The Adventurer's Son(74)
Trial and error,
Failure and terror,
The truth of the matter at hand.
Death in a whisper
Is so much to weather
For the life of a wife
And her man.
Chapter 42
TIJAT
Carson Ulrich, Ken Fornier, Jeff Sells, Roman, and Peggy, Dos Brazos, July 2015.
Courtesy of the author
The next day I drove back to Panama City, relieved to escape the Gap unscathed. My gut said Roman had never made it that far, but if he had decided to slip into Panama unannounced and undetected, he had succeeded.
By February 2015, we had run out of options. We decided it had to be foul play because no one had found any sign of him in Corcovado beyond Zeledón. This didn’t mean that I wouldn’t go back into the jungle to look, but it did mean we needed expertise that we simply didn’t have: criminal investigative skills by an American, rather than—or together with—a Costa Rican. Ideally, it would be someone bilingual who knew how to get people to talk but who would also listen to us and learn what we knew of our son. It was a tall order.
For most parents of missing children, there is no point—until they are able to lay their hands on the remains of their offspring—when they will concede: My missing child is dead. Six weeks after he’d disappeared, the odds of finding Roman alive seemed even. But after six months, I knew enough biology and human survival to realize that the odds were nearly zero. Still, we had faith that he was alive somewhere, somehow.
A memoir entitled The Cloud Garden describes how its authors, Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, were kidnapped and held hostage for nearly a year. Reading it gave us hope. So did the psychics who contacted us, performed a “remote viewing,” and reported that Roman was still alive.
Over the following winter, television producers sought out our story, but we ignored them. We had been disappointed with media coverage of Roman in general. It had been sensationalized at best, exploitative at worst, and always mistaken in some way that heaped hurt upon our pain.
One television production company connected with Peggy through the Missing Americans Project. The project’s founder, Jeff Dunsavage, maintains an online presence with updated postings of U.S. citizens who have disappeared while out of the country. Reading the monthly accounts of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans who disappear in Latin America is enough to give any tourist second thoughts about visiting there. Peggy found that the project’s mission statement struck a chord and she joined. “Adding my son to the list,” she wrote on the web page.
Dunsavage once claimed, “Media is the tail that wags the government dog,” and cynically pointed out that without the harsh light of publicity, public servants don’t always serve. He emailed Peggy, then arranged a call with a television production company called TIJAT (This Is Just a Test).
A TIJAT producer told her about his own father, who had been murdered in Honduras. The producer spent a decade, he said, trying to get his father’s murderer jailed, but without success. Then, within days of using a video camera as an investigative tool, justice was served and the killer convicted. The TIJAT producer found that using cameras opened people up in rural Central America in a way nothing else did. He suggested that TIJAT make a documentary film to speed up our search for answers.
I was doubtful about TV, but after her call with Dunsavage and TIJAT, Peggy told me, “They want to help and I think they can. Let’s hear what they have to say.”
TIJAT offered us a two-pronged effort to help us with permits and personnel. There would be a former Air Force PJ named Ken Fournier, who would help in the jungle, and a criminal investigator named Carson Ulrich. Short-statured, middle-aged, and muscle-bound, Ken and I knew each other from adventure racing and shared a mutual respect. Carson was a recently retired, twenty-five-year veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. With his bald head, goatee, tattoos, and towering stature, he looked like a guy who could kick ass and take names. These two were exactly what we wanted. The plan sounded ideal.
The producers said that they would step back and simply document the story as it unfolded. We were wary of reality TV. Mark Burnett’s Eco-Challenge shows rarely looked like the adventure races that I had participated in, even when his camera crews followed and filmed my teams to feature. During our first conversation with TIJAT’s producers, I asked how they differentiated between documentary and reality TV. After a long pause on the conference call, one of the producers volunteered that reality TV was “overproduced.”
TIJAT would compensate Peggy and me for our time by hiring Ken and Carson. They would also pay us royalties for any family photos or videos they used. In June of 2015, we contractually agreed to this arrangement. It fit with our view that TV would keep the search alive, provide permits and expertise we lacked, and put pressure on Costa Rica’s government and the embassy. But the arrangement came at an unexpectedly high price.
LOOKING BACK NOW and watching the resulting show, titled Missing Dial, I see what we gave up. We gave up the son we knew, the one we had raised, the one that I loved. We gave up Roman for a fictionalized character my voice-over called Cody. I read lines written by someone who knew neither Roman nor our history—lines I felt powerless to change and pressured to read. Worst of all were the dramatized scenes of our son’s death, re-created to generate “buzz.” TIJAT settled on National Geographic Channel as the network to fund Missing Dial’s production, in part because of my past history with National Geographic magazine.