A missing high school football player has turned into a state-wide mystery.
An exclusive sneak peek at ID's Murder Under the Friday Night Lights, airing Jan. 11, captures a clue in the case of Tom Brown, a beloved teen who vanished from a small Texas town without a trace—and left his backpack.
Per the episode description, Tom's disappearance led to conspiracy theories after "baffling clues and community pressure pit the local sheriff against a brash private investigator until some very unusual suspects emerge."
Tom's mother Penny Meek seeks answers after a workman for the power company discovered a discarded backpack belonging to Tom, with his laptop eerily "sitting perfectly in an upright position."
"The backpack had been there for a while," Penny explained. "It was wet. Inside the backpack were some of his school papers and notebooks and his laptop. The laptop was sent to a forensics lab. All it had was his schoolwork on there. The laptop had not been used since Tom disappeared."
She added, "The sheriff told me that he thought Thomas left it there. That is not what I believe."
The location of the backpack was found roughly six miles away from Tom's abandoned truck and the "rugged terrain" of the forest proved to be an odd path for Tom to take, had it purposefully left the backpack there. Plus, he would have had to cross a vast body of water.
"You cannot walk across the Canadian River," Penny pointed out. "You cannot cross the river bottom by foot."
As one investigator noted, "If [Tom] was committing suicide, why would he do that? If someone abducted Tom and taken the backpack and put it on the other side of the fence so that no one could find it...It was just another one of these little mysteries in a story that was getting more and more mysterious all the time."
The new true crime series focused on football-related cases to "showcase how a tragedy that happens off the field can have ramifications far beyond the championship game," as the official description reads.
The six-episode series Murder Under the Friday Night Lights features more cases like "Killer in the Field" that focuses on the mutilated body of a high school teacher; "Game of Privileges" in which a star football player is the prime suspect in the murder of a Mexican immigrant; "Do It For Juan," where a former quarterback-turned-coach is gunned down in Louisiana; and "Mr. Untouchable" about what really happened to local California football hero TK Kelly.
As the series says, these "tragic crimes have not only turned the lives of the high school football players on these teams upside down—but have torn entire communities apart."
Watch the eerie clip above to see more about Tom Brown's disappearance.
Murder Under the Friday Night Lights airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on ID.