Disappeared In An Underwater Cave? What Happened To Ben McDaniel?!

hey guys welcome back to my channel and welcome to another true crime video today's case is just wild it really blows my mind I think it's one of the most confusing mysteries of all time honestly I'm surprised it's not more talked about not that many people know about this case but it's just so weird you're gonna leave this video just wanting answers that you're not gonna get there are all types of theories and really any of them could be valid today we're gonna be talking about a missing scuba diver but before I get into that I wanted to thank today's sponsor chase defy and tell you about something awesome that they have started called case to five protects normally when case defy sponsors my content I tell you guys about phone cases but today I am telling you about a new product that they have so this is a UV sanitizer for your phone it goes right in here and it will disinfect your phone and destroy 99.9% of germs in just a few minutes now as you can tell it's pretty big so it's not 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the center of attention and was always making jokes you know everyone that knew him described him as the classic life of the party guy he always had a big smile on his face loved to make people laugh and for the most part people really liked Ben Ben came from a very stable close-knit kind of wealthy family he had two other brothers and him and his brothers and his parents were really really close so Ben skipped the whole college route and instead became an entrepreneur at age 18 and started his own construction company and that actually was pretty successful for him up until 2008 when the economy crashed and like many people Ben was kind of screwed they just weren't getting enough jobs I mean that's the last thing people are going to want to pay to have done is construction especially stuff that doesn't need to be done and not only that but one of Ben's employees started talking [ __ ] about him to all of their customers and ruined a bunch of client relationships so they lost a bunch of people over that and this employee literally convinced a bunch of their clients that they should just hire hint' the employee instead which I'm pretty sure is illegal but eventually after twelve years in business Ben had to completely closed down because of all of this stuff that had gone on 2008 was a really rough year for Ben like it was for a lot of people not only did he lose his business but he also lost his wife they got divorced and it was not a pretty situation and that same year Ben's younger brother who he was really close with died of a stroke at age 22 so that just shook their whole family there were this really tight-knit family and they were not expecting one of them to die so young so it was just really emotionally traumatic for Ben Ben and his brother Paul the one who passed away were super super close so losing his best friend and his brother essentially at the same time was just beyond difficult to him and into a total depression after Paul passed away it seemed like Ben was having a real difficulty bouncing back to his life he also was in a lot of debt to the IRS 4250 grandage so quite a bit so eventually he felt like he had no choice but to sell his house and move home which always is just really hard mentally to have to make that choice I mean he's lucky to have loving parents that welcomed him back home and we're kind of happy to have him back but you know it's still depressing it doesn't feel great to have to sell your home and move in with your parents so he was at a terrible point in his life at this time Ben's parents were very supportive of him during this time he stayed with them until 2010 actually and he actually moved out because they had offered for him to take a sabbatical is it sabbatical sabbatical I don't know anyway it basically means a break from life it means that his parents were willing to pay his way in life so that he could just take time off of working and get his mental health back on track and not only that the family had a condo in Santa Rosa Beach Florida and they said that Ben could stay there rent-free as long as he wanted to so Ben decided to take them up on this offer and he moved to Florida into the condo now this was a really beautiful area in North Florida it would be a great place for someone to kind of take a break from it all kind of get off the radar connect with nature and just heal from all the hard times that he had been going through so he moved into the condo by himself other than his dog who was named Spooner and Ben was very attached to his dog Spooner he absolutely loved her and took her everywhere that he could most of the time except for when he went diving so long before all this when Ben was a child he loved the ocean he was fascinated by marine life by the sand by the waves just loved the beach and he was really into snorkeling and collecting like small you know enemies or starfish or little fish and just checking them out and he actually started scuba diving legitimate Skoob when he was pretty young and he had kind of lost this passion in his life as time went on and he got older but now that he was moving back to Florida he figured that this was the perfect time for him to pick up his old hobby and start scuba diving again he also had talked about wanting to be an instructor one day possibly and now that he was in Florida he could just spend all of his time viewing that and he got super super into it anyone that talked to Ben especially around this time said that it's all he really want to talk about with scuba diving and that was the perfect time for him to finally work towards becoming an instructor so in the first couple months that he was in Florida he had already logged 250 dives so quite a bit he was really kind of rushing through it honestly it seemed like he was very eager to learn as much as he could and become an instructor as fast as possible so things in Florida were going much better for him his mental health was really recovering he was feeling a lot better and happier spending most of his time in the water in August of 2010 Ben took a trip to go see his parents in Tennessee for his mom's birthday mom is named patty and his dad his name's Shelby and they were super excited to have their son back they loved when their kids would come and visit them and they said it was a great birthday celebration and while he was there Ben was telling his family about his next scuba diving adventure he was going to try to become a master in cave diving his parents were a little nervous but also excited for him they knew that he was an adventurer Ben was not afraid of anything according to them and they figured he would be just fine but unfortunately this is the last time that they would see Ben he said bye to his family and he made the seven-hour trip back to Florida so then two days later on August 18 2010 Ben woke up bright and early and wanted to get a jumpstart on diving for the day he left his house and drove an hour inland to get to an area called Ponce de Leon in Florida this area is a pretty small town that's really known for its beautiful natural springs and it also was the home of an underwater cave called the vortex now Ben actually love to go to the vortex he was known as somewhat of a regular there he was there as often as he could be and was super interested in the cave system there now this area is super popular for divers because it actually stays at about 68 degrees even though it's hot as balls in Florida and normally water that sits there heats up pretty fast but this just stayed nice and cool so it's a really popular area for people to dive in fact people travel from all over the world to come to the vortex and it's one of the best places to cave dive and to get experience with cave diving so once Ben got to the vortex he spent some time checking all his equipment making sure he was all set to go and then he did a couple exploratory dies or he just dove all the way down there and then went up pretty quickly and logged how deep he had gone and how long it took cetera now according to that log it seems like Ben went down into the cave several times went pretty deep into it and then came back up and logged it each time he spent the entire day doing this and then at 7:00 p.m. he decided that he was going to do his final dive down there for the day so he got into the water went down to the cave went about 300 feet and and at this point there is a gate and a sign the sign literally has the grim reaper on there's no way in hell I would go forward if a sign had a grim reaper on it but it basically warned divers that you should dive at your own risk in this area that there is nothing in there worth dying for and it's incredibly dangerous and that's why they have a gate down there blocking people from going further now this gate is actually locked to the public most of the time and you can only get a key to it if you are a certified cave diver you have to go to the front desk prove your certification they give you the key and you know you go in and you take the key with you and then you're supposed to lock up on your way out and bring the key back to them and that's how they keep track and make sure that no one's still in the cave apparently back in the 90s like 13 people died trying to dive in this cave so the owners of this area we're told if they didn't put up a sign or try to prevent people from going there it would be not completely so that's why they put the sign up but in this case Ben was not scared and decided he was going in anyway so two employees who happen to be diving at the same time in the same area notice then go in to the cave through the gate and continue to swim into the cave for a deep-penetration dive now Bennet actually according to his logs had done this dive before and it had gone fine but unfortunately this was the last time that Ben would ever be seen so two days later on August 20th Friday morning one of the employees at the springs named edoardo noticed that Ben's truck was still parked in the exact same place that he had parked on Wednesday morning he realized that he had never seen Ben get back out of the water and he was very concerned about the fact that his truck was still sitting in the same place obviously at a place like this you think the worst immediately maybe Ben drowned down there maybe he's stuck somewhere in the cave and that's exactly what Edward was thinking now Eduardo actually was one of those two employees that saw Ben trying to go through that gate so soon he put the pieces together that that was last time he saw him and his car is still here so he's starting to think that maybe he didn't come out of the cave so he goes in and tells his manager they freaked out and they immediately call the police they called the Holmes County Police Department and when they got there they didn't really know what to do because this isn't a normal situation and normal protocol just won't work here so they ended up calling in some expert divers now Eduardo was one of the divers that they decided to have go in there and look for Ben and they were all pretty sure that they were not gonna find Ben alive I mean in most situations of missing divers like 99% of the time you're not gonna find something alive it's normally a recovery mission to get someone's body because the caves are very very high pressured and there's no way that you could survive in there for two days with the oxygen supply that he would have had I have major air pressure issues like I cannot go below ten feet I get super claustrophobic I cannot imagine cave diving there's nothing else that sounds more scary than like running out of oxygen or panic when you're in a cave and not being able to get out so they formed a group of divers and they all went into the cave together to see if they could find then meanwhile back on land police are searching Ben's truck to see if there's any evidence or clues that they might find in there but there were no red flags and no sign of foul play Ben's wallet was still in the car and still had over a thousand dollars of cash sitting inside of it his cell phone was there as well and it was pretty clear that Ben was planning to come back to his truck he also had his dog Spooner at home who Ben loved and he wouldn't have just left her for days without anyone to check on her I was very out of character for him so it really seemed to them that Ben was lost somewhere in the cave was planning to come back out and never did so soon after the divers went into the cave one of the divers came up with three decompression tanks all three of the tanks had Ben's name on it so they knew that they were his tanks now I don't know anything about this because I will never scuba dive in my life with my ear pressure issues even though I would love to but decompression tanks are used for people that go on deep penetration dives because of the depths that they go in they experience really intense pressure and when they come back up to the surface they have to do it really slowly and they use these tanks to help alleviate the intense nitrogen levels that build up in your body when you're on a deep dive if you have too much nitrogen in your body it can be toxic and if you don't use the decompression tank to help get rid of the nitrogen then you can get decompression sickness commonly known as the bends now two of the tanks were found outside of the cave like right outside of it and one of them was found inside the cave one was still completely full one was half full and one was completely empty so that kind of tells us that Ben had tried to use them at some point in the dive but because they were all found in the water still it leads most people to believe that he never came out of the water so the group of divers that they kind of just gathered had come up without anything but those decompression tanks no sign of Ben they said they did not see him in there but of course they're not the best of the best out there as far as cave diving so police started at contacting some of the best divers in the country to come and search the vortex for Ben meanwhile the police in Tennessee actually went to the house of Patty and Shelby and told them that their son Ben was believed to be missing but was most likely dead because he never emerged out of a very deep cave and they were absolutely shocked and devastated his mom said she could barely even walk when she found out the news she was just horrified they were all just so surprised that this could happen to him because they said he was super prepared he was constantly studying about cave diving and the risks of it and his girlfriend even said that in the weeks leading up to his disappearance Ben's desk was literally covered with books about cave diving and he was just obsessed with it he made it his life so they were really surprised that something could happen to him so his family headed straight down to Florida to see if they could help in any way so at this time investigators are really looking into the vortex and trying to understand what's going on here without having to go down there and dive to see it themselves they realized that there was this gate and that this was a protected area that you were only supposed to go in if you are a certified cave diver they found out about the whole key thing how he would have had to get key from the front desk and this is when they found out that Ben did not get the key because Ben was not cave certified he was self-taught he really believed in self teaching actually and yes a lot of people choose to live that way in the diving world but most people in the diving community are very against that and are really Pro certification a lot of divers talk about how even if you were certified for every other type of diving done all these dives and you've experienced it and the pressure and all that that's great but it's nothing like a cave dive I mean this is a whole different beast people who cave dive all the time say it's crucial that you have that sort of so it's very disappointing that then did not have it and it seemed that he was sneaking into the cave he was somehow able to like shimmy underneath the gate and was getting in there all the time so Eduardo like I said was in the area that last time that he went through the gate and this time instead of having him go underneath it I mean he knew he was gonna sneak in there anyway he decided that he was just going to open it with his key and just let him in which I assume the owners of the vortex would not have approved of so Eduardo finally told all of this to the police he felt really guilty that he was the one who let him in there without a key but it seemed like he was going to be going in there whether I duardo had let him in or not Ben was a big guy he was over six feet and he was really strong so he was able to get through that gate no problem so now they know he for sure went in the cave there's multiple witnesses that saw him go in one of them let him in but how are they not able to find his body because a cave is essentially like a tunnel there's one way in one way out there was no other way to get through out anywhere else like you go in and then you turn around and come back out some parts of the cave were so narrow that groups of divers had to go in like a single-file line it was super super dangerous very very sketchy to go through the cave itself was 1,500 feet long so a lot of space that Ben could be and since the divers were not finding a body they were looking for any other signs that Ben was there and possibly may have had a struggle of some sort they thought that if he had panicked or run out of oxygen or something malfunctioned that there would be scratches on the wall there was limestone on the wall which is pretty easy to scratch and there were some parts that were just really narrow that they thought they would see some evidence of having gone through it some people thought that maybe he was even underneath the silt at the bottom of the cave so they searched through all the sand like they went through this whole cave as much as they possibly could every last inch of it every cave diver that they sent down there would come up saying the same thing that there's really no way that Ben is in there and at this point this story had gone really viral on the Internet especially for the cave diving community and just the scuba diving community in general now there were a few really deep parts of the cave that no one had gone into yet so there's still a possibility that Ben was in there and just hadn't been seen yet so that's when this guy named edy sworn s'en got involved now edy is an international underwater cave rescuer he's very very well known in the community and anytime there's a serious cave diving issue edy normally gets involved with the rescue if there was anyone that was gonna find Ben in the cave it was going to be ed so ed went down into the cave to search for Ben himself and he came up with absolutely nothing edy said that he went as far as a human could possibly go into that cave there were some points where he couldn't even hold his head up right he had to turn it sideways to fit himself through some of those tunnels can I get a [ __ ] no but despite getting into all those little nooks and crannies every possible place a human could be and came up absolutely empty handed which leaves us with a huge mystery where is Ben McDaniel after ed was not able to find anything Ben's family felt really hopeless their last shot was this guy who had originally mapped out the cave when it was first kind of discovered the guy had told them that he would try to go in there and bring a camera but then eventually he said his camera was too big and then after a while I guess he kind of ghosted them and that whole lead was kind of shut down it seemed like no one else could help and they were getting extremely frustrated and they just wanted answers I mean they'd already had one son died and they knew exactly how he died he died of a stroke and it's terrible but you can mourn and you can on you can accept they were able to you know bury him and have closer to the situation but with Ben they have no idea where he is they don't even know if he's for sure alive or not I mean there is a chance that he's still alive I mean not in the cave but maybe he got out of it I mean they have no idea and the possibilities are kind of endless here eventually they came up with a $10,000 reward for anyone that could go in the cave and find any sign of Ben or figure out what happened and they actually ended up getting a lot of heat from the diving community they thought it was super dangerous for them to be offering people ten thousand dollars to risk their lives and go into incredibly deep areas of the cave where you know edy couldn't even get to it just seemed very unsafe and too risky so eventually police decided to bring back dogs to the area to see if they could catch Ben's sent anywhere see if he left the water and immediately the dog started alerting to the water which is really interesting so they decided to test a sample of the water to see if there was anything decomposing in it if there was a body decomposing in that cave they'd probably be able to pick it up in a water test and they did find bacteria in the water however they were not able to confirm if it was from Ben or if it was just from some decaying animal who had fallen into the water so about a month into the search police ended up sending a remote-controlled camera down into the caves that they could watch back on shore and send that into areas that humans just can't get they were hoping that they could get to the very end of the cave that no one has been able to get to yet and get some footage of it so they were able to get the camera in 700 feet into the cave but eventually it became too narrow and too tight for the camera to continue it was bashing into everything not getting any good footage they couldn't see anything so they brought it out and nothing new came out of this so as I start looking into Ben's personal life they start seeing how troubling his past was and start thinking maybe he was you know suffering from depression police started thinking that maybe he had gone into the cave knowing he wouldn't make it out that it was some type of suicide attempt which just doesn't sit right with me I don't know about you guys I just don't understand how that makes a difference here because that still doesn't answer the question of where his body is and I don't know why someone who loves diving so much would choose to end their life with something that they love and they were so passionate about the police had talked about how II D the professional diver had said that there were areas in the cave where it got too narrow for you to get back out like if you were to continue any further there's no way that you'd be able to get out so I started theorizing that he purposely went and launched himself in one of those areas but again that seems like the weirdest possible way to end your life and like I mentioned they weren't able to find any trace of scratching on the wall which you definitely would find in a situation like that and everyone in Ben's personal life said there was just no way that even though he had been through some hardships that he was finally in one of the happiest times in his life he was loving diving loving living in Florida and he was finally getting his life back on track it just wouldn't add up for him to at this point go and end his life also most divers think that there's just no way that Ben's body is anywhere in that cave they said that if he was decomposing somewhere that there would be fish and other creatures attracted to the decomposing smell and they would be all over that area but they said it was like a ghost town down there so most professional divers especially ones that have actually gone in there think that Ben is not in the cave so where the hell is he so as time has gone on people who course come up with a bunch of different theories about what could have possibly happened to Ben now one of the most popular theories is that maybe Ben actually planned this whole thing out that he wanted to leave his current life stage his death and then purposely disappear some people theorize that he left his car there he pretended he was going into the cave and snuck out of the water and went to Mexico or somewhere like that people think that the reason that he left those tanks there were to make it look like he was going on a deep dive and make them think he went into but he actually never went in or went in some ways and came right out and snuck out of the water and wouldn't start a new life others think that it was a staged suicide like the police said that he wanted everyone to think that he went in the cave and it actually went and killed himself in some other way but these situations just don't make sense to his family they said there's just no way he would have done that to them he was very close with his parents and they knew they had already been through hell by losing their other son at age 22 to a stroke they said that he just wasn't the type to disappear like that and leave them wondering what happened the rest of their lives he loved his family he loved his dog too like he wouldn't have just left his dog but I guess those theories are a possibility investigators also really looked into his whole background they looked at his phone records his financial records his personal writings and stuff in his house and there was absolutely no indication of any type of planning for him to leave the country or to stage anything like this and then there's the possibility that Ben's body is still in that cave somewhere that he's just you know really small crevice or somewhere where people have not been able to get to and he's just stuck most divers say this is very very very unlikely but I guess it's an actual phenomenon that sometimes divers if they panic like if something gets in their mask or if they're running out of oxygen or something scares them sometimes they can panic so much and become disoriented I mean you are deep under the water not in your normal surroundings and sometimes you can become very confused and sometimes in that panic people can wedge themselves into a tiny tiny space that you normally wouldn't think a person can fit as time went on the diving community online was pretty brutal towards Ben and his family they were really pissed off that he was not a certified cave diver and snuck under the gate and stuff so there was a lot of backlash towards him it became very well-known and very controversial and a lot of different divers wanted to prove their theory was right and then in Marie of 2011 six months after Ben had disappeared Ben's family was contacted by this woman her name is Jill Heiner she's an Australian and she is known as one of the best cave divers in the entire world Jill and her husband had seen all the terrible things being said about Ben online and all of the arguments that people were having over what could have happened and decided that she wanted to go down there and figure out what happened herself so she and her husband went down to Florida and they took cameras into the cave and they actually filmed something called Ben's vortex it's a documentary and they took hammers down there in an effort to show Ben's parents that he wasn't in there you know just to show them the very ends of the cave now Jill and her husband like everyone else did not find been in the cave however they found something that no other diver had found and it was Ben's shovel it's not able to be proven that this was been shoveled but his family said that he liked to take his shovel on cave dives to look for things and it looked like his shovel so they believe that it is his and it was at the very end of the cave however law enforcement looked more into the shovel and they determined that it actually belonged to one of the people who had originally mapped out the cave so they don't even know if Ben had made it that far in so really nothing came out of this documentary a lot of people said it's an interesting watch I'll link it below if you want to check it out but it did not lead to finding Ben and it is still just as much of a mystery today in March 2012 the reward increased to $30,000 the family still wants answers about what happened to Ben and right after this a man named Larry Higginbotham actually went in the cave and he died in there but unlike Ben's his body was recovered now a lot of people think that even though it hasn't been confirmed that Larry was down there looking for Ben or possibly trying to get that reward so after getting a lot of backlash about it they ended up cancelling that reward offer which i think was a good decision now obviously this wouldn't be a true cram case without a theory about possible foul play and there's actually some interesting information here so the night that Ben was at vortex Springs the owner was also there his name is Lowell and he's known for being kind of a sketchy guy he was actually facing criminal charges at the time that this all happened allegedly he had taken one of their employees who confronted him about him not paying him and he said he owed him thousands of dollars and he took this guy out into an isolated wooded area and beat him really badly with a bat the man escaped luckily and he thinks that he probably would have killed him if he wasn't able to escape but later Lowell Kelly was charged with assault and kidnapping so this is really not a great guy he was fined and sentenced to seven years of probation however he didn't even complete this whole thing because he did pass away he died at a vortex spring chili cook-off apparently he fell down a flight of stairs and hurt his head which sounds really sketchy to me he didn't die from this right away but friends took him home got him all comfortable in bed and his condition worsened overnight and he later passed away however he was alive and well and there on the day that Ben McDaniel was at vortex Springs some people think that maybe they got into an altercation that Ben was confronted about going into the tunnel under the gate or getting in there when he wasn't supposed to so maybe Ben really did emerge out of the water and then lo killed him as soon as he got out somehow he got rid of his body two days later they find his car and the whole thing starts now remember this is pure speculation there's absolutely no evidence to prove that this happened the only reason people even theorize about it is because Lowell is such a sketchy guy and because he was there another theory is that Ben's body was found by some of the employees that may be Lowell had ordered them to get rid of him that maybe they didn't want it to look about on vortex that a guy had gone through the gate and had died on their property and they didn't want to create any more problems for the business so they decided to discard his body and by the time the police found out and got involved was all too late to come forward about what really happened and this could be a possibility but you'd think that they would be smart enough to also move Ben's truck out of the property to make it look like he left and so it his last destination but who knows again this is all theories pure speculation no one has any idea what happened to Ben McDaniel that day some people even think Eduardo could have had something to do with it since he was the last one to see him he let him into the gate but he took a polygraph test and apparently passed so Ben is still missing to this day and it's really really hard for his family they have absolutely no answers as parents said it's just ruined their lives really they've started a grief counseling group for other parents who've lost their kids in an undetermined way they still have Ben's dog Spooner living with them and they love her it's kind of like a memory of him in a way Ben's family is pretty religious and they said that they've come to the conclusion that he did pass on they believe that he's in heaven and that gives them some closure but they would love to know what truly happened and so would everyone else I mean I'm sure a lot of you out there are dying to know what happened to Ben because it drives me crazy I was literally up last night thinking about it before filming this until late hours thinking about how scary it would be to be stuck in a narrow cave and not be able to get out but just the fact that I didn't find his body in there I mean it makes no sense how how I mean if he died in there he would have been found right this just makes no sense this wasn't a typical cave with really small areas that you could wedge a person's body into it had small tunnels but it didn't have like crevices like that just listening to the way divers explain it there's just no way his body's in there dude but I know some people will disagree and some people think he's still in there so let me know your theories I want to know what you think leave me a comment leave your theories I definitely want to hear from you but that's it for me and you guys stay safe out there I will see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 883,624

Rating: 4.9587398 out of 5

Keywords: kendallraeonyt, kendallrae, kendall rae, ben mcdaniel, mile higher, mile higher podcast, lights out podcast, true crime, id discovery, mystery, unsolved mysteries, mysteries, true crime daily, paranormal, unsolved, vortex springs, danelle hallan, eleanor neale, cold cases, crime, buzzfeed unsolved, disappearance, cold case, dateline, crime documentary, true crime documentary, investigative, investigation, cold case files, missing person, 48 hours, hln, 20/20, abc news, the first 48

Id: fswAvJ-L9qE

Length: 32min 7sec (1927 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020