Benjaman Kyle was the alias chosen by William Powell (born August 29, 1948), an American man who has severe amnesia. On August 31, 2004, he was found naked and injured, without any possessions or identification, next to a dumpster behind a Burger King restaurant in Richmond Hill, Georgia. Between 2004 and 2015, neither he nor any authorities could determine his identity or background, despite an intensive search that included television publicity and various other methods.
In late 2015, genetic detective work, which had gone on for years, led to the discovery of his identity as William Burgess Powell (born August 29, 1948). With the rediscovery of his Social Security number, he again became eligible for employment and has received public assistance.[1]
Incident and post-amnesia
On August 31, 2004, at 5:00a.m., a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found Powell unconscious, naked, and sunburned behind a dumpster of the restaurant.[2][3] He had three impressions in his skull that appeared to have been caused by blunt force trauma; he also had red ant bites on his body. Employees called emergency services, who took him to St. Joseph's/Candler Hospital in Savannah. He had no identity document and was recorded in hospital records as "Burger King Doe" or "B.K. Doe". There were no reports of stolen vehicles in the area and local restaurants and hotels had not encountered any individuals matching Powell's description.[2] Two weeks later, he was transferred to Memorial Health University Medical Center, where records state he was semiconscious.[2]
He eventually said that he remembered his name was "Benjaman" – spelled unusually – but said he could not recall his last name. He chose the surname "Kyle" based on his placeholder initials "B.K." He had cataracts in both eyes, and had corrective surgery nine months after he was found, when a charity raised enough money to pay for the operation. Upon seeing himself clearly in the mirror for the first time, Powell realized he was around 20 years older than he thought he was.[4]
Powell believed he was passing through Richmond Hill, either on U.S. Route 17 or Interstate 95 in late August 2004. He may also have been on the road because of Hurricane Charley, which had hit earlier that month.[5][6]
After being released from the hospital, Powell spent several years between the Grace House men's shelter and hospitals. In 2007, while at The J.C. Lewis Health Care Center, he met a nurse who inquired about his past.[1] The nurse helped support Powell financially, while he earned money mowing the lawns of neighbors.[1] He was diagnosed with dissociative amnesia in 2007 by Atlanta psychologist Jason A. King.[7] Georgia Legal Services was unable to obtain Powell's medical records because Memorial Health requested an $800 fee. A friend contacted Georgia CongressmanJack Kingston for help with the case. To help with Powell's identification, Kingston's office sent DNA samples to the FBI's National Criminal Justice Information Services Division in West Virginia.
For many years after his amnesia, Powell was homeless; further, he had been unable to obtain employment as he could not remember his full Social Security number.[9] Several online petitions were created asking lawmakers to grant Powell a new Social Security number. In 2012, an online petition was created on the We the People petitioning system on whitehouse.gov, but when its deadline expired on December 25, it had received only two-thirds of the number of signatures required to receive an official response. In February 2015, forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick reported that Powell had cut off all contact with her just as she felt she was nearing a breakthrough.[5] A DNA test revealed that Powell shared significant amount of DNA with members of a family named Powell in the western Carolinas– descendants of a 19th-century man named Abraham Lovely Powell.[1]
On September 16, 2015, Powell announced that his real identity had been found, including identifying his name and close family members.[1][10]
Search for identity
There were a number of major efforts to identify “Benjaman Kyle” by matching his fingerprints or DNA with that stored in various databases. These efforts included:
Newspaper articles were published in the Boulder Daily Camera and the Denver Post in July 2009.[12] Based on Powell's memories of the University of Colorado Boulder campus, it was hoped at the time that someone would respond to the articles to identify him.
Colleen Fitzpatrick attempted to create a family tree for Powell, and based on DNA tests, cousins were identified from the western Carolinas who collaborated with her to try to determine his identity. Fitzpatrick's efforts had not yet pinpointed his exact identity when he cut off communication with her.[1]
More specific memories placed him in Indianapolis between at least 1954 and 1963.[6]
Powell also had memories of being in the Denver Metropolitan Area. He had detailed memories of the subscription the University of Colorado Boulder's Norlin Library had to Restaurants & Institutions. He also remembered the Round the Corner Restaurant on The Hill, and the Flatirons and The Fox Theater near the Boulder campus.[17] This placed Powell in Colorado in the late 1970s to early 1980s.[12] Powell reported having memories of the controversy surrounding the construction of mass transit in Denver, at a time when the city still had no financing to proceed. Although the RTD Bus & Light Rail system in Denver went into operation in 1994, public debate over the construction of the system dates back to about 1980, consistent with the time period of the other memories that Powell has of Denver and Boulder.[18]
More specific memories of Boulder placed Powell there between 1976 and 1983.[6]
Powell had nearly no memory of his life after the 1980s, including how he ended up in Georgia.[11] One event he does remember is reading about the September 11 attacks.[7] Many of his memories he cannot describe in words and are at the tip of his tongue.[7]
Identification
On September 16, 2015, Powell announced on his Facebook page that his identity had been established by a team of adoption researchers led by CeCe Moore.[1]
The Orlando Sentinel reported on September 22 that Powell had received a Florida identification card with the help of IDignity, an Orlando-based organization that helps the homeless and others obtain identification documents.[19] IDignity also assisted in establishing Powell's identification.[20]
On November 21, 2016, Benjaman Kyle's true identity was revealed to be William Burgess Powell. He was born on August 29, 1948, in Lafayette, Indiana, and was raised there. In 1976, he had cut ties with his family and abandoned his possessions, including his car and the trailer where he had been living. His family filed a missing persons report at the time, and police found he had moved to Boulder, Colorado on a whim with a coworker. His birth date turned out to be one of the details about his previous life that he had remembered correctly. A reporter found some Social Security records of him working in various jobs until 1983, after which no records could be found for the remaining period of more than 20 years before his discovery in 2004.[1]
Media coverage
Powell appeared on the Dr. Phil show on the October 16, 2008, episode "Who am I".[16] Dr. Phil McGraw paid for Powell to seek a professional hypnotist in an effort to help him recover lost memories. He also appeared on local television networks across the country. Powell says he has been met with skepticism about the case.[6]
The news of William Powell's identification received widespread coverage, including stories by the Orlando Sentinel, ABC News and New York's Daily News.[21][22]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
