Ben McDaniel disappeared in August 2010 and, despite intense searches of the underwater cave system where he was last seen, no sign of his remains has been found.
Fair UseBen McDaniel, the diver who disappeared from a Florida spring in 2010.
On August 18, 2010, 30-year-old Ben McDaniel put on his scuba gear and descended into the underwater cave of Vortex Springs near Ponce de Leon, Florida. McDaniel had been scuba diving since he was 15, and had been working on mapping the cave system. But McDaniel never surfaced. After that summer evening, Ben McDaniel was never seen again.
At first, investigators suspected that McDaniel had gotten trapped in the cave and drowned. But scuba divers who searched the caves found only some of his gear. They found no sign of the missing man.
So if McDaniel wasn’t in the cave, where was he?
While it remains possible that McDaniel got trapped deep in the cave, somewhere nearly impossible to reach, other theories about his disappearance have also emerged. Some suspect that McDaniel may have been murdered. Others have speculated that McDaniel may have staged his own disappearance, as he had recently gone through a divorce, the death of his brother, and the collapse of his business.
But no one knows for sure. To date, Ben McDaniel has not been found, making his disappearance one of the most bizarre in recent memory.
The Early Life Of Ben McDaniel
Ben McDaniel was born on April 15, 1980, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Shelby and Patty McDaniel. The McDaniel family was wealthy, and McDaniel had a stable and healthy childhood alongside his two younger brothers. According to a 2011 article from the Tampa Bay Times, he also had an early love for the outdoors, and started scuba diving at the age of 15.
Investigation Discovery DisappearedBen McDaniel with his scuba gear.
But by 2010, Ben McDaniel had started to struggle. He’d gone through a messy divorce, lost his construction business, and owed almost $50,000 in tax debts. Worst of all, McDaniel had lost his 22-year-old brother to a drug overdose in 2008. McDaniel had been the one to find him.
In 2010, McDaniel’s parents offered to pay for his “sabbatical” and suggested that he move into the family’s beach home at Santa Rosa Beach in the Florida Panhandle to help him get back on his feet. McDaniel agreed to their offer and, in April 2010, he moved into the home with his dog, Spooner.
At first, it seemed like things were looking up. McDaniel began to spend his days scuba diving, and became a regular at Vortex Spring near Ponce de Leon, Florida, roughly an hour north of Santa Rosa Beach.
McDaniel told his parents that he was mapping the caves at Vortex Spring, and that he wanted to become a scuba diving instructor. But then, in August 2010, Ben McDaniel disappeared while doing the thing he loved most.
A Fateful Dive At Vortex Spring And A Puzzling Disappearance
The Original Vortex Spring/FacebookA scuba diver at Vortex Spring.
On August 18, 2010, Ben McDaniel spent the day at Vortex Spring. He dove once, tested his equipment, and made notes in his dive log. Other divers also saw him examining Vortex Spring’s underwater cave.
That evening, McDaniel called his mother, then prepared for his dive. Just before sunset, he sank into the water, and started to make his way toward the cave system. Along the way, he passed Eduardo Taran and Chuck Cronin, both employees, who’d gotten to know him over the past several weeks.
According to local news back in Memphis, Taran suspected that McDaniel had been jimmying open a gate that blocked part of the cave system. Experienced divers like Taran had a key and, on that night, Taran opened it for McDaniel before he made his way to the surface.
This part of the cave was blocked off for a reason. In the 1990s, 13 divers had died in the caves, and Vortex Springs had erected a sign which read: “GO NO FARTHER. THERE’S NOTHING IN THIS CAVE WORTH DYING FOR.”
ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy Stock PhotoThis warning sign blocks the most treacherous part of the Vortex Spring cave system, where Ben McDaniel disappeared.
But Ben McDaniel — despite the fact that he lacked the proper certification — decided to take a risk that night and swim past the sign.
He was never seen alive again.
The Frustrating Search For Ben McDaniel
On the morning of August 20, Vortex Spring employees noticed with alarm that Ben McDaniel’s car was still in the parking lot. They called the Holmes County Sheriff’s Office, who quickly arrived on the scene. .
The authorities closed off the park and began searching the area. In McDaniel’s car, they found his wallet (with $681 in cash), his cell phone, his dive logs, and a rough sketch he’d made of the underwater caves.
It seemed that McDaniel had never resurfaced after his dive on August 18. So recovery divers began to search the underwater caves of Vortex Spring in hopes of recovering his body.
ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy Stock PhotoEduardo Taran, one of the last people to see Ben McDaniel alive, preparing for a dive at Vortex Spring.
But this was no easy task. The mouth of the cave was 50 feet deep, and the gate where Ben McDaniel had last been seen was 300 feet into its cavern. From that point, the cave grew narrower and narrower, stretching just 10 inches across in some spots.
That said, the initial search of the cave did turn up one clue — two of Ben McDaniel’s decompression tanks. Divers use these as they ascend to the surface, and McDaniel had seemingly left them outside the cave for his return. But the tanks contained only air — which more experienced divers saw as a concerning error on McDaniel’s part. He should have known that cave diving required a gas mix. Without it, the diver would start to feel intoxicated. But McDaniel’s lacked, perhaps, this necessary knowledge.
As news about Ben McDaniel spread throughout the scuba-diving community, word soon reached Edd Sorenson, an experienced recovery diver who owned a scuba shop just an hour away from Vortex Spring. Sorenson was in the Bahamas at the time, and he came back to help the search effort. Having heard from other divers just how challenging the search had been, he decided to try to investigate the caves himself.
Sorenson made his way past where the other divers had gone, but he saw no sign of the missing diver. And Ben McDaniel — who was larger than Sorenson — would have left signs like limestone scrapings.
“We went through the whole cave,” another diver told the Tampa Bay Times. “If he’s in there, I don’t know where he’d be.”
So if Ben McDaniel’s wasn’t in the cave, where was he? In the years since, many different theories about his disappearance have emerged.
The Theories Surrounding Ben McDaniel’s Disappearance
Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0The main pond of Vortex Spring.
With no sign of their missing son, the McDaniel family set a reward of $30,000 for anyone who could uncover Ben McDaniel’s remains in the cave. This decision enraged the diving community who felt like the reward would cause divers to lose their lives in the cave — and they were seemingly right. In 2012, a diver died in the caves at Vortex Spring, apparently while searching for McDaniel’s body.
Divers weren’t the only ones who were unable to prove that McDaniel’s body was in the cave. In the first month and a half after McDaniel’s vanished, tests were performed on the water of Vortex Spring to check for signs of human decomposition. Ultimately, all of the tests turned up negative.
Because of this, coupled with the lack of scuff marks on the cave’s limestone walls, rescue cave divers and other members of the caving community are confident that Ben McDaniel is not in Vortex Spring. But if not, where is he?
According to one theory, Ben McDaniel may have faked his death to start a new life. Proponents of this theory point to McDaniel’s recent emotional struggles as reasons why he’d want to leave his life and start anew. However, his loved ones don’t believe he would have left his dog to starve, or that he would have vanished so soon after his parents lost their youngest son.
Others suspect that Ben McDaniel was killed. The Tampa Bay Times reports that there were teenagers drinking near the site that day, and that a drunk man tried to go diving that night after sunset. Possibly, McDaniel was even killed by the Vortex Spring employees who last saw him, though both passed polygraph tests.
Perhaps the most popular theory is that McDaniel died in the cave on August 18th, and when employees arrived the next morning and discovered his body, they panicked — then disposed of his remains somewhere else.
However, no one knows for sure what happened to Ben McDaniel. Without a body, it’s a total mystery what happened after he took his final dive.
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