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.

Soon after we had signed the contract with TIJAT, the embassy let us know that they had possession of Roman’s missing Mexican backpack. The big pack contained his sleeping bag, blue Kelty tent, Jetboil, and the cold weather clothing that he had used on volcanoes farther north. His pack also held his belt, an empty wallet, his blue jeans and flip-flops, new cotton socks still in the packaging, a puffy Patagonia pullover, notebooks, and more.

Half of what we had posted on the equipment flyer was there. In the photo I snapped of the yellow bag at Do?a Berta’s hostel the first day of my search in Costa Rica, the waist belt of the pack is visible in the corner of the frame. At the time I had no way of knowing it was Roman’s.

Peggy and I were shocked that the embassy had held his pack for so many months before telling us. The OIJ had even received it from the new owners of the Corners Hostel months before that. Nobody had bothered to tell us until the final day of a maximum sixty-day holding period: they could have—but did not—tell us the day they took possession of it. Instead they waited months. Actions like this make the harsh reveal of public servants on television necessary.

Carson himself seemed to have a serious ax to grind with the State Department, while “production”—consisting of a constellation of a dozen producers and directors—had a stake in whipping up conflict for television drama. It felt to me as if both Carson and the primary face of production, executive producer Aengus James, provoked me to confront the embassy in its failure to tell Peggy and me about the very equipment I had described to the consul general nine months before. While I was angry about their failure, answers were more important: What did he use as a backpack if he left both his Mexican pack and the yellow bag behind? And if not the Jetboil, then what stove did Jenkins see?

Production put us up at an isolated eco-lodge on the Piedras Blancas arm of the Rio Tigre just past Dos Brazos. The lodge nestled intimately in the steamy jungle. Agoutis rustled boldly off the porch. A three-toed sloth climbed a short cecropia tree near enough for us to see the cloud of small moths that call its fur home. A rainbow flock of tanagers visited the bird feeders of ripe banana morning and night. Ken caught a fer-de-lance barehanded and brought it down to show us.

For Carson and Ken it was unbearably hot and humid, without electricity at night. As if to make us squirm and sweat even more during the jungle’s daytime discomforts, production shined bright, hot, studio lights in our faces while Carson interviewed us. Straight-faced and sweating, Carson instructed me: “Tell me everything you know about Cody.”

That would be impossible. Instead I recited what I’d told Dondee, and everyone else who would listen, the story, now old, about how Roman had been raised, what he’d done in El Petén, his disdain for guides and drugs. I told Carson about Jenkins and Pata Lora. I laid it all out. But Carson, like Dondee a year before him, didn’t seem to be listening.

Meanwhile, Aengus wanted more emotion from me. “So the TV audience can better empathize,” he said. He even staged Peggy in a scene along a jungle stream where she walked over a hazardous slimy rock again and again, in hopes, it struck me, that she might slip, fall, and grimace in pain, so the audience could better “empathize.” I called him out. “A bit overproduced, don’t you think?” I wouldn’t stand for “reality” at Peggy’s expense.

From the day production’s team first entered the jungle, I wondered how a jungle search could have been part of their plan. Jenkins guided their team to Zeledón so they could film Peggy and me in the jungle with him. Half of the crew couldn’t keep up on the trail; they lacked both fitness and experience. The sound man’s shoes came apart. A cameraman slipped off the trail into a steep gully. We walked the last hours in the dark.

Production was unable to secure park permits. There would be no further searching inside Corcovado’s jungle at all. Instead, Missing Dial would follow Carson Ulrich driving around the Osa, looking for evidence someone had murdered Cody Roman, doing what Peggy and I couldn’t, what we needed Carson to do. And for that we were grateful.

Peggy and I had to head home to Alaska for some business, after which I would return to Costa Rica. On the airplane, we talked about how the show’s production wasn’t looking like it would become the documentary we were expecting. “But maybe when I get back down there it will have moved forward in the right direction.”

Unfortunately, it hadn’t. It moved back.

Chapter 43

Carson

Carson Ulrich, Iguana Lodge, August 2015.

Courtesy of the author