On the night of December 13th, 2020, 21-year-old Texas State University student Jason Landry left his apartment and started making his way to his family’s home in Missouri City, but never arrived.
At approximately 12:30 a.m., a volunteer firefighter came across his abandoned Nissan Altima, which was still running, on a remote gravel road around 30 miles away from his apartment. He also discovered Jason’s belongings, including his clothing, scattered hundreds of feet away, but no sign of Jason himself.
It appeared that he had overcorrected and spun out, hitting a tree and a barbed wire fence in the process. No blood was found inside the car, but it was impossible to say for sure that he wasn’t injured in the accident.
What happened after the accident is also a mystery. Using his digital footprint, authorities were able to create a timeline of events, which led to the realization that only roughly an hour had elapsed from when he’d last used Snapchat on his cell phone to when the volunteer firefighter found his vehicle and scattered personal items.
An extensive search would fail to locate the missing college student. Over the years, speculation about what occurred during that fateful hour, including why he undressed and where he went after leaving the crash site, has inspired multiple theories ranging from a tragic accidental death to murder.
Yet solid evidence is lacking and the question still remains: What happened to Jason Landry?
The youngest of three children, Jason David Landry was born on July 29th, 1999, in Missouri City, Texas, to parents Kent and Lisa.
Described by those who knew him as friendly, happy, and a goofball, Jason had an affinity for fun clothes, especially “wacky and cool socks,” as well as a passion for music, was close to his family and loved his betta fish, Sparky.
He was a “pure extrovert, full of pure optimism,” said Kent of his youngest son.
After graduating from high school, Jason attended Sam Houston State University, but later transferred to Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, where he studied engineering and sound recording technology, with an eye towards eventually becoming a music producer.
The COVID-19 lockdown and the inherent isolation that came along with it was difficult for Jason and he reportedly began smoking marijuana as a coping mechanism.
“Given his personality, isolating him was one of the worst things you could do to him,” stated Kent.
However, as winter break approached in December 2020, Jason was said to be upbeat and excited to have time off. He decided to make the 165-mile drive home to Missouri City, to spend the holidays with his family.
“On Saturday (December 12th), he sounded just like Jason to me,” said his mother Lisa. “He was very excited about the next semester, and I remember rolling my eyes because he was talking, talking, talking, but he still hadn’t gotten to his point.”
He packed his PlayStation, clothes, toiletries, a pill bottle with several marijuana blunts, a laptop, and a plastic tumbler housing his fish Sparky. Ready to go, he left his apartment at just before 11 p.m. on the night of Sunday, December 13th.
December 13th, 2020, 10:55 p.m.: Jason opens the Waze navigation app and enters his destination to set up his route.
11:05 p.m.: He is driving down Highway 80, traveling under Interstate 35 in San Marcos.
11:15 p.m.: Jason continues heading south on Highway 80, passing through the small communities of Prairie Lea, Fentress, and Stairtown.
11:24 p.m.: He enters Luling, continuing on towards the intersection of Austin Street and Magnolia Avenue. For unknown reasons, he stops using Waze at this point and pulls up Snapchat.
11:28 p.m.: Jason sends a Snapchat selfie to his ex-girlfriend.
Around 11:30 p.m. Jason made a wrong turn (or at least diverted from the route that Waze had recommended), which led him down Salt Flat Road, a remote and darkened stretch that begins as a paved road and then turns to gravel.
December 14th, 12:31 a.m.: A volunteer firefighter discovers Jason’s abandoned Nissan and his scattered personal items on Salt Flat Road and calls in a report. The car is running with the keys still in the ignition; the headlights are on and the front passenger door is locked.
There are several unknowns here, beginning with why Jason closed down Waze. However, it has been speculated that he could have done this accidentally when he opened up Snapchat. As far as his final activity on Snapchat goes, he sent a selfie to his ex-girlfriend at 11:28 p.m. and reportedly looked at ease.
The volunteer firefighter, who phoned 911 after discovering the abandoned vehicle, had this to say when asked by the dispatcher if he was able to locate the driver:
“I have not. I’ve gone up and down Salt Flat and I haven’t located him yet. But, uh, it appears that he grabbed a backpack or something out of his car and he’s thrown it in the middle of the road along with a cup that smelt like alcohol, and he stripped out of his clothes wherever he’s at. There’s some blood on his clothes.”
Whether or not the cup truly had alcohol in it (or if it actually belonged to Jason) is unclear, as reports do not elaborate on this.
Texas Monthly on the kind of landscape that runs along Salt Flat Road:
“After discarding his clothing, he appears to have walked into some of the most unforgiving country in Central Texas, a hilly, wooded landscape fragmented by barbed wire, carved open by steep gullies and murky creeks, and littered with aging electrical equipment and rusted oil pumps.”
Authorities arrived on the scene at 1:15 a.m. and began looking around the immediate area and inside the vehicle. Both the front and rear ends of the car had incurred damage and the rear windshield was shattered.
The air bag hadn’t been deployed and there was no blood inside. The headlights were still on and the keys were still in the ignition. It appeared as if Jason had made a hasty exit from the Nissan following the crash. It was ultimately concluded that this was a single-car accident, in which he had overcorrected and spun out, hitting a tree and a barbed wire fence.
They searched his belongings, puzzled at why he had removed his clothing (a shirt, shorts, sandals, underwear and SpongeBob socks), which lay across the roadway roughly 900 feet away from the car.
His underwear had a small blood smear on it, but no one knew what had caused it or if it was even from an injury that had occurred that night. It was theorized that he had accidentally brushed up against the barbed wire fence and gotten hurt.
“Probably some college kid,” said Texas State Trooper Cristobal Flores on the body cam footage. “What in the world was he doing down this road?”
Dozens of feet away from his clothes, they came across his wallet, toiletries, marijuana stash, and the tumbler which contained Sparky, who had sadly already died.
Law enforcement performed a cursory search of the immediate area, including a nearby abandoned house, but discovered nothing else. They had Jason’s vehicle towed and left the scene.
Kent and Lisa were contacted with the alarming news that their son was missing and had apparently been in a car accident. Kent drove to the impound yard, where the Nissan Altima had been taken. He looked inside and quickly discovered that Jason’s phone was wedged between the seat and the center console.
After leaving the impound yard, Kent went out to Salt Flat Road around 7 a.m., expecting to see authorities in the area looking for Jason, but instead saw no one. No police officers, no tape roping off the scene, nothing. He was shocked that no one appeared to be searching for his son.
Trying to process what was happening and desperate to locate Jason, Kent began conducting his own search and taking video footage of the scene. Jason’s belongings were still strewn around the area. He was unable to find Jason or any further clues.
Flores would later explain the lack of urgency surrounding the search for Jason during those early hours by stating that they’d assumed he had fled the area because he had something to hide.
They performed a wellness check at his apartment that morning and discovered that he wasn’t there, nor had his roommate heard from him.
Kent believed that the first officers on the scene had become biased against his son after finding his marijuana stash.
“Regardless of whether Jason was drunk, stoned, or any of the above,” Kent said, “you had what you thought was a naked college student wandering a place he did not know in freezing-cold weather with arctic winds. You need to find that person and save them from themselves. However they got in that situation, find them and help them.”
Once investigators began to realize the gravity of the situation, they started to search for Jason Landry in earnest.
On the afternoon of December 14th, local law enforcement was joined in Luling by the Department of Public Safety, who also brought in Texas Search and Rescue (a nonprofit organization) to help. Texas EquuSearch, another nonprofit organization, also came out. Jason’s family actively participated in the search efforts as well.
Luling, which once had the reputation for being the “toughest town in Texas,” due to its lawless nature and rowdy cowboys in the late 19th century, is now a small community made up of ranches and (mostly privately owned) oil wells.
More than 100 volunteers—on foot, on all-terrain vehicles, on horseback, and with search dogs—combed the region for days, inspecting oil-storage tanks, abandoned shacks, fields, and bodies of water.
A small plane, drones, and a helicopter—equipped with infrared technology capable of picking up on a heat signature even after death—were brought in to perform aerial searches as well.
Eight cadaver dogs led investigators to a pond approximately 1,000 yards away from the crash site, indicating the presence of human remains within the small body of water.
Divers were unable to find anything, despite several tries, so finally it was decided that the pond would need to be drained. Over the course of three days, the draining process was carried out, but it turned out that there were no human remains in the pond.
Dogs made similar hits at multiple other bodies of water in the area, which were drained as well, but again no human remains were recovered.
While tracking dogs are not infallible, they typically don’t make this many mistakes, so what happened here? One scientist thought they might have the answer.
Texas Search and Rescue’s Shawn Hohnstreiter:
“We’ve talked to a scientist that has suggested something in the oil-production process when mixed with water is creating the illusion of human decomposition. We don’t know if it’s true. We need scientific research and white papers to understand what happened out there.”
All told, over 31,000 acres of land was combed in the effort to locate Jason Landry, but no sign of the missing student ever materialized.
In an effort to make sense of what happened to Jason that night, several theories have been proposed.
On the night that he went missing, temperatures varied from 36-43 degrees (F), with a wind chill that made it feel even colder. With this in mind, it has been suggested that Jason might have been suffering from hypothermia and had removed his clothing due to a phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing.”
There are two leading theories for why this occurs in some hypothermia victims—one being that peripheral vasoconstriction (the narrowing of blood vessels in the extremities, which helps the body maintain its core temperature in a cold environment) fails due to exhaustion from fighting the cold for so long, causing the blood vessels to suddenly dilate, sending blood rushing to the limbs and creating a sensation of extreme overheating.
The other theory is that prolonged exposure to the extreme cold damages the brain’s hypothalamus, inhibiting its ability to regulate body temperature.
Paradoxical undressing occurs during the end stages of severe hypothermia and is estimated to happen in 20% to 50% of fatal cases.
While it is certainly plausible to think that Jason suffered from hypothermia that night, was there enough time for the paradoxical undressing stage to have already taken place?
His last selfie, taken at 11:28 p.m., conclusively places him in his car and wearing clothes. The volunteer firefighter discovered his abandoned vehicle and scattered clothing at 12:31 a.m.
So we have a window of just over an hour for Jason to crash, exit his car, become severely hypothermic, experience extreme overheating and undress, scatter his other belongings, and wander away from the scene.
This small window of time has caused some to doubt that this is what happened.
As previously stated, there was no blood inside the Nissan Altima, nor was the air bag deployed. However, this does not mean that Jason wasn’t injured in the accident. It has been speculated that he incurred a head injury and became disoriented as a result.
After all, there is the question of why he didn’t stay in his car and use his phone to call for help. (Although, it’s also possible that he couldn’t find the phone, considering that it was wedged between the seat and the center console.)
This could suggest that he wasn’t thinking clearly and, in a state of confusion, maybe he removed his clothing before wandering off into the dark, frigid landscape and succumbing to the elements.
Additionally, some investigators have stated that they don’t find it particularly odd that no trace of Jason has been found, given the presence of predators like coyotes and feral hogs in the area, theorizing that post-mortem predation and a scattering of his remains might have occurred.
However, locals found this explanation lacking, noting that they kept an eye out for vulture activity every day during the search and never saw any of the birds circling.
“We’ve never heard of animals picking someone’s body clean out there,” said rancher Sandra Robinson. “There’s always something left.”
The local police speculated that Jason had been under the influence of drugs—not only marijuana but perhaps psychedelic drugs as well—at the time of the accident and that this might explain his confusing actions afterwards.
However, it is important to note that Jason wasn’t known to use any drugs except for marijuana, nor was any drug aside from that found among his belongings, so the idea that he was on anything else remains speculative.
His friends did acknowledge that they’d noticed a change in him after he began smoking marijuana, though. He had become fascinated with mysticism and using marijuana as a sort of a gateway to enlightenment.
“It seemed more and more apparent that our conversations weren’t making sense anymore,” stated friend Jack Frank. “Jason would talk about the rapture coming, aliens, Jesus, Elon Musk, and all these things that he would tie together somehow.”
Jason reportedly FaceTimed with a friend approximately an hour before leaving for Missouri City, which his friend recorded because Jason “was so messed up that he didn’t think he was going to remember it later," suggesting that he was high at the time. The recording has no audio, though.
Furthermore, Jason’s search history in the week before he vanished included queries like, “how long can you live in the woods without food?” and “how long can you go in the wilderness?”
Authorities also pointed out that many small towns in Central Texas have a meth problem and questioned if Jason had planned to meet up with anyone in Luling for the purpose of buying narcotics.
However, in 2022, the attorney general’s office revealed that they were unable to find any evidence to support this.
“Nothing has been found on Mr. Landry’s social media, cell phone or other electronic devices to suggest that he knew or was planning to meet anyone in Luling, including the lack of credible information pertaining to the purchase or sale of narcotics.”
As for why Jason chose to drive down Salt Flat Road, this also remains a mystery. He might have simply made a wrong turn after switching off his navigation app.
Conversely, some have theorized that he may have purposely made the choice to take Salt Flat Road, a back road with no streetlights that provided a clear view of the sky, to get a better look at the meteor shower that was taking place that night.
To explore the possibility that foul play had occurred, the Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office sought the assistance of criminologist Kim Rossmo.
Rossmo went out to Luling to get an idea of what the area is like. He was immediately puzzled by why Jason would have undressed and taken off his shoes.
“I made it ten steps before I said F- this,” said Rossmo, who had removed his own footwear in an attempt to recreate part of Jason’s experience. “It was too painful.”
He returned to Salt Flat Road at night and started to wander around the surrounding land with a flashlight. He noticed a group of people standing in the field, whom he assumed to be oil workers, and approached them to ask if any of the nearby structures had had lights on back in December.
Instead of receiving an answer, he heard a woman’s voice issuing a warning: “You need to leave now. You’re on private property.”
Rossmo returned to his vehicle and drove over to a nearby bridge. However, within minutes, a truck approached him and the driver allegedly pointed a shotgun at him, apparently warning him to leave the area. A verbal altercation ensued between the two men. Fortunately, though, the tense encounter didn’t escalate further as both men called the police.
As he would learn from Caldwell County investigator Jeff Ferry, the man with the shotgun was Stuart Carter—the owner of the property that Rossmo had been told to leave.
A look into Carter’s past revealed a history of violence. He reportedly shot two dogs that belonged to one of his oil workers, although he claimed that he’d only done this because he believed they posed a threat to his own animals. Furthermore, he’d allegedly shot his own son (who survived and did not press charges) during an argument years earlier.
Since Carter owned land near which Jason had vanished, Rossmo wondered if it was possible that a nude and confused Jason had wandered onto his property that night and gotten shot.
However, Carter strongly denied any involvement in this case or knowledge of what happened to Jason Landry, yet acknowledged that it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that another landowner might have killed the college student.
“If it was a woman, people would probably think she was in distress. If it was a naked man, I think it's safe to say he could wind up dead.”
Ultimately, Rossmo discarded the foul play theory and eventually came to the conclusion that Jason had likely succumbed to hypothermia.
However, other investigators, including retired FBI agent Abel Peña, still believe foul play to be the most plausible explanation.
“I think the biggest red flags for us initially,” explained Peña, “were the clothes just being laid where they were placed. The more we examined it, the more we ran it by some of our team. We all agreed that it appeared like it was staged.”
Peña noted that Jason’s phone last pinged close to an intersection that is known to have drug activity before he made the fateful turn onto Salt Flat Road.
He revealed that a witness had come forward with a disturbing account, claiming that Jason had been ambushed by one or more people at this intersection and then severely beaten, after which he was driven out to Salt Flat Road, forced to undress, and then killed before they staged the accident.
The veracity of this somewhat convoluted story has yet to be confirmed, though.
“Locals feel like someone knows something,” said Kent. “It makes me wonder if someone actually does and just hasn’t come forward.”
Many who live in the area find it odd that no trace of Jason has been found.
“There’s people out there every day—every single day,” said Tracy Perryman, president of the Luling Oil Museum. “So yeah, it’s very, very strange, and that’s why I think there’s more to this story than Jason just driving off the road.”
Jason Landry’s case remains open and active. His loved ones are deeply committed to finding answers and are offering a $20,000 reward for information.
“We're one of many families who are staring at an empty chair around the kitchen table, not knowing." said Kent Landry. “Are they gone? Are they not gone? What can you do? That's the part that really never allows you to have a sense of peace."
The Landry family held a candlelight vigil in his honor on December 13th, 2025—the fifth anniversary of his disappearance.
If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Jason Landry, you are encouraged to contact the Texas Attorney General's Office at 512-936-0742
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