Out of Gas

In August 2013, Kyle is woken in the night by a call from his 26-year-old brother Brandon, who says he is driving north on Highway 277, a desolate two-lane road through West Texas, that three men are chasing him, and that his truck is about to run out of gas. Kyle assumes none of it is real: Brandon has a history of methamphetamine use, had asked about getting drugs two days earlier, and is only out on the road because of a fight with his fiancée, Ladesa. Kyle drives out with his wife and four-year-old son anyway and finds Brandon's truck parked half on the road with the lights off — and no Brandon. On the phone Brandon insists he is 'right here', and when a sheriff's cruiser approaches he tells Kyle to run from the cop, which means he can see the scene from somewhere in the flat, open plains where there is nowhere to hide.

Because Brandon has an active drug warrant, Kyle tells Deputy Neal of the Coke County Sheriff's Department only that his brother walked off to get gas. Neal locks the truck, turns on its hazards and leaves; the next morning the truck is still there, and Ladesa's report to the department makes clear Brandon never arrived anywhere. A four-day search with canines, helicopters and thermal cameras across the flat scrubland around the truck finds no trace, and authorities conclude Brandon — fresh off a fight, carrying a warrant — simply fled.

Then Ladesa walks in with Brandon's phone records: at 12:50 AM that night, between frantic calls to Kyle, Brandon dialed 911 himself — something she says he would never do given how much he feared police. The tiny local dispatch had never passed the call along. On the recording Brandon sounds genuinely in peril, and another voice is audible in the background before the call cuts out. The search resumes, expands, runs for a year, and still finds nothing. Private detectives hired by Ladesa fare no better.

In January 2022, nine years on, a small group of volunteers combing the same field off Highway 277 finds shorts, pieces of two white shoes, and a fragment of human skull that DNA testing confirms is Brandon's — right near where his truck stood, in flat, open ground that hundreds of searchers had covered. That leaves two options, and the episode ends by weighing them: either every search somehow missed him, or Brandon was somewhere else the whole time and his remains returned to the field later. Neither answer makes sense, and the case remains unsolved.