It seemed to me that Pata Lora had psychological issues, not criminally violent ones. Firsthand complaints I had heard centered on his thieving and lying.

I certainly didn’t have all the answers. I’d learned early on to get used to being wrong. But something was clearly missing.

If Jenkins had seen him cooking, how did the Jetboil stove get back to the Corners Hostel? Was there a second stove? And what was Roman carrying when he left the hostel? Was there a second backpack? The blue one that Cody carried with Pata Lora to Arnoldo’s place in Dos Brazos and Roy Arias’s house in Piedras Blancas? Or the green one that Jenkins had seen Roman with on Zeledón?

Carson had no place in his narrative for Jenkins and Roman meeting in the jungle and no use for days or dates, other than one Sunday in July when Pata Lora and Cody got in an alcoholic cabby’s taxi (the colectivo doesn’t run on Sunday). Carson completely ignored the previous year’s account of the friendly guide with his distinctive ears who had seen Pata Lora with a gringo in Carate within a day of when Roman said he’d get out. Anything I offered Carson about Roman’s character or experience was summarily dismissed as immaterial. Scientists call this kind of analysis “cherry-picking the data.” Even Aengus, who’d hired Carson, observed: “Doesn’t give you much faith in law enforcement, does it?”

Still, like Carson kept reminding me, a dozen people saw Pata Lora and Cody together. To bend the facts and fit Carson’s story, I sketched out in my notebook the two jungle trips necessary during those weeks in July 2014 after Roman wrote his last emails and before Thai and I arrived.

On the first trip, leaving Puerto Jiménez soon after emailing us, Roman encounters Jenkins’s brother hurrying downstream on July 9 or 10 for a court date July 10. Then Roman climbs Negritos’s canyon walls, camps above Zeledón, and meets Jenkins the next morning, July 10 or 11. To fit Pata Lora’s story with Jenkins’s required that Roman walk out on July 11 or 12, leave the Jetboil and backpack at the hostel, hop in the drunk cabby’s taxi with Pata Lora on Sunday, July 13, and walk to Carate by July 15, when Roger Mun?z, the friendly guide, sees the pair. Then, sometime afterward, they meet Guicho, who kills, dismembers, and feeds Roman to the sharks. This way, all the dates would fit with people, places, and events. Now, I simply needed to change our son to someone we didn’t raise.

Peggy reacted to my doubts with her own in an email:

The women at the hostel need to be interrogated. They know something and need to talk. They are key. Nothing else makes sense. We, our friends, and his friends know our son, and know that he wouldn’t even think of getting his hands on drugs—especially in another country. DON’T let anyone even try to sway you to join their uninformed opinion. WE know our boy, Roman. He would never be so stupid.

By the end of August, I’d been forcefed a narrative I believed. My journal recorded my feelings.

We are closer than we’ve ever been to solving this and it’s thanks to Ken and Carson. Carson says “they” want good TV. He says he wants a conviction, justice. He’s in it for that. He also says this is for real and no TV show has ever done this for real in real time.

Carson must be right.

Chapter 45

Pata Lora

Guichos, Carate, November 2015.

Courtesy of the author

One of the biggest events in Missing Dial—when the producers and Carson are sure they’ve caught the lightning in a bottle of live crime-solving on TV—comes when Ken and Carson lure Pata Lora to a remote shack to scare him into thinking they have all the facts. Carson lays out the narrative his Dos Brazos informants had fed him, based on stories by Willim, who claimed his nephew Pata Lora told him about Guicho, the dismemberment, and the sharks.

Aengus put me in a stuffy SUV where I took notes, listening via an audio receiver connected to the car’s speakers. A cameraman and GoPro recorded my reactions to Carson’s soft interrogation of Pata Lora. At the end of a long hike together, Ken had led him to a remote shack where Carson was waiting. Initially wary, it took some coaxing on Carson’s part and reassurance by Ken, Pata Lora’s new best friend, to get him to relax and talk. That and chain-smoking cigarettes.

“Everybody saw you go in with him but you came out alone,” Carson said referring to the hike with Cody.

“Who said that?” Pata Lora responded.

“Four miners in Carate.” Carson’s reference to the Guicho family was meant to throw Pata Lora off-balance.

Pata Lora now took the story and ran with it, spinning yarn faster than Carson could pick it up. He described in detail how he and Cody encountered the three Guichos a few miles up the Carate River from the beach. There was Pollo with a 9-mm pistol, Mario with a machete, and their dreadlocked father, who went by Guicho, standing behind his sons.

“I saw their faces, Guicho, like they were angry. They were looking at Cody, like, ‘YOU OWE ME!’”

“What did Cody say?” Carson asked.

Pata Lora recounted Cody’s alarm: “What happened? What happened?”

The Guichos responded: “Shut up, motherfucker—and you—you run! RUN! Or I will kill you, motherfucker!”

Pata Lora went on, “Of course, man, I run.”

Carson pushed. “And Cody was alive?”

“Of course. I don’t know how they killed him. I don’t know nothing, man. I save my life, that’s all. That was the last thing I saw. I’m not fucking lie. You look in my eyes.”

The scene in the show is tense. The hidden cameras give it a peep-show quality. Pata Lora sounds shaken: “Now I’m fucking scared.”

Carson was sure that this was Pata Lora’s “dark secret,” a true confession of a scene Pata Lora had witnessed—the Guichos abducting Cody.

The interrogation disturbed me, too. Afterward, everyone in production—cameramen, sound men, assistants, Aengus, Jeff—was quiet, somber, long-faced, and respectful toward me. Aengus walked up, his white iPhone earpiece dangling. “Sorry, man,” he said putting his hand on my shoulder. I was in shock, feeling like I should believe what I had just heard, but couldn’t.

Have I been wrong all along? And Dondee and Carson right? Was my son not who I thought he was?

CARSON CLAIMED “THIRTY witnesses” from Puerto Jiménez to Carate saw Cody and Pata Lora. Whenever I challenged him, he responded, “They’re all wrong, and you’re right?” Dondee had said the same thing. It was what everyone said, the polite ones, too, when I was out of earshot: “That poor grieving father. He’s lost his son and refuses to accept the truth that his son had no skills and poor judgment.”

For me, the show Missing Dial doesn’t document Carson and Ken catching a killer. It documents my betrayal of the son I raised as I warp dates to fit the fantasy of the Osa’s pariah: Pata Lora.

I managed to save some of my son’s dignity in a corner of my heart, crowded against our Umnak walk, Culebra swim, Wilderness Classic, and a lifetime of trust. I tried to make sense of these feelings in my notebook:

I’m wondering how did I just let everything I know go—I was so sure that Roman wasn’t with Pata Lora. Now I’ve given in to all of it, following Carson’s lead. Like him, any little thing that doesn’t jive with the narrative is just ignored.

Dates don’t line up?

Nobody keeps a calendar here.

Footwear and colors don’t match up?

What color did you wear last week, last month, last year? How about just yesterday?

Smoking pot?

Are you so sure it wasn’t just Pata Lora smoking pot?

Thumbtacks?

Maybe he was trying something out for Panama.

And a guide?

Maybe he just liked Pata Lora as a local, was using him the way he might in Panama.

Just writing all that is difficult! It’s like I feel like I am stepping on his memory! Like I am disregarding everything I know after six months of emails and a lifetime with my own son.

But I signed on for Carson and this is where he brought us—and while I have trouble separating his truth from his manipulations, he does want to solve this. And he has “dozens” of people who said, Yes, we saw Pata Lora with that gringo who looks and acts like Roman! That seems less likely than the other contradictions.

Do I have doubt?

Yes.

Am I willing to swallow that bitter pill?

Yes.

Do I want this to end?

Of course.

By September 2015, I had stepped out of everyone’s way, tried hard not to disagree anymore, and let Carson and production work with the retired-FBI-agents-turned-Hollywood-consultants to move forward. The consultants, Carson, and production all agreed that Pata Lora’s recorded statement was sufficient for an arrest and a conviction of murder.