“Yo, yo, I need help bro.”

That frantic-sounding message was written at 1:10 a.m. on April 7, 2022, by the Facebook page of then-36-year-old Ryan Withee.

At 2:10 a.m., came another hasty message: “Deat.” No one knows what the second message refers to, but it’s one of the final clues about Withee’s whereabouts, albeit an elusive one.

Ryan Withee is one of the approximately 500 people who are currently missing in the City of Milwaukee. An argument at a sober living house, a brief appearance in a mysterious surveillance video, Facebook messages, and meager belongings scattered in two different spots are the only clues. Last known location: Vicinity of 3100 S. 8th Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

It’s not a crime for adults to go missing, which makes police investigations of missing people more difficult. They have the right to do that. Tracking the movements of a relapsing drug addict can be difficult. Maybe they want to disappear. Maybe they’re holed up in a drug house somewhere. Maybe they’re couch surfing or living outside. Maybe they’ve left town. So many possibilities, and often such people turn back up alive. To be perhaps too blunt, the short-staffed police can’t spend their days chasing every drug addict around the city.

But…as the days turned into weeks, the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, it’s become increasingly clear that something happened to Ryan Withee. But no one knows what.

In April 2022, Withee, then 36, walked out of the frame in a surveillance video and hasn’t been seen since, his case shrouded in the agonies of addiction in a city plagued by a dependency crisis, against a backdrop of non-enforcement.

He had knocked on the door of a woman’s house on S. 8th St. She told police she didn’t know him.

This is the last image taken of him:

In some respects, Withee had vanished many times before, into the torments and mists of heroin and crack cocaine addiction. But this time, he never came back.

Ryan’s mom, Dorliene Lanctot, paints her son’s human complexity, in contrast to the matter-of-fact police reports, which outline the to-no-avail efforts to find him, under bridges, in homeless encampments, at rescue shelters and hospitals. Lanctot runs a Facebook page devoted to finding Withee called, “Bringing Home Ryan.”

“Together we can make a difference and bring Ryan home. It takes one to speak up, Please help us to end this nightmare, 🙏” the page says.

“You don’t know how impossibly difficult grief is until someone you love goes missing. Then you spend the rest of your time trying to bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable. And somehow you do. You even learn to laugh and smile again, when you are ready you will even begin to fully live again. Life for you now is a balancing act and sometimes you will fall.”

She describes Withee as “compassionate and strong-willed. He had dreams. He wanted to own his own painting business.”

Withee’s case challenges the traditional definition of newsworthiness; addicts who disappear don’t often become big news stories, generally, and neither do most men (and people of color, which Withee was not). It’s worth wondering why. For every Gabby Petito or Natalee Holloway, there is a missing person like Ryan Withee (and Johnnie Patterson, 15-year-old Joniah Walker, Christopher Harris, Carvell Jennings, etc.), desperately sought by family members but never a household name.

Perhaps we can learn more about the ails afflicting a city by broadening the definition of news value beyond the aberrant or “man-in-a-white-van” abduction rarity to accord the Ryan Withees of the world the news coverage that any human life deserves. Withee’s disappearance occurred in a fast-changing news environment with declining resources, and it’s being investigated by a short-staffed, embattled Police Department that has approximately 500 active missing person cases on any given day and records some 2,500 to 3,500 per year. Most are found quickly; many are related to a subculture of online grooming, broken homes, and group home runaways, advocates say. There are also missing elderly, veterans, some kids, battered women, and others. A single officer is assigned to handle long-term missing cases for MPD.

Wisconsin Right Now dug deep into one tantalizing clue left unanswered in the police reports – that Ryan Withee’s name was run by the Menomonie Police Department some four hours away (why, when he didn’t have a car or any ties to that community)? We unraveled that mystery, but the answer didn’t bring the family any closer to the central questions:

Where is Ryan Withee?

What happened to him?

Only you can help answer that. Please share his story widely.

Someone, somewhere, saw something.

Someone, somewhere, knows something.

‘I Have a Feeling That Ryan Is Not Here Anymore’

“I truly believe he wanted to overcome” his addiction, Lanctot told Wisconsin Right Now during an interview at her Milwaukee home. Ryan lived with her off and on, but he was using again, so she couldn’t let him stay because he has other siblings.

Ryan, who went to East Troy High School, started doing hard drugs at age 17.

“He had a big heart. He struggled with addiction. He wanted to find someone to spend life with him,” she said. “Not knowing his father put a hole in him. He had a big heart. He would help anyone.”

Ryan’s drug addiction can also be traced to being sexually abused at age 7 or 8, his mom says. Pain medications also started his problem. “He never came back from that,” she says. She found him once under a porch. He had overdosed. But he survived that time.

“I have a feeling Ryan is not here anymore,” his mom says, sadly. “He wouldn’t have gone on his own.”

But she wants to know what happened to him.

She thinks Wisconsin needs a task force on the missing.

“I think he ended up with the wrong person. A drug dealer caught up with him. Something happened to him that night,” his mom says.

She means the early morning hours of April 7, 2022.

“I’d like to find out what happened. It’s torture, the things that go through your mind. It’s the stuff of horror movies.”

She reached out to “all the media.” Fox 6 did a couple of stories and covered his vigil. “It was like he didn’t matter, that he wasn’t important,” his mom says. That was about it. His disappearance was featured on a podcast called “The Vanished.”

“My son matters. He is as important as any other person who goes missing. He was labeled an addict. He was more than addicted. He was a caring son. A loving brother.”

She doesn’t sleep well. She has depression. Each day she cries less, but she still cries.

A friend wrote on the “Bringing Home Ryan” Facebook page that Ryan gave “good vibes, and was often the voice of reason between the two of us. He worked hard to live an honest life and kept hope alive that he could someday be someone his daughter could be proud of; she kept him motivated. He always talked proudly about his mom and siblings as he loved you all so much.💖”

“His energy, charisma, and enthusiasm,” another friend recalled. “He took a lot of pride in the way he dressed…definitely had an eye for fashion!”

Withee came of age in the era when opioids and heroin were exploding in southeastern Wisconsin after relaxed standards for opioid use were pushed by doctors at a pain center at UW-Madison and others who wanted them available to terminal cancer patients in severe pain; over the years, the expanded use shifted to chronic pain and then big Pharma blew it into the stratosphere with its deceptive advertising campaigns and incentives for doctors. Then came the southern border crisis, where fentanyl and cocaine were shipped north.

In 2024, 444 people lost their lives to overdoses in Milwaukee County. The numbers were even more staggering in the three years after COVID, peaking in the 600s.

Does the answer to Withee’s disappearance lie within the horrors of his addiction?

‘I Need Help’

On April 7, 2022, a Milwaukee police officer tried to contact Withee’s mom over the phone. She told police about the strange text messages that Withee wrote on Facebook Messenger.

At 1:10 a.m.: “Yo, yo, I need help bro.”

At 2:10 a.m.: “Deat.”

The police investigation is documented in dozens of pages of police reports obtained by WRN. What follows is based on them.

Lanctot told police that she had gone to the address in the 3600 block of S. 14th St. where Withee was staying and picked up his belongings.

She spoke to his roommate (also described in the police reports as the house supervisor), Dane, who told her that Ryan left the house on Monday, April 4, 2022, at 3:30 p.m.

The next day, on Tuesday, Dane came home and “found Ryan’s backpack open and against the house. There wasn’t anything in there.”

Ryan’s mom told police she hadn’t seen or heard from Ryan “since Monday and no one else has.”

Another officer, Dustin Langfeldt, conducted a follow-up. He went to the recovery home where Withee was living. He spoke to a new resident who said he had just moved in and had no idea who Withee was.

The sober living house had four rooms, an 11 p.m. curfew, and zero tolerance for drug and alcohol use. If a person used drugs, they were kicked out. The rooms were occupied by Dane, a man named Steve, and two new residents.

Steve was identified as Steven J. Starich. He told police he last saw Withee on April 4, 2022, at a house meeting. Withee “looked out of it” and he had been going in and out to the Dewey Center to “try and figure out his medication for depression and bipolar.” WRN called the number for Starich in the police reports, but it was disconnected.

Withee left the meeting that night, and he hadn’t seen him since. Withee previously told him he had suicidal tendencies but made no mention of it recently, and he didn’t seem like he was in trouble or going to harm himself.

He only knew that Dane “had received a call stating someone had found a cellphone and … also that Dane found Withee’s backpack.” The officer checked for surveillance cameras at or near the home and didn’t find any, which his mom questioned.

The number in the police reports for Dane is disconnected. He did not respond to a request for comment on Facebook.

On April 7, 2022, Officer Nicole Swenson reached Dane. Dane said that Withee had recently relapsed on drugs, possibly crack cocaine so he was “discharged from the group home they reside at.”

He described that “one of the roommates (unknown name) was very harsh on Withee before kicking him out. Dane stated Withee left the residence in pajamas and slippers on Monday, April 4, 2022. Dane stated Withee returned on the morning of Tuesday, April 5, 2022, and asked him to gather a backpack and clothing for him. Dane stated that he provided him with his backpack and two sets of clothing.”

Who was this roommate? That question is not answered in the police reports.

Withee told him he was going to get on a bus and possibly go to the Dewey Center for mental health treatment, where he had been treated two to three weeks before, returning home “out of it,” as if he was overly medicated.

According to Dane, he called Withee’s phone at 12:41 p.m. and an unknown male answered it. He told him he found the phone in an alley near S. 8th St. and West Oklahoma Avenue and agreed to return the phone to Dane.

Dane said they met at a “Hometown” gas station near S. 14th St. and W. Morgan Ave. at 4 p.m. and he retrieved the cell phone from the subject and gave it to Lanctot. It had a security code so no one had been able to access it.

Lanctot told WRN that she later turned the phone over to the police but believes it has never been accessed.

Police weren’t 100 percent sure what day Dane retrieved the phone but did review video surveillance a the gas station. A police report said the exchange occurred at 4 p.m. Police looked through surveillance video but “observed no cellular phone exchange.” It’s not clear whether they were looking at the right day.

The Investigation Launches

On April 5, 2022, a Monday, at around 3:15 p.m., Lanctot, 58, walked into the Milwaukee Police Department.

“I’m here to report that my son, Ryan C. Withee… is missing,” she said. She had last talked to him on April 4 at 3:15 p.m. His phone was found on 8th and Oklahoma in an alley. She accessed his Facebook messenger on his phone and he was ‘messaging people and telling them that he needed help.’”

On April 10, 2022, Milwaukee Police Officer Thomas Brummond, assigned to the District 6 Early Power shift, was instructed by a sergeant to conduct a follow-up regarding a missing person, Withee.

He called the Dewey Center, but the last time Withee was there was in March for a “four-day stint.” He called around to hospitals and the jail to no avail.

Withee’s mom, Lanctot, guessed that he might be in a homeless encampment, but he wasn’t there either.

On April 14, 2022, there was a break in the case – a verified sighting of Withee. But it only added to the mystery. Lanctot called the police and said she had received information that Withee may have been at a home in the 3100 block of S. 8th St.

Two police officers went and knocked on the duplex door but no one was home.

On May 2, 2022, two other police officers went back to the home in an attempt to “contact the caller of a welfare check that was received on April 4, 2022.”

It turned out that the caller, Denise Perez, had told police that an unknown male was knocking on her door and she was concerned for his welfare. After Lanctot posted on social media about Withee being missing, she was sent video surveillance of this incident and confirmed it was Withee. Perez wasn’t home.

Police showed Withee’s picture to a person at a homeless encampment under a bridge but he didn’t recognize Withee. They checked a homeless encampment in the woods and spoke to a woman who didn’t recognize him either. They found no record of him ever staying at the Milwaukee Rescue Mission.

Lanctot had been posting flyers around town. She said he had not picked up prescription medications for depression/anxiety, which could cause him to become unstable.

His friend Damon Kehoe told police that he was very close friends with Withee and spoke with him three days before he went missing. But then he received a text message asking for a place to stay the night he went missing. He called Withee the next day but didn’t get an answer. He suggested checking the woods because Withee would hide when he would consume drugs.

Police also spoke to another friend named Karla Olivares, who said that, when she met Withee in 2018, he was living in a tent in the woods near the Dewey Center, where he was receiving treatment.

They moved in together, but she had to ask him to move out after he attempted suicide by overdosing near their residence. She knew he was losing a financial grip, but he was a survivor who would do anything to survive. He sometimes visited drug houses.

Because Withee had ties to East Troy, police checked the Walworth County Medical Examiner’s office, but there were no John Does.

Another friend told police that in late 2021, she had received a text from Ryan about needing $40 and sent the money to a CashApp username that she believed was “likely a drug dealer.” She provided the username to the police as a possible lead.

A Sighting at Last

The two officers went back to South 8th Street and finally reached Denise Perez. “An unknown white male knocked on her front door and she answered thinking that it was a family member trying to get into the house,” she told police.

He was mumbling and thought he lived at her residence, but she didn’t recognize him. He mentioned something about outpatient care and then walked briefly away. He came back and knocked again, but then walked away northbound.

He knocked on a neighbor’s door, but no one answered. He had a cell phone in his back pocket. He walked over to a yellow house, and she saw him standing at the corner of S. 8th Street and West Oklahoma. He was walking eastbound past the alleyway.

The occupant of the yellow house, Edward Kasten, said that his granddaughter came home from work and saw an unknown subject in the backyard. He confronted him and “the subject asked him where a place was” and Kasten told him to leave his backyard. The subject then left eastbound into the alleyway. He was disoriented but cooperative.

Ryan Withee has never been seen again. Another man on S. 8th Street named Joseph Rakowski told police he was exiting his garage when he observed a cell phone seated on the bricks behind his garage. He picked up the locked phone but someone, presumably Dane, called it and he answered. He met him at a gas station.

He had to convince Dane that he “was not the subject’s friend.”

On May 5, Withee’s mom turned up in the lobby requesting to speak to a police supervisor. She believed that something had happened to her son because of the length of time he was missing, and she was upset that two local news channels “were refusing to broadcast her son on their telecast because he is not listed as critical missing.”

The sergeant, Christopher McBride, told Lanctot that the information police had did not lead them to designate him as a critical missing because he “uses illegal street drugs and had been in and out of sober living homes and Dewey residential treatment.”

Lanctot told police she last heard from Withee on April 4, when he called, sounding odd and not making sense. He showed up at Perez’s home about an hour later.

The mom went to the residence and spoke to a woman there who said she did not know Withee.

He has a “history of overdosing, both intentional and nonintentional,” the mom said and she once found him under the porch of her home after an overdose. She had brought the phone which was a pay-as-you-go phone with no account. She couldn’t get into it.

Withee had a history of living outside and in tents, previously lived in Georgia and “pissed off drug dealers in the past.”

The police report said the mom agreed that police had done everything they could at that time. They obtained the video file from the mom that showed Withee on the front sidewalk, captured “short, indistinguishable dialogue” and was 24 seconds in length. His mom thinks she can make it out.

Police checked the wooded area around the Dewey Center to no avail, finding only an abandoned makeshift shelter created out of sticks. They reached out to a homeless outreach worker.

On May 12, police chased down a lead that Withee had shopped at the Speedway on May 7 on Lincoln Ave. The store manager said he had seen Withee before and he usually came in with a female. Police reviewed the video from May 6. Only one person may have fit Withee’s description. However, that man had his face covered with a blue hospital mask and had a hood pulled forward with a baseball cap underneath. Due to the poor photo quality, and the fact most of this man’s features were covered, police could not tell whether this was Withee. Police tried to reach an employee who may have seen Withee that morning but received no answer.

In June, police walked through a park, checked a vacant building, and had the Fusion Center check for Withee references in a “confidential digital database” for financial, social media, and phone numbers of police encounters. Nothing turned up.

Police developed a bio of Withee. His mom lived in Milwaukee, and his father lives in Gallipolis, Ohio. He has five siblings and goes by the nickname “Harlem.” He was born in Cortland, New York. He had no credit cards or cash.

Police had responded to other calls involving Withee: An “overdose” call on Dec. 17, 2020, and May 17, 2021. A theft report on June 30, 2021. A probation and parole call on Jan. 26, 2022. An injured/sick person call on May 1, 2022.

Lingering Questions

Did Ryan Withee overdose? If so, where is his body? Will it turn up someday in the woods or a vacant house?

Why was his backpack left at the sober living house?

How heated was the argument when he was kicked out?

Could he have met with foul play somehow? Ticked off a drug dealer, been robbed by the wrong person, perhaps been disposed of by someone who didn’t want to be blamed for handing him the drugs that led to an overdose?

Did he leave town?

Police placed Withee in the National Missing and Unidentified Person System (NAMUS) and asked for him to be placed in the Wisconsin Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children and Adults.

His criminal record was checked. He had not been arrested since 2020.

In August 2022, Police Officer Keyona Vines, who was then assigned to missing people cases for MPD, asked Withee’s mom for permission to feature his photo on the news and social media platforms. Lanctot said yes.

The vast reach especially of commercial television can be invaluable in missing person cases, but, in this case, it generated very little. And he never garnered massive coverage.

On August 5, police finally asked Lanctot for Withee’s cell phone.

Withee’s mom told police she had access to his Facebook account because he had once used her cell phone to check it, but there was no activity from him on it.

The last activity from Withee came at 1:11 a.m. April 5 to his friend Damon Kehoe.

“YoOIIIIIIIO.”

“Yo.”

“Yo”

“Yo”

“I need help m bro”

“Hey”

With a thumb’s up symbol.

And then on April 5 at 2:10 a.m.

“Deat.”

April 5, 2022, at 2:29 p.m., Kehoe wrote back:

“WHAT UP”

The night before, at 8:38 p.m. on April 4, there was a message from a person named Justin.

“How many u got?”

Withee’s Facebook responded, “30.”

Ryan’s mom told police she believed “Ryan was selling his medication.”

April 5, 1:58 a.m.

“U want.”

April 5, 2 a.m.

Audio call.

“Yo younxxomifn.”

“Yo commin.”

And then at 2:08 a.m., an audio call.

The mom signed a form giving police consent to search her son’s abandoned cell phone. It was placed on MPD inventory as evidence.

There is no indication in the reports that the phone was ever accessed, and Lanctot told WRN that she doesn’t believe it was.

A Body in a Pond?

On August 4, 2022, the Greenfield Police Department received an anonymous tip that Withee’s body was in a small pond in Pondview Park. Police searched the path, by drone and then contacted the MPD dive team. Multiple officers entered the pond water and two cadaver dogs were deployed.

Nothing was found.

Lanctot told police that Ryan “did tell her that he had to stay on the south side because if he did go on the north side of Milwaukee, he would be killed because of his drug use.”

Police also found a Facebook communication between Ryan and a woman named Jessica, whom he met in rehab. They spoke about an injury to his ankle. But those messages were from March of 2022.

That’s when police learned from a “confidential source” that the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office in Menomonie “conducted a check of Ryan’s name on 5/25/22.”

When MPD called the dispatch there to see “why his name was ran in NCIC,” the dispatcher said there were no dispatch calls with Ryan and “there are several different agencies they could have ran Ryan’s name and was not able to tell me who did.”

The mom told police that she did not know why Ryan would be in Dunn County. That angle was then dropped.

However, Wisconsin Right Now has solved that mystery, at least.

We contacted the Dunn County sheriff, who was able to track down the officer who ran the name. It turned out that the officer was trying to run a license plate and typed the plate incorrectly by one letter. That plate then came up to an old plate that had been registered to Ryan Withee. The officer then typed the correct plate, which was not associated with Withee in any way.

In short, it’s a complete dead end.

Sheriff Kevin O. Byrd told Wisconsin Right Now that the officer was able to retrieve his command log from that date and came to the following conclusion:

“At 1836 hours I ran Ryan’s license plate, 97*MDX, which was expired in 2008 with no vehicle associated. Within 25 seconds I ran another plate, 97*WDX (stars inputted by WRN for personal privacy reasons), which leads me to believe I was running a license plate and read the digits wrong so I just happened to enter Ryan’s plate.”

The officer continued, “I ran it through CentralSquare CAD on my squad laptop, which automatically runs the registered owner. So I never ran Ryan’s name, but his plate rather, which automatically triggered the name to be run. I know this because the system ran it twice at exactly 18:36:53 hours which is how the software is programmed to run (both using M and F entered for sex as some states require correct entry and some will run either way).”

Meanwhile, back in 2022, the MPD’s investigation continued.

Withee’s case worker hadn’t seen him since March 24 and said he was doing well.

On August 25, a tip came in from a man who said he saw Ryan near an old boat house alive, after seeing news of Ryan’s disappearance in the media and on social media. But police found the man, and he was not Withee.

Into October 2022, police sporadically checked into the case. They got Ryan’s fingerprints and entered them into NAMUS. They collected his DNA.

On Sept. 29, 2022, Lanctot provided Vines with the IP addresses that Ryan used to last log into Facebook on April 4 and 5. She had also found a random Facebook user who has the name “Deat.” Police figured out that person’s name. Police weren’t able to track down this “Deat,” but there is no evidence the two knew each other or that this person was the Deat Ryan had mentioned.

Police checked pawn shops, but Withee had not pawned anything since 2020. In December 2022, police put up missing person flyers and checked that Ryan had not picked up his medications. He had not. On Jan. 11, 2023, police reached Kehoe, the man who received Facebook messages from Withee, to arrange an interview.

They found no evidence Ryan had a bus pass or had boarded an Amtrak train.

On Jan. 16, 2022, Kehoe told police he had known Ryan for 4-5 years and met him at a Riverwest sober house.

He showed police his Facebook messenger conversation with Ryan on April 4, which included four missed calls and messages including “Call me Asap” and “What you doing tonight.”

Damon said that he did speak to Ryan about living with him and tried to help him by getting him into a sober house and getting him a job but he got fired because he came to work high. Ryan used heroin and crack.

He would shoot up the heroin in his arms and wherever he could on his body but he didn’t know who Ryan would use drugs with or any drug dealers that would give him drugs. He would go anywhere to use including vacant properties and coffee shops.

Ryan had no girlfriends or boyfriends but had a daughter who lived in North Carolina.

He was asleep when Ryan messaged him on April 5 so he didn’t answer. It was unusual for Ryan to contact him at 1 a.m. He tried to contact Ryan when he woke up but Ryan never answered. He didn’t know what Deat meant. Withee might have been high because what he messaged made no sense.

Ryan used drugs under a bridge and in a vacant building under construction, Kehoe told police. He would go to Walmart or other stores to steal after calling his drug dealer to ask what they needed.

Police tried to find the vacant building and looked under the bridge to no avail. They went back to homeless shelters and community service agencies.

‘Justin’

On August 5, police canvassed the neighborhood around Oxford House.

On Jan 18, 2022, police conducted a follow-up with the Facebook user Justin. He had been messaging with Withee. They identified him, but the name is blacked out.

The man told police he had known Ryan for two years through his ex-girlfriend. He thought Ryan might have gone back to Georgia. It is not unusual for him to go missing because he has done this before, he said.

Again, the details are alleged in the police reports.

Justin talked to Ryan on April 2 and 3rd to check up on him. Ryan had mental health problems and a bad drug problem and used heroin by injecting it. He was getting worse. He also used crack. He was trying to get clean and got around by bus.

He said Ryan was sending him “gibberish messages” and was hyping and Ryan got pills that were prescribed for him for mental health issues. They communicated twice a month.

Police looked through many pages of messages between Justin and Ryan, but they are blacked out in the police reports.

After that point, the investigation trailed off, and the disappearance of Ryan Withee faded from any headlines.

Someone knows something. Someone saw something. There is a mother who daily begs for answers.

The time to come forward is now.

If you have any information about Ryan Withee’s disappearance, please contact this author at [email protected] or MPD’s Sensitive Crimes Division at 414-935-7405 or MPD’s 24-hour non-emergency line at 414-933-4444.