Benjamin Kyle Docuseries Lands May 25 on Investigation Discovery
benjamin kyle returns to television on May 25 when Investigation Discovery premieres The Many Lives of Benjaman Kyle, a four-part docuseries built around the man found unconscious behind a Georgia Burger King in August 2004. The case has lingered for decades because the central mystery is not the discovery, but the missing years that followed.
August 2004 in Georgia
In August 2004, initial reports described the man as naked and bloodied when he was found behind the fast-food restaurant. When he woke up, he said he had no memory of who he was, a claim that sent the case into a long search for identity rather than a standard missing-person file.
Hospital staff nicknamed him B.K. Doe, short for Burger King Doe, before he began identifying himself as Benjaman Kyle. He was later identified in 2015 as William Burgess Powell, tying the television project to a real identity question that took more than a decade to settle in records, even if it did not settle the larger story.
Eric and Shannon Evangelista
The series follows Eric and Shannon Evangelista as they try to piece together Powell’s lost identity. Shannon Evangelista said, “We’ve never stopped, and we’re still investigating,” and added, “I think the big question that’s still looming, the driving force for us, is where he was from 1983, when his Social Security earnings stopped, until 2004, when he was found at a Burger King. We’re hoping the public will help us answer that.”
Eric Evangelista said, “His form of amnesia was a very outdated form of amnesia that you only found in old movies and soap operas,” and, “This guy’s full of it, and we need to go further.” That pushes the docuseries beyond a retelling: it is built around a gap in the paper trail, not just a strange headline.
1983 to 2004
Powell disappeared from Indiana in 1976, and his Social Security earnings stopped in 1983, leaving the filmmakers focused on the nearly 30 years between the end of that record and the 2004 discovery. Powell has publicly maintained that he suffered from memory loss, and he has not been arrested or charged with any crime.
The show arrives with one practical ask for viewers: anyone with leads is being encouraged to contact Hot Snakes Media. For a case this old, that is the point of the series — to turn a true-crime curiosity into a fresh search for what happened between 1983 and 2004.
