2 MISSING: He Left His Truck at the Boat Ramp and Walked Into the Water
The screen glowed in the gray morning light, and for a moment no one on the boat said a word.
Then Jared leaned closer.
“That looks like a hand,” he said quietly.
“That looks like legs and a hand.
I think we might have just found him.
”
The day had begun with a different case.
Jared and his teammate Cade, of the search group Adventure With a Purpose, had returned to Mount Pleasant, Texas, to revisit the disappearance of Maxine Gray, a young woman who vanished on April 5, 1992.
The team had worked her case before.
This time they came back with fresh eyes and a new sonar system that could tell, in a single pass, whether a shape on the bottom was a twig, a rock, a tire, or a car.
Adventure With a Purpose travels across the United States working missing persons cases free of charge for families and law enforcement.
They fund the work through documentaries, merchandise, and the revenue their videos earn on YouTube and Facebook.
They also publish videos of unsolved searches, because viewers often send in clues.
That is how they found Ethan Caswell Zook in Nebraska.
After one video aired, a viewer told them the party Ethan had attended was not where the team had searched, but at a different location.
Thirty days later, the team returned and found Ethan in a pond at that exact spot.
Something similar happened with Maxine.
After the first video, her friend Kathy reached out with new details.
Maxine had lived at the Adobe Motel in Mount Pleasant and worked at the Days Inn.
On the day she disappeared, her boyfriend, Timothy, came to her job, picked her up, and cursed at her, and her employer sent her home.
She went back to the Adobe Motel and changed her clothes.
Later, at her family’s home, she told her siblings she was going to pick up some jewelry at her boyfriend’s parents’ house in Maud, Texas.
Timothy was with her at the time, in the early afternoon.
Kathy’s mother said Maxine stopped by the J&H afterward.
After that, she was never seen again.
Maxine was driving a 1965 Chevy Malibu.
In Jared’s view, a car like that does not simply vanish without a trace.
Kathy had done her own research a couple of years earlier but had found nothing more.
Jared began, as always, by marking what he called the “ground zeros”: the Days Inn where Maxine worked, the Adobe Motel where she lived, and the town of Maud where she said she was going.
On the first search, the team had cleared the waters closest to her life: the area north of the hotel, the town lake, and the water just north of the Adobe Motel.
Now they went further.
A small pond near the Days Inn was only 3.
4 feet deep, too shallow to hide a car.
Jared asked himself whether Maxine, upset after being sent home, might have crossed the road to sit and compose herself.
So the team scanned the pond directly across the street.
Old aerial photos helped them rule out another pond nearby.
In the early 1990s, the roads beside it had not yet been built, workers had been moving dirt, and the pond had been drained and completely reshaped by 2015.
But one body of water near the Days Inn had looked exactly the same in every photo since 1995, the closest year he could find, with access from the road even then.
The Hampton Inn that now stands there did not exist yet.
That was the one worth checking.
The sonar showed 9 feet of water, then 5, then 4.
There was nothing.
Jared explained the new equipment as he worked.
The entire system, a Garmin setup with side and down imaging, a LiveScope transducer, and a single 17-inch screen, now fit in a backpack he could carry onto a plane.
The most important piece, he said, was the 56 UHD ultra-high-definition transducer, about $600 and worth every cent.
On the screen, the black band down the middle was the water column, the amber areas were the lake bed, and the dark edge at around 60 feet was the shoreline.
The side scan reached 75 feet in each direction and could be scrolled back in time, while the LiveScope showed fish moving in real time.
The team followed Highway 67, the road between Mount Pleasant and Maud, checking every pond along the way.
They saw tires, a boat ramp, and a tree they rolled right over.
At one point a shape appeared that looked like a car window.
Jared was not ready to dismiss it, since Maxine disappeared in April, when spring rains could have pushed the water higher than it is now.
He turned the boat and scanned it again from a 45-degree angle.
It was not a car.
In Maud, they reached a lake Jared had marked as the most probable location.
On the map, nearly every dot along the shoreline was a boat ramp.
He counted them: eighteen.
The search there turned into a struggle.
Channels narrowed and became choked with vegetation.
Old bridge pillars stood on one side, new ones on the other.
The water dropped to seven feet, then to half a foot of murk.
The wind caught the boat broadside, pushing it into the shallows, so Jared took down the flag to stop it acting like a sail.
“We got ourselves in a pickle,” he admitted, laughing, as he balanced the motor at just the right height to avoid churning up mud.
Between passes, he spoke about why they do this.
The team does not take money from families, because he never wants anyone to feel they are paying for a guaranteed result.
Adventure With a Purpose has now solved around 40 cases, and the Butterfly Effect, the network of people the team has trained, has solved more than 100.
“As far as hitting the mark every time,” he said, “I wish I could.
But I cannot.
But we try.
”
There was no sign of Maxine that day.
Then a new call came in.
A man named Philip Brown had gone missing in June 2025.
His truck had been found parked near a boat ramp, his keys with it, and his dogs locked inside.
Cadaver dogs had alerted hard in one specific area of the water.
Authorities had also warned that Brown may have had multiple firearms.
At the ramp, the team met three people: Red, Alfred Point, and Morgan, a dog handler.
They explained what happened.
On the day Philip disappeared, a fishing tournament was taking place on the lake.
One of the county commissioners went out on the water and noticed Philip’s truck parked in the small lot.
When he came back later, the truck was still there.
The windows had been cracked only slightly, and the dogs inside were overheating.
People gave them water through the gap in the window, and that was when they realized Philip had never come back.
Later, evidence suggested that Philip had walked into the water and did not want to go on.
A game warden once saw what he believed was a mass under the surface, but he lost sight of it before he could photograph it.
Since then, boats had been banned from that part of the lake, and the dogs had not been run there in months.
When they had been, the results were striking.
Morgan’s six dogs all alerted in the same area.
Other handlers brought dogs too, about ten in total, and every one of them hit in nearly the same place.
Jared was puzzled.
A body normally goes through float cycles, and the lake was heavily used by fishermen and deer hunters.
Someone should have seen him.
Had Philip weighed himself down? Red mentioned that the lake held alligator gar and alligators, and Jared wondered whether they might disturb remains.
Alfred disagreed firmly.
Nothing in that lake, he said, would touch a body.
And no amount of weight would keep one down.
“You could have a body weighed down with 200 pounds of chain and it’ll float to the top,” he said.
The only exception, in his experience, was very deep water, around 100 feet, where a body might rise only partway, then sink for good once it released its gases.
This lake was nowhere near that deep.
In fact, it was the opposite problem.
Jared walked to the spot where the dogs had hit hardest, near a white buoy that now sat on dry land because the water had dropped so far.
The depth gauge read almost zero, about a foot and a half.
At that depth, the sonar could barely scan, the motor could barely push, and diving would be pointless.
Anything left of Philip there would have been exposed.
The better approach, Jared said, would be people in waders walking a grid.
Still, he wanted to try.
Morgan showed him the handler’s map, each colored track a different dog, all converging on the same small stretch near a stick poking out of the water.
Jared launched the boat, realized he had forgotten to put the drain plug in, fixed it with a laugh, and went out.
He picked up fish, then a mass of something on the left side, right where the dogs had been heading.
It was interesting enough that he made a decision: the team would sleep at the ramp that night and search again at first light, even though they had a 5:00 flight to catch out of Dallas the next day.
In the morning, Jared took the transducer off its mount and held it by hand to reach the shallows.
Near the stick, the screen lit up with a shape: what looked like a head, an arm rising up, a body, legs.
“I think we might have just found him,” he said.
He navigated straight to it.
“Right there.
There he is.
Head, arms.
I think we got a guy.
”
He began suiting up to go into the water.
Asked how confident he was, he said he was confident enough to miss his flight.
Nothing else out there, he said, was over five feet long with arms, a head, and an upper body.
But as they moved closer and studied the image again, the shape changed.
The “head” was the mass of a tree.
The “arm” was a branch rising from it.
The “body” was its trunk, and the second arm was another limb.
It was a tree.
They made one final pass, then another check on a last target.
It was a stick.
They had covered the area up, down, left, right, and center.
Jared reminded everyone that they were searching nine months after Philip disappeared.
Even then, he said, some remains should still be present, unless the locals who claimed the alligator gar would leave nothing were right.
Others insisted the fish would never touch a body.
He didn’t have the answer.
The question that bothered him most was the one no one could explain: why had Philip never floated to the surface?
“We wish we had better news for you,” Jared told the group at the ramp.
They had scanned everything they could and checked every target, but none of it was what they were looking for.
He urged Morgan to keep running the dogs, to watch whether the water dropped even lower, and to send people out in waders, side by side, across the area where the dogs kept alerting.
Then the team said their goodbyes and got back on the road.
Maxine Gray, missing since 1992, and Philip Brown, missing since June 2025, both remain unfound, and their families are still waiting for answers.
