A man woke up outside a Burger King and claimed to have “amnesia”. A new documentary claims he may be tied to cold cases
He was found naked and unconscious behind a Burger King in rural Georgia – a man with no wallet, no identification and, he claimed, no memory of who he was.
For years, the mystery man known as “Benjamin Kyle” haunted investigators and fascinated the public.
Since he was found in 2004, he has wandered through life with no social security number, relying on strangers, doctors and documentary filmmakers to help piece together the fragments of a past he said he could not remember.
Now, more than two decades later, Investigation Discovery is revisiting the bizarre case in a new two-night, four-part docuseries that suggests the mystery may be far darker than anyone realized.
Filmmakers Shannon and Eric Evangelista, founders of Hot Snakes Media, initially set out to help the man recover his identity. Instead, they say they uncovered disturbing inconsistencies in his story, and witness accounts that led them to believe he was linked to several cold cases and a possible connection to a powerful Midwestern crime family.
In April 2015, the mystery man was identified as William Burgess Powell, an Indiana man who went missing in 1976.
But Shannon Evangelista says major questions remain unanswered. Over the years, the team has continued their investigation into Powell’s life, hoping to answer the question: what happened between 1976 and 2004?
Through years of research and chilling witness accounts, Evangelista now alleges that Powell may never have suffered from amnesia at all.
Instead, she claims he may have had ties to a notorious crime family in Lafayette, Indiana, and to George Keck, who was once believed to be connected to the 1977 killing of Purdue University student Kristine Kozik.
The mystery began on August 31, 2004, when a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia discovered a man lying naked behind the fast food joint.
The man, believed to be in his mid-50s, was temporarily admitted to the hospital under the name “Burger King Doe,” later shortened to “B.K. Doe,” but when regained consciousness, he assumed the name of Benjaman. He later told staff his last name was Kyle because it matched the BK initials, he says in the documentary.
He believed his birth date was August 29, 1948 and he had a few blurred memories of Denver, Colorado, and Indiana, and but did not know how he ended up in Georgia and couldn’t remember any other identifying details about his life. He was diagnosed with dissociative amnesia, a rare condition that caused him to lose almost all memories connected to his past life.
He made his home in Jacksonville, Florida, but struggled to live and work without a social security number and government ID, so continued on his quest to find his identity. His strange story drew national attention, including television appearances on Dr. Phil and extensive media coverage, as investigators struggled to uncover who he really was.
A team of genetic genealogists, led by CeCe Moore, who heads the Parabon NanoLabs genetic genealogical unit, finally identified the man in 2015 as William Powell.
