A Wisconsin kayaker who faked his own death so he could start a new life with a woman in the country of Georgia texted his wife he loved her on the night he executed the plan, telling her he had gone to the lake to watch the northern lights.

Emily Borgwardt woke up alone the next morning, her desperate texts of “Where are you????” and “Babe?” going unanswered. By that point her husband, Ryan Borgwardt, had already overturned his kayak on Green Lake and biked through the night to catch a bus to Canada, the first leg on his journey to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to meet a Ukranian woman he was secretly courting online.

The texts were among a massive file of case documents the Green Lake County Sheriff’s Office released to The Associated Press this week that offer a glimpse into the couple’s tense marriage.

Borgwardt, 46, was convicted of obstruction last month. His wife divorced him in May.

Before they booked Borgwardt into jail, investigators asked him during a three-hour interview why he did it.

He said he felt like a failure, saying later in the interview that he has accumulated about $75,000 in credit card debt and $130,000 in business debt. He said he didn’t have a good relationship with his wife and his children didn’t want to do anything with him anymore.

“I think just the inability to feel like you could talk to your wife about some of this stuff, and maybe the complete hopelessness that you have in the situation that you’re in,” he said. “And you end up meeting a friend somewhere on the other side of the world who sort of has a somewhat similar story and you just end up becoming friends and the friend thing ends up turning into more, but you didn’t really plan on that.

“It wasn’t your intention. So a door kind of opens up for you in a way to possibly make things work like that,” he added.

He said he hoped that he could avoid detection long enough to be declared legally dead. At that point he planned to apply for citizenship in Georgia but hadn’t figured out how to do that if he was declared dead.

Borgwardt pleaded no contest to the obstruction charge on Aug. 26. He was sentenced to 89 days in jail.