. Doe” for “Burger King Doe.” He then began identifying himself as Benjaman Kyle. While he was diagnosed with retrograde amnesia, which causes someone to lose memories before an event such as a brain injury, trauma or illness, Shannon’s husband, Eric Evangelista, began to question his diagnosis.
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“His form of amnesia was a very outdated form of amnesia that you only found in old movies and soap operas,” he explained. “And when we began questioning Benjaman, he didn’t want to be found. It became obvious that there were roadblocks he was putting up. If you really wanted to be found, you would be willing to do anything possible. That’s when I said to Shannon, ‘This guy’s full of it, and we need to go further.’”
Powell has publicly maintained that he suffered from memory loss.
The Evangelistas are no strangers to analyzing cases. Evangelista previously spent 14 years as a broadcast news producer and newspaper journalist. Shannon was a federal criminal defense attorney specializing in organized crime before becoming an assistant district attorney in Orange County, California, and later moving to New York as a prosecutor in the Special Narcotics Division of the district attorney’s office.
Shannon said that after learning Powell’s story, they were determined to reconnect him with his family and document his journey. But as they dug deeper, the mystery only intensified, raising more questions than answers about who he really was.
“It was weird,” she said. “I had this dream that I was going to reunite him with his wife, who was going to be crying as the kids were like, ‘Dad!’ But when I took him out, I noticed he would know all the places. He would be like, ‘In 1984, they built this theater,’ or ‘I remember they were giving tickets for this.’ He wouldn’t remember people, and he didn’t want to go anywhere where there was a person who could recognize him.”
Powell, now 77, said he had 23 memories from “the mid-‘80s.” During filming, he was driven through the mountains of Colorado to a location he claimed to remember. At one point, he joked, “If anyone wants to get rid of a body, this would be a good place to shove one off. It’d be years before they found it.” He then laughed and kicked a rock down a mountain.
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“He would start to say these impromptu things that were scary, like talking about digging up skulls in the cemetery and dumping bodies,” said Shannon. “It was just like, ‘What’s happening here?’ I was like, ‘We need more help. We need a profiler. This is beyond my experience.’”
The Evangelistas turned to Ken Maxwell, a retired FBI assistant special agent in charge of the New York division, for guidance.
“The first of what we would call a strong lead or break in our journey was the surfacing of a missing person report that the Indiana State Police wrote back in August 1976 that detailed the circumstances of how he fled in the middle of the night from Lafayette, Indiana, in March of that year,” Maxwell explained to Fox News Digital.
“In that report, it says his vehicle was abandoned in a rural area north of Lafayette. It wasn’t just abandoned — they took the license plates off of it.”
“To anybody who’s been in law enforcement, people just don’t take the license plates off their car and then drive all night with a friend to Colorado,” said Maxwell. “They were fleeing from something.”
Shannon pointed out that Maxwell managed to obtain Powell’s medical records from the time he was discovered at the Burger King. He argued the records contradicted aspects of Powell’s story.
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“The story was that he was beaten and thrown next to a dumpster behind the Burger King,” said Maxwell. “There wasn’t a single abrasion or scratch on his body other than the infected ant bites on the soles of his feet, skin mites and some sunburn.”
Maxwell also argued that the initial EMT response cast doubt on whether Powell’s amnesia was genuine. Still, experts note that memory disorders can be difficult to definitively verify or disprove.
During filming, producers uncovered possible ties to a crime family in Lafayette, fueling speculation about whether he had connections to organized crime. Cold cases in the area were also explored. Maxwell said he took all theories seriously.
No public evidence has emerged linking Powell to any homicide or organized crime activity.
“In any investigation, you really have to go out of your way to try to corroborate the initial information,” said Maxwell.
“We had a few people tell us that he was a hitman. We had a few people tell us who he was hanging out with back in the ‘70s, and we did some checks on them. There were some pretty nefarious characters with criminal records. Even his brother was concerned about the place where he was working because of the kind of clientele that used to frequent the place.”
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Shannon said they last interacted with Powell in December 2016. They later discovered he no longer appeared to be living at his last known residence, and they said they had been unable to determine his current whereabouts.
“There’s no listing of him,” she said. “He just went MIA as far as we are concerned. We’re not entirely sure where he is. We’ve heard rumors that he’s living at some specific boarding house, but there’s nothing concrete there for us anymore.
“Everyone we talked to, anyone that he had a relationship with, said they haven’t heard from him in years. We did see him working at a place in Lafayette, a convenience store. Ken went in, and they said that he had left that position. None of them had heard from him.”
“We believe he’s still in the Lafayette area because he really doesn’t have a lot of financial resources to go places, but I think that’s well-founded speculation,” Maxwell said. “He’s masterful at laying low.”
Maxwell also said his investigation suggested Powell was “a computer expert,” a skill set he believes could have helped him conceal his identity and keep his whereabouts hidden.
New theories about Powell’s true identity kept surfacing during filming, but for the Evangelistas, every lead seemed to raise even more questions than answers. Still, their search continues.
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Despite years of investigation, no evidence has publicly emerged linking Powell to any violent crime, and many questions about his past remain unanswered.
“If you have a purposeful plan to live underneath the radar, off the grid, you can do it,” said Maxwell.
“Families have arguments all the time,” he reflected. “They don’t run away for 21, 22 years. There’s no paper trail on this guy between 1983 and 2004, when he was found behind the Burger King in Georgia.”
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“I just want to find out more about who this man was,” said Evangelista. “We want answers. This is not the end.”
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