transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] Constantly changing every day, how much of a teenager's life can we truly know? When something happens to someone in that stage of life, where do our minds wander on their fate? And how do we search for answers around lives paused on the cusp of adulthood? Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Eagan. Sometimes I marvel at having survived adolescence. Between the extremely bad and dangerous choices, a deep misunderstanding of my own mortality, and the true depths of despair I wallowed in as a consequence of trauma and hormones, it is a wonder I am alive and well-ish. It seems a cruel trick of evolution that we are so unwise at the same time that we are unquantifiably brave or conversely that we are so unwise and feel so hopeless. For Thomas Brown, however, it seems his fate was not tied to his bad decisions or overconfidence in his own mortality. For Thomas Brown, it seems no amount of right decisions could have changed his outcome. Before we dive in, much of today's episode relies on the comprehensive coverage done by Texas journalist Skip Hollinsworth for a podcast mini-series he did about this case in 2020. Oddly enough, when I did a search for this case on newspapers.com, I got zero results. Google was a little more helpful, but Skip Hollinsworth was the most helpful. Canadian Texas is a very small town that shouldn't really stand out at all. It seems to this city mouse to be the typical rural Texas small town, complete with a high school football stadium with more seats than there are residents of the town. And Thomas Tom Brown was about as typical a teenager as teenagers come. In the fall of 2016, Tom was an 18-year-old senior at Canadian High School, where at 6'1 and 180 pounds, he was a starting offensive lineman on the school's football team. I'm not even going to try to pretend to know what an offensive lineman is. One of the guys in the line who stops the other football guys from going anywhere? Or maybe they just stand in a line and scream obscenities at the other team until they cry and go home? Thank you. Try the clam chowder. Anyway, at some point early in his senior year, Tom got demoted from starting lineman and decided that rather than be benched for the season, he would just quit the team. Fortunately, football was not Tom's only interest. He was also into theater and had been cast in a leading role in the high school production of The History of Tom Jones, which is not, as I first thought, a play about the iconic singer who had women's underwear thrown at him during concerts and sang Thunderball, but is about some dude from the 1700s. Tom competed and went to state in public speaking with 4-H and had aspirations of being a sports broadcaster. Tom was a good kid, with good grades and a variety of hobbies and interests across the board. He always made it home in time for curfew. He had no run-ins with law enforcement except for one incident the year before when he and some friends had been hanging out outside the local movie theater late one night, though not past his curfew, when Nathan Lewis, a sheriff's deputy from a neighboring county, was driving back to his home in Canadian and suspected the kids were up to no good. Now, listen, I don't know who the other kids were that Tom was hanging out with. Maybe they were known rabble rousers. But from what I could tell, Tom wasn't known to hang out with a rough crowd. And it's not like the kids were doing anything awful. They were just kids hanging out outside a movie theater. Tom would later tell his mother Penny that he and his friends were waiting for a friend whose father owned the movie theater. According to a piece and podcast in Texas Monthly from 2020 by Skip Hollinsworth, Deputy Lewis said, Tom, what the hell are y'all doing? You guys need to get y'all's butts home. Tom's mother Penny was not amused by this encounter at all. And I have to say on the surface, at least given what we know, I wouldn't have been either. Sure, it takes a village and everything, but like unless the kids were actively breaking the law, I don't know what business it was of an off-duty police officer to tell them to go home. So unamused was Penny by this encounter that she filed an official complaint. The complaint went nowhere, and when Lewis then ran for sheriff, Penny was not quiet about her feelings, telling people she worried that if made sheriff, he would go around harassing everyone's kids for no reason. Despite Penny's one-woman campaign against him though, Lewis was elected sheriff of the county in 2016. Aside from his demotion on the football team, the only hiccup in Tom's life at the time, it seemed, was his recent breakup with his longtime girlfriend, Sage. But even that had ended amicably. She was going to West Texas A&M, and the two decided that the distance was too far to continue seeing each other. Sage told Hollinsworth at the Texas Monthly that Tom had been, quote, characteristically sweet during the breakup. He told her he hoped she would find a good guy to be her next boyfriend. Sage was still so fond of Tom that she wrote him a lovely goodbye letter that read in part, I know God will bless both of us, end quote. So Tom Brown was about as typical a teenager as one can expect to find, which makes what happened on the night of November 23rd, 2016, still so incredibly confounding. On November 23rd, 2016, the night before Thanksgiving, Tom went out for what would normally be a Monday night out in rural small town America, which is to say he and some friends got together to just kind of drive around and not do much. We did a version of this when I was growing up in New York City, just walking around and not doing much. Those days are gone. Anyway, according to Tom's friends, early in the evening, Tom and his buddies Michael Castelline and Caleb King were driving around in Tom's 2009 Red Dodge Durango. Michael split early and was home by 8 PM. Tom and Caleb met up with Christian Webb to drive around for a few more hours. At one point, the threesome stopped to walk around Canadian Wagon Bridge before heading to the middle school around 11 PM to hang out in the parking lot, I guess. By the end of the evening, it was just Christian and Tom, and then cameras showed Tom leaving the middle school parking lot at 11:26 PM, presumably in time to get home for his midnight curfew. At 11:36 PM, Tom used his mom's debit card to purchase 21 gallons of gas. That is a shit ton of gas. As midnight came and went, Penny grew concerned. She texted her older son Tucker, who'd been down in the living room watching a movie with a friend, to ask if he'd heard from Tom, who hadn't returned her text as he normally would have, if he was going to be late. By 12.30, Penny woke up her husband and Tom's stepfather Chris Meeks to say she was going out to look for him. This is how unusual it was for Tom to not come home. Tucker also tried texting Tom. Both his and Penny's first texts were read, but the next attempts to reach Tom went either undelivered or straight to voicemail. Penny hopped in her truck and Tucker and his buddy hopped into his. They drove around everywhere they could think of. Tucker dropped his buddy off at home about an hour later and continued driving around looking for his little brother. After an initial search with Tucker, Penny returned home and called Tom's friend Caleb. Caleb in turn called Michael and Christian. No one knew where Tom was. At first, Christian hoped maybe it was just a flat tire, but Tom had a phone charging cable in his car and absolutely would have called or texted to let someone know he was stranded. So concerned were the friends that they all got in their cars and drove around looking for Tom. According to their accounts, they drove everywhere, downtown, the football stadium, the rodeo arena, even out to Lake Marvin, the reservoir east of Canadian that's surrounded by campsites and picnic areas. By 2.30 that morning, Penny called in a missing persons report. By 4 a.m., Deputy Pine Gregory had been out looking for Tom and stopped off at Penny's house. One report claims that at 3:33 a.m., Tucker called the sheriff's office offering to accompany a deputy in a search for Tom. Someone, either Penny, Tucker, or Chris, suggested that maybe Tom had gone for an impromptu visit with his ex Sage, who was home for Thanksgiving. Of course, that wouldn't explain why he had suddenly got no contact, but people grasp at straws when they're desperate. So Gregory and Tucker went to Sage's house, but of course, neither Tom nor his truck were at Sage's. The two continued to search. By 7:30 a.m., Penny and her husband Chris were at the sheriff's office to meet with now sheriff Nathan Lewis, a former deputy who Penny had filed a complaint about after the run-in he'd had with Tom and his friends at the movie theater a year prior. This would be Sheriff Lewis' first missing persons case. And of course, as with most cases like this, the sheriff's assumption was that Tom had just gone off to party. Of course, Tom didn't drink or smoke and was not in any kind of way a kid who would go off to party and be MIA. Meanwhile, Tom's friend Christian had enlisted her father, Trey, who owned a helicopter sales and service company to take a helicopter out to look for Tom from the sky. And that was how Tom's red Dodge Durango was spotted, quote, under a small grove of trees across a dirt road from the water treatment plant just north of town. As Hollinsworth described it, quote, it was a strange place to find the vehicle, Christian said. She had no idea the dirt road even existed. And I was almost sure that Tom didn't know about it. We never drove up to that point at all. End quote. According to a report later released by the attorney general, Tucker allegedly prevented Deputy Gregory from turning down the road where the car was found while they were out searching together that morning. Stick a pin in this for later, stranger. Sheriff Lewis rushed to the scene and a search of the car and its immediate surroundings commenced. He then explained their initial search, quote, We walked around the car several times looking around. 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, find anything, end quote. Dude, are you okay? Like, you're just describing the most basic steps of a search. Oh, you circled around? Good job, detective. It really is this guy's first missing persons case. Well, you see, first, we knocked on the door, you see, and then when nobody answered, we knocked again, and then you see, we, well, we rang the bell and then we determined that, you know, no one was in the residence at that particular point in time. Anyway, after this stellar start, Lewis noticed one footprint near the driver's side car door and a spot where someone had relieved themselves close by. I don't think they did anything to try to collect DNA from the urine. There is DNA in urine, right? Like, that feels pretty basic? According to Hollinsworth, the car was unlocked and inside they found, quote, cans of smokeless tobacco, two pairs of football cleats, towels, jumper cables, a pillow, and a clown costume, which Tom had worn for a school drama production, Penny later told me, end quote. Missing were Tom's wallet and keys, his cell phone, his mother's debit card, with which he had bought approximately a million gallons of gas the night before, and his backpack with his school laptop in it. There was, however, a thin streak of dried blood on the inside of the driver's side door, but the blood was very dry and almost certainly had not come from anything that happened the night before. But they did find a 25 caliber shell casing on the floorboard, which was particularly strange considering there was no evidence that a gun had been fired in the car, just as there was certainly not evidence that someone had bled copiously inside the car. Christian and her father Trey had been joined in their aerial search by Christian's brother Emmett in his own helicopter. The game wardens released their tracking dogs and bloodhounds were sent in from Amarillo. The dogs tracked Tom's scent for about three quarters of a mile and lost it near a marsh. It was like Tom blooped right off the face of the earth. With his car found, but no whiff of Tom, authorities commenced a grid search. Armed with an approximate last location, they began poring over hours of CCTV footage. According to the Attorney General's report dated February 5th of 2020, the timeline they were able to piece together went like this. 6:04 p.m., Tom leaves home. 11:26 p.m., Tom's Durango scene headed toward town. 11:28 p.m., to 11:36 p.m., last known credit card transaction at the gas station. 1:10 a.m., Durango scene headed to Tom's house. 1:11 a.m., Durango scene headed back toward town, away from Tom's house. 5:28 a.m., Durango again scene headed toward the house. 5:30 a.m., Durango again scene headed to town. 5:56 a.m., Durango scene heading to water treatment plant and not coming out. 8:30 a.m., Durango found at the water treatment plant. What on earth was Tom doing going back and forth like that? Assuming, of course, it was Tom in that truck. Later that same afternoon that Tom's Durango was found, Sheriff Lewis showed up at Penny's house to return the car and ask if anyone in the house owned a 25 pistol. Penny was like, no, but also you're already returning the truck? Apparently, Lewis told her they'd already gotten everything they needed from it. According to Penny, when she asked if they'd finished processing it and gotten fingerprints or whatever, his answer was, well, we don't need it anymore. That seems awfully fast to me. As you know, Stranger, everything I know about cops, I learned from The Wire and SVU. And of course, no one celebrates when someone goes missing, especially someone so young. But one would think that a brand new sheriff would be excited about a case like this. At first glance, it seems like it should be relatively easy to solve. How far can a kid who's not dressed for cold weather get on his own? At some point, he'd have to use his phone or his mom's debit card, and they'd be able to find him, easy peasy. But to Penny, the speed and nonchalance with which Sheriff Lewis returned Tom's truck was alarming. She was also concerned, and rightly so, I think, that Sheriff Lewis hadn't put yellow police tape around Tom's truck. Sheriff Lewis' approach to investigating her son's disappearance was lackluster enough that she went ahead and hired a private investigator named Philip Klein. Right away, Klein and Lewis clashed. Lewis apparently took exception to Klein's involvement in the case, and Klein took exception to Lewis in general. He told Hollinsworth that in his opinion, Lewis was, quote, very arrogant, GQ-ish. He wore golf shirts and a golf pullover that said, Hempel County Sheriff. He wore a cowboy hat and had the fuzzy beard. You know, not the full beard, but the fuzzy beard. I thought, my God, this is the sheriff. I said, please do your research on myself and my firm. We do this all over the United States and around the world. If you have any issues with me, please pick up the phone. And he laughed, end quote. In all fairness to Klein, it wasn't just Lewis's rugged good looks he took issue with. According to a presentation of the case Klein gave in 2020, and it's important to note there's not official record of this conversation. But according to Klein, Penny told him that Lewis's response to her concern that Tom's car hadn't been processed thoroughly enough, or at all, was this, quote, He's a runaway. And I'm sorry I have to say it like this, but he is a runaway that wears diapers, that pees in diapers, that is queer, that is probably in North or South Carolina or California, end quote. Okay, so a few things here. I'll get to the neon elephant in the room in a second, but again, there's no way to know if this conversation happened or happened like this. We're hearing it secondhand from Penny through Klein. Secondly, I'm pretty sure Lewis returned Tom's truck the day they found it. So it's unclear how we would have gathered any character references about Tom in the time between searching for Tom and processing his truck, unless someone casually mentioned the thing about the diapers to him while they were out searching, or he knew this information beforehand, which I don't think is likely. Thirdly, how the hell did this kid get to North or South Carolina or California in less than a day with no resources? Fourthly, all of this leads me to believe that if some version of this conversation did happen, it didn't happen when Lewis dropped the truck off at Penny's. In fact, the version of the story Klein told Hollinsworth was that when he'd been hired by Penny and approached Lewis for the files, Lewis replied by saying, quote, I think he's gay. I think he has a fetish of wearing adult diapers and peeing in them. He sat there for 30 minutes and tried to convince me that Tom had run away, that he'd run away from life in Canadian, end quote. Okay, now it should be noted that several people did confirm that Tom sometimes wore diapers. Penny admitted to Hollinsworth that she'd caught Tom wearing his young cousin's diapers in fifth or sixth grade, but had no knowledge of that habit continuing. We also don't know that this was a fetish as Lewis characterized it. It could be that Tom was dealing with some incontinence issues that he was too embarrassed to tell anyone about. Let's say Tom's ex Sage found out about the diapers, and rather than admit that he had bladder control issues, he thought it would be less weird to just be like, I don't know, I like wearing them sometimes. No one actually knows what it was about. But far more importantly, Tom's sex life and tastes were so far beyond the point, it shouldn't have come up in any context, and I feel dirty even talking about it. Let me say that louder for those of you who may be hard of hearing. What Tom liked to do with his penis and parts has nothing to do with fucking anything. And also, like, he's queer? So, what's your fucking point, bro? He's queer so he doesn't deserve to be searched for? He's queer so if he was murdered and his murderer is still out there, by the way, like, what? He was asking for it so it doesn't matter? For what it's worth, the official statement from the Attorney General on this topic is thus, quote, evidence shows that Thomas Brown had a fixation on wearing diapers stemming from his childhood that was known to his family and a few close friends. The investigation revealed that this fixation was a major stressor in Brown's life that he had kept secret from friends for a long period of time. Brown had recently confided in a few friends about the diaper fetish in the six months leading up to his disappearance, verified by phone records. It should be noted that the investigative team determined that the diaper fetish had little to no relevance in the criminal investigation and should be disregarded as sensationalism, end quote. But again, I wouldn't trust an attorney general to identify or define a fetish. So, now that that's out of the way, let's move on. After the break, back to actual evidence. On January 27th, 2017, just about two months after Tom mysteriously disappeared from his car, a maintenance worker found Tom's backpack about four to five feet behind a barbed wire fence under some trees. It's not entirely clear how far away from Tom's truck the backpack was found. The closest I could get was in Hollinsworth Description that it was found about a third of the way down a 12 mile stretch of Lake Marvin Road. But I don't know where that is in relation to Tom's truck. Anyway, the backpack showed signs of element exposure, including mold. Clearly, it had been sitting outside for some time. Inside the backpack were Tom's school books and papers and his school laptop. Sheriff Lewis put on his sleuthing hat and figured the backpack had to have been placed there intentionally because it surely would have gotten tangled in the trees if it had been tossed over the fence. So it seems the only two ways that Tom could have placed the backpack there himself were if, as Hollinsworth describes it, quote, he would have had to trek through the pre-dawn darkness for nearly four miles, traversing marshy area, fording the thigh-high Canadian river, and making his way through acres of tall grass and heavy undergrowth. And he would have had to do all of that while shouldering his backpack, end quote. Or, quote, he could have walked back into town and over to US Highway 60, which runs right through the heart of Canadian, followed that highway north to Lake Marvin Road, then made a right-hand turn and walked down the road to the spot where the backpack was eventually found. That trip, however, would have covered roughly eight miles. Tom only would have had an hour and a half to get there before the sun rose and before the town started looking for him, end quote. Not to mention, he then would have had to disappear himself from that spot as well. By April, Penny was so frustrated with Sheriff Lewis's limp efforts that she held a press conference during which she announced, quote, I am grateful for all the work done by our sheriff's office, but I believe there were some assumptions made in the very beginning, which weren't based on facts and ultimately led to doing nothing. We are beyond frustrated with the lack of new evidence or leads garnered. Navigating the various law enforcement agencies has proven to confuse us, frustrate us, and leave us questioning much about the way the investigation began and has continued. We need answers, end quote. Lewis, who apparently was not expecting to be called out, was in the crowd at the press conference and defended himself in his department saying, quote, we have not forgotten Tom Brown. We will not forget Tom Brown. We will do everything in our power to find Tom Brown, and we have not given up, nor will we. Right now, we have no evidence to say that anything else happened. We have no evidence showing that a crime has been committed, and so at this point, he is missing, end quote. Thank you for that crucial update, Detective Obvious. Wow, I am really on one today. And then on October 17th, 2017, Klein conducted another search of the area in which Tom's truck had been found. With 150 people searching the area, just six minutes into the search and 21 miles down the road from the truck, one of the searchers found Tom's iPhone. It was in perfect condition. It had allegedly sat out in the weather for nearly a year and was in perfect condition. Not only that, but the field in which it had been found had been mowed many times over in the spring and summer between Tom disappearing and the phone being found. Searchers also found an empty black pistol case that could hold a 25 caliber handgun. It took another three months for them to get around to powering up and unlocking the phone. What they found was a search for a suicide hotline shortly after 9 p.m. the night Tom went missing, and then the phone's battery died at 1223 a.m. the next morning. Tom's friends were adamant that Tom was religious about keeping his phone charged. Indeed, the phone's record showed it was plugged into the truck's charger all night and never got unplugged. Long before Tom's phone was found, however, Penny apparently reached out to one of Tom's friends' mothers to see if the friend might know what Tom's passcode was. No one did. Penny claims she did this because the investigation team asked her for it. The investigation team denied having asked her for the pin. Klein insists that the only people who knew where he was planning on searching were the folks at the police department and Sheriff Lewis. And says he believes anyone from the department could have planted the phone when they knew the search was happening. He doesn't believe Penny had the phone before it was found in the field. A year after Tom went missing, Klein did his own processing of Tom's Durango, this time using Luminol to find traces of blood. He claims his tests showed blood all over the car and evidence that it had been cleaned up. There are a few problems with this though. These were the findings about Klein's Luminol testing in the Attorney General's report. Quote, the investigative team stands by its position that this test was not properly conducted and the results are invalid. Luminol does not require an alternative light source and must be done in darkness. The second spot of blood only known by investigators was not discovered, photographed, or mentioned in Klein's test. Photographs provided by Klein depict a car that appeared to be covered in blood. However, photographs also depict the individual conducting the test, believed to be Philip Klein, also covered in blood. This is likely because the blue light used during the testing was illuminating light against dark objects. So, basically, according to the AG, Klein messed up the test. But then he was cagey about the results, claiming to have never heard back from the lab. And when, on 8-17-20, Chief Deputy Brent Clapp, with the Hempel County Sheriff's Office, told Sergeant Kating that Philip Klein had called the week of August 10, 2020, asking which deputy had been present for the luminol test. Klein stated the deputy's last name was Martinez. Clapp advised that there were no deputies present for the testing, and that they have never had a deputy named Martinez. End quote. Also, Tom's truck already looked like a crime scene before whatever happened the night he went missing. No offense, my car does too. There's trash all over the place and the thing is dusty. One would think that fingerprints would have been pretty easy to lift. Not only that, but how does one clean up blood spots, but leave all the dust in place? Also, not for nothing, but doesn't Luminol pick up semen? I'm the last one to bring up a teenager's habits, but I'm willing to bet there might have been sexual activity of some kind that went on in that truck. No? But I guess we'll never know because the lab never got back to Klein? I don't know. On January 29th of 2019, Deputy Pine was out looking for deer antlers at night in what had to have been freezing weather when he found a skull. According to Hollinsworth, more officers arrived and found a femur, smaller bones, tennis shoes, remnants of blue jeans, and Tom's driver's license. The remains were tested and identified as having belonged to Tom. The bones showed no fractures, no bullet wounds, and there wasn't enough there to send anything in for toxicology. No weapons, ropes, or cords were found in the cottonwood trees where the remains were located. There was no gunshot wound in Tom's skull. There was some evidence of blunt force trauma on the back of his skull, though it couldn't be determined if it was done before or after his death. And according to the AG report, quote, blunt force trauma was observed in the maxilla, zygomatic arch, and greater wing of the sphenoid. These injuries would not have caused death or incapacitation. Furthermore, it was determined that the injuries could not be solely attributed to a perimortem incident, end quote. Whatever hit him in the head wasn't even enough to incapacitate him. Who knows? It could have been old football injuries. And, strangers, that is it in terms of facts of the case. Nothing more of Tom or his belongings were ever found. All that's left is theory and conjecture. There are, of course, only three logical theories. Either Tom ran away, died by suicide, or was murdered. It is exceedingly hard to disappear oneself in today's age of digital footprints. According to Hollinsworth, a classmate of Tom's, Macy Patterson, said Tom once spoke about how easy it would be to just disappear from Canadian if you didn't use anything that could be tracked. She speculated that maybe he left town. There was a police theory that maybe Christian had helped Tom get out of Canadian, and Tom was using a friend's phone to remain in contact with Christian. She would later tell her parents she was scared that her phone was bugged. She was, however, cleared of any criminal activity. Caleb was questioned and kept repeating that he had no idea what happened, and he had no contact with Tom since that night. But he said the cops kept saying, we don't believe you. Most people close to Tom don't believe he killed himself. There wasn't enough in his life or countenance that would suggest it. Penny had floated the idea early on, but when pressed, she couldn't think of a good reason for it. She told Hollinsworth, quote, Well, 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, and he's broken up with his girlfriend. I mean, the kid had a lot on his plate. And so was suicide 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. But he was regular Thomas, so I just don't think that he committed suicide at all. End quote. His ex-girlfriend Sage told investigators that once Tom had wondered what would happen if he jumped in front of a train. According to the AG report, quote, multiple witnesses stated Thomas Brown struggled with mental health surrounding issues concerning his family history and his faith. Evidence from Thomas Brown's phone showed he frequently joked about suicide or dying to his friends. One witness stated to investigators that only a few months before Brown disappeared, he was seeking help with mental health issues. This witness offered to help Brown get therapy and drive him to Amarillo for confidentiality purposes. End quote. Brown declined the offer. I mean, show me a teenager who isn't struggling with mental health issues, you know what I mean? Also, some of us have very dark senses of humor and joke about suicide. I think it's healthy if it's not a verboten topic. His brother Tucker pointed out the absurdity of filling his gas tank and then killing himself. It's not like he got a text or phone call that might have set him off, and the friends he was hanging out with that night didn't say anything about him seeming particularly sad or off at all. But also, like, how? Unless he cut himself on purpose enough to bleed out. I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that he filled his gas tank, parked somewhere hard to find, and then took a really long walk and killed himself. But then why did he ditch his backpack? And where was the knife? One would think a knife would have been found with the remains? Remember the timeline of Tom's Durango on CCTV footage throughout the town? It's highly unlikely it was Tom who was driving the truck after some point. According to the AG report, the Dodge Durango was verified to be driving around town at approximately 1:10 a.m. on November 24th and again at 5:28 a.m. near the intersection of Birch and Second. The vehicle is then presumably seen driving into the sewage area at 5:56 a.m. and never coming out. If Thomas Brown was behind the wheel of the Durango at these times, he would have been driving from the time he was pumping gas at Franxx around 11:30 p.m. until the Durango is last seen at 5:56 a.m. without having the use of his cell phone. The phone died at 12:23 a.m. even though a charging cord was found in his vehicle, end quote. Someone was driving that truck, and whoever it was knows what happened to Tom Brown. There was the bullet found on the floor of his truck, but there was no evidence that Tom had been shot either inside or outside the truck. It's Texas. Lots of people have guns in Texas. It's possible someone just had a spent shell in their pocket for whatever reason and dropped it. There is some suspicion around the lack of files found in Tom's iCloud. According to the AG report, quote, Thomas Brown's iCloud account contained very little data, while Tucker Brown's account had thousands of photographs, messages and other data verified through digital forensics. The brothers shared an iCloud account. Per a search warrant issued to Facebook, Thomas Brown's Facebook account was deleted. No information could be obtained on when the account was deleted. During the investigation, Penny Meek provided information to law enforcement that Philip Klein had taken down Thomas Brown's Facebook account. When the investigative team asked Philip Klein if he had taken down the account, he denied doing so and stated he thought Penny Meek had taken down the account. I don't really think any of that points to anything suspicious. He may not have been a kid that took a lot of photos or had stuffed a store in the cloud. And also, they couldn't figure out when the account had been deleted? I find that hard to believe. Penny was interrogated and claimed the police accused her of killing her son and putting his body out in the field. She told Hollinsworth, quote, I'm not even five-five. I couldn't even pick him up when he was alive. I can't pick him up when he's dead. I can't move a body, end quote. They accused her husband of helping her, or maybe her elder son Tucker. Remember what I said about the Attorney General's remark in a later release that Tucker may have led Deputy Gregory Estre from finding the car in their initial search together? Well, of course, suspicion has landed on him over the years too. Tucker refused to take a lie detector test because he said his results wouldn't be accurate because of how distraught he was over his brother's disappearance. There are others in town who think Penny had something to do with it. If not his death, then the hiding of his body. On a billboard in town, looking for any information into Tom's disappearance, someone had scrawled her name in black spray paint. But I don't know what her motivation would have been. As far as I know, there were never any claims of abuse or domestic disturbances at the house. They seemed like a happy family, and Tom seemed like a pretty happy, well-adjusted, and very busy young man. Not that that all necessarily precludes murder, but I just don't see it. Sheriff Lewis is convinced that Penny had something to do with it too. But there are those that think Sheriff Lewis is the culprit. There are some wild theories that have been floated, including that he was sleeping with Tom, and that's why he killed him. He had drug and alcohol dependence. Some teenage boys confessed to accidentally killing Tom on the football field, and Sheriff Lewis buried the body or fed it through a wood chipper. Philip Klein seems convinced of Lewis' culpability. At first, positing that Tom got into a fist fight back at the football stadium the night he went missing with a teammate named Chris Jones that somehow ended in Tom's murder. He then told this story at his presentation on the case that he said he'd gotten from Chris Jones, who was in jail at that point for a completely unrelated crime. On Thanksgiving Day 2016, Jones said he got into Sheriff Lewis' patrol car with goggles on and they drove around for about an hour. When they got to where they were going, the goggles were removed and Lewis turned the car's headlights on. Jones then saw Tom bound to a chair with Deputy Gregory holding a gun to his head. According to Jones, they were told they needed to throw the football game on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, where they would kill both Jones and Tom and this was the last he ever saw of Tom. According to Klein, they were able to verify every bit of Jones' story except the gambling ring. He never says how he verified it or what evidence he had. Jones also claimed that he had been paid to throw other games and that Sheriff Lewis was the enforcer for the gambling ring. Ignoring, for a moment, that this story sounds like it came right out of a bad action movie, there were some whispers that this was why Tom was benched partway through the year, because he wouldn't throw the games. It's hard to imagine other team members wouldn't have known about this, though. It takes more than two high schoolers to throw a game. According to the AG report, their determination was that Jones was an unreliable witness who had told multiple versions of the story over the years and that they had investigated all his versions and found none of them credible. Klein tells another version of the story in his presentation but would not identify the person that gave him this information. This story is that after getting gas, Tom went to the football stadium and someone snuck up on him in his Durango. This person pulled out a 25 caliber pistol and accidentally pulled the trigger. They then pushed Tom into the backseat and drove the Durango to Lake Marvin Road, dumped the body, cleaned it up, drove to town to find a place to stash it before settling on the water treatment plant. To help with the cover-up, someone in law enforcement that Klein said his sources identified a Sheriff Lewis, came to help cover it up. One of the boys called either his father or a friend of his father, who called up Lewis, who ordered them to cover up the crime. Klein, to this day, claims to have evidence to support this. But I would have to imagine the football stadium parking lot had cameras? Maybe not. But couldn't this person have just dumped his mom at the entrance of the ER? Where was that person's car? And where was all the blood? If someone shot him and then pushed him into the back seat, why was the only clear sign of blood that was found on the inside driver's side door handle? If it had gotten on the shooter's hands, wouldn't it have been everywhere? And how do you clean up blood without cleaning up all that dust and detritus? Here's my conclusion, Stranger. Someone did something. I don't know who, and I don't know why or what they did. As much as I'd like to joke that it was aliens, I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Tom's fate may still be unexplained, but it's not unexplainable. For a missing persons case, Tom's has uniquely presented a lot of physical evidence. A vehicle, a backpack, a phone, any investigator's dream. And yet, neither the newly minted sheriff nor the private eye in competition with him were able to put together the pieces. And authorities haven't shown much indication of renewed efforts toward the case since. In August of 2019, the Texas Attorney General suspended the case, saying, according to local reporting from KFDA, quote, all evidence that has been discovered has been analyzed, end quote. The case is still open, though, and in 2024, Penny and other family members of Tom filed a lawsuit for more forensic testing to be done on Tom's remains. After undergoing dismissal in lower courts, the family is willing to take the motion as far as the Supreme Court of Texas, according to the Canadian record. It's always the loved ones still searching in the end. Someone knows. Someone knows what happened to Tom Brown that night in 2016. But unless that person decides to clear their conscience, it seems all we're left with is questions. Next time on Strange and Unexplained, by very popular demand, The Winchester Mystery House, something that as of this moment, I still know absolutely nothing about. Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment and Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written by me, Daisy Eagan, with research by Keely Heiss, editorial help from Bekkadee Gregorio, and sound mixing and design by Jeff Devine. If you have an idea for an episode and want to submit a question for an Ask Me Anything episode, head to strangeandunexplainedpod.com and fill out the contact form. I will write back. Eventually, I need an assistant. You can follow me on social media at DaisyEagan, or follow the show at SNUpod and Grab Bag Collab. Stay strange.