Casefile Archives 10: Ben McDaniel

Casefile Archives 10: Ben McDaniel

From Casefile True Crime by Casefile Presents

May 16, 2026 · 1h 13m · Episode 406

About this episode

The episode discusses the mysterious disappearance of scuba diver Ben McDaniel at Vortex Spring in Florida.

On Friday, August 20 2010, officers from the Holmes County Sheriff's Department were called to Vortex Spring, a commercially operated dive park just outside the Florida town of Ponce de Leon. A 30-year-old scuba diver from Tennessee by the name of Ben McDaniel had failed to resurface after diving into the narrow cave network under the basin of the spring two nights earlier, and nobody had seen or heard from him since.  When a recovery mission failed to find any sign of Ben, his loved ones and members of the cave diving community were left in shock. Was Ben stuck in an unexplored part of the cave somewhere, or was something else entirely at play? --- Casefile Archives is a series of special bonus releases revisiting the earliest years of the show. The re-run episodes have been completely edited, polished, re-recorded and freshly produced from start to finish to match our current production standards. They are not complete rewrites - our goal wasn’t to alter the cases or reshape the writing, but to preserve the original storytelling while giving the production the refinement it didn’t have when we started the show back in 2016.  Where appropriate, updates have been…

People in this episode

Host: Anonymous Host

Topics covered

  • scuba diving
  • missing person
  • cave diving
  • Florida
  • true crime
  • recovery mission

Keywords

  • Ben McDaniel
  • Vortex Spring
  • scuba diving
  • missing person
  • cave diving
  • Holmes County Sheriff's Department

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Holmes County Sheriff's Department

Places: Vortex Spring, Ponce de Leon

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