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And what's your grief like at this point, because you can't grieve in the traditional way a parent grieves over the loss of a son? We I don't think we grieve yet because we we we still don't know. We've had a memorial, but we don't have we have nothing. We I mean, we don't have remains. We don't have an autopsy. We don't have a forensics report. We have nothing.

Do you sleep, do I haven't slept in three more than three years. The first time I meet Tom's mom, Penny Meek, she's just gotten home from one of Canadians elementary schools where she teaches computer classes. She's dressed casually, white blouse, blue jeans, tennis shoes. Her white blonde hair falls to her shoulders. Pinny lives in a ranch style home on the outskirts of town bordering a wide open pasture. She introduces me to her other son, Tom's big brother, Tucker.

Are you going to sit in on this? Sure, yeah. That'd be great.

Tucker is 24, an information technology specialist at a nearby school district. Pene also introduces me to her husband, Chris, who works as a line operator for an oilfield supply company. Penny and Chris married in 2012, six years after Penny divorced Tom and Tucker's father. We all sit down at the kitchen table and Chris serves as glasses of tap water.

And I want to do a deep dive more than maybe the other stories have done about Thomas's life. And and then some of the questions are going to be hard when you're OK with that. What kind of guy was he?

I want you to help me out with this, Tucker. I mean, was he a typical Canadian boy?

I wouldn't say he was typical at all because, you know, the typical person that comes up here is like a farmer rancher types. They're tough guys, football stars, that kind of thing.

And though Tom played football and was part of that group, too, he fit in with all Kraut's Tom, especially like being an actor, even as a young boy, he would put on elaborate plays.

He was different. And then he would always want me and Tucker to be in his play with them. But we didn't ever know what we were supposed to do. And so he would act his heart out and then he would tell us what lines to say. Like he had go, he would say something, and then he would be like, OK, you say, you know this. And then Tucker and I would try to follow whatever we were supposed to do and and be in his little play with him.

Tom was funny, he was outgoing, he was also known for his big heart, someone who stood up for other kids when they were bullied.

I have a mom who sent me a text message shortly after Thomas went missing and her son had been in class with Thomas since we started school here. I think he was autistic and sometimes he would have outbreaks in class. And the other kids, you know, would kind of pick on him and make fun of him. And Thomas would sit there and then and a little bit he'd be like, that's enough. You need to knock it off. He just shut it down.

I have to say, sitting at their kitchen table, listening to a family swap, stories about a beloved son. This is what small town life is all about, a life where kids don't get into too much trouble because there isn't much trouble to get into. But eventually we get to talking about the night that changed all of their lives, the night Tom disappeared. I'm Skip Hollandsworth from Texas Monthly and this is Tom Brown's body episode to Tom Slewed.

Penny told me that on Thanksgiving Eve 2016, at the stroke of midnight, she checked her phone for a message from Tom. Tom had gone cruising around Canadian with a few friends that evening. His curfew was midnight.

Well, I was kind of panicking about five after 12 because Thomas doesn't miss curfew. Well, and he most certainly didn't just leave you hanging either. I mean, if he was going to be late, he would say, hey, I'm a stop, stop off by all stops and grab a burrito before I come home and a Coke and then I'll be home. And then he was he he had ten times better communication skills than I mean, he would let you know what he was doing.

He would let you know where he was going to be. He wasn't he wasn't secretive by any means. And so there were times when he was late, but he would text and he would say, yeah, I to be late, but I'll be there.

So, yeah, it was if he told me he was going to be home in five minutes, he was home in five minutes or less. Penny told me she called and texted Tom Tucker, who was at the house watching a movie with a friend, did the same. Neither of them got an answer. Penny woke up her husband Chris, who was asleep in the bedroom and told him she was going to look for Tom. She grabbed her keys, climbed in her Chevy Suburban.

Tucker suggested she drive around town past Tom's usual hangouts and along the route that Tom's friends referred to as Tom's Loop. Meanwhile, Tucker and his friend got in Tucker's Toyota forerunner and scoured the roads outside of town.

Me and Taylor went out and looked for a possible accident somewhere. If we could see skid marks of that animal, whether, you know, where he rolled his car so we could find him. And, you know, if that's what happened, we give him some help and, you know, save his life, if that's what it came to. Because we didn't we had we didn't know what happened. In a town as remote as Canadian, Tom could have gotten in a terrible wreck on a country road without anyone knowing it.

But Tucker said there was no sign of Tom's Durango. He took his friend home and then he drove around a while longer before heading back home himself. Penny was already there. She knew that Tom had been with his friend Caleb King that evening, so she called Caleb's parents. The Kings are one of Canadians most prominent families. Caleb's father, Ken, runs an energy service company. He's also a politician, a Republican member of the state House of Representatives.

When Penny called Caleb's mom, Robin answered the phone.

She was pretty alarmed that Thomas didn't come home. And she went to work, came about and I can hear their whole conversation. And then Caleb started calling other friends out.

Granted, I mean, I was asleep and I was kind of confused. I was just like, what do you mean he didn't show up? I mean, this is Caleb. I'm waking up and I'm drowsy and I'm kind of confused, like, why didn't he come home? So I was like, well, let's just call, make sure that this isn't bigger than it. Yeah. And I mean, it turns out it was. And so I and then I would got a text from Tucker saying, Where's Tom?

Um, and I was like, oh, crap. I don't know.

Caleb called Michael Castleton who who'd been with Caleb and Tom earlier that night. Michael said he had no idea where Tom might be.

Yeah, I thought it was weird. I mean, he had never missed curfew. He never stayed up later than he needed to.

Caleb also called Christian Webb, the former Canadian high school valedictorian who had gone cruising with Caleb and Tom later that night.

My first thought was that he had just gotten a flat tire. That was my immediate first thought. I mean, nothing ever happens in Canadian, so nothing terrible most of the time. So, I mean, I was concerned, but I didn't I didn't have a huge amount of concern.

Caleb, Michael and Christian each got in their own cars to go looking for Tom.

We were out and my mom were out here in the same car and Tucker had been out and Penny were out and they were in separate vehicles. We had a lot of vehicles.

And that's what we were thinking was like all of us out here, sure, we will find his car.

Christian went as far away as the town of Higgins.

Twenty five miles away, there was an old abandoned hotel there that we sometimes go and just walk around and kind of explore it. Why he would go to the hotel by himself, I don't know. It was just kind of my second instinct as to where he might be. And I didn't see his car, so I drove back into Canadian and just drove around all the roads. We did take the roads outside of town.

At roughly two thirty a.m., Pinny called the sheriff's department. The dispatcher contacted a deputy on duty named Pine Gregory.

I was actually in my office when the call came and it came through on this phone dispatcher and she said, hey, are you all going to go out and do anything with that call? And I said, what call civil. I just told Dan that we had a missing 18 year old kid. And he told me, well, I didn't do it. He wants to say, well, that's not necessarily true. Did spoke with her. And basically kind of went through the rundown through various brands, where would you hang out those kind of things like everyone else had done?

Gregory drove around Canadian looking for Tom's Durango. He ended up at Tom's home sometime after three a.m. when I pulled up to the front of the house.

And if I remember right, they had opened the door open, but they had like a glass storm door and they saw me pull up and they met me in the yard. They didn't invite me in the house. We stood out there in the yard, Tucker, pinning it on, I'd say for 15 minutes or better, kind of going on the rundown of where he might be. And then Tucker and I left and went to various locations looking for Tom.

But after Gregory drove around for more than an hour, Tom and his Durango were still nowhere to be found. By seven, 30 a.m., Penny and Chris were on their way to see Nathan Lewis, the 32 year old sheriff of Hemphill County, of which Canadian is the county seat. Lewis has short red hair, a neatly trimmed beard. People and Canadians say he looks exactly like the NASCAR driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr.. Lewis was born and raised in Canadian.

His father used to be mayor. When Lewis was in his early 20s.

He began working for small town Panhandle police departments, got into some car pursuits, did some drug work, did several narcotic search warrants on taxes, and so does I was I was doing something to do because I love law enforcement. I love I love kicking doors pouch.

So what did Lewis took over as sheriff of Hemphill County in September 2016. He'd made the war against drugs the focus of his campaign.

The biggest thing is why he ran for office. I ran on cleaning up the town of drugs, meth, and that was my focus. You know, we're peace officers no matter what, we're going to keep the peace no matter what. I don't have to tell people that I'm going to keep the peace and we're peacemakers. What I told the people what I'm going to do, and that was to rid the drug problem.

Lewis was definitely good at drug busts. He started making arrests soon after he was sworn in as sheriff, but he had never done a missing persons case. And suddenly here he was two months into his job when Penny and Chris walked into his office. Lewis and Penny, of course, knew one another. They and their families attended First United Methodist Church, but they weren't exactly friends and it all had to do with Tom. Just a year earlier in 2015, Lewis was working as a sheriff's deputy in a neighboring county late one night while driving back to his home in Canadian, he noticed a handful of teenagers hanging around the downtown Palace movie theater.

One of the teenagers was Tom Lewis, thought they were trying to break in, so he pulled over and ordered Tom into his truck. Tom said they were merely looking for a friend whose father ran the theater so I could talk to all of them.

I said, you guys need to get shot. But Tom, you don't need to be out here. It's midnight. No business open. The theater ain't open and no is not. There you go. That's what I told that. Was it as exactly what happened. Tom, however, told Penney a different story.

According to Pene, Tom said that Lewis had accosted him in the stop.

He was very unprofessional. He was swearing at the boys using the F word. For whatever reason, my son seemed to be singled out of the group. He told my son several times, you need to call your mom and tell her what you've been doing, to which Tom was like, I don't know what to call my mom and tell her what I've been doing. We're just walking around town with the summer night. They hadn't been out of school very long.

They're just kids being kids, to which Lewis did place Thomas in the car with him. I was very uncomfortable with that.

Pene filed a complaint against Lewis with the sheriff's department. The complaint went nowhere, but she began telling just about everyone she knew that Lewis should never be elected sheriff of Hemphill County.

And I felt like if he was elected sheriff, that's what he was going to do to our kids in the community all the time. Like he was just going to mess with them because that's what he did.

Lewis insisted that he had never abused his power and that he certainly had not mistreated Tom.

He told me that after the movie theater incident, he ran across Tom at a Rotary Club meeting, how he was doing a public speaking event before he went in there and gave a public speaking bill in the Rotary Club one day. And he saw me in the Rotary Club and he approaches me, a man I'm sorry for for that night. And he told me that he told his mother a lie. He said, man, I said to my mother because he he told his mother that that I was brutally cussed at them, pulled a gun.

He said all kinds of stuff to tomorrow. And he said, man, I'm sorry for doing all this stuff in the past, the past, man, don't worry about it. I just always tell the truth. And that's all I told him. And I didn't say I never I never dealt with him ever since I never dealt with him again, never had any issues with any troublemaker.

In fact, Lewis told me when he first spoke to Penny and Chris that Thanksgiving morning when Tom went missing, it did not occur to him that Tom was in any sort of trouble.

Well, be honest with you, I figured that we had a high school kid that went out and partied and didn't come home on time. But shortly after his meeting with pinioned Chris Lewis got a phone call. Tom's Durango had been found. All right, Manny, so tell me about how your friends got that great patio furniture. Well, they use Gigha Points, a site that uses data to match you with the best cards for the way you actually spend so you can score cashback, free travel, patio furniture and more.

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Oh man, I need to get on there as well. Then go to gigabytes dotcom slash TVB. You'll get a personalized report to maximize your credit card rewards. That's GIGO Pouye A.S. Dotcom TBP. Thank you for supporting Tom Brown's body. Early that morning, Tom's friend, Christine Webb had asked her father, Trey, to help her search for Tom, the Webb's are another prominent Canadian family tree, owns a helicopter service company, and he's an experienced pilot.

They boarded one of the company's four seater helicopters and Trey flew low all over Canadian and the surrounding area. It didn't take long for them to spot Tom's Duaringa parked under a small grove of trees near the water treatment plant northeast of town.

I was confused because his car was in a spot that I didn't know about, and I was almost sure that Thomas didn't know about. It was in a weird spot that was typically not accessible because of the gate. So I was I was more concerned at that point.

Trey maneuvered his helicopter over the car. He asked Kristian to turn our eyes away to protect her from seeing a potentially violent scene. But the Durango was abandoned. Trey called the sheriff's office and Lewis raced to the plant.

It was myself and another deputy, Jerry Ortega, that actually went to the car first. And when we got to the car, we looked in every window. We walked around the car several times, looking around, seeing what we could see. There was nobody in the car. Then we started circling around, you know, kind of looking in the area to see if we could see anything. Funny thing, there was nothing. The car was pulled up into the trees.

And so right before the car, it's kind of sandy. And there's some there's clay dirt out there. But where he was, was it pulled up in there? And right when he opened the driver's door, there was just a little bit of dirt and then the rest of it was grass and brush and just, you know, dead stuff that, you know.

But it looked like there were some footprints coming up. The driver's side was definitely there was definitely a shoe print that you could see outside the driver's door. And then there was a distinct here and mark right there outside the door. It was just like you open the door and you step out. There was one one print down, but you could you could hardly see what kind of print it was. You could tell was a shoe print so that you and Mark had to have been made.

It was very fresh, fresh air. It was very fresh.

The Durango was unlocked. Tom's keys, cell phone and wallet were not inside. Lewis did find Michael Castle Tienes debit card, which had fallen in between the front seats. He also noticed a thin streak of blood on the inside of the driver's front door.

On the end, it was very dry. It was very dry. It was not fresh. It had not been there that night on the driver's side of the handle. But it did look like it was probably I can not cut or something or a finger cut or a paper cut. That's the only blood that was in the car. There was no other blood in that car, period. There was one other thing that Lewis and his deputy spotted, a 25 caliber shell casing on the floorboard, Lewis said he was bewildered because there was no there was nothing in the car that said that there was a gunshot that went off in that car.

There was no splatter. There was no there was no gunpowder residue in the car. There was nothing. There was nothing.

The news about Tom was soon racing through town like a prairie fire. Some residents postponed their Thanksgiving meals, drove to the water treatment plant and searched for Tom on foot, horseback and four wheelers. Trayon Christian Web kept looking for Tom in their helicopter, and Christian's brother joined the search in a second helicopter. Game wardens arrived with a tracking dog, but no one spotted any trace of Tom in. The dog could not find a scent to follow. As the day wore on, friends and neighbors dropped by Penny's house, bringing leftover turkey and pumpkin pie and words of encouragement.

Thompson, Tucker's father, Kelly Brown, drove in from his home in Periton, forty five miles away.

I was in such shock, I think at the time. Skip that and if I would have tripped across his body, I wouldn't have known. I mean, I would have, but but I was pretty pretty much in shock that that just goes without saying that that's something. I think all we all all of us parents fear that. But but then when it does happen, I will tell you that it takes it to another level. I was pretty, pretty shaken about that.

That afternoon, Sheriff Lewis also dropped by to update Penny in the family on everything he'd found. He just said that he asked us. He said there was a shell casing, the 25 caliber in the car. He asked us if we had one and we said, no, we don't have a caliber of gun like that. And in the end, I don't really remember what else he said. He just said he was returning the car and I questioned it.

I said, why are you bringing the car back? And he said, well, we're done with it. We don't need it anymore. And I said, You're telling me you processed the car like you've gotten fingerprints or whatever from the car? Well, we don't need it anymore. It's OK.

When I talked to Lewis, he told me his deputies had tried but been unable to lift any fingerprints from the Durango.

That car was filthy, dirty. I'm talking dust on all, everything, dust everywhere. And there the car was so dirty. You don't get fingerprints because this isn't CSI. This isn't a TV show. And people don't understand that. People don't understand, you know, that you can't solve a case within 45 minutes of TV show, but you can't get fingerprints off of something that has dirt on. You just can't do it. It's it's impossible. Maybe some FBI person can do it.

We can't. And so we looked everywhere that we could possibly get prints off of. We couldn't find anything to give principals.

Lewis had the Durango towed back to Penney's and Chris's home. Apparently, he wasn't thinking, at least not yet, that the Durango could be part of a potential crime scene that needed to be preserved. When the Durango arrived at the house, Tom's brother Tucker and a friend promptly did their own search.

So we kind of dug through it and make a few. We did make a mess, but we were just kind of looking at stuff and, you know, looking under stuff like, is there anything in here, a shred of evidence that, you know, and of course, we were all in shock.

So we we didn't find anything. I mean, we didn't we didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

Louis told me he did not sleep that night. The next morning, he got to his office and ordered his deputies to have the Durango towed back to the sheriff's department. He said he wanted to check things out one more time just to make sure he was doing everything by the book.

The second time we did everything again, we restocked the blood spot. We have the Q tip in the do for evidence. We went and we put more ink on that core fingerprint dust. And you can imagine to make sure we didn't miss anything because I mean, you got to realize that when the things that are going through your mind, could you miss something? You could miss something.

So I want to make damn sure that I didn't miss anything the second time actually something was missing from the Durango, which no one noticed until the superintendent of the Canadian public schools dropped by the house. The superintendent asked if anyone had checked Tom's school computer. He said that if Tom had been using it to get online, it could potentially be traced.

Penny and Tucker said that Tom kept his computer and his schoolbooks in a backpack, which he almost always left in the back of his Durango, unless he needed to bring it inside the house to do homework. Curiously, no one had seen Tom's backpack when they searched the vehicle in attempts to trace the computer were unsuccessful.

What's more, the phone records show that Tom's cell phone had been turned off since midnight and had not been turned back on. For those who knew Tom well, nothing was making sense, why did Tom park the Durango by the water treatment plant, a place he was never known to go? And why in the darkness had he walked away carrying his wallet, his keys, his cell phone and strangely, his backpack, which contained his books and laptop? Why would he do that?

And where in the world was he going? I'm just trying to get you closer now to sort of see what it would have been like walking out through this without actually having to walk out in the dark. No flashlight, as far as we know. Yeah.

On the afternoon, Laurie Brown drove me around town. She took me to the spot where Tom's Duringo had been found. I wanted to see for myself the patch of land where Tom supposedly had disappeared.

All right, let's take a walk.

It was one of those typical windy panhandle afternoons. This car, you're going to have to verify that. I don't know what's down there, but it was just pulled up somewhere right around here. So it wasn't like he tried to hide the car. Whoever was in the car tried to hide it.

The land was wooded and the grass was high, but the terrain wasn't all that rough. Laurie explained that as you get closer to the Canadian river, three quarters of a mile to the east, the vegetation gets thicker and the ground turns soggy. In fact, when searchers crisscross the area and their four wheelers that Thanksgiving Day, they didn't get very far.

I just know that they were looking for and they were out here on horseback and we will get some of these guys had they got stuff, they had trouble. This was another thing that didn't make sense. No one who knew Tom could imagine him trekking into that thick brush and marshy river bottoms in the daytime, let alone in pitch black darkness.

Yeah, that seems highly impossible to me. Here's Tom's friend, Christian one. Tom wasn't an outdoorsman at all. He liked having his, you know, his phone and his video games. And he never did outdoorsy things. And it was freezing cold that night. He wasn't wearing many clothes. I mean, the clothes he is wearing were really thin in the days following Tom's disappearance.

Sheriff Lewis intensified the search. He brought in a team of veteran bloodhounds from the state prison in Amarillo. The dogs were taken by their handlers to the dirt road where the Durango had been found. They were given a piece of Tom's clothing to sniff and they picked up a scent following it east to northeast for nearly a mile. Then the scent abruptly disappeared at the edge of a slew and the dogs turned back. Lewis also organized a grid search. A couple of dozen people walking side by side around the water treatment plant.

They turned up nothing. Lewis even brought in a mounted search and rescue team from nearby Randall County to hunt for Tom along the Canadian river. The rescuers on horseback didn't find anything either. Lewis had better luck studying video footage from security cameras around town. It was around curfew, that car, his car is positively identified. His car drove from downtown, turned up Alexander's up on barge and goes towards his house.

One camera posted in front of a convenience store called Toms Durango just after midnight, heading up a street in the direction of his home and then coming back down the same street only a few minutes later. And around five, 30 a.m., Lewis told me the car goes from the town of Alexander Street two minutes later, exactly again goes back into town.

There was no apparent purpose or pattern to the car's direction. Then at fifty six a.m., the Durango was picked up by a camera positioned on top of a city owned building near the water treatment plant.

You see Tom's car driving on the road, going through the gate, and you can see it in the distance, the tail out. So you can see it go up over the hill. And then that's where we find the car. That's where the car was parked. And there was nobody in or out before or after on that video at all.

What Sheriff Lewis is describing here is really puzzling. A camera captured Tom's Durango parking at the water treatment plant, but in the video, no one could be seen getting in or out of the car. What had seemed like a potential lead only raised more questions. Why would Tom be driving around Canadian in those early morning hours, dodging his family and friends in the sheriff's deputy who were out looking for him? Why might he have driven toward his home at some point in of all the places he could have chosen to abandon the Durango?

Why the water treatment plant? Or what if those weren't even the right questions? The security footage had definitely opened up several other possible scenarios. What if Tom hadn't walked into the woods after parking his Durango, for that matter? What if he wasn't behind the wheel at all? What if someone else was driving his car? And if that was the case, where was Tom? The afternoon of November 26, two days after Thanksgiving, pinioned Chris returned to the sheriff's department.

Oh, I didn't have any enemies. Obviously, I think this is actual tape of their interview.

The interview was handled by Sheriff Lewis's chief deputy, Brent Clap. Clap is a former Panhandle cowboy with a thick old West handlebar mustache. He had been in law enforcement for more than a decade. A state trooper, Klap knew also sat in on the interview. Chris was interviewed first. He said Pinny was her son's main caregiver and that he was, quote, an observer. That's the word he used. He said he had no idea why Tom disappeared.

Chris left the room and Penny walked in.

At the start of her interview, the officers asked Pinny to describe Tom is a for especially for the underdog, whether he has grown up with him, gone to school with him. It doesn't matter if I do that phrase. Yeah.

Pinny also wants the officers to know that Tom rarely, if ever gets in trouble.

He's just a good kid. I know. I mean, I just don't really have to display very much. He just normally does what he's supposed to do. Then the DPS trooper asked Penny about her initial fears when she heard the Durango was found at the water treatment plant.

Now, when you found out the truck was there, what was your first thought? I thought he committed suicide.

I thought he committed suicide. And he says, tell me why.

Because it runs in my family and I just stay here. Maybe at that point he was distraught about breaking up with his girlfriend. And if he thought it was suicide, how would he go about doing that? I figured it would have been like the. The choking game, Penny says you might have heard of it, it's garnered occasional headlines over the years and most commonly attempted by teenage boys. Someone intentionally strangles himself or someone else in the lack of oxygen leads to a feeling of euphoria in a very brief loss of consciousness.

It's resulted in some accidental deaths. But Penny quickly pivots, telling the officers that she didn't actually know much about the choking game except for hearing about a boy in a nearby town who had tried it. The thought randomly occurred to her that Thanksgiving morning, she says, because she could not fathom how else Tom might have killed himself.

That that or I guess I mean, what now? Because he's not a dead person. I had already checked for the to the house. All of us are accounted for. I already checked and everything was accounted for. It turned out that Penny and her family had dealt with suicide in the past. Her father suffered from depression and he shot himself to death almost two decades earlier. So Penny sensitivity to suicide was understandable. But why was that? Her initial fear about Tom?

During one of my own interviews with Penny. I asked her about that.

Well, I mean, I was thinking he's a senior. His boat is loaded as far as academics. He doesn't really know where he wants to go to college. I mean, he kind of has an idea, but he's not you know, he doesn't have it nailed down and he's he's broken up with his girlfriend.

I mean, the kid had a lot on his plate. And so was it completely out of the realm of possibility? No, not really. I don't think it's out of the realm of any of our high school kids to commit suicide at all. I mean, so I did check for all of that stuff and there wasn't anything missing or out of place.

So that thought went away during her interview at the sheriff's department.

Penny was asked if she had seen any changes in Tom that would suggest he was suicidal.

So if that was the case, you know, anything you've seen, any change in behavior that you can tell us about, Penny is adamant that Tom is just fine as far as changing behavior.

No. And not choosing, which I mean nothing. And I have been in contact with several of his teachers and his teachers have said he was doing great in school. His grades are going better than they have been there a little bit higher. Even the teachers who don't have even class this year that may be having in past years were like I in the hall. And he's laughing. He's smiling. I mean, I don't know. I'm just I'm baffled.

The officers changed directions. They ask if it's plausible that Tom could have left Canadian maybe with someone Penny did not know, just getting in a car with somebody you don't know.

I mean, I just I don't think he would do that. I don't think you can rule it out. I just don't see him doing it. But Pene offers up a theory of her own about Tom's disappearance. Maybe he's run off to one of those professional wrestling schools he had always talked about and I don't know, may be kind of a it may be a stretch.

And I don't even know how he would get there. But he also tells me he loves WWE wrestling. And I used dad and I kept taking him to, against my best wishes to use the matches. We went to the big one down in Dallas and he asked me before school, can I be a wrestler? And I'm like, you do whatever you want when you get out of college, you know? And he's like, we pay for it.

And I'm like, let's pay for college. And that's it. There are wrestling schools around. I don't know if he wants to try to one of them and try to attempt it. I don't know. Like I said, that might be a stretch. But he has and he's researched it. I don't know.

As the interview comes to a close, Pene offers one more theory. I would think at this point, he's hiding somewhere we don't know where I. My gut tells me he hasn't left a compound.

My gut tells me he hasn't left Hemphill County. The officer responds.

That's not his intuition.

That's mom's intuition right there. When the officer asks why she thinks that Pene sounds almost hopeful, at least for a moment.

And I can be wrong. I mean, I've been wrong about a lot of this, but I think he's here somewhere.

For the most part, Penni sounded overwhelmed, searching for answers, which is perfectly understandable, her life, after all, had just been upended. Her son had gone missing. Still, when Sheriff Lewis watched the video feed of the interview, he immediately wondered if Penny was revealing everything she knew. I would tell you, you know, on that ship, I was amazed of how this mother would say those things, you know, your son or your daughter didn't come home.

The first thing you're going to tell authorities is your son committed suicide and even possibly done it by the choking game. I mean, they said that there has to be a back story behind it. After Penny and Chris left the sheriff's department, Lewis heard what seemed to be a potential back story. His deputy, Jerilyn Ortega, walked into his office. She told him that she had just conducted an interview with Tom's ex-girlfriend, C.J. Pennington. And Sage had told her that Tom had been hiding a secret when that sage herself had only learned about earlier that spring that the Jerilyn Ortega had just finished interviewing Sage Penington.

Sage brought up one thing that just hit me. I couldn't believe what she was saying was that Paul was struggling with wearing diapers. He was wearing men's diapers even up to the day he disappeared.

After hearing this, Louis arranged another meeting with Pene. She arrived at his office with a couple of friends. Louis began with a routine update on the investigation. Then, according to Pene, he asked her what she knew about Tom wearing diapers. Pinny said she was furious.

He just asked me about it. And I was, you know, I said, I don't even know what you're talking about. Like where? I don't know where you got that information. I said, What are you talking about? Penny told me she was already upset with Lewis for the way he had been running the investigation, not processing a potential crime scene and returning Tom's Tarango the same day it was found. And now she was convinced the sheriff was trying to trash her son's reputation.

She told her friends that she suspected that Lewis was still holding onto a grudge from that incident at the movie theater in 2015. One of Penny's friends sent her an article about a man named Philip Klein, the owner of Klein Investigations and Consulting, based just outside of Beaumont in southeast Texas. In the missing person's world, Klein is a celebrity of sorts. The NBC show Dateline once hired him to travel to Mexico to try and track down Olivia Newton, John's missing boyfriend, who had allegedly faked his own drowning.

Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison. Describe Klein this way. If you ask him or even if you don't, Klein will tell you that he's one of the best there is at finding people who don't want to be found over the last twenty five years. Klein says he's investigated 1800 missing persons cases and he says 80 percent of the time he's found the person he's looking for.

I could tell you a hundred of these cases that we've done that you would go, oh, my God, that's Klein. And you see why people turned us. It's because we take the hard stuff. We don't take the easy gravy stuff.

Penny became convinced that Klein could find her son, so she gave his office a couple days later, the private investigator arrived in town. His investigation was about to turn Canadian upside down. Next week on Tom Brown's body. Brings you to reality on a Sunday morning, makes you want to go to the church. Get on your knees and say a few words, right? Right. I got you. That's gospel. Evil has come to Canadian taxes. Tom Brown's body is a Texas Monthly production executive producer is Megan Krait, produced and engineered by Brian Sandefer, who also wrote the music.

J.K. Neko is our editor and Paul Knight is our fact checker. Audio assistants are Sean Cronin and Imogene Hopper. Our theme music is No Hard Feelings by The Avett Brothers. I'm your writer and host, Skip Hollandsworth. If you like the show, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Thanks for listening. See you all next week. Looking for more true crime podcast, check out in the red clay from our Friends at Imperative. Available now here's a trailer.

In March of twenty nineteen, I stepped foot for the first time into a little farm town called Winder, a town full of stories, legends and secrets.

And it would change my life. What I unearthed was a story shrouded in scandal and mystery 50 years in the making, a story with secrets never before revealed. But as I would learn, the deeper you dig, the more secrets you're likely to find buried. Listen and subscribe to in the red clay right now on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.