Chance Englebert

Chance Englebert was a young husband, father and rodeo competitor from Moorcroft, Wyoming, who became the subject of a six-year missing persons case after he vanished during a family visit to Gering, Nebraska, in the summer of 2019. He was 25 years old at the time he disappeared, married to his wife Baylee, and the father of an infant son, Banks, who had been born only weeks earlier. His case drew national attention, including coverage by NBC's Dateline, and his family kept his story alive for years through community searches, a roadside billboard and social media appeals.

On July 6, 2019, Englebert and his wife were staying with her grandparents in Gering while visiting her family. After the two argued that evening, he left the house on foot and told a friend he intended to walk roughly 35 miles back toward Wyoming. He was last seen walking in the 700 block of O Street in Gering before he vanished without a trace. Despite hundreds of interviews, search warrants, polygraph examinations and searches involving more than a dozen agencies and forensic K9 teams from several states, no sign of him was found for more than six years.

That changed on October 10, 2025, when hikers discovered human remains in a remote, little traveled area of the Scotts Bluff National Monument, roughly five miles from where Englebert was last seen. DNA testing confirmed on November 25, 2025, that the remains belonged to him. A joint statement from the Gering Police Department and the Scotts Bluff County Attorney the following day concluded that Englebert had died from blunt force trauma consistent with a fall of somewhere between 130 and 290 feet from a cliff on the monument's North Bluff, and that the death was accidental.

The ruling has not settled the matter for everyone who loved him. His mother and other family members have publicly questioned how he could have ended up in such a remote, rugged location on his own, and have said they believe someone else was involved in his death. Authorities have maintained that an exhaustive investigation turned up no evidence that the death was anything other than accidental. His remains were returned to his wife following the identification.

Englebert's death closed one chapter of a case that had haunted southeastern Wyoming and the Nebraska Panhandle for six years, but for his family the questions have not gone away. He is remembered by those who knew him as a devoted young father who, as his wife told Dateline in 2019, would not have simply walked away from his family.