Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt.

And you guys, sometimes the hardest cases to crack aren't always the ones with nothing to go on.

They're often the ones where everybody seems to know something, but they're too scared to talk.

Because today's story isn't about someone disappearing into the dark alone.

It's about a young man who vanished in front of, quote unquote, friends from work.

Their first version?

He panicked, pulled the car over, hopped out, and booked it.

But the only people who say they saw what happened next

are the same ones who can't keep their stories straight.

And when the truth keeps bending like that, it's not confusion. It's not bad memory. Usually,

it's a bold-faced lie. This is the story of Christopher Cole Thomas. It's just after 3 a.m. on Black Friday in 2016.

But in the small town of Benson, North Carolina, no one's lining up to snag a deal on the latest iPhone or the biggest TV.

It's quiet. Most people are asleep. And the streets are practically empty, which is giving time for a couple of officers to finish up some paperwork in the police department parking lot.

And it's in that quiet moment when two men walk up. Their names are Julian Valles Jr. and Jeremy Carpenter. Now, they're not panicked or

screaming or anything like that. They just need a little bit of help. They're passing through after

visiting Julian's family for Thanksgiving. They were on their way back to Minnesota, where they

both work. But now they don't have keys to their car. And the story of how that happened is weird.

They say that they were traveling with a third buddy, Christopher Thomas, who goes by Cole, and he's

the one who was driving. But out of nowhere, he started acting paranoid. And before they knew it,

he pulled over, took the keys, jumped out, and then, like,

ran until he dropped out of sight. They don't know why or where he went. I mean,

Cole couldn't have even known where he was, because he's not from around there. He's from

...