In 2017, Jayden Penno-Tompsett set out on a New Year's road trip. He hasn't been seen since.

Jayden Penno-Tompsett and his mate Lucas Tattersall planned to spend New Year’s Eve 2017 in Cairns.

The Newcastle pair had left home days before, making the long drive to far north Queensland.

On December 31 the pair arrived in the small town of Charters Towers, 130 kilometres inland of Townsville.

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There, CCTV footage captured Jayden, 22, at a service station in the early hours of New Year’s Eve.

Not long after, Jayden and Lucas got into an argument. Jayden walked off into bushland, and Lucas drove away.

When he returned not long after, Jayden was still missing.

He was never seen again.

Lucas reported his friend missing three days later, and more than 20 police and 50 SES and RFS volunteers combed a huge 85 square-kilometre search area around Charters Towers, where Lucas said he had left the car.

Lucas defended himself in a series of Facebook posts in 2018, upset at accusations he should have done more to help.

“I’m sorry to tell you but if someone wants to just up and leave and f*** off then that’s what they are gonna do. [You] don’t understand how hard I tried to help Jayden when I with him and calm him down so we can sort this out,” he wrote, news.com.au reported.

He said he was heartbroken about what had happened and needed to leave Charters Towers without his mate because he was owed money in Cairns that he needed to get his car, which was “on the verge of breaking down”, fixed.

For two years, Jayden's mother Rachel has wondered what happened to her son.

Police suspended the physical search for him in late January 2018, about three weeks after his disappearance, but she has not stopped searching.

On December 30, a day before he vanished, Jayden responded to a text from his mother asking "R u ok?".

"Yeah," he said, an uncharacteristically brief response that worried her.

"He normally would have elaborated. He would have said ‘Yeah, I’m at blah blah’ or ‘Yeah, I’ll call you later’. It was the last I heard from him," Rachel told 9News in May 2018.

Speaking to the Daily Mail on the two year anniversary of Jayden's disappearance, Rachel said she became more concerned when she hacked Jayden's Facebook and email.

She discovered threats from a man she discovered was a local drug dealer, who Jayden allegedly owed money.

Her son was in debt and she said she believed he was pressured to go on the road trip after someone threatened to have him and his mum 'roughed up'.

Jayden had told Rachel to make sure she was not home during the day one afternoon leading up to Christmas, and when she returned home her screen door had been damaged.

"There was a lot of suspicious stuff," she said.

"He told me he was in a bit of trouble and that he was getting threats, but he didn't say who from."

Rachel also runs the Jayden Penno-Tompsett Help Find Facebook page, where she receives regular tips and information.

She told the Daily Mail one name had repeatedly come up in tips she received.

She has passed her information to police, but hoped an inquest into Jayden's disappearance, and presumed death, would confirm her suspicions of foul play.

More than anything, she just wants to find her son.

Feature images: Facebook.