Why Did Richard Hoagland Disappear: Planned Exit, Capture

Richard Hoagland never gave a clear reason for why he disappeared on February 10, 1993, leaving his wife and two young sons in Fishers, Indiana. On the day he vanished, he offered his wife two different explanations in the space of a few hours; when a Florida detective finally caught him 23 years later living under a dead man’s identity, he offered a third that was just as thin. The record shows a departure that was carefully prepared, but the motive behind it has never been publicly established.

What He Told His Wife That Day

Hoagland called his wife, Linda Iseler, at work on the afternoon of February 10, 1993. In one call, he said he was sick and needed the emergency room but refused her offer to come along. He never showed up at any hospital.¹

Around 4:45 p.m. he called again to say he would be gone before she got home. At 5:40 p.m. he called to say goodbye: “I can’t live this way anymore. I feel you would be better off without me.” That night, in a final call, he said something different: “I don’t want to go to jail. I’m never coming back.”²

The two statements point in different directions. One reads as personal unhappiness with his marriage. The other reads as fear of an imminent criminal problem. He never reconciled them.

The Jail Comment Nobody Could Explain

The line about jail has never been accounted for in any reporting on the case. No pre-1993 criminal charges, lawsuits, or documented legal investigations against Hoagland in Indiana have surfaced. At the time, he was 39, had been married to Iseler for eleven years, ran an insurance company, and lived in a five-bedroom house near Geist Reservoir. Iseler described him as a “shaker and a roller” who was always making deals.¹

Investigators in 1993 considered the possibility that he was involved in drug trafficking. Iseler said she had no knowledge of any such activity, and no drug charges were ever brought.¹ Whatever Hoagland feared prosecution for, the public record does not identify it.

A Planned Exit, Not a Breakdown

The steps Hoagland took after his phone calls argue against any reading of the disappearance as an impulsive act. He left his van at Indianapolis International Airport, but no airline had any record of him boarding a flight. He left his passport at home. Even so, throughout the rest of February 1993 he placed collect calls to Iseler from Aruba and Venezuela. How he crossed borders without his passport has never been explained publicly.²³

After the Caribbean calls stopped, Hoagland surfaced in Port St. Lucie, Florida. He rented a room inside the home of an elderly man named Edward Symansky, whose son, Terry Jude Symansky, had drowned in a boating accident in 1991 at age 33. Terry left no wife or children, and most of his family lived in Ohio. While renting from the grieving father, Hoagland got hold of a copy of Terry’s death certificate.⁴

He used the death certificate to obtain Terry’s Ohio birth certificate, then an Alabama driver’s license, then a Florida driver’s license in 1994. From that point on, he lived as Terry Symansky. Terry’s sister, Cynthia Bujnak, later described her father as the victim of the scheme: “He stole my brother’s death certificate.”⁵

Under the stolen identity, Hoagland built what looked like an ordinary life in Zephyrhills, Florida. He married a woman named Mary in 1995 and had a son with her. He bought property, earned a private pilot’s license, bought at least one airplane, and used the Symansky name to file paperwork with HUD for Section 8 housing and to obtain FAA pilot and medical certificates.²⁶ His second wife and their son had no idea who he really was.

None of that is the behavior of someone who cracked on a Wednesday afternoon. Locating a usable dead identity, moving between countries without a passport, and holding a false name for more than two decades all point to a decision made in advance and executed with patience.

What He Said When He Was Caught

The scheme unraveled in 2016 because of a genealogy project. A nephew of the real Terry Symansky was researching his family tree on Ancestry.com and discovered that his uncle, who had drowned in 1991, appeared to have married someone two years after his death, along with other post-death records in Florida under Terry’s name.⁷

The tip reached Detective Anthony Cardillo of the Pasco County Sheriff’s Department. In July 2016, Cardillo confronted the man living as Terry Symansky at his home in Zephyrhills. Hoagland at first insisted he was Symansky. When Cardillo produced the real Symansky’s death certificate, he confessed his true identity.¹

Asked why he had left in 1993, Hoagland offered only that he had gone because of “family issues with his wife and children.”¹ In another account, he told investigators he simply wanted “to get away from his wife.”⁸ Neither explanation touched the jail comment. Neither explained the years of preparation. Neither addressed why leaving required stealing another man’s life rather than filing for divorce.

What His Family Thought Was Really Going On

Iseler was never given a fuller answer. In the years after the disappearance, police treated her as a suspect for a period, interrogating her repeatedly about her husband’s whereabouts. She later said he had left them “with nothing, absolutely nothing.” The bank foreclosed on the Fishers home. The family van was repossessed.¹

Hoagland’s older son, Matthew, later speculated that his father “got caught up with the wrong people — got carried away and over his head in something.” He offered that as family speculation rather than fact. When Matthew finally met his father again after the 2016 arrest, he summed up the reunion in three words: “This guy, nothing.”⁸

Douglas, who was six when his father left, said in 2018 that he had no interest in reconnecting. “I don’t think I need to stir up old demons.”²

What the Record Still Doesn’t Answer

Federal prosecutors in the Middle District of Florida charged Hoagland with one count of aggravated identity theft. He pleaded guilty on February 16, 2017, and U.S. District Judge Susan C. Bucklew sentenced him to two years in federal prison on May 30, 2017.⁶ The criminal case established what he did after leaving. It did not establish why he left.

Several concrete questions remain open in the public record. What Hoagland meant by “I don’t want to go to jail” has never been publicly explained, and no charge, debt, or investigation from before February 1993 has been identified that would fit the remark. The 1993 drug-trafficking theory was never substantiated. How he reached Aruba and Venezuela without his passport, and what he did between the Caribbean calls and his arrival in Port St. Lucie, is not documented. His own accounts, in 1993 and in 2016, do not line up with each other and do not account for the scale of what he built afterward.

What the record does support is narrower. The departure was prepared, not impulsive. The man who walked away had reasons he was unwilling to name at the time and unwilling to name a quarter-century later. Anyone hoping for a single clean motive will not find one in what has been made public.

1
ABC News. Missing Indiana Man’s Family Found Him Alive After 23 Years
2
IndyStar. Richard Hoagland Abandoned Indiana Family; Judge Now Says He Must Pay
3
New York Post. Dad Who Abandoned Family, Stole Dead Man’s Identity Owes $1.86M in Back Support
4
The Ledger. Man Must Pay $2M in Child Support After Hiding in Florida Under Stolen ID
5
People. Richard Hoagland Missing Dead Son Terry Symansky Identity
6
U.S. Department of Justice. Zephyrhills Man Sentenced to Prison for Identity Theft
7
WRTV. Missing Man Found Living Under Dead Man’s Identity 23 Years Later
8
Everett Herald. Decades Ago He Abandoned His Family and Assumed a New Identity