Couple Who Vanished After Thanksgiving Dinner Were Found Dead Near Open Trunk, Son Says, Revealing More About Their Final Hours

Greg Lightfoot was expecting his elderly parents, Linda and Gary, to return home to Lubbock, Texas — where all three of them live — on Nov. 27. Earlier that day, the couple drove to Panhandle to spend Thanksgiving with other family members, a trip that normally takes about three hours.

However, as it grew dark and his parents still hadn’t arrived, a concerned Greg phoned his relatives to ask if they knew what was going on.

“I called and asked how the day went,” he tells PEOPLE, but says they didn’t remember anything out of the ordinary and said his parents seemed fine when then left.

Since the couple didn’t have a phone on them — Greg says his dad, who was hard of hearing, had trouble with his phone, while he believes his mother just forgot to grab hers — he told their relatives to report the couple as missing to local police.

Five days later, their bodies were found in a rural area of Quay County, New Mexico, hours away from their home.

The Quay County Sheriff’s Office said that deputies were dispatched to a ranch west of Tucumcari on Dec. 2, after receiving a report of a possible sighting of the couple’s vehicle. When they arrived at the scene, they found an inoperable vehicle parked in a tree line at the end of a pasture, which was later confirmed to belong to Linda, 81, and Gary, 82.

“Tragically, both individuals were found deceased at the scene,” the Quay County Sheriff’s Office wrote in their statement at the time, noting that an investigation into their deaths remained ongoing.

“It was certainly a shock and unexpected,” Greg says of their deaths. “We’re handling it one day at a time, basically. We’re just trying to get through it as best we can.”

An only child, Greg, 53, did not go with his parents to Panhandle because he was sick the day before— but he says that his parents had made previous trips to and from Panhandle with no issues.

Although he’s yet to receive a preliminary report from police, he says the confusing path his parents took after leaving the Thanksgiving gathering around 3 p.m. local time was possibly complicated by construction, missed turns and a medical episode of some kind.

Greg says authorities told him that a license plate reader first got a hit for the couple’s car in Groom, which is only 20 miles east from Panhandle. However, that came in around 7 p.m., about an hour after they were expected to arrive home in Lubbock.

“My theory now is that they went to Amarillo after leaving Panhandle to get to I-27 to come back home,” he says.

Although he says his mother has no major health issues that he was aware of, he says he thinks that “something must have happened” to his mother while she was driving. (His father, he notes, doesn’t drive anymore.)

“I don’t know if she was having mini-strokes or something on the way west toward Amarillo,” he says.

Either way, at some point, Greg believes “they either got lost or they got overwhelmed” and decided to turn around and go back to Panhandle — but they missed a turn and they eventually ended up in Groom instead.

After realizing they had gone too far east, they likely turned around again to try and go back to Panhandle or Amarillo, but they “either got lost or overwhelmed…and kind of blew through,” he says.

The next time a hit on their license plate come through, the couple had reached New Mexico.

Greg says a police officer actually pulled over his parents that night in New Mexico because Linda veered out of her lane.

“They had told the officer that they were lost and they were trying to get back to Lubbock,” Greg says. “The officer was a little mystified, I guess, as to why they had ended up where they were. But he gave them directions.”

However, the officer — who had no idea they had been reported missing as a bulletin wouldn’t go out until the next day — said at a certain point they stopped following the directions he gave them.

“He didn’t pull them over a second time,” Greg says. “I don’t know if he got a call or had something else going on.”

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Early the next morning, a license plate reader detected their car around 2 a.m., and his parents were last seen around noon at a Love’s Travel Stop in Tecumcari, N.M.

Although by that point they were still miles away from home, as Greg points out, they were “generally headed in the right direction back.”

“If they had kept on going east, they would’ve at least made it back to Texas, either to Amarillo or to Panhandle,” he says.

Despite the fact that police put out a Silver Alert and searched for the couple throughout New Mexico and Texas, there was no sign of Linda and Gary over the weekend.

Then, on Tuesday, Dec. 2, Greg was on the phone with the Quay Count Sheriff when a rancher called about finding a car that matched the description of his parents’ vehicle.

“The sheriff went out to check it out,” Greg says, “and sure enough it was their vehicle and they were found with the car.”

Greg says his parents “blew through a gate and a cattle deterrent and then ended up in some trees,” which the rancher didn’t discover sooner because of the holidays — and despite using drones to search, police likely missed them due to the tree coverage.

Greg says his parents found together beside an open trunk, and there’s a theory that his mom passed away first, since she was found with a jacket over her face and torso.

“We assumed my dad did that,” he says.

Although an autopsy report has not yet been released, Greg says it’s assumed that his parents froze to death.

The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator has confirmed to PEOPLE that their office has the Lightfoots’ remains, and that an autopsy report takes 2-3 months to finalize.

When reached by PEOPLE, the Panhandle Police Department had no update to share, nor did the Quay County Sheriff’s Office, which is handling the investigation, although they did say it’s “believed the couple got lost after leaving Panhandle.”

Gary, who served in the military and spent many years in law enforcement, and Linda, who worked in banking, were married for 62 years before their deaths.

“My parents were always interesting, fun people, very personable,” Greg says. “They liked to travel. They liked to help people out when they could, whether it was coworkers or friends or people they just met.”

The fact that his parents were able to visit their relatives in Panhandle for Thanksgiving was a “mixed-blessing,” according to their son.

“It was nice that they got to see everyone,” he says, “and have a good experience to sort of say goodbye, even though they didn’t realize that that was what was happening.”

Greg has established a GoFundMe to pay for funeral arrangements and final expenses. A memorial for the couple will take place at Southside Church of Christ in Lubbock on Friday, Dec. 19.