The smiling face on the billboard along the two-lane highway in rural western Nebraska is a grim reminder of a family’s loss and their desperate pleas for answers.
It’s been nearly six years since Moorcroft, Wyoming, man Chance Englebert disappeared on a weekend trip to visit his in-laws.
“What happened to me here on July 6, 2019?” the billboard reads next to a photo of Englebert’s smiling face.
The question is one that plagues law enforcement and Englebert’s friends and family, all of whom have been desperately searching and waiting years for some kind of answer.
The family first put up the billboard in 2020 on the first-year anniversary of his disappearance. Every couple years, it requires a costly facelift to repair the faded image and peeling vinyl.
The billboard was initially paid for by donations, but the endeavor has since been taken over by Englebert’s grandmother, Linda Kluender, who took the occasion of her birthday in February to touch it up for the third time.
“I don’t want our boy faded,” Kluender told Cowboy State Daily.
Englebert, who then was living in northeast Wyoming, vanished during a trip to visit his wife's family in Nebraska. Six years later, there's still no answers, nor has law enforcement identified any people of interest in his disappearance.
His family continues their efforts to finally solve the mystery that grows colder every day.
For Kluender and Englebert’s mother, Dawn, and their family, the billboard is more than just a request for tips. It serves as a constant reminder of their love for him as well as their tenacity in their search for answers.
It’s a costly endeavor at around $1,800 to $2,100 to revamp and then $350 each month to rent, but it’s worth every penny to Kluender.
“We will not give up,” Kluender said. “That billboard will be up as long as there is breath in me, and then I pray I can leave Dawn enough to continue it.”
Heated Argument
So far, answers have been slow to come as to what happened the last night Englebert was seen.
Brian Eads, lead investigator with the Gering Police Department in western Nebraska in charge of Englebert’s investigation, confirmed there are no new updates in the case.
“Unfortunately, no, nothing new,” he wrote in an email. “We continue to get some tips here and there, but nothing that has panned out.”
All that’s known is what has been released so far by the Gering police and Englebert’s family.
Englebert, then 25, his wife Baylee and their infant son had driven from their Moorcroft home to visit Baylee’s family in Gering, Nebraska, for the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
Englebert had spent the day golfing with Baylee’s family when he got angry over comments one of them had made about his new job. Englebert had just been laid off from a job at an area coal mine along with hundreds of others and was set to begin a new position at a propane company in Moorcroft the following Monday.
Upset, he then called his wife to come get him, telling her he wanted to return to Wyoming. As the couple drove to Baylee’s grandparents’ house, an argument ensued, according to authorities, and when they arrived, Englebert took off on foot from the home to cool off.
As he walked through Gering, Englebert called family members in South Dakota and his best friend, Matt Miller, in Wyoming, asking them to pick him up, but all were at least four or more hours away.
Englebert told them he wanted out of Gering and planned to walk the 35 miles to Torrington, Wyoming.
He never made it.
Final Traces
He was last spotted on surveillance video walking alone in neighboring Terrytown, about 1.5 miles north of Gering and halfway between Gering and Scottsbluff.
In the video, he looks down at his phone before taking a 90-degree turn to the left, as if following a map.
His last communication was a text message to a family member at 9:08 p.m., just as a torrential storm swept through the area.
The jumble of letters and the smiley face emoji made no sense to any of them.
“He never used emojis,” Dawn said.
Despite a massive 17-plus-agency search of the Gering-Scottsbluff area and along the North Platte River with drones, divers, cadaver dogs and hundreds of volunteers on foot, horseback and ATVs, Englebert remains missing.
Subsequent searches over the years by Miller and other volunteers have likewise turned up no clues.
Possible Theories
Though typically tight-lipped about the open investigation with the media, Eads opened up in a January 2022 interview with News Nation in which he floated one theory he’s investigating about a robbery gone wrong.
Eads told the news outlet that he’s heard tips about the alleged robbery from several people with various reiterations and suspects, though so far nothing has panned out.
“There’s a lot of rumors and a lot of speculation,” he said during the interview, adding that his agency continues to get a lot of tips that are similar in information but also very different. He said his agency has conducted numerous polygraph tests to weed out suspects and tipsters.
Likewise, Eads said that he’s interviewed Baylee “at length” and that she’s always been cooperative, as has been the rest of her family.
He’s not ruling out foul play, though thus far there’s no indication that a crime took place.
Another theory circulating by some on social media was that Englebert wandered or accidentally fell into the surging North Platte River as the storm passed through that night.
Englebert’s friends and family, however, do not believe that he would have succumbed to the elements that night no matter how much the storm was raging given his skills as an outdoorsman and his athleticism as a former college rodeo star.
Money Doesn’t Work
Ample reward money, likewise, has done nothing to bring out viable tips.
To sweeten the pot, Kluender increased the reward money from $20,000 to $220,000 for just one year leading up to Englebert’s 30th birthday on Dec. 2, 2023.
There’s still a reward available, sitting at $22,000.
Along with the police investigation, a handful of volunteer private investigators have stepped up to help the Englebert family.
In 2021, Casper-based private investigator Amanda Waldron volunteered her time and made some strides on the case.
A new volunteer private investigator who asked to be identified only by his company name RD Investigations unearthed two new tips last year, including a potential unconfirmed sighting of Englebert by a former clerk at a convenience store in Scottsbluff.
If accurate, this would help nail down Englebert’s movements that night, putting him 2 miles down the road from the last known sighting of him on surveillance video in Terrytown.
The second new lead included another unconfirmed sighting of two women in their mid-20s running alongside the road near Five Rocks and Stable Club roads through the rain that night while frantically yelling for help, within a mile of the store where Englebert was allegedly last seen.
The witnesses also told RD Investigations that they saw the women getting picked up by a white, two-door pickup that was towing a small boat on a white trailer.
RD Investigations shared his report with both Gering and Scottsbluff law enforcement.
The private investigator told Cowboy State Daily on Monday that he may have a lead on possibly identifying one of the females as well as the driver of the pickup truck.
Never Giving Up
In the meantime, Englebert’s family hopes that someone will see the billboard and feel compelled to share key information to finally solve the mystery of what happened to him that night.
“The frustrating thing is that money so far hasn’t worked in getting anyone to come forward,” Dawn said. “A billboard may be more effective because people have to drive by it every day and ask themselves the question.”
She and her husband, Everett, who live on a ranch in South Dakota, don’t have the heart to drive to the spot where their son was last seen to see the billboard for themselves, she said.
But she hopes it resonates with someone who will come forward to share what they know.
“I just beg for people to be honest about what happened, and if they really know something, please tell someone,” she said.
Along with losing her son, they said another casualty has been losing their grandson, Banks, who they haven’t seen since Englebert vanished due to lasting tensions between the two families.
Efforts to reach Baylee were unsuccessful, though in the past, she's told media outlets that she no longer gives interviews out of fear for her safety.
Regardless, Dawn said she and her family will continue to fight until they know what happened to her son.
“We are never going away or giving up,” she said.
Dawn said she’s grateful for her mother, who continues to lead her own crusade to find out what happened to her grandson.
For her, the billboard stands for more than just a way to solicit tips and information. It also preserves his memory and the man that he would have been.
“The sign says we are proud of you, Chance,” Kluender said. “You tried everything in your power to build a good marriage, good family.”
She thinks of Englebert’s son and the fact that he, too, lost a father.
“I want Banks to know that we did not give up trying to find his daddy,” she said.
Anyone with information is asked to call RD Investigations at 605-389-3196 or the Gering Police Department at 308-436-5088.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
