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21-Year-Old's Car Was Found Abandoned, but He Was Nowhere to Be Seen · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I am looking at a satellite map of Coldwell County,
• 0:02
  Texas right now. If you zoom in, you see this
• 0:06
  patchwork of you know, Gray's and Brown's oil fields, scrub
• 0:10
  brush ranch land. It looks like the middle of nowhere. Yeah,
• 0:15
  because I mean, frankly it is. But if you scroll down,
• 0:18
  just outside the town of Luling, you find this jagged
• 0:20
  line called Salt Flat Road. It's gravel, it's unlit, and
• 0:24
  looking at it on a screen in the comfort of
• 0:26
  a studio, it looks Oh, it looks harmless. It's a
• 0:30
  line on a map.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: But if you were standing there tonight, or you know, specifically,
• 0:33
  on the night of December thirteen, twenty twenty, that line
• 0:36
  on the map feels very very different. A I bet
• 0:38
  it is pitch black, the kind of darkness where you
• 0:41
  can't see your hand in front of your face unless
• 0:43
  the moon is out.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: And there was no moon, no moon, And on.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: That specific night, the only light came from the gemintin
• 0:50
  meteor shower streaking overhead and the headlights of a single
• 0:54
  crashed Nissan Ultima.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: It is January thirty first, twenty twenty six. We're looking
• 1:00
  at a mystery that has been frozen in time for
• 1:02
  over five.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Years, now, over five years. It's incredible.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: The car was there, the lights were on, the keys
• 1:08
  were in the ignition, but the driver, twenty one year
• 1:11
  old Jason Landry, was gone, just gone, and he did
• 1:14
  just walk away. I mean that would be a standard
• 1:16
  missing person's case. What was found nine hundred feet down
• 1:20
  that gravel road.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Well, that turns this from a sad story into something
• 1:24
  that just defies logical explanation.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: The clothes, that's the detail that gets everyone. It's the
• 1:30
  detail that stops you cold.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Neatly piled. We're going to get to that because neatly
• 1:33
  piled is a phrase that I mean, it keeps me
• 1:36
  up at night when I think about this case.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: It implies, it implies intent, it implies calmness. Yeah, and
• 1:42
  it completely contradicts the chaos of a car crash.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: It challenges every assumption we have about survival, about human psychology,
• 1:49
  and about how the brain functions under extreme stress. Whether
• 1:53
  you're obsessed with forensics or you just want to understand
• 1:55
  the human condition, this case forces you to look at
• 1:58
  that fragile line between normal and well gone.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: So here is our mission. We aren't just going to
• 2:04
  recount the timeline you can find a timeline on Wikipedia.
• 2:08
  We are going to sift through five years of evidence,
• 2:12
  from the initial confused police reports of twenty twenty to
• 2:16
  the exhausted but determined updates from the Texas Attorney General
• 2:19
  in twenty twenty six.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're going to deconstruct the theories.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: We're going to argue the science and try to understand
• 2:26
  how a human being can simply vanish from the face
• 2:28
  of the earth, leaving only a pile of laundry behind.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: And we have to do this carefully. We are stripping
• 2:33
  away the rumors, all the Internet chatter and looking at
• 2:36
  the raw data because somewhere in that data the answer
• 2:39
  has to exist.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Let's start with the human element, because before he was
• 2:43
  a missing person on a poster, Jason Landry was a guy,
• 2:46
  a specific, real person, and that's.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Such a vital place to start in these deep dives.
• 2:51
  There's a risk of the person becoming a ghost before
• 2:53
  we even tell their story for sure, but looking at
• 2:55
  the source material, Jason is very vivid. He was twenty one,
• 2:58
  He was a student at Techis State University in San Marcos.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: He was a big guy too. I think that's important
• 3:03
  for context later when we talk about the physical search.
• 3:06
  He was six foot one, one hundred and seventy pounds, athletic,
• 3:09
  he had played football. This wasn't someone who was frail, right, and.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: He had specific identifiers noticeable acne, scarring on his face,
• 3:20
  a goatee. He was, you know, growing into his adulthood,
• 3:23
  and by all accounts, he was a deeply relatable, well
• 3:27
  liked guy. He worked at Jimmy John's, the classic college job.
• 3:31
  He was described as having a dry sense of humor, intelligent,
• 3:34
  very musical.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: But there is a duality here that we have to address. Yeah,
• 3:38
  I mean, if you look at the surface, you see
• 3:40
  this all American student. He's heading home to Missouri City
• 3:43
  near Houston to see his mom and dad for Christmas.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the normal stuff.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: But if you dig into the months leading up to
• 3:48
  December twenty twenty, the picture gets a little more pixelated,
• 3:52
  a little blurrier.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: That's the nature of investigating the life of any twenty
• 3:56
  one year old. But in Jason's case, there was a
• 3:58
  mark shift in behavior. And we need to be you know,
• 4:01
  clinical but honest about this because it informs all the
• 4:04
  theories about what happened that night.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: We're talking about the the esoteric turn his.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: Life took exactly. Friends and close associates noticed he was
• 4:13
  smoking a lot more.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: Marijuana, which, on its own, for a college student.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: Right in a college town, that isn't exactly a headline.
• 4:20
  But it seemed to be affecting him differently, or maybe
• 4:23
  he was using it to cope with something deeper.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: I was looking at the logs of his social media
• 4:27
  and his text messages from that semester. It wasn't just
• 4:30
  you know, partying. He was posting pictures of cannabis bud, sure,
• 4:33
  but the captions and the private messages were getting really heavy.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: Heavy is a good word for it.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: He was talking about altered states of consciousness.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was diving into these high concept, almost spiritual topics,
• 4:45
  the rapture, Aliens, Jesus, elon musk.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: All on the same breath, sometimes.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: All on the same breath. He was connecting dots that
• 4:54
  most people don't connect. Friends said his messages, and this
• 4:57
  is the quote, no longer made complete sense.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: That is such a polite way of saying something very alarming,
• 5:03
  isn't it. It is When a friend says your texts
• 5:05
  don't make sense, it usually means you were detaching from
• 5:08
  a shared reality.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: And we have to remember the context of twenty twenty.
• 5:12
  This was the height of the pandemic era. Of course,
• 5:14
  isolation was rampant. Mental health among college students was plummeting globally.
• 5:20
  So you have a young man, possibly isolated, using substances
• 5:24
  that can heighten paranoia or spiritual ideation, and he's spiraling
• 5:28
  into these rabbit holes of thought.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: It sets the stage for a fragile mental state. But
• 5:33
  then you have this whiplash back to normalcy. Because on
• 5:36
  the weekend he disappeared December twelfth and thirteenth, he wasn't
• 5:41
  ranting about aliens. He was acting like a dutiful son.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: That's the contradiction that makes this so hard to parse.
• 5:46
  He was excited to go home. He texted his mom,
• 5:49
  Lisa Landry a Christmas list.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: And the items on that list, I mean, they break
• 5:53
  my heart. He didn't ask for a new car or
• 5:55
  some expensive tech. No, he asked for socks.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: It's the banala of it. Socks. It just it grounds him.
• 6:03
  It shows he was planning for a future, right, you
• 6:05
  don't ask for fresh socks if you're planning to walk
• 6:07
  into the wilderness and disappear, you ask for socks because
• 6:10
  you have cold feet and you're planning for the next semester.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: So we have these two Jasons, the Jason who is
• 6:15
  exploring altered states in the rapture and the Jason who
• 6:19
  just wants some new socks and to.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: See his mom, and both of those Jason's got into
• 6:22
  that Nissan Ultima on the night of December thirteenth, and
• 6:25
  that car.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Ride is where everything completely unravels. Yeah, let's construct the
• 6:29
  timeline of that night. Yes, so timing is incredibly, incredibly tight.
• 6:33
  It's ten point five to five pm. He leaves his
• 6:37
  apartment in San Marcos.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: Let's visualize the load out. He's packing for a month.
• 6:41
  He has his laundry basket, he has toiletries, he has
• 6:44
  his backpack, and he has a tumble up plastic cup
• 6:47
  with his pet fish in it.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: We have to pause on the fish because to me,
• 6:50
  that is the single most compelling piece of psychological evidence
• 6:54
  that he intended to survive this drive.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's a caretaking behavior. If you are in a
• 6:59
  state of complete psychosis where nothing matters, or if you're suicidal,
• 7:03
  you generally do not take the time to secure a
• 7:05
  beta fish in a travel cup. You are trying to
• 7:08
  keep a small, fragile life alive. It proves he had
• 7:11
  a destination in mind.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: So he's got the fish, he's got the laundry. He's
• 7:15
  wearing a T shirt, black Nike shorts, gray underwear, slide
• 7:19
  sandals basically.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: And those socks he liked SpongeBob SquarePants socks.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Again, just comfort were. He is dressed for a heated car,
• 7:27
  not for a hike in the Texas wilderness, not at all.
• 7:30
  He starts driving, he turns on ways, and for the
• 7:33
  first thirty minutes or so, he's a digital ghost, but
• 7:36
  a very active one. He's snapchatting friends.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: He facetimes an ex girlfriend.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: He sends his selfie at eleven point two eight pm.
• 7:44
  This is crucial, so crucial. In the photo, he looks calm.
• 7:47
  He's wearing his baseball cap. He doesn't look terrified. He
• 7:50
  doesn't look like he's hallucinating demons. He looks like a
• 7:52
  guy driving.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: Home, just a normal guy on a normal drive.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: But right around that time, eleven point twenty four pm
• 7:57
  to eleven point two eight pm, something happens with navigation.
• 8:01
  He is in Lulling, Texas. He's supposed to be heading
• 8:03
  toward Interstate ten. I ten is a massive, well lit
• 8:07
  concrete ribbon that shoots you straight to Houston. You could
• 8:10
  drive it with your eyes closed.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: But he doesn't go to iten he's at the intersection
• 8:13
  of Highway eighty and Magnolia Avenue in Lulling and he
• 8:16
  stops using Ways.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, this is a major point of contention. Did he
• 8:20
  turn the app off or did he just ignore it?
• 8:23
  And why?
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: Well, we have to talk about how these apps work
• 8:26
  in rural areas. Ways, Google Maps, Apple Maps, they're algorithms.
• 8:31
  They prioritize math, and sometimes they prioritize shortest distance over
• 8:36
  safest road. In rural Texas, the shortest distance between two
• 8:39
  points might be a gravel.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Cowpath, But I've driven with Ways. Usually it keeps you
• 8:44
  on the highway unless did he miss a turn.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: It's very possible. The intersection in Lulling can be confusing
• 8:51
  if you aren't paying attention. If he missed the ramp
• 8:53
  to E ten, the app might have immediately.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Recalculated, recalculating turn right on salt flat.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: Road exactly, And if you're tired or maybe a little high,
• 9:02
  or just trusting the robot voice, you turn and.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: Once you make that turn, you are committed salt flat
• 9:08
  road isn't the place you can easily you turn on,
• 9:10
  especially in the.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Dark, exactly. And let's talk about the texture of that drive.
• 9:14
  He goes from the street lights of Lulling onto blacktop
• 9:17
  and then suddenly the pavement just ends.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: It turns to gravel.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: It turns to gravel. The sound of the tires changes
• 9:24
  that loud crunching noise. The car starts vibrating, Dust kicks
• 9:29
  up in the rear view mirror.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Any normal driver would think, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: Wrong, You would think so, but he keeps driving. He
• 9:36
  drives for miles into the darkness.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: This is where I start to question his state of mind,
• 9:42
  because if I'm driving a sedan, not a truck, a
• 9:45
  Nissan Ultima, and the road turns to gravel and the
• 9:48
  lights disappear, I am stopping. I'm checking my phone.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: But what if his phone didn't have a signal true,
• 9:54
  or what if he was in that altered state we mentioned,
• 9:56
  if he was dissociating, maybe the gravel road felt like
• 9:58
  part of the journey. Maybe he wasn't processing the danger.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: So he's driving down this pitch black tunnel of dust,
• 10:05
  and then he crashes. It's roughly eleven point four five
• 10:08
  pm or midnight.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: And the crash site it tells a story of lost control,
• 10:12
  but not necessarily high speed chaos. Okay, the car veers
• 10:16
  off the road in the twenty three hundred block. It
• 10:18
  hits a tree or a fence post on the passenger side,
• 10:20
  spins around and comes to rest facing the opposite direction.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: And the rear window shatters.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: Shatters from the impact or the spin.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: But the airbags didn't deploy.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: That is a massive detail. It means the deceleration wasn't
• 10:31
  sudden enough or violent enough to trigger the sensors. He
• 10:34
  didn't hit a brick wall at sixty miles per hour.
• 10:37
  It was a spin out, a slide.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: So physically he probably wasn't badly hurt. He might have
• 10:42
  been shaken up, maybe hit his head on the side window,
• 10:45
  but he wasn't crushed.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: The evidence supports that there was no blood in the car,
• 10:50
  no spiderweb crack on the windshield from a head impact.
• 10:54
  He likely stepped out of that car relatively unscathed physically.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: And that's where the timeline goes completely dark. He crashes,
• 11:00
  the car is dead, it's midnight, he is.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Alone and This is where the volunteer firefighter comes in.
• 11:05
  It's about twelve thirty am. He's driving down salt flat road.
• 11:09
  I mean a stroke of luck that anyone was there
• 11:11
  at all. And he sees the car.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: He sees the lights.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: The headlights are on. The interior dome light might have
• 11:17
  been on. He walks up to the car. The keys
• 11:19
  are in the ignition, but the engine is off. Yes,
• 11:22
  and the doors are unlocked. He looks inside. He sees
• 11:25
  the phone, he sees the wallet, He sees the fish
• 11:27
  in the tumbler, but no driver. But he sees no driver.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: That image is just haunting, the lights cutting through the dust,
• 11:34
  illuminating nothing but scrubbrush. It's like the Mary Celeste.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: The firefighter calls it in. The troopers arrive. They assume
• 11:41
  what anyone would assume, drunk driver. He crashed. He didn't
• 11:45
  want a dui, so he ran into the bushes to
• 11:47
  hide or walk it.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Off, which is a standard police assumption. Right, he's hiding exactly.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: They probably thought they'd find him walking down the road
• 11:54
  in an hour, or at a farmhouse the next morning
• 11:56
  asking to use a phone. They didn't treat it as
• 11:59
  a high risk disappearance. Immediately because the scenario college kid
• 12:03
  crashes car and runs away is incredibly common.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: But then the sun comes up and the search expands,
• 12:11
  and Jason's father, Kent Landry, arrives on the scene, and
• 12:14
  this is.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: Where the story shifts from a traffic accident to a
• 12:17
  complete nightmare. They start walking the road and nine hundred
• 12:21
  feet away from the crash site, about three football field.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: That's a long way.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: It's a very long way, and they find the clothes.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, stop, we need to really visualize this because when
• 12:30
  I first read clothes were found, I pictured debris. I
• 12:33
  picture a shoe that flew off in the crash. I
• 12:36
  pictured a jacket dropped while running.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: No, that is not what this was. This was a process.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: They found his t shirt, his shorts, his underwear, his socks,
• 12:47
  his sandals.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: And they were stacked, stacked. The reports very slightly on
• 12:51
  the exact geometry, but the consensus from the family and
• 12:55
  early responders is that they were in neat, deliberate piles.
• 12:58
  The socks were together, the shirt was placed. This wasn't
• 13:01
  a frantic shedding. It looked like someone getting ready for
• 13:04
  bed or getting ready to take a.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Shower in the middle of a gravel road in thirty
• 13:08
  degree weather with.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: A windshill making it feel even colder kit landry.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: The dad recognized the SpongeBob socks immediately. Can you imagine
• 13:17
  that moment you are looking for your son, hoping he's
• 13:19
  just hiding in a barn, and you see his socks
• 13:21
  on the ground, gut wrenching, and not just his socks,
• 13:24
  his underwear.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: It confirmed his worst fear, Jason was naked. Whatever happened,
• 13:29
  Jason had stripped down to nothing and walked away into
• 13:31
  the darkness.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: And the underwear had a small bloodstain.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: A small smear on the waistband. Not a hemorrhage, just
• 13:38
  a smear. Maybe he had a scratch, maybe from climbing
• 13:41
  a fence, we don't know. But it was the only
• 13:43
  blood fountain anywhere.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: So now we have the central mystery, a naked man
• 13:48
  walking into the freezing Texas night, leaving his clothes in
• 13:51
  a tidy pile.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Why this is where we have to move into the
• 13:55
  theories because logic breaks down here. We have to look
• 13:58
  at science, psychology, and you know the possibility of something darker.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Let's start with the theory that the authority settle on
• 14:05
  pretty quickly, hypothermia, specifically something called paradoxical undressing.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: This is the official leading theory and chemically, physically it
• 14:15
  makes a certain amount of sense.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Explain it to me like I'm five, Yeah, because paradoxical
• 14:19
  undressing sounds made up.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: It's very real. Your body has a thermostat called the hypothalamus.
• 14:26
  When you get too cold hypothermic, your body pulls all
• 14:29
  the warm blood from your arms and legs into your
• 14:31
  core to protect your heart and lungs. Okay, that's why
• 14:34
  your fingers go numb.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Okay, so you're freezing, you're shivering.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: You feel cold, right, But as the hypothermia deepens and
• 14:41
  your brain starts to fail, that mechanism breaks. The muscles
• 14:45
  clamping those blood vessels. Shit, suddenly just give up.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: They relax, and the flood rushes back.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: Exactly, All that hot blood from your core rushes back
• 14:54
  to your frozen skin. It's like stepping into a hot
• 14:56
  shower after being in the snow, but multiplied by ten
• 15:00
  to death. But you feel an overwhelming, burning flash of heat.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: So the victim thinks they are on fire.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Yes, they are delirious. They are confused, and in a
• 15:09
  desperate attempt to cool down, they strip off their clothes.
• 15:12
  It's happened to hikers, skiers, elderly people who wander off,
• 15:15
  they're found naked in the snow.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, I get the biology the hot flash of death. Yeah,
• 15:20
  but I have a major problem with this theory. In
• 15:22
  Jason's case.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Is it the timeline?
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: It's the timeline A and D the behavior first, the timeline.
• 15:26
  He crashed around midnight, the clothes were found nine hundred
• 15:29
  feet away. How fast does hypothermia set in? It was
• 15:32
  thirty degrees, not thirty below zero.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: That is a valid critique to reach the stage of
• 15:37
  paradoxical in dressing. We're talking severe hypothermia usually takes hours
• 15:41
  in thirty degree weather.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Especially if you're dry, and Jason was dry.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: He was dry, he was active. Could he have gone
• 15:48
  from crashed car to brain broken hypothermia in forty five minutes.
• 15:53
  It's physiologically unlikely unless there are other contributing factors.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Contributing factors like drugs or shock or wind.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: But even then it's incredibly fast.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: And then there's the neatness. If I'm delirious, if my
• 16:06
  brain is frying and I think I'm burning alive, am
• 16:09
  I going to take the time to fold my shirt?
• 16:11
  Am I going to stack my socks?
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: That is the sticking point for so many people. Paradoxical
• 16:15
  undressing is usually frantic closer. Ripped buttons are popped, They
• 16:19
  are scattered as the person stumbles. Right, A neat pile
• 16:22
  implies a cognitive structure that a hypothermic brain just shouldn't have.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: It looks like a ritual, not a panic.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the second theory, the one that
• 16:31
  ties back to those text messages we talked about.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Drug induced psychosis or a spiritual break. Yeah, let's play
• 16:38
  this out. He crashes, the car, spins, the shock of
• 16:41
  the accident hits him.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: And remember he has been in an altered state mindset
• 16:45
  for weeks. He believes in ascending. He's thinking about the rapture.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: So maybe the crash trigger or something. He doesn't see
• 16:51
  a car accident he sees a sign.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Exactly what if in his mind the crash was the
• 16:56
  beginning of the ascension. If he was hallucinat the cold
• 17:01
  might not have felt like cold. It might have felt
• 17:02
  like I don't know.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: Energy and the stripping.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: In many religious or spiritual psychoses, clothing is seen as
• 17:09
  a binding. I came into this world naked, I leave it.
• 17:13
  Naked stripping can be an act of purification.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: So he stacks his clothes because he is preparing to leave.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: His body, or or preparing to enter a new dimension.
• 17:23
  If he believed he was meeting Jesus or Aliens, both
• 17:27
  topics he discussed, he might have presented himself in a
• 17:29
  way that made sense to his shattered logic.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: So the neatness wasn't about being tidy.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: No, it was about being respectful of the event he
• 17:36
  thought was happening.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: That is terrifying. The idea of him walking down that
• 17:40
  dark road thinking he was walking into heaven but actually
• 17:43
  walking into the brush to die.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: It aligns with the evidence of the clothes better than
• 17:48
  simple hypothermia does, but it still leaves one massive question unanswered.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Where is he right?
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: Whether it was hypothermia or psychosis. He walked away, he
• 17:57
  didn't have shoes, he didn't have clothes, He couldn't have
• 17:59
  gone far.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Which is why we need to talk about the foul
• 18:02
  play theory. Because looking at the Internet comments, looking at
• 18:06
  the Reddit threads, nobody wants to believe the wandered off story.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: No, people want a villain.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Everyone thinks there was a third party.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: It is the third party theory, the idea that someone
• 18:17
  else was there.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: There were rumors right, stories about him being run off
• 18:20
  the road, stories about a drug deal gone wrong.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: There are always rumors in small towns. People mentioned a
• 18:26
  local drug dealer. There were reports of shootings in the
• 18:29
  area months prior. The theory is that Jason was intercepted.
• 18:32
  Maybe he was chased onto Salt Flat road, but the
• 18:35
  ways data, the digital footprint shows no other phones traveling
• 18:39
  with him. The dashcam footage from the firefighter shows the
• 18:42
  scene was quiet.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: And what about the clothes In this scenario, if someone
• 18:45
  kidnapped him, why make him strip and neatly fold his clothes.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: That is where the foul play theory just hits a wall.
• 18:52
  Killers don't usually ask their victims to neatly fold their
• 18:56
  laundry in the middle of the road. No, it doesn't
• 18:58
  fit a mugging. It doesn't fit a carjacke.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: In unless the clothes were planted.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: That's the stage scene hypothesis that someone killed him elsewhere,
• 19:07
  dumped the car and planted the clothes to make it
• 19:09
  look crazy. But that requires a level of sophistication and
• 19:13
  calmness that most impulsive criminals don't have and why.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Leave the phone? Why leave the wallet.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: And the fish?
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Exactly? Why leave the fish? If you are staging a scene,
• 19:23
  you don't worry about the beta fish.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: So the foul play theory, it feels good because it
• 19:28
  gives us a villain, it gives us someone to blame.
• 19:32
  But the evidence, the physical stuff, just isn't there.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: The Texas Attorney General's Office has run these leads down.
• 19:38
  They have interviewed the person's of interest that the Internet flagged.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: They found nothing, nothing, no blood in the car, no
• 19:44
  sign of a struggle.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: So we circle back to the most likely and maybe
• 19:47
  the saddest scenario. He walked away. But if he walked away,
• 19:52
  why haven't we found him?
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: This is the part that frustrates the public. How can
• 19:55
  you lose a body?
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: We've seen the photos of the search drones, kilicop dogs, horses,
• 20:03
  hundreds of people walking arm in arm.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: But you have to understand the Texas brush. I've spoken
• 20:07
  to search and rescue experts in that region. This isn't
• 20:10
  a park. This is dense, thorny Mesquite. It is hog country. Dogs,
• 20:15
  feral hogs. They are a massive problem in Texas. They're scavengers,
• 20:19
  they're aggressive. If a body is out there, nature reclaims
• 20:23
  it very, very quickly.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: Oh wow.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Between the coyotes, the buzzards and the hogs, remains can
• 20:28
  be scattered or destroyed in days.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: Has a gruesome thought, it is, but.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: It's a reality of the terrain. Also, there are wells,
• 20:36
  there are sinkholes, there are old oil tanks. It's possible
• 20:39
  he sought shelter in a pipe or a hole to
• 20:41
  get out of the wind and died inside something that
• 20:43
  blocks the view of a drone.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: So he could be right there, hidden.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: He could be ten feet from where a searcher walked,
• 20:49
  but under a canopy of briars that just looks undisturbed.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Let's pivot to the investigation itself, because for the first
• 20:55
  year or two there was a lot of criticism of
• 20:57
  the local sheriff.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: There was the Caldwell County Shriff's office is a small agency.
• 21:02
  They treated it as a runaway case. Initially, they didn't
• 21:05
  lock down the scene as a crime scene immediately.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: They let the car get towed right.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: They did, and that's standard for a crash, but in hindsight,
• 21:12
  evidence might have been lost. The family was frustrated, the
• 21:15
  public was furious.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: But then the big guns came in.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: By twenty twenty two, Yeah, the case was transferred to
• 21:21
  the Texas Attorney General's Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit.
• 21:25
  This was a huge win for the family.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: I imagine it meant.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: More resources, more eyes, and a fresh perspective.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: And they have kept at it even now in twenty
• 21:34
  twenty six they.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: Have They have released extensive reports. They have definitively ruled
• 21:39
  out the abduction theory based on the data. They focus
• 21:43
  on the search.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: We have to talk about the search team because this
• 21:45
  isn't just cobs anymore.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: Now. This is one of the most dedicated volunteer movements
• 21:49
  I have ever seen. The Jason Landry Search Team. They
• 21:53
  formed in twenty twenty two. It's regular people, moms, dads,
• 21:58
  students who spend their weekends through thorns.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: They've done nearly thirty searches by now.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: And they search intelligently. They use apps to track their grids.
• 22:07
  They document everything they found, the backpack, They found the hat.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: But the backpack was found fairly close to.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: The clothes, right, Yes, it was found in the days
• 22:14
  following the disappearance. The trail of items close backpack hat
• 22:20
  points in a direction but then the trail just stops.
• 22:23
  It's like you evaporated, and that silence is what draws
• 22:26
  the Internet in. We need to talk about the online
• 22:29
  detective phenomenon of the TikTok sleuth. It's a double edged sword.
• 22:34
  On one hand, you have people like us discussing the case,
• 22:36
  keeping Jason's name alive, the media coverage People Magazine, Texas Monthly.
• 22:42
  It keeps the pressure on the AG to not close
• 22:44
  the file.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: That's a good part.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: The bad part is the harassment. People sitting in their
• 22:49
  basements in Ohio accusing a random rancher and Lulling of
• 22:52
  murder because they got a bad vibe from a Google
• 22:55
  Earth photo.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: It's crime tourism too, people going to Salt Flat Road
• 22:58
  to take selfies.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: It is, it's respectful, and it actually hurts the investigation.
• 23:02
  If you have random people trampling the scene, you're destroying
• 23:06
  potential evidence. You're muddying the waters.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: It's a modern complication for sure. But for the family,
• 23:12
  for Kent and Lisa, does the Internet.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: Help or hurt I think they take the help where
• 23:16
  they can get it. They just want their son back.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Let's focus on them for a moment.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: The Landrys Kent Landry has been living in purgatory for
• 23:22
  over eighteen hundred days. He counts every single one.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: He posts the count on social media. Day fifteen hundred,
• 23:30
  Day sixteen hundred.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: It's an act of defiance, refusing to let the world
• 23:34
  move on.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: They hold a vigil every year December thirteenth. I read
• 23:38
  a description of the one from this past December twenty
• 23:41
  twenty five. It was cold again. They stood on that
• 23:43
  road with candles.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: It's that horrible oscillation, isn't it. You want to hope
• 23:47
  he's alive, that maybe he had amnesia, maybe he's living
• 23:49
  a new life somewhere, but you also know the reality
• 23:52
  of eighteen hundred days of silence.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: At this point, the search is for bones, it's for closure.
• 23:57
  It's so the family doesn't have to wonder every time
• 23:59
  the phone rings.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: So here we are, January twenty twenty six, five years.
• 24:04
  What is the status today.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: The status is active. The case is not cold in
• 24:08
  the sense that it's been shelved. The reward is still
• 24:11
  there twenty thousand dollars for information leading to Jason.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: And the volunteers are still going out.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: They operate seasonally. They can't search in the summer, the
• 24:19
  Texas heat is deadly and the snakes are out. But
• 24:22
  from October to May they are out there. They are
• 24:25
  a clearing brush, they are draining ponds.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: Is there any new technology being used.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: They're using better drone light ar now which can see
• 24:32
  through some of the brush. They're reanalyzing the satellite imagery
• 24:36
  from twenty twenty. But ultimately it is probably going to
• 24:39
  come down to a human being stumbling across something.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: A hunter, a utility worker, or a confession.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: If the foul play theory is true.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: If the foul play theory is true, someone knows secrets
• 24:51
  like that are hard to keep for five years.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: They are. But again, the evidence points to the elements.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: You know, We've talked about biology, ways, algorithms, hog and
• 25:00
  satellite maps, but I keep coming back to that tumbler.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: The fish.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: The fish. It's such a small thing, but it's the
• 25:06
  anchor of this whole story.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: For me, it represents the tragedy Jason was nurturing. He
• 25:11
  was responsible in that moment. He was trying to get
• 25:13
  a living thing from point A to point.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: B, and in the chaos, whether it was his brain
• 25:19
  misfiring or the cold taking over, he lost the ability
• 25:22
  to save himself.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: It forces us to confront how fragile our grip on
• 25:27
  reality is. We think we're in control, we think I'm
• 25:30
  just driving home. But a wrong turn, a drop in temperature,
• 25:34
  a misfiring synapse, and the world just dissolves.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: If you are listening to this and you live in
• 25:40
  that area, you've heard something five years ago that you
• 25:42
  brushed off, a rumor, a story at a bar, Please
• 25:45
  say something.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: The smallest detail can crack a case like this.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: The number for the Texas Attorney General's Cold Case Unit
• 25:50
  is available online. There's a twenty thousand dollars reward. Don't
• 25:54
  let this family wait another eighteen hundred.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: Days until he has found salt. Flat road is just
• 25:58
  holding its breath.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: It really is. The silence out there is loud.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: It's the loudest sound in the world.