by Roman Dial
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 Doña 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
I returned to Costa Rica alone. Emails from the show’s producer Aengus, the director, and the producer’s assistant promised important news: Carson and Ken are on fire. Good people are risking a lot to get us the answers. You’re going to get the full download.
I wondered what it could be. It was obvious during the first week of the show’s production that the OIJ was gun-shy of the media. The embassy, too, was unwilling to go on camera. And MINAE refused to permit park access to TIJAT. With neither park access nor my willingness to search fictionally for the camera, the production company focused on Carson and Ken working together to solve a murder on TV, something neither had done before, much less on TV.
The red-eye from Anchorage to San José in a seat that didn’t recline left me spent. I slept twelve hours at the Iguana, recovering. When I finally emerged from my room, the crew was excited. Almost giddy, the show’s director, Jeff Sells, who specializes in reality TV shows, led me to the Iguana’s two-story postmodern hut and its upstairs dining room reserved for special occasions.
Sitting at the head of a table pushed aside for effect, Carson waited in shorts and a black T-shirt illustrating 100,000 years of weapons evolution. Ken sat at the table, too. Production put me between them. Three cameramen stood dripping in the noonday heat. Two shot from tripods. The third shot from his shoulder to best capture my emotions for an empathetic television audience.
“Honestly, this is not easy to tell you,” Carson warned, leaning in. “Pata Lora took your son, and he met up with a group of miners. One of the miners’ names was Guicho. They were using drugs.”
He paused. “And they killed him.”
This can’t be.
CARSON’S BLUNT STORY was devastating. Its revelation of Roman’s death was horrible to picture, but far worse was that this ex-DEA agent—who, I hoped, would find something new—had exposed nothing more than a sensationalized Pata Lora story.
“Why’d they kill him?” I asked, choking on the words both because they were so horrific to say and because I realized that Pata Lora was central to Carson’s narrative.
“For whatever pocket change he had on him.”
“They have a body?”
Carson shook his head. “This is the hardest part to tell you. They dismembered him.” The image was horrible, even if I didn’t believe it was true. “And they fed him to the sharks.”
Carson delivered these statements as factually as if he had watched it himself, with as much empathy as if he were describing an oil change. He managed, “I’m sorry.”
“How sure are you of this?” I had recovered from the bloody image as I grappled with the unthinkable.
“It’s the only story we have and we’re doing everything to corroborate it.”
Frustration pushed my disappointment aside. We’d chosen Carson to do what we couldn’t: investigate criminals. But here was the Pata Lora story
again. I asked the obvious. “You don’t have any other way to go, do you? I mean, that’s it, right?”
“The only other alternative is they’re all mistaken,” Carson deadpanned.
Roman was raised in the tropics. He walked across the Petén, boated through the Moskitia. He planned to cross the Darién Gap. He would never take the tourist trail from Dos Brazos to Carate with a guy like Pata Lora. How can I make this clear? Why doesn’t anybody listen? I know my son!
“Right, and that seems really unlikely, doesn’t it?” I asked rhetorically, my blood pressure rising.
“It does.”
“You guys got it figured out and all it comes down to is squeezing it out of him, right? There’s only one lead and you got it. I guess it’s solved. That’s kind of how I feel.” I was pissed off now. A year on and we were no further. In fact, we had slipped backward.
It felt like a wrap. I got up to leave. Aengus and Jeff had their showdown between stubborn father in denial and bully expert agent. They’d gotten me to choke on the words why’d they kill him while I was wired for sound and filmed. And the ex-DEA agent had his killer—Guicho.
But the whole encounter left me off-balance: the image of my son murdered, dismembered, fed to sharks, told coldly at midday under bright lights with cameras rolling to capture every twitch and tear for consumption and profit. This felt overproduced. This was no documentary. This was goddamned reality TV, and I had sold my soul for the wrong investigator.
That was harder to swallow than the dismemberment and the shark feeding. Carson’s wholehearted conviction disappointed me. Here we were again, back to the Pata Lora story that wouldn’t go away.
Maybe it won’t go away because it’s true?
WALKING DOWN THE stairs and back to my room I felt shocked, dizzy, out of body. The collision of What if they are right? with Why the fuck won’t they listen to me? left me weak, shaky, vulnerable.
My phone rang as I wondered if maybe Pata Lora and this guy Guicho had killed Roman. The number was unlisted.
“Hello?”
“Roman.” Even with the echo and delay of a cell-to-cell call bouncing off a continent’s worth of towers, I recognized the cagey voice from a year ago, the one who’d asked if I had a weapon or someone to watch my back before I went in with Vargas to Las Quebraditas. “We have an asset in Costa right now if you need him.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
Maybe I do.
“I got one of my best guys down there right now. He’s available and ready to take out that black snake. He could be on the Osa tomorrow.” This was surreal. Here, I could take care of my next stage of grief—anger—with a simple yes on the phone.
But I was far from sure what had happened. And I certainly had no place for retribution or revenge.
I told the cagey voice no, we didn’t need his asset, and hung up.
Chapter 44
Kool-Aid
Eyelash palm viper, Corcovado, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Back in my room, the ceiling fan wobbled. My confrontation with Carson and the caller’s offer to take out the “black snake” had left me shaken. Maybe everybody was right, even the voice on the phone. Maybe I was just a father in a persistent state of denial, clinging to a romantic notion of his son.
Carson had nudged me away from my conviction that Roman had never been with Pata Lora. And while all of the Osa might have wanted to rid themselves of their pariah, everything I’d heard from officials was that Pata Lora had no record of truly violent crimes. As for this guy Guicho—perhaps he was capable of murder.
A week went by with me skulking around, scowling at Carson. Yet slowly but surely, Carson, Ken, and the production company and their ex-FBI-turned-consultants wore me down. Carson seemed hurt that I didn’t accept his story as fact. Eventually, it dawned on me that you don’t hire a consultant to argue. Carson had been hired for me. He was there to help.
Like me, Roman could be stubborn—glaringly, frustratingly, and passionately stubborn. I saw this in Carson, too, as if he channeled Roman’s spirit, even his mannerisms: stiff hand gestures, a level gaze in distracted thought, a crooked finger. I empathized in Carson’s frustration with me for neither accepting nor respecting his role. His inability to articulate his convictions, choosing forcefulness of expression over clarity of logic, felt familiar. Together, and perhaps ironically, these elements of Carson made me more favorable to his thinking.
Carson wanted the end game of an arrest. He was a cop, after all. But an arrest wasn’t enough for me. Nor, at this point, was justice, even if Carson’s story were true. And I certainly wasn’t after revenge. Guicho or Pata Lora could be taken out, apparently, with a phone call. More than anything, Carson and production wanted to solve a murder on TV, but I needed all the pieces to fit without contradiction, without ignoring facts.
CURIOUS, I WENT back to Doña Berta and tested her memory of my visit from the year before. She remembered well Thai and me. She offered the same story: Roman had been there, left his things, paid to reserve a bed for his return, but never came back. She’d told Dondee something different, and Carson something else still.
For over a year, I had pondered each story a local told me in the context of directions given to strangers: even when locals have no idea which way to go, they give directions. It felt as if the locals on the Osa told us stories about our son the same way, but with a twist: they told us what they thought we wanted to hear. As if when asked, “This way?,” they answered, “Yes,” not knowing if it was the right way or not. No wonder Carson kept hearing Pata Lora stories. He paid his informants to tell them.
While many people feared Pata Lora, others simply disliked him. Some said that he had been imprisoned for murder. Pata Lora himself told Carson and Ken that he had killed a man over, of all things, a bicycle and gone to prison because of the crime. If that were true, then why did the OIJ and the Fiscal—the Costa Rican prosecutor involved in criminal investigations—both say Pata Lora had never been charged with murder?
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 Munõz, 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 force-fed 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.
