Nine Years of Fake Photographs: Edward and Austin Bryant

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

December 14, 2025

Edward Dylan Bryant, born Dylan Levy Bennett, and his younger biological brother Austin Eugene Bryant entered foster care together in the late 1990s and were placed with Edward Eugene Bryant and Linda Kay Bryant, a couple in Monument, Colorado, who went on to formally adopt both boys in March 2000. Edward was seven at the time of the adoption, Austin only four. The Bryants were not new to fostering or adopting. Over the years, the couple ultimately adopted nine children total, and they collected more than seventeen hundred dollars a month from the El Paso County Department of Human Services in support payments tied to the children's care, money intended to cover the costs of raising kids the state itself had classified, in Edward and Austin's case, as having special needs.

Sometime in the early 2000s, both boys stopped being seen by anyone outside the Bryant household. The exact timeline has never been fully settled, in part because the adults responsible for the boys gave shifting, inconsistent accounts once investigators finally started asking questions years later. Linda told authorities at one point that both boys had run away together in May 2003. Edward Eugene offered a different version, saying Edward ran away in 2001 and that Austin left separately, years later, in 2005. Neither account was ever reported to police at the time either boy supposedly vanished. No missing persons report exists from anywhere near the actual dates in question, from either parent, for either child.

An Invisible Nine Years

What makes the Bryant case so disturbing is not simply that two children disappeared, but how completely their absence was concealed for the better part of a decade. Once an adoption is finalized, the ongoing social worker checkups that accompany foster placements generally stop, a policy meant to give adoptive families privacy and stability that, in this case, appears to have functioned instead as a nearly perfect blind spot. With no state employee required to lay eyes on Edward or Austin again, Linda took active steps to maintain the appearance that both boys were still living in the home. She reportedly printed photographs of children she found online, unrelated kids with no connection to the family at all, and displayed them around the house, presenting them to relatives and others as recent pictures of Austin and Edward as they supposedly continued growing up. Family members were reportedly discouraged, even outright forbidden, from asking about or discussing either boy, a silence that held for years even among people who might otherwise have noticed something was deeply wrong.

Meanwhile, the financial benefit continued flowing. According to prosecutors, the Bryants kept collecting government support payments designated for Edward and Austin's care for years after both boys had already vanished, including Medicaid billing submitted for Edward in December 2003, well after his own adoptive father would later claim he had already run away. By the time investigators added everything up, they calculated the couple had fraudulently collected roughly one hundred seventy five thousand dollars in support payments and benefits tied to children who were, by the state's own eventual determination, no longer in their care at all, and very possibly no longer alive.

A Tip From the Extended Family

The case only came to light in January 2011, nearly a decade after Edward was last confirmed seen, when two young men connected to the extended family, identified in reporting as Ricky and Bryan Pennington, provided police with an anonymous tip. They had reportedly been wondering for some time what had actually become of their relatives Austin and Edward, concern that finally pushed them to bring their questions directly to law enforcement rather than continuing to accept the family's silence on the subject. That tip opened an investigation that moved quickly once it started, and within weeks detectives were looking not just for two missing boys but at the adoptive parents who had spent years benefiting financially from their continued, unreported absence.

Accounts of Abuse From Inside the Home

As investigators dug into the family, they located James Bryant, another of the couple's adopted sons, who provided detailed, disturbing testimony about what life inside the household had actually looked like for the boys before they disappeared. According to James and to Bryan Pennington, who told investigators he had personally witnessed the abuse on repeated occasions, Austin had been denied food multiple times a week, spanked, forced to run repeatedly up and down stairs as punishment, and confined for extended periods, including being locked in the garage for days at a stretch. One of the most specific and disturbing details to emerge described Austin being wrapped so tightly in blankets during punishment that he could not move at all, with witnesses describing his appearance in that state as resembling a mummy. Investigators also noted that Austin had been withdrawn from his Christian school and switched to homeschooling not long before he disappeared entirely, removing him from the one remaining setting where an outside adult might have regularly observed him and potentially noticed signs of what was happening at home.

Arrests, But Not for the Disappearances Themselves

Edward Eugene Bryant, fifty eight at the time of his arrest, and Linda Bryant, fifty four, were arrested in February 2011 as the investigation accelerated, with bail set at one million dollars each. The charges filed against them, however, centered specifically on the financial fraud rather than on the boys' disappearance or the alleged abuse itself. In January 2012, Linda pleaded guilty to fifty four separate felony counts, including four counts of theft, two counts of conspiracy to commit theft, and forty eight counts of attempting to influence a public servant, charges tied directly to the years of fraudulent benefit claims and falsified paperwork used to keep the money flowing. She was sentenced that March to forty two years in prison. Edward Eugene pleaded guilty to five similar felony charges, with nineteen additional counts dismissed as part of his plea agreement, and received a thirty year sentence.

Neither Edward Eugene nor Linda Bryant has ever been charged in direct connection with what actually happened to Austin or Edward themselves. Investigators have treated the boys' disappearance as a potential homicide investigation, given the length of time involved, the inconsistent and unreported accounts from both parents, and the documented pattern of abuse described by other family members, but no charges specific to the boys' fates have ever been filed against anyone.

No Trace, Nearly Twenty Five Years Later

Extensive searches connected to the case have never turned up any physical evidence indicating where Edward or Austin actually are, whether either boy is alive somewhere under a different identity or circumstance, or what happened to them in whatever period they actually stopped living in the Bryant household, a period that remains genuinely uncertain given how directly the two adoptive parents contradicted each other and their own prior statements once investigators started asking. Age progressed images have been released over the years attempting to show what each boy might look like as he grew older, Edward now well into adulthood, Austin not far behind him, renderings built entirely from childhood photographs since no confirmed image of either of them exists from any point after they vanished.

A System That Looked Away

What the Bryant case ultimately documents, more than anything else, is how thoroughly a lack of institutional follow up can allow a family's private reality to diverge completely from what the paperwork says, for years, without triggering a single official check. Two children who had already survived the instability of the foster system, and who were supposedly given a permanent, adoptive home specifically to protect them from exactly that kind of uncertainty, instead vanished from that home so quietly that it took an anonymous tip from cousins, rather than any government agency actually tasked with their welfare, to notice they were gone at all.

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