E9 Missing in NC | What Happened to Cole Thomas?

Unlike most of this podcast, this is not a story about skeletal remains. In this case, no human remains have been found. Cole Thomas is officially a missing person, but his father knows in his heart his son is dead.  Imagine if your child disappeared without a trace. Given that there are so many ways of communicating and tracking people these days it’s hard to picture, but it happens. Children and adults seem to simply vanish every single day in America. In this episode we introduce you to a family whose adult son vanished in North Carolina in 2016. You’ll hear the heartbreaking story of Cole Thomas from his father, Chris, and the community advocate who is trying desperately to help this grieving father find his son – alive or dead. Chris Thomas refuses to give up, and he will go to almost any lengths to bring Cole home.

True crime meets forensic science in the What Remains podcast from WRAL Studios. With no ID, human skeletal remains often end up at medical examiners’ offices where they sit in storage closets for years, gathering dust as evidence slowly disappears. These are some of the most difficult cold cases to crack. Unsolved murders. Missing people never identified. Families without answers. Every year in the United States there are 600,000 missing person reports and 4,400 sets of unidentified human remains are found. But matching the remains to the missing people is not an easy task.   Meet the passionate scientists, investigators and volunteers dedicating their lives to the seemingly impossible: matching missing persons to unidentified human remains. WRAL Studios presents What Remains, hosted by veteran crime reporter Amanda Lamb.