What began as an effort to help a man discover his forgotten identity evolved into a complex investigation filled with unexpected revelations, unanswered questions, and a decades-old mystery. The Many Lives of Benjaman Kyle, Investigation Discovery’s two-night documentary event, follows the story of a man found injured and unconscious behind a Burger King in rural Georgia in 2004. Claiming to suffer from a rare form of amnesia, he became known as Benjaman Kyle, alias chosen by William Burgess Powell, while searching for answers about his past.

Years later, filmmakers Shannon and Eric Evangelista began documenting his journey to uncover who he really was. However, as they investigated further, inconsistencies in Kyle’s story began to emerge, transforming the project from a hopeful search for identity into a true crime investigation involving cold cases, hidden histories, and shocking discoveries.

Joined by former FBI investigator Ken Maxwell, Shannon Evangelista spent more than a decade following the case and searching for the truth. In this interview, Shannon and Ken discuss how their perspectives changed throughout the investigation, the challenges of uncovering decades-old information, the moments that surprised them the most, and why they believe there are still unanswered questions waiting to be explored.

Isabella Wandermurem: When you first met Benjaman Kyle, what convinced you that his story was worth dedicating more than a decade of your lives to? 

Shannon: Yeah, I mean, you know, we just really, at the time, I felt extraordinarily bad for everything he had gone through, you know, and was continuing to go through. Not being able to get a job, not having Social Security, you know, he couldn’t work, which is something that he told us he pretty much lived for and loved to do. Couldn’t rent an apartment, couldn’t make money. I mean, he was literally having to rely upon the kindness of strangers to survive.

And I think he had felt very let down, because he felt like no effort was really made to find out who he was. So when we first met him, we really felt excited to help him and get him back on his feet. And, like, I had, like, dreams of, you know, reuniting him with, like, a wife and a Child. It is not how it ultimately ended up going 

Ken: Shannon and Eric were involved before I was. They invited me in September of 2015 when they knew, when they finally started to realize that something was wrong. So they needed some investigative assistance. And so my motive initially, not knowing anything about the project, was to do what I have always done in my career: approach it with objectivity and see what this guy is all about. But fairly early on, I suspected that there was something really wrong, that he was misrepresenting who he was.

Isabella Wandermurem: And over all these years, how did your roles evolve and how different were your responsibilities at the end of the project compared to when you first started?

Shannon: In the beginning, we just really felt like it was going to be more of a happy docu-follow. And once we figured out who he was, that would be the end of the story. And I certainly never anticipated that I would actually be on camera. I mean, that’s just not something I do. And we had brought Ken in initially to do an investigation and kind of look into, “hey, who is this person?” You know, but it evolved, and it became the kind of thing where neither Ken nor I was willing to stop getting answers at all costs, even in the face of, you know, a lot of pushback and a lot of scary things happening.

Ken became completely encompassed in this. We are a regular part of each other’s lives. I talk to him daily, and it’s something that we’re still not going to give up. Regardless of a second season. We are committed to finding out why he dumped that car and who he’s been from 83 to 2004.

Isabella Wandermurem: How did your different backgrounds and experience complement one another?

Shannon: This is really the interesting part. Before this, I hadn’t really done true crime. You know, I’ve been doing this since 2014, and all of my shows before that were more like reality. I had ‘Wildlife’, which we still do. So initially, I had no idea that my background as a DA and a defense attorney was going to come into play. And it did. One of the less obvious ways that it came into play was when I was talking to George Keck (Kyle’s Associates), and a lot of people said, you know, how did you get him to trust you and tell you what he said?

I was not a stranger to somebody getting bad acts off of their chest. And every time someone does that, no matter who they are or, you know, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a spiritual thing to be able to say, ‘I did’. You know, I know about this, and it was an accident. And some way I feel bad that that happened, no matter who it is.

And so it was kind of an honor in that way because, at the time, George Keck knew he was going to die, he was sick. And I think there was a small part of him that did want to get it off his chest. And my training as a defense attorney and making a safe space for somebody to do that kicked in there.

But the rest of the time, especially dealing with Benjamin Kyle, you know, the fact that I had been a DA in the past and had all of this experience in doing investigations and whatnot, either to defend somebody or to prosecute them, it was something I started using every single day. It’s like it wasn’t even the producer and me doing that.

But Ken can answer that even better than me because he has a lot of investigative experience that he used.

Ken: I guess the best way to answer that question is that, unlike the true crime genre, my entire life has been dealing with real crime. And so I brought that background over 30 years in law enforcement, most of it with the FBI- to the production. And every step that we took and every turn that we took revealed new information that was additional motivation to try to find out the truth. You know, ‘who is this guy?’ ‘Where is he from?’ ‘What’s he been involved in, and why is he lying?’ Because fairly early on, you know, I came to the conclusion that he was misrepresenting the facts and intentionally trying to hide his past. So it became more and more intriguing as the days and weeks and months went by.

Isabella Wandermurem: And what was the biggest challenge you guys faced while pursuing the truth?

Ken: I’m going to say the most obvious one is the span of time. You know, it’s in this computer age in which we live in. Back when Benjamin was in hiding and when he fled Indiana in 1976, the technology wasn’t there in terms of a digital footprint. So trying to obtain records from, you know, 30, 40 years ago or more, and then also finding individuals who knew him at the time. A lot of time has passed, and a lot of people have passed, you know, by the aging process. So that was a big challenge, and it’s always a challenge in working a cold case murder to try to retrieve real, factual evidence from a long time ago.

Shannon: For me, it was the amount of people that said they were too afraid to talk to us, like, I had not really encountered that in my experience. That just wasn’t something that I had to deal with at this level. But there was a moment where George Keck, who had, you know, he was the prime suspect in the 70s in the Christine Kozik case. His wife had given information about him, and he had failed a lie detector, and he had had a fake alibi that he got caught. So it was the kind of thing where when he said to us, ‘I’d be afraid of Powell if I was you’. I started to see there was a lot more than meets the eye. And time and time again, our investigator was frustrated by people saying, ’I can’t tell you because I’m worried for myself’ or ‘I’m worried about this or that’. That was very hard to deal with.

Isabella Wandermurem: And there’s something that surprised you guys the most after all these years?

Shannon: Oh, so many surprises. Well, we have some that would hopefully come in a season two. I believe ID will do a second season. It’d be crazy not to, but as the relationship unfolds, he sent a very crazy email to me that shocked us. So I’ll just leave it at that because I want to tease it, but I don’t want to tell you too much; there were a lot of surprises.

Ken: Well, certainly nothing would shock me with all my years of experience in dealing with aberrant behavior. But one of the slight surprises was when he ceased to have communication with us, you know. We confronted him in December of 2016 with all this information we had found out about him, and over three successive nights of interviews, and he became very upset with us and threw off his microphone. He had agreed to cooperate with the documentary and just went out the door, and we haven’t heard from him since. He came to the full realization that if we ever got to air that interview, we were onto him big time, and there was no way he was going to weasel his way out of it or provide us with some false answers that we would accept. So we knew we were on the right track for sure. Well, we always knew we were on the right track, but that firmed it up. But that was a little bit surprising because he didn’t even attempt to re-establish communication with us to try to weasel his way out of what we have found out about him.

Shannon: Yeah, it got pretty intense. I wanted to air it this season. However, there’s still so much that the audience needs to get caught up on to put this three-day event into context, because like, there’s so much you still need to learn. So then when you see us confront them about it, you’ll be like, ‘oh, I know what they’re talking about.’

Isabella Wandermurem: Shannon talked about being on camera and why was it important to make yourselves part of the story?

Shannon: So it was like we’re sitting here trying to cover his story and what’s going on. But it was a kind of thing. It started in Colorado, not even with us, but with some of the junior members of the crew. He started to get angry if he wasn’t told everything ahead of time. And we had to explain to him, like, this is a documentary. We have certain standards. This is not scripted television. You’re not given a script. This is real life, and you have amnesia, and we are taking you to places on your memory list. And so we need to see your legitimate reaction on camera. You can’t be told ahead of time. And he did not like that. So he began lashing out with members of the crew in Colorado. And it became the kind of thing we call it fourth wall breakage. It became the kind of thing where he was literally pulling us into the story because the push and pull between us and him and the game of cat and mouse where he would say these terrifying things to gauge reaction started to take up more real estate than anything else, to the point that we were really kind of honestly pulled into the ring by him.

Isabella Wandermurem: What questions are you most eager to explore in a possible second season?

Ken: Our goals are, and Shannon touched on it very briefly earlier, to definitively find out why he and Charles Chico Goetz fled in the middle of the night in March of 1976 to escape to Colorado after dumping a car and taking the license plates off. We have some theories behind that, but I don’t want to engage in theories. We engage in evidence and in facts. So that’s certainly one of our goals. And then when you look at what we’ve uncovered, and I’ll answer in a general sense that, Powell’s associates back in the 70s in Lafayette, Indiana, were not altar boys. And he was hanging around with, as my Irish mother would say, with a bad crowd. And what was that? What were those associations all about? And what acts did they commit together? So there’s a multiple purpose or goal to continuing with this project. But really, and it sounds very self-serving and corny, but it’s a quest for truth. We’re not going to stop until we get the entire truth about this man and his life.

Shannon: Yeah, I second that. I’m also excited because we’ve been getting incredible leads from the public, and I cannot wait to tell the audience those leads and follow those on camera and ask Benjamin about them like, or William Powell rather. We’re not done talking to William Powell by any stretch of the imagination. We recently located where he is, so I’m excited for all of that in season two.