Rachel Monroe investigates Adventures with Purpose—a group of volunteer salvage divers who revive cold cases by searching for cars in lakes and rivers—and what happened when true-crime aficionados turned their skills on the man behind the mission.
Just after Christmas, Leisek and Ginn drove from Oregon to Missouri, where they helped recover the car from a depth of twenty-five feet; Ashby’s body was in the front seat. The resulting video, “Solved Missing Persons Case . . . Bringing Closure for Nathan’s Family,” was viewed more than ten million times. Leisek had assumed that the Ashby situation was a one-off, but the A.W.P. in-box was quickly flooded with messages from people asking for help locating family members.
For most of his life, Leisek had chafed at hierarchies and rules. “I don’t deal well with having stupid people be in charge,” he told me. Now he’d stumbled into a niche where his preference for working outside official channels seemed to be an advantage. On one search, when A.W.P. recovered a body that several other dive teams had failed to retrieve, the local sheriff appeared impressed. “The thing about me is I don’t have all the red tape,” Leisek told him. As civilians, the A.W.P.
On long drives, Leisek would sometimes talk about his rough childhood: how he’d temporarily dropped out of high school to work at the same mill as his father; how he’d briefly been homeless and eaten out of dumpsters; how he’d gone years without speaking to his parents. But, as he told it, the story arc always bent upward, toward triumph. He was still married to his high-school sweetheart; he’d repaired his relationship with his parents; and his work with A.W.P.
Last February, A.W.P. was working on a case in Florida when Leisek left abruptly, without explanation. A couple of months later, he filmed himself sitting in a dim living room. “My heart is just, like, pounding out of my chest right now,” he said. “I’m not here to give you a polished video today, you know. I’m simply here to talk about me, my vulnerabilities.” In the next hour, Leisek discussed his depression, got choked up, reminisced about past cases, and gave away merchandise.
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