Are there any thoughts on what might have happened?
Great question.
JMO
Been trying hard to come up with some idea of something that allows them to come home safe and sound and unfortunately the only things I can think about is some sort of foul play.
If there had only been one of them then at least we could leave open the possibility of the person becoming disoriented or some sort of memory issue but because there are two of them the odds of something like that is virtually impossible.
One thought I had is if they stopped at that Lot to rest or wait to meet the person with their cattle, then maybe some stranger that was in the lot decided to rob them. That theory would only make sense if the stranger robber(s) forced them to leave with them like to maybe try to withdraw money from an ATM or something and then harmed them elsewhere. Since there were 2 of them I am not sure if stranger robbers would pick those 2 as targets because they seem the type to defend themselves pretty well.
So that unfortunately takes me to what I suspect is a shared theory that the person they were trying to meet decided to tell them to meet him/them at the lot and that they would drive them in the meetee's vehicle since the 2 probably did not know exactly where the land was where the cattle were allegedly being raised. So duped the 2 into the meetee's vehicle and then when they drove them out to who-knows-where they harmed them to avoid paying money or avoid telling them there was no actual cattle and they had taken them for their money or something along those lines.
When relying on out of state people to run a part of your business there is a lot of trust involved in some aspects. How easy would it be for a fake out of state "cattle raiser" to accept money to raise cattle and may have even bought some cattle or just showed them pictures of other people's cattle. It would be easy for a fake cattle raiser to fool someone into thinking everything was fine. Until the day the funder decides to go check to be sure his cattle are healthy and really there.
I have to assume that the reason the older brother brought the younger brother along was to have some extra "muscle" because they may have suspected this particular "cattle raiser" of trying to rip them off. The problem is a gun or other strong arm weapon is the big equalizer and if the bad people had pulled a gun on them before they could react then even if they had 3 or 4 people with them it may have not been enough to get out of a really bad situation.
If I read things right their primary purpose of the trip was to meet up with one particular "cattle raiser" so I suspect they were already having some issues and questions about this person or persons.
This story unfortunately sounds awful right now because I cannot think of anything normal that could have happened. I hope there is some way these 2 can make it home safe.
One thing that doesnt make a whole lot of sense was that if they were meeting someone that same morning as their early afternoon flight it didnt allow a lot of time to meet this guy to check on the cattle. It almost sounds to me that the "meetee" may have been giving them a sort of run around and finally when they said look our flight is leaving tomorrow and if you dont meet up with us then we are going to law enforcement about this. The meetee probably arranged the meeting place and the time. Once there I suspect he pulled a weapon and forced them into his vehicle and it ended badly. I really hope I am wrong because that would be a terrible thing if it happened that way.
Prayers for LE to get to the bottom of this case one way or another.