UPDATE: On Tuesday, March 17, 2026, the Wakefield Police Department announced that a body had been recovered earlier in the day from Lake Quannapowitt. According to the press release, the clothing suggests that the victim is Jason Thomas. The medical examiner has not yet identified the cause and manner of death. No foul play is suspected.
There are moments in life — simple, ordinary moments — that seem so normal at the time, but when we look back on them later, they can carry such significance.
For Kristen Bartoli, there’s a singular moment: locking eyes with her husband, Jason Thomas, for just a second before he turned away and walked down the street on the night of December 12, 2025.
At the time, Kristen thought he was just going for a late-night walk around their Wakefield, Massachusetts, neighborhood. He’d been struggling with the recent deaths of his parents.
Now, three months later, she remembers it as the last time she saw her husband.
Jason, an assistant director of chemical biology at Novartis, met Kristen in college. They’ve been married for a decade. “He’s one of the kindest people I have ever met,” Kristen said. “He always took the time to go out of his way to make others feel important and happy.”
Kristen, a former scientist, is now an animal trainer and behavior consultant — a career change she says Jason encouraged. “It was actually Jason’s idea,” Kristen said. “He encouraged me to follow my passion.” The couple has five dogs — Dazzle, Prosecco, Champagne, St. Germain, and Fireball.
On December 12, 2025, Kristen and Jason were coming home from a night out with their friends. “He was really quiet,” Kristen said. While that wasn’t typical for Jason, it wasn’t surprising, given the circumstances. It was one of the first times that Jason and Kristen had gone out socializing after Jason’s parents died the month before.
Jason, who is an only child, had been by his mother’s side when she passed away in hospice care. Just an hour later, as he and his father were preparing details for the funeral, Jason’s father collapsed in his arms and died of a heart attack. According to Kristen, it was traumatic. “He had never lost somebody so close before. And then to lose both of them,” she said.
While his grief was enormous, Kristen felt like they were making it through the tough time together. “There were days where I’ve never really seen him cry so much before,” she recalled. “But then there are days, like, he’d be like, ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk with the dogs. Go for a hike.’ And he’d seem better.”
When the couple got home on December 12, they took care of the dogs, letting them out and giving them treats, before heading upstairs to their bedroom. According to Kristen, everything seemed normal. But after turning away for just a moment, she was surprised to find Jason had disappeared. She called out and he didn’t respond, so she went looking for him. Then she heard a distinct bang come from the front of the house. She recognized it — it was the sound of the mailbox closing. “I ran out the driveway door,” Kristen recalled. Jason was there, walking in front of the house. “We made eye contact,” she said. At the time, it gave her peace, she says — like that moment of connection meant Jason wasn’t angry or upset. “That means something to me because I truly felt like he was just going for a walk. Like he wasn’t trying to get away.”
Kristen knows from their Ring cameras that Jason left the house at 11:53 p.m. From then until 12:13 a.m., she called Jason a number of times. She believes she fell asleep shortly after 12:13 a.m., waking up around 1:30 a.m. to find that Jason had not returned. “I opened my eyes, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God. The lights are on and he’s not in bed,’” she said.
It was then that Kristen realized Jason had emptied the pockets of his jacket when he came upstairs — his phone and wallet were on the bathroom counter. Shortly after that, she went outside and found his Apple Watch in the mailbox, presumably left behind when she heard the noise of the mailbox door closing.
Kristen says she immediately began searching the home and their two cars. Nothing. Then she drove around the block, checking the routes he usually took on his walks, including a route around a nearby lake. When there was still no sign of Jason, she called the Wakefield Police Department. “They asked me a bunch of questions, and I was just like, ‘This isn’t like him.’ Like, ‘He couldn’t not come home.’ Like, ‘I think there’s something wrong,’” she recalled.
Dateline spoke to Wakefield Police Chief Steven Skory about his department’s search for Jason in the early morning hours of December 13, 2025.
Four on-duty officers began canvassing the area in their patrol cars, and checking with local businesses for cameras or possible sightings.
When those initial officers asked Kristen if she wanted to file a report, she says she held off, hoping Jason would come home on his own.
But when the sun rose with no sign of him, Kristen headed to the police station to file a missing person report.
With the report officially filed, Chief Skory says his department was able to request help from the Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council. “So we also called in a canine team and drone team,” he said. By 11:00 a.m., Skory said there were five or six canines and four drones searching for Jason.
Investigating officers were able to locate a Ring doorbell camera that showed Jason not far from his home. “He crosses a street right near a train station and a set of railroad tracks,” Skory said. “And that’s where we focused our search.”
The issue with searching the railroad tracks with a canine team, according to Skory, is that the scent is hard to follow. “Every time a train comes through, it pulls scent away from anything,” he told Dateline. Both the drone and canine teams followed the railroad tracks, but found no sign of Jason. “We’ve had two other sets of canine teams come in with both scent dogs and cadaver dogs that have done their own searches, and nothing has been found,” he noted.
Investigators told Dateline they don’t believe foul play was involved in Jason’s disappearance. Kristen says she has pored over Jason’s journals, looking for anything to make sense of it all. The loss of his parents certainly put him under a massive strain. And despite things going well at work, “Jason seems to have felt a lot of pressure,” Kristen said. He had even mentioned to her that maybe he wanted to change careers. Kristen says she didn’t take his comments seriously at the time. “I’m just letting him talk it out,” she said. She assumed he wanted a change because of his grief. Whatever did happen, Kristen says, it has left her absolutely shell-shocked. “None of this makes sense to me,” she said. “He would not leave us.”
Kristen wonders if it’s possible her husband got on a train at the Wakefield station. She says the conductor told her no one boarded the train there that night. But the commuter train moves slowly, so maybe he just jumped on without anyone seeing him. “If the train goes by, he could have just reached on and grabbed on,” she said. She’s put up posters along the train route, which ends in Haverhill, Massachusetts. “I can’t believe he would willingly walk away from us, because he always said we’re his entire world,” Kristen said, of herself and the dogs. “But at the same time, I’m like, if he wasn’t well and he needed time, then I don’t know.”
The Wakefield Police Department has received tips and reports of possible sightings of Jason since he disappeared. “None of them have panned out,” Skory said of the rumored sightings. “It’s very frustrating for us because we’ve hit a dead end.” Nothing of Jason’s has ever been recovered. “No gloves, no hat, no jacket. Nothing,” Skory said. And according to investigators, there hasn’t been any activity in his bank accounts, including any access to his parents’ estate.
“He’s entered into NCIC as a missing person. His picture is everywhere. He’s been on the news. It’s on social media. People are well aware of the fact that he’s a missing person,” Skory told Dateline. Despite all of this, there has been no confirmed sign of Jason since the night of his disappearance. “He basically just vanishes after he walks past in that one video,“ Skory said.
There’s one more uncharted search zone — the waters of Lake Quannapowitt. Jason would sometimes take the dogs around the lake for a walk since it’s not far from their home. The night Jason disappeared, Kristen searched around the lake for him. Police also covered the lake in those first few hours, and dogs and drones have combed the area to no avail. But no one has ever been able to search the water. “The lake was partially frozen on December 13th, and it froze over completely shortly thereafter,” Skory said. “It’s been completely frozen since.”
Come spring, the Wakefield Police Department has plans to search with a dive team and sonar equipment. “We just have to wait for the lake to unfreeze before we can do that,” Skory said. “And that’s just to rule out the possibility that he’s in there.”
It’s a sobering thing to look forward to, but Kristen will stop at nothing in her search for Jason. “There’s no sign that he’s in it,” Kristen said. “But at the same time, not knowing is just, like, it’s awful. It’s just awful. It’s the worst.”
The search will continue until Jason’s family and community have answers. “Our detectives have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on this case,” Skory said. “Our own drone operators have gone out on their own time to go over areas that they already searched, just in case they missed something. We’ve had the cadaver dogs go out twice. Our detectives have gone out. They’ve knocked on every business door, every residential door, asking people if they saw anything, if there was any video.”
“I just want people to keep their eyes open,” Kristen told Dateline. “If you see anything, if you know anything, please just reach out. I just need to know he’s OK.” At this point, “he could be anywhere,” Kristen acknowledged. But she encourages people to check their security cameras and call the Wakefield Police Department if they see any unusual behavior in the days and weeks since Jason’s disappearance. “If you saw anybody hitchhiking that night, if you saw somebody being picked up in a taxi, or — or if you had picked them up in a taxi or an Uber and [they] didn’t have a wallet,” Kristen said. “That is important information.”
No matter what happened, Kristen wants her husband to know one thing. “He’s so loved, and I really hope he knows how loved he is, and how missed he is,” she said.
Jason is 5’5” and 180 lbs., with black graying hair. He has a distinctive mole on his right nostril. He would have turned 46 the month after he vanished. He was last seen wearing a gray and white Columbia puffer jacket and a black hat with the label “Turtle Fur”. He also had on a blue wool sweater, dark blue jeans, and blue sneakers with white stripes on them.
If you know anything about Jason Thomas’s disappearance or whereabouts, please call the Wakefield Police Department at 781-245-1212.
If you have a story to share with Dateline, please submit it here.
