Gone Cold Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.

A cool, clear November Saturday afternoon in small town, Texas. Church bulletins for Sunday were

already printed, the crops harvested, and the town was settling into the rhythm of an ordinary autumn weekend.

Just off U.S. Highway 287, two little boys were playing in their aunt's backyard.

At 1.30 p.m., the younger boy, a three-year-old, ran to the house in a panic,

crying and trying to say what he'd seen. He was too young

to make all the words line up, but the message was clear. His six-year-old brother Bradley had told him

to run, and now Bradley's gone. No one heard any screams. There were no tire squeals. At least none anyone could place.

No neighbor ready to swear they saw the moment it happened. Just two brothers in a yard, then one.

By mid-afternoon the phone calls began. By evening the searches. And by the next morning, Chilli-Cothi, a small town that

believed it was safe, didn't feel like the same place anymore.

141 days later, two fishermen on the Peas River found what everyone feared, and an investigation that began as a

missing child case became a homicide. You're listening to Gone Cold, Texas True Crime.

I'm Vincent, and this is the abduction and murder of Bradley Eugene Gilbert.

Chilicothe, Texas, 1984.

To understand what happened to Bradley Gilbert, you have to understand where it happened.

Chilicothe, ironically meaning big town in Shawnee, sits on the western edge of Hardiman County, not far from the Oklahoma state line.

In the mid-1980s, it was a town of about 1,200 people. A few churches, a grocery, a feed store, cotton gins, families who'd known each other

for decades. It had the feeling of a place where the kids walked home from school without a care in the

world, and neighbors waved from their porches without missing a beat in their conversation.

But it was also a town under strain, drought, rising interest rates, and collapsing cotton prices

had hit hard. Farming wasn't what it used to be. Jobs were thinning out.

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