A story that has never been told. It began for me three years ago, but the family's nightmare began four years before that. Their son had gone to Thailand for a holiday but never came back. He was presumed dead.

It could have been my family. It could have been yours. Here was a family of intelligent, successful people. They were business people. They were organizers. They were talented. They had a wide circle of influential friends and associates, but now they were helpless, broken, and had depleted every resource they had.

Their family business was billboards and advertising and they were used to getting results. When their son first disappeared, they posted a reward, took trips toThailand where they erected large billboards, posted flyers, retraced their son's trip and beat on the doors of officials and media, including CNN. Still they had no son, no body, no leads and only a few emotional threads left. This young man, 25 years old, was very much loved. So what happened?

I had traveled alone through India and Nepal for a year and knew first hand how very easy it would be to disappear in Asia. The possibilities are endless. The family had come to the conclusion that perhaps someone had slipped drugs into their son's drink that had destroyed his mind. Perhaps he was in a mental institution somewhere in Thailand. Slipping drugs into foreigner's drinks is common, for the purpose of robbing them. Prostitutes are known to paint drugs on their nipples in order to have their victims pass out. In Asia you can be robbed, raped, murdered, tossed into the sea or decapitated. Easy. An alarming number of foreigners, worldwide, go missing every year. Some bodies are found; some are not. The Thai Police have large photo albums of dead bodies, yet to be identified. The bodies wash up on shore or are found in the jungle, on the streets or in hotel rooms.

While traveling in Asia I met dozens of people, old hippies, young hippies and just plain lost souls. They had dropped out, tuned out, and were sitting on beaches, on mountains, in ashrams, or lying in hammocks, contemplating the meaning of life. Most of them were stoned, suffering post traumatic stress disorder, stuck in time, or just plain didn't give a damn.

I remember two young girls I had met on a train from Bombay to Hospit. They were on their way to Poona, heads shaved and rings in their noses. I was sure they were 16 years old, no more. They were laughing at the fact that their families had no clue they were overseas. I tried to get their names but they had given each other cutesy Indian names and had abandoned their given names. I got off at Hospit. There were so many people like those kids on every 'Lonely Planet' trail. What could I do?

But three years ago, while watching "Mom" cry (I cannot use her real name) I knew I would be returning to Asia to find her son. To watch a mom grieve over the loss of her son, her first-born, is something every parent would find painful to watch. I wept. I also knew my undertaking would not be easy. At that time I was working for a law firm where it was always drilled into me, "What does the evidence say?" So I prepared……for an entire year.

We had daylong family meetings to go through every detail of their son's trip, his life, and the realm of possibilities. Each family member suffered, some quietly, some loudly, but all suffered. Some clung to hope as if it was the very air they breathed, especially Mom. Some could not bear to continue on the roller coaster of hope and despair and had come to their own conclusion that this boy was dead. I interviewed friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances. I slept in his room, read his books, poured over family albums, and examined his schoolwork. I learned his likes and dislikes, his hobbies and interests.

He had been studying genetics at University but had not attended that semester. He was a tree planter, a naturalist, and had the quiet demeanor of his father. He was part Chinese and proud of his heritage. When he was around twelve years old he wrote a story about what he wanted to be when he grew up. He wanted to be 007, James Bond. It seems fitting, therefore, that for this story I refer to him as James.

James had phoned home after four-and-a-half months in Thailand, said he was coming home and that he had booked his flight for the sixteenth. He had also sent a letter home. He placed one more call home from a Thai hospital, but the family was not home to receive the call. The flight booking was confirmed but no one showed up for the flight, and the sixteenth came and went with no James in sight.

When the family, including James' energetic uncle, had originally gone to Thailand in search of James, they received an anonymous phone call that led them to his daypack. A few things were in the pack, everyday sort of things. The people at the bungalow where the pack was located said that James had been swinging in his hammock, talking crazy, and that he had been sick. Other leads went nowhere and the family was forced to return home. The Embassy, the Police, Interpole - where were they?

I wanted to see everything that was in the daypack, but much of it had been dispersed, given away, thrown away, and put away. Nothing had been closely looked at and the police had never asked for it. Mom had kept his scarf. She loved to smell it.

There had been twelve paperback books in the pack. I wanted them, so I rummaged through boxes to find those books that had since been put away. While reading the paperbacks (all sci-fi) I came across a train ticket tucked inside one of the books. Stamped on the end of the books was the name of a small bookstore in Malaysia. The family developed a roll of film from the pack. The photos showed a happy James with friends, strangers. James had his driver's license and birth certificate in the pack. His passport and his traveler's checks, though, were never found and the traveler's checks never cashed.

The most important piece of evidence from the pack by far was a diary. James had kept a day-by-day diary of his trip. There were telephone numbers and names in the diary, but there were also thirty pages ripped out at the end. Everything in the diary was pretty upbeat and brief except for the very last entry. The entry cussed and ranted like a crazy, angry person. James was not crazy, nor was he an angry person. He was known to always keep his cool even when others were losing theirs. There was also a scribbler that James had used to write an RPG world in. Quite brilliant. RPG stands for role-playing game, something that James had been into for ten years. There was a wealth of evidence, never studied or scrutinized.