The Adventurer's Son

by Roman Dial

  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.

  AFTER CARSON’S INTERROGATION, I volunteered to meet with Pata Lora. Aengus and Jeff could hardly hide their excitement: maybe as the father I could convince Pata Lora to go to the OIJ with his story about the Guichos. Six cameras recorded our meeting at the waterfront in Puerto Jiménez. It was in front of the seafood restaurant, where Peggy and I had spoken on the phone the night we last felt that Roman was all right after all.

  Pata Lora had always been a sideshow for me, someone I didn’t need to talk to—the personification of a rumor I never believed. I had discounted his stories as fabrications, a grab for attention, tales that rubbed the salt of insult—dishonoring Roman’s skill and independence—on my raw wounds of loss.

  This would be the first time that we would meet. Carson and Ken had showered him with gifts, meals, hotel rooms, even cash. He arrived in their car with them.

  After production wired Pata Lora for sound, he walked up in sunglasses to meet me. Lean and about my height, he wore a green camo-colored ball cap, board shorts, and an army-green shirt that Carson would wear. Other than eyebrows and a thin, well-trimmed goatee and line of beard along his jawline, he had no hair showing on his head. He walked with a determined gait and a barely perceptible limp. His left ankle bulged in deformity. It looked like a parrot’s foot.

  I asked Pata Lora to tell me the truth, to make nothing up, and to take off his sunglasses. I wanted to see his dark eyes as he shared vignettes of my son’s final days. Instead, Pata Lora gave a coarse description of a hike with Cody that left me unconvinced he had ever been with Roman. There were no details, no stories, no images. Looking into Pata Lora’s gaze I saw only emptiness.

  His eyes came alive when he described his own abusive father who had abandoned him to grow up on the street. Pata Lora acknowledged that he admired me as a father looking for his son. At the end of the made-for-reality-TV moment, he asked for a hug. I gave him one, feeling sorry for Pata Lora, but unable to shake the feeling he had never been with Roman.

  Between takes for Missing Dial, Carson led a crusade criticizing the OIJ and the State Department for their inaction. It was hard not to admire his passion, but it got him into trouble. During one meeting with the Fiscal, Carson inadvertently wore a hidden wire. The government threatened arrest with a denuncia, a formal legal complaint or warrant. Carson fled Costa Rica, his mission to solve a murder in real-time TV unfulfilled.

  With Carson gone, it was now up to me to carry on the new Pata Lora story during multiple meetings from Golfito to D.C., often with Aengus and Ken in attendance. Flipping through a folder of eight-by-ten-inch photos of a dozen witnesses from Puerto Jiménez to Carate, I told Carson’s latest version of the Pata Lora story to the Fiscal, the embassy, the director of the OIJ, and eventually, with embellishments of my own, to the assistant director of the FBI.

  I had to admit—as awful as the sweaty filming and bullying by Carson had been—the heavy presence of Missing Dial accomplished what Mead Treadwell, the Fellowship,
GoFundMe, scores of volunteers, and Facebook posts had not. It had put sustained pressure on everyone. By September 2015, everybody from Osa’s illegal miners to the director of the OIJ had one thing in common with Peggy and me: we all wanted the search to end.

  Missing Dial had everyone’s attention and it hadn’t even been produced. The officials probably feared how their actions—or inaction—would look on TV when the show finally aired. Carson and Ken, it seemed, got more people talking in a month than OIJ or the FBI had in a year. Still, according to Costa Rican law, a body is needed for a murder conviction. Without that, Pata Lora’s recorded statement during the interrogation, while valuable to the Fiscal, was not enough. Pata Lora’s story might just be a confusion of fact and fantasy.

  The day I left Costa Rica, Pata Lora took the boat to Golfito, promising to give the Fiscal his statement identifying the Guichos as having abducted Roman at gunpoint.

  Chapter 46

  A Backpack

  Mall, San José, Costa Rica, March 2016.

  Courtesy of the author

  I flew home to Alaska the first week of September 2015 and went back to work teaching a full load of classes, writing papers, advising students. We had hired a lawyer who petitioned the court for guardianship of Roman and in November we successfully subpoenaed the bank for his 2014 financial records. The records showed what we’d known all along: after July 9, the day he wrote us, there had been no bank activity.

  Through the fall and into the winter, Peggy and I clung to Carson’s embellished story. It was all that Missing Dial could give us. The price I had paid for drinking Carson’s Kool-Aid and telling an enriched Pata Lora story was high: denying the life I’d known as a father to my son, as if our lives together had never happened. But the benefit was that Costa Rican and American officials believed the story.

  All that OIJ needed was a body between Piedras Blancas and the Pacific Ocean for corroboration, conviction, and justice. And if that happened, we’d have closure, albeit incomplete. We’d know what happened physically—who killed him and how, perhaps—but we would never know why Roman became someone who would walk with Pata Lora in the first place. And that question nagged me.

  In January 2016, the Fiscal separately informed both Aengus and me that psychological testing of Pata Lora diagnosed him with schizophrenia, a condition that explained much of his behavior. About the same time, Peggy and I finally had what we’d always hoped for: park access. Accompanied by embassy officials, Fuerza police, MINAE rangers, Cruz Roja (without Dondee), and the OIJ detectives and dog teams, we could go anywhere we wanted—just so long as TIJAT wasn’t there.

  FROM JANUARY THROUGH May, Peggy and I made four trips with these Tico teams. Sadly, each trip was a search for Roman’s remains rather than his broken, living body. The search teams that worked with me now had come two years too late. This was the kind of support I had hoped for in 2014, when he had possibly been alive, when I had wanted—but was denied under threat of arrest—access to the park. The leader of these searches was a Tico lawyer named Jorge who worked at the U.S. Embassy and whose father once directed the OIJ.

  On the first trip, Jorge picked up Peggy and me at the airport and drove us through the busy streets of San José, explaining the Costa Rican judicial system. “Mr. Roman,” he said, “in Costa Rica it is essentially impossible to get a murder conviction without a body. Unlike in the USA, people saying things is not enough. In fact, the murderer could even confess to a killing, but without physical evidence, like a body, there could be no conviction.”

  Jorge had passed tests to become both a Fiscal and a judge and knew well what was necessary for justice. “Without a Fiscal and a judge present, OIJ investigators cannot even ask any questions, other than where a suspect lives, his name, and other nonincriminating information. All of this makes this case with Pata Lora very challenging.”

  With Jorge, OIJ, its cadaver-sniffing bloodhounds, MINAE, and Fuerza we searched between Carate and Piedras Blancas. Local miners helped us look off-trail and in mining tunnels that honeycombed canyon walls. Ever since my first days in the jungle, I had made a habit of looking among the miners’ few possessions under their open black tarps. And here, on the banks of a small creek, I spotted something familiar beneath one. It was a short piece of foam sleeping pad of the type I recalled giving Roman two years before in Veracruz.

  I had packed our packraft paddles with small pieces of pad like this on my flight to Veracruz, then offered it to him as a useful piece of gear. Its color, type, brand, and dimensions matched a pad I had once trimmed for an adventure race a decade before. It was the only physical evidence I had ever seen of Roman in the jungle. And there it was on the Pata Lora trail.

  Questions flooded my imagination. How did it get here? Are Roman’s remains nearby? Is this miner involved? The OIJ and Fuerza swarmed over the old man who was just downstream with his gold pan. The miner explained that he had bought the pad in a community near Dos Brazos years before. Suspiciously, he also lived with the woman who’d raised Pata Lora after Pata Lora’s own parents had estranged him.

  IN MARCH 2016 during Anchorage School District’s spring break, Peggy and I again headed to Costa Rica. We spent a few days in San José where I hoped to discover what Roman had purchased for the $411.91 his bank records showed he had spent there. Throughout Latin America, his total monthly expenditures had generally averaged about $1,500. This purchase was a significant outlier. Sitting at the desk of our airport hotel room, I studied two lines on the bank statement.

  07-06 WITHDRAWL DEBIT CARD PURCHASE $411.91

  07/05 PURCH 2438921418641877318698 TNF 04 SAN JOSE CR

  Googling 2438921418641877318698 TNF 04 hit nothing. I puzzled over the three letters TNF. What’s TNF? The family tent that we’d used for years and pitched on Kuyuktuvuk Creek and Umnak left me thinking, TNF. . . . Could TNF stand for “The North Face”?

  I Googled San Jose North Face. A store nearby in a large shopping mall popped up.

  “Peggy! Maybe Roman bought a GPS at a North Face store here in San José. People who saw him with Pata Lora mentioned a GPS and a camera.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” she said. “Maybe he bought a camera, too. And shoes? Raingear? For his Darién trip?”

  Peggy and I jumped in our rental car and hurried to the mall, excited that this might answer some questions. Soon the store clerk was paging through cash register records for July 2014. At nearly 220,000 colónes, Roman’s purchase was easy to spot on July 5.

  But he had not bought a GPS or a camera—the store didn’t sell either—it had been a backpack! Midsized and lightweight, the Conness 55 model North Face backpack was well suited to the style of wilderness trekking that Roman would do in Corcovado or the Darién.

  This is the missing pack!

  I photographed pictures of the pack from their catalog. We now had a new search image while walking in the jungle: an olive-gray, midsized pack with a zippered compartment on the bottom and pockets on the waist belt. Excited, I texted Aengus about this important news. He texted back with the kind of lukewarm response Dondee had shown when Thai and I had found the yellow bag at the Corners Hostel; probably, I thought, because it didn’t fit his show’s storyline.

  We had also heard a new spin to the Pata Lora story. An Osa Tico told us in November 2015 that Pata Lora twice confessed to him that he—Pata Lora, not the Guichos—had killed Cody, then buried the body. The Tico suggested that we offer a six-figure reward, like $100,000 or more, to lure Pata Lora into revealing where he’d hidden Cody’s body. The local said he could facilitate. Using only the promise of the money, together with drink and mota, the Tico said he could convince Pata Lora to reveal where he’d hidden the body. We would pay nothing. As we drove the seven hours to Puerto Jiménez from San Jose, Peggy and I discussed how we might trap Pata Lora.

  Our third day in Costa Rica, March 2016, Peggy and I drove to Pata Lora’s house. We hung out with him and his French girlfriend, had a beer, made small talk. Pata Lora
rolled a joint and shared it with the mademoiselle he lived with and who paid rent on the house.

  As we were leaving, I pulled out a flyer offering a $50,000 reward—ten times what we had posted more than a year earlier for Cody Roman’s remains. I had given another to the local Tico whose idea it had been in the first place, encouraging him to follow through with his plan. We hung a third at the Dos Brazos pulperia. All were meant to flush out the killer.

  Pata Lora hated his nickname, so Carson and Ken had taken to calling him “Joe,” an Americanized version of his first name, José. “Listen, Joe,” I said, handing him the flyer, “we are offering a big reward to find our son’s remains. Fifty thousand dollars.” I looked to see if he’d take the bait, but his face didn’t change. He had the same nearly blank expression he showed when I asked him to recount his days walking with Cody. “Maybe, since you saw him with the Guichos, you can find him?”

  “Yeah, I can, man. Sure I can!” he enthused. “But I need some scuba diving equipment, so I can go into the ocean out by Madrigal River where his bones are. His bones are underwater, man,” he rambled on. “Can you give me some money?” He took another toke off his joint, then offered it to me. “So I can buy the equipment and go into the water and find the bones?”

  I declined the smoke and finished my warm beer. “No, Joe. We’ll give you money for the body when you find it. Maybe you can get someone else to loan you the equipment and you can split the reward with them.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Peggy and I headed to Piedras Blancas in a black SUV with an embassy driver. Jorge, two OIJ detectives, and a pair of cadaver dogs and their handlers drove in their own vehicles. We would stay at Roy Arias’s place, then hike on and off-trail to the ocean by way of the Carate and Madrigal Rivers inside Corcovado. The SUV climbed a greasy jeep trail through deep ruts and along narrow ridgelines leading to Piedras Blancas.