Disappearance of Ben McDaniel

Background

In the late 2000s Ben McDaniel was going through a difficult period in his life. The oldest of three sons born to Shelby and Patty McDaniel, a wealthy couple who lived in Collierville, Tennessee, outside Memphis, he had returned to live with his parents after his marriage ended in divorce and his construction business failed, the latter leaving him with tax debts of almost $50,000 to the Internal Revenue Service and the state of Tennessee. He was also still grieving for his younger brother Paul, a frequent rock climbing partner during their youth, who died in 2008 at the age of 22 from a stroke. Ben had found Paul unconscious in the family home and tried to revive him; he later became active in raising money for the foundation his parents established to support research into prevention and treatment of strokes.

The McDaniels suggested their son take what they called a "sabbatical", offering to support him financially while he and his dog, a chocolate Labrador he had rescued, lived in the family's beach home at Santa Rosa Beach on the Emerald Coast of the Florida Panhandle. He accepted the offer and moved into the house in April 2010, around his 30th birthday. His parents and girlfriend say the move was proving beneficial, as Ben was beginning to think and talk about moving on from his recent personal setbacks.

Relocating to the Gulf Coast allowed Ben to indulge in his preferred hobby, scuba diving. He had first taken it up at the age of 15, practicing with his tanks in the family pool. Despite living on the coast during his sabbatical, he preferred to dive in fresh water, becoming a frequent visitor to Vortex Spring, located inland a short distance north of Ponce de Leon.

At Vortex Spring, which claims on its website to be the largest diving facility in the state, divers descend into clear waters at a constant temperature of 68 °F (20 °C) fed by the Floridan Aquifer. Diving instruction is offered for all levels; experienced divers come for the underwater wildlife and the cavern, which begins at 58 feet (18 m) below the surface. All divers are required to present proof of open-water certification and sign a release of liability.

For the most experienced divers, some of whom come from around the world, the main attraction of Vortex Spring is the cave, which starts 300 feet (91 m) from the cavern, at a depth of 115 feet (35 m). At the entrance is a sign depicting the Grim Reaper and warning divers that the consequences of continuing past that point could be fatal. The cave continues, steadily narrowing, to a locked gate almost 300 feet (91 m) from the entrance. The dive shop gives the key only to those who can show that they have cave diving certification, which requires two months' training including 125 dives with an instructor or certified diving partner. This policy was instituted after the deaths of 13 divers in the cave during the 1990s, in response to threats from the state to ban diving in the cave entirely. Starting from the gate, over 1,600 feet (490 m) through the area's limestone bedrock have been mapped, to a depth of 310 feet (94 m); the cave's full extent is not known. At some points the passage narrows to 10 inches (25 cm), requiring divers who would pass through to take off their tanks and hold them at their sides or in front, and twist their bodies.

Ben's dives at the site were regular enough that the dive shop employees and other frequent visitors came to know him. One of the employees, Chuck Cronin, believed that while Ben had the proper equipment and considerable diving knowledge, he was often overly confident in his abilities and not shy about saying so. That opinion, the Memphis Commercial Appeal later reported, was shared by posters on a scuba diving website, scubaboard.com, who had also met Ben during trips to Vortex Spring. (According to a 2014 online comment by his father, he could not find anyone at Vortex Spring willing to be his diving partner, so he did his dives alone.) His parents later defended him from those criticisms by seeing them as positive traits. "Ben was brave," his father later said. "Ben was fearless. He followed his passions."

McDaniel was not the only person associated with Vortex Springs at the time facing serious legal issues. Lowell Kelly, at the time the owner of the Vortex Spring, was facing criminal charges. He had allegedly taken a temporary employee who he said owed him thousands of dollars out into an isolated wooded area and attempted to beat him with a baseball bat to make him pay up. The man escaped, and prosecutors later charged Kelly with assault and kidnapping in the incident.

Disappearance

In mid-August, four months into his Florida sojourn, Ben returned to Tennessee for a week. His parents and girlfriend, Emily Greer, said he seemed optimistic. He told them he was working on getting certified as an instructor so he could find a job and that he was researching cave diving with an eye toward getting that certification as well. On his nights out with Greer, he told her of plans to eventually start a diving-related business. On the weekend of August 14–15, he returned to Florida, leaving behind a letter thanking his parents for the sabbatical and promising to look after them as they grew older. They never saw him again.

On August 18, the Wednesday after he returned to the Santa Rosa Beach house, he went up to Vortex Spring again. In the middle of the day, he did one dive. Other divers saw him looking closely at the area around the cave entrance, as if, it was later reported, he was planning something. After resurfacing he filled his tanks at the dive shop, a transaction recorded on security cameras (it is not known what he filled those tanks with). He spent much of the rest of the afternoon by himself alongside the spring, witnesses said, testing equipment and making notes in his dive log.

The day had been hot, with temperatures around 90 °F (32 °C), and as evening came Ben began preparing for another dive. He called his mother on his cell phone, the last contact he has had with his family. Around 7:30 p.m., as the sun began to set, he went in again.

Cronin and fellow employee Eduardo Taran, on their way back from a dive themselves – something they often did on Wednesdays after the shop closed – saw Ben as he began descending, with his lights on and wearing a helmet, suggesting he was venturing into the cave. Taran, who had suspected for some time that Ben was forcing the gate open, went down to him and unlocked it, watching Ben go in and then returning to Cronin. No one is known to have seen him since.

On some nights when they had seen Ben dive late, the two had stayed at the spring after resurfacing until they saw bubbles on the surface, indicating that he was beginning to decompress in order to safely resurface. But on the night of the 18th, they instead went back to Taran's house for coffee.

Ben's truck was still in the parking lot the next morning, but with many summer visitors coming to enjoy the site's many water-based recreational opportunities and picnic grounds in addition to diving, the employees were (or later claimed to have been) too busy to notice. They did see the truck the next morning. After determining that no one else had seen Ben, Taran called the Holmes County sheriff's office.

Search

Upon arrival, the sheriff's deputies sealed off the spring with crime-scene tape. Ben's tanks, wet suit and other diving equipment were not present and there were no signs of a struggle near his truck or anywhere else he could have been. His wallet, with almost $700 in cash, and cell phone were in the cab of his truck; dive logs showed that he had explored the cave and a map he made was also found. At the Santa Rosa Beach house officers found his dog, hungry from having been unfed for two days. Based on these circumstances, police and dive shop employees assumed that he had never resurfaced and had in all probability drowned somewhere in the cave trying to get out. Cadaver dogs alerted on the water surface, further supporting that theory.

As the word of a missing diver in the Vortex Spring cave got out, other cave divers came for what they assumed would be a recovery operation, taking advantage of the weekend. The McDaniels were called, and they drove down to Florida, along with Greer, to watch what they could from the shore. News media in the Panhandle and Memphis followed the search closely.

Divers scoured the cave, looking in every small crevice and fissure where Ben might have crawled in a panicked attempt to get out as his tanks ran low, a pattern found in other cave diving deaths; many said later that they felt they had risked their own lives to do so. But over the ensuing weekend they found no sign of Ben.

They did, however, find some of his equipment. Two tanks known to belong to McDaniel were found near the entrance to the cave. But this discovery struck some searchers as inconsistent with Ben's supposed intent to explore the cave he was technically not permitted to enter. Most cave divers place their extra air tanks, which they need for decompression, at points along their route so they can follow them out, not at the entrance to the cave. And when tested, the tanks were found to contain just air, not the specialized gas mix Ben would have been likely to use had he been researching cave diving as his parents said he had been.

On Sunday, August 22, no other sign of Ben had been found. A text message was sent to Edd Sorenson, a veteran cave diver and recovery specialist with hundreds of dives to his credit, on his yacht in the Bahamas, where he was leading an expedition. He came to Vortex Springs the next day. Other divers, and an official with an international cave-diving rescue organization, told him it was too dangerous to go any further than they already had.

Sorenson, who has been described by the Tampa Bay Times as being able to go where other divers cannot, persisted. He made three separate dives that day, going (by his account) 1,700 feet (520 m) into the cave, 200 feet (61 m) further than those sections Ben had mapped, using a diver propulsion vehicle and smaller tanks to increase his range. He found nothing – no body, and no evidence of one such as increased activity by carnivorous aquatic scavengers, nor any evidence that Ben had gotten into those sections, such as marks on the cave walls or disturbed silt.

Ben was 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm) tall and weighed 210 pounds (95 kg), one inch (2.5 cm) taller and 20 pounds (9.1 kg) heavier than Sorenson. Without cave diving training, Sorenson said, there was no way Ben could have gotten through some of the narrower passages, called restrictions by divers, in the cave. "I know what I'm doing and I barely made it through," he told the Commercial Appeal. "The last place I searched was pristine, without a mark that a diver had been there. It would be impossible to go through that restriction without making a mark on the floor or ceiling. He's not in there."

The McDaniels did what they could to help the search. They hired Steve Keene, who had originally mapped the Vortex Spring cave in 2003, to look. After seven dives, he apologized to the McDaniels for not finding any fresh sign of Ben. "If he's in there, I don't know where he'd be," he said later. They agreed to put up $54,000 to guarantee the cost of replacing a remotely operated underwater vehicle brought to the spring by the Fort Lauderdale police, in case it was lost in the cave. (It was unable to go any further than human divers had due to technical issues.) In total, 16 divers spent 36 straight days looking for Ben's body in the cave with no results. Volunteer searches continued afterwards at the spring through November, often with the McDaniels and Greer in attendance.

With the cave thoroughly searched, some divers began questioning whether Ben was there at all. Perhaps his body had been secretly removed from the cave before searching began and disposed of on land or it had washed out through the spring's outlet. Others, including Cronin and Kelly, suggested he had staged his own disappearance to start his life over under another identity and escape his past troubles. Authorities began to consider these possibilities and adjust their search.

The cadaver dogs searched the woods around Vortex Spring without success. Assisted by helicopters, they searched the swamps along the spring's outflow into Blue Creek and Sandy Creek to the Choctawhatchee River. Thirty separate tests of the water over the next several months showed no sign of an increase in the bacteria that would indicate the presence of a decomposing human body. Taran, who said he had let Ben into the cave despite knowing he lacked certification to dive in it, passed a lie detector test of his account.

Reward offer and controversy

Frustrated by the limitations the search had thus far encountered, and increasingly coming to believe that Ben's body was in an area of the cave no one had yet reached, the McDaniels offered a reward of $10,000, raised from money contributed at a benefit held on what would have been their son's 31st birthday, at the end of the year to anyone "brave" enough to go to those places and find it. The insinuation of cowardice alienated divers who had already risked their lives searching the cave, and raised fears among them that it would only encourage untrained divers to enter the cave and take potentially fatal risks for the reward money. Undeterred, the McDaniels increased the award, twice.

In March 2012, by which time the reward was $30,000, the fears of the cave divers were realized. Two days before the Investigation Discovery cable channel series Disappeared aired a segment on Ben's case, a diver from Biloxi, Mississippi, Larry Higginbotham, died in the cavern at Vortex Spring. His body was found the day after he, too, had failed to return from a dive. "He just got himself in a pinch and couldn't find his way back out", said one of the divers who recovered the body.

There was no explicit evidence that Higginbotham was trying to find Ben and claim the reward. The divers who recovered his body believed he was, however. "He was found near a shovel left near a restriction so small that no one could get through it," said Sorenson, who had pulled Higginbotham's body back through four tight restrictions.

The following month, amid increasing criticism, the McDaniels rescinded the reward offer. "Not only did it endanger the lives of divers who would risk going farther than they should," said Sorenson, who was by then even more firmly convinced that their son had not died in the cave, "it put all of our lives at risk because we have to go in to recover the bodies." By that time the McDaniels had also come to believe that, if he had not died in the cave, Ben had been murdered. A phone tip line they set up had not received any calls, and no one who had not yet said anything was likely to be further motivated to do so, they said. (Ben's father elaborated the following year that the family was told to rescind the reward while in the Vortex Spring area for exactly this reason).

Death of Lowell Kelly

In 2011 Kelly disposed of the charges against him by pleading no contest. In return he was fined and sentenced to seven years of probation. He did not live long enough to complete even one of those years.

During a chili cook-off he was hosting at Vortex Spring in December, Kelly reportedly fell down the stairs and hurt his head. A person present took him to his home in Ponce de Leon, where he helped Kelly shower and, afterwards, put a blanket over him and left him to rest in the bathtub. In the morning, a different person came to the house, and found his condition had worsened overnight. Emergency medical services responded to a call and took him to a hospital in Pensacola.

Kelly remained comatose, and after his condition did not improve he was transferred to hospice care, where he died the following month. The Holmes County sheriff's office, which had also been the lead agency investigating the McDaniel disappearance, implied that it had not gotten the full story of what had occurred the night of Kelly's injury and that it had some questions it wanted answered. However, police would not name the individuals who had taken Kelly home and found him there in the morning. The sheriff's office also refused to release the autopsy report to the Northwest Florida Daily News despite its status as a public record under Florida's sunshine laws; it claimed that release of the report would compromise an ongoing investigation.

Shelby McDaniel, Ben's father, implied three years later in an online comment on an article about his son's disappearance that Kelly's death was not the result of an accident, and possibly connected to Ben's case. "I've sources he talked when he drank too much and was baggage," he wrote. "I guess honesty is not the best policy with some people."

Subsequent investigations

In 2011, with it looking unlikely that Ben's body would be found in the cave, the McDaniels began considering the possibility that he had died not in a diving accident but as a result of foul play, and that the disappearance might have been staged to cover that up (or at the very least he had been found dead by the dive shop staff, who feared the consequences of that discovery). They hired a Florida private investigator, Lynn-Marie Carter, who found that other people associated with Vortex Spring besides Kelly had criminal records. "There is just as much reason to look above the water for Ben's body as there was to look below it in the cave," she told the Commercial Appeal.

Some other events reported to have occurred on the day Ben disappeared supported that theory. Kelly said shortly afterwards that on that evening, a man he described as "wild-eyed" and apparently drunk showed up at the shop and asked if it was too late to dive; the possibility has been raised that this man, if he existed, may have been involved. Earlier that day, a diver had had a confrontation with several teenagers on the property about their drinking; they eventually left but may have come back in an attempt to exact revenge. Shelby McDaniel said in a 2014 online post that the family had also learned that Kelly had remained at Vortex Spring well into the evening that day, rather than leaving at the end of the day as he usually did.

In a comment the following year on the same thread, Shelby questioned how it was that the dive shop employees failed to notice his son's truck in the parking lot throughout the day after he was last seen even though it was within their view the whole time. He is further critical of how the Holmes County sheriff's office handled the investigation, saying they should have treated it as a crime scene from the beginning. In particular, he claims, the lie detector test that Taran passed was inadequate, as it had consisted of only three questions (he says he later learned that a properly administered examination with the device should take over an hour), and that Kelly and Cronin should have been asked to take the test as well.

Two months later, Shelby said that he believed Taran and Cronin both knew more than they claimed about Ben's disappearance, as Kelly had before his death. In 2014 he wrote that he still had investigators working the case and knew more than he was able to say. "There is much I could tell you that the public is not privy to knowing! ... [T]here is coming a point in time [when] I will reveal answers to most of the questions associated with our son's disappearance."

Ben's Vortex

Among the divers who heard about the case was Jill Heinerth, a Canadian who has set the world record for deepest dive by a woman. Afterwards, she and her husband Robert McClellan, both certified cave divers and documentary filmmakers, went to Vortex Spring to make a short video. They hoped to show it to the McDaniel family in the hopes of giving them a better understanding of the risks associated with cave diving, and "closure", as Heinreth put it. At the time she believed that Ben, whatever his fate, was not in the cave's depths.

But then during the research process, she was able to read Ben's dive logs and the map he had made. She realized that he had, in fact, gotten very far into the cave. And, knowing that divers in trouble will often burrow deeper into narrow crevices such as those within the cave in a mistaken effort to get back to the surface, she revised her opinion. "I simply see no reasonable evidence that he is NOT in the cave," the Commercial Appeal quoted her as writing in an email.

She and McClellan turned their private video short into a feature-length documentary, Ben's Vortex, released in 2012. It considers all the theories regarding its subject's disappearance: an accident as originally believed, a murder or coverup of the accident as the McDaniels have sometimes alleged, and the possibility of a staged disappearance to allow Ben to escape his problems. In support of the latter, which McClellan has stated he believes, the film paints a more negative picture of the McDaniels' lives prior to Ben's disappearance, suggesting that Paul McDaniel's death may not have been a stroke but rather a prescription drug overdose and that Ben, too, was addicted to the same drugs.

Shelby has taken umbrage at this depiction, calling it "very misleading" and said that bringing up Paul's autopsy report was "a real real low blow". His two sons had been on prescription medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder since childhood, he allows, but they were not addicts or abusers. And, he added, Ben had paid off his tax debts at the time of the disappearance. He also disputes Sorenson's contention, repeated in the film, that Ben is not in the cave. The veteran diver and other rescuers, he claims, went into the wrong section of the cave during their searches.

Nor does Shelby believe Ben had any intention of abandoning his life. He had left his dog in Santa Rosa Beach and had not given Greer any indication of such plans. Shelby also noted that Ben had seen the impact Paul's death had had on his parents. "After what we went through with Paul, we know our son well enough to know he wouldn't put us through that again," his mother told the Commercial Appeal.