A new, two-night, four-part docuseries reexamining the man long known as Benjaman Kyle premieres May 25 and returns viewers to the night a naked, unidentified man was found behind a Burger King in rural Georgia in 2004.
The series, The Many Lives of Benjaman Kyle, follows filmmakers Shannon and Eric Evangelista of Hot Snakes Media, who say they began their work trying to help the mystery man recover his identity and instead found inconsistencies that opened new lines of inquiry into William Burgess Powell — the Indiana man identified as the mystery person in April 2015.
The scale of what the filmmakers claim matters: the project is a four-part reconstruction that traces Powell’s paper trail — he went missing from Indiana in 1976, his Social Security earnings stopped in 1983, and then, on August 31, 2004, a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found a naked man lying behind the restaurant. That man was admitted to a hospital under the name Burger King Doe — later shortened to B.K. Doe — and over years he assumed the name Benjaman, saying his last name was Kyle because it matched the BK initials.
Shannon Evangelista says the filmmakers never stopped digging. "We’ve never stopped, and we’re still investigating," she said, and identifies the clearest gap driving them: "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."
That gap frames the context viewers will need. The man who became Benjaman Kyle had no wallet and no identification when he was found, said he had no memory of who he was, and was later diagnosed with dissociative amnesia. He believed his birth date was August 29, 1948, had blurred memories of Denver and Indiana, and eventually made his home in Jacksonville, Florida, where he struggled to live and work without a Social Security number or government ID. His story drew national attention and television appearances while investigators and journalists sought to place him.
The Evangelistas say their reporting uncovered witness accounts and threads that do not fit a neat narrative and that suggest connections worth following, including links to cold cases and a possible Midwestern crime family. Eric Evangelista described the picture the family painted and what he found in Powell’s story: "His form of amnesia was a very outdated form of amnesia that you only found in old movies and soap operas," he said, and added bluntly, "This guy’s full of it, and we need to go further."
The tension at the center of the series is exactly that: the man identified in 2015 as William Burgess Powell now sits between two competing frames — a medical diagnosis that explains a loss of memory and a set of investigative questions that imply deliberate gaps, inconsistent accounts and unexplained movements across decades. The filmmakers say their work pushes at the same narrow window: from 1983, when Powell’s Social Security earnings stopped, to 2004, when he was found at the Burger King.
Producers present their material at a moment when basic facts remain unsettled. Reports tied to the series say Powell has not been arrested or charged with any crime, that he does not appear to have a criminal record, and that his current whereabouts are unknown. The series itself functions as both documentary and inquiry: it reconstructs how a man with blurred memories came to be identified, and it broadcasts the loose ends the filmmakers say police and public records left behind.
When the series airs on May 25, it will do more than retell a well-known oddity; it will sharpen the question the Evangelistas say has driven them for years and answer, in practice, whether those questions can still be pushed into new leads. The filmmakers have concluded their initial help in restoring identity turned into a wider investigation; their plainly stated aim is to fill the 21-year silence between Powell’s last known earnings and the night he lay behind that Burger King. The show's release, and the new claims it assembles, ensure the mystery that made him Benjaman will be examined again — and that the search for what happened between 1983 and 2004 will be the story viewers are asked to judge for themselves.
