THE CASE IN ONE SENTENCE: A twenty-one-year-old Texas State University student crashed his car on a rural gravel road at midnight, left behind his phone, his wallet, his clothes even his underwear and vanished so completely that five years, hundreds of search hours, and a Texas Attorney General investigation have produced nothing.

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On the night of December 13, 2020, Jason Landry was doing what thousands of college students do every December: going home for the holidays.

He was twenty-one years old, a student at Texas State University in San Marcos. His parents, Kent and Sheri Landry, lived in Missouri City, a suburb southwest of Houston about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from campus on a good night. Jason left his apartment at 10:55 p.m., opened Waze on his phone, and started driving.

For the first thirty minutes, everything was ordinary. Cell phone data tracked him south on Texas 80, through small towns including Fentress, Prairie Lea, and Stairtown, before he entered Luling on Texas 80 at approximately 11:24 p.m.

Then something changed.

At the intersection where Texas 80 becomes Austin Street, he stopped using Waze and began using Snapchat. He missed his turn. Instead of heading toward the interstate, he continued straight down a road that led away from civilization and onto Salt Flat Road, a dark rural gravel road in Caldwell County.

At 12:31 a.m., a volunteer firefighter spotted Jason’s Nissan Altima crashed and abandoned on Salt Flat Road. The lights were on. The keys were in the ignition. The front passenger door was locked.

Jason Landry was not there.

What Was Left Behind

When Jason’s father Kent arrived at the impound yard that morning and later returned to the crash site, what he found deepened the mystery rather than explaining it.

At the scene, investigators found Jason’s backpack, a laptop, gaming equipment, toiletries, and marijuana. His clothing was scattered along the roadway including his shoes, his shorts, and his underwear.

He had left everything. Not just his valuables his phone, his wallet, his laptop. His clothes. Every piece of what he’d been wearing was on that gravel road.

Investigators believe he may have overcorrected on the gravel road, spun out of control, and crashed. What they cannot explain is what happened after the crash. A young man got out of a wrecked car on a dark rural road at midnight, removed every stitch of clothing, and disappeared into the South Texas night.

There are theories. The most charitable: disoriented from the crash, possibly panicked, possibly under the influence, he ran into the surrounding scrubland and succumbed to exposure, his remains simply not yet found in the thick brush. 

The Investigation

The Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office caught the case a county with a single investigator and limited resources. Within days, the scale of the response grew. Texas Search and Rescue spent nine days on initial searches, including three days of aerial coverage, with more than 100 volunteers covering 31,680 acres.

They found nothing.

In February 2022, the Caldwell County District Attorney and Sheriff’s Office requested that the Texas Attorney General’s Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit take over the investigation. The unit one of the first to take on such cases in Texas dedicated hundreds of hours, obtained a geofence warrant for the area near the crash, interviewed dozens of witnesses, brought in experts in digital forensics and accident reconstruction, and had independent experts analyze Jason’s cell phone data.

The geofence warrant yielded no activity near the crash site and provided no additional information. Nothing on Jason’s social media, cell phone, or other electronic devices suggested he knew or was planning to meet anyone in Luling.

Dispatcher calls from the night Jason disappeared reveal that investigators attempted to ping Jason’s phone through Verizon Wireless. Verizon reported coordinates placing the phone on Hoover Street at 2 a.m. nearly five miles from where the car was discovered. Around that same time, dispatchers fielded a report of a “possible naked male” on nearby property.

That lead was investigated. It produced nothing definitive.

In November 2023, the OAG hosted an extensive roundtable case review alongside experts from the FBI, the Texas Rangers, the Department of Public Safety, and multiple specialist agencies. The panel concluded that all credible leads and investigative steps had been thoroughly pursued.

He has not been found.

Five Years

The holiday season is the hardest time for the Landry family. A new generation is growing up knowing Jason only through photographs. “My granddaughter looked at his picture and said, ‘Who’s that?’ She’ll never know her Uncle Jason he’d be the fun uncle,” Kent Landry said.

Every year since Jason’s disappearance, family and friends have gathered for a candlelight vigil at the crash site to pray for answers. A volunteer search group goes out to search the area about once or twice a month in the fall and winter. A Facebook group “Missing Person: Jason Landry” has 22,000 followers sharing search updates and memories.

A $20,000 reward is offered for information leading to finding Jason. “We would love to write that check,” Kent Landry said. “It would be bittersweet to do it, but we would be so thankful to finally get closure for our family.”

There are cases where the mystery is the absence of information. The Jason Landry case is a mystery of the wrong kind of information too much that doesn’t connect, details that multiply rather than resolve.

The phone five miles away at 2 a.m. The report of a naked man on nearby property that same night. The clothes scattered along a gravel road. The marijuana left at the scene alongside a laptop. The Snapchat session that started exactly when the navigation app stopped, at exactly the intersection where he went the wrong way.

“So many of them that we’ve heard from believe very strongly that someone does know something,” Kent Landry has said. “Locals feel like someone knows something. It makes me wonder if someone actually does and just hasn’t come forward.”

Five years and not a trace not a bone. Not a single confirmed sighting. A young man drove into the Texas night and became, in the language of cold case files, a missing person with no resolution.

His family lights candles every December at the place where his car was found, on a gravel road in Caldwell County, under the kind of dark rural Texas sky where the stars are very bright and the silence is very deep.

They are still waiting.