Despite a 10-year age gap, Lydia Carter and her brother, Robert Wayne Cox, were always close. “He was always good to me growing up,” Lydia told Dateline. “He was just a good-hearted guy.”
In the fall of 2008, Lydia noticed a change in her brother. He was anxiety-ridden. This wasn’t the first time Robert dealt with anxiety. He struggled with it when he moved from California to Arkansas in the late ‘80s.
Lydia recalled going over to Robert’s house in Havana, Arkansas, one day in 2008, when he was particularly on edge. “I said, ‘Well, let’s take your blood pressure and let’s just see what’s going on,’” she said.
Robert’s blood pressure was high, and Lydia convinced him to get it checked out. She said doctors ran a CT scan and found nothing wrong with Robert. He was prescribed blood pressure medication.
“From there it just kind of escalated on into 2009,” Lydia remembered. She was concerned and convinced her brother to go to counseling. She says doctors recommended Robert to CHI St. Vincent’s behavioral health facility in Little Rock. He was admitted for a couple days in late 2009. According to Lydia, Robert left without a diagnosis and his health continued to decline.
In September of 2009, around his 56th birthday, Robert started to become nonverbal. By Thanksgiving of that year, his head began to droop and his body showed signs of muscle atrophy, according to Lydia. By Christmas of 2009, Robert was completely nonverbal and his chin rested on his chest. He walked with a shuffling gait and needed assistance completing daily tasks, such as getting dressed.
Lydia and her father, Gene Cox, frequently took care of Robert. “I was up there every day, multiple times a day,” Lydia said.
Robert lived in a log house on Rodeo Road that he and his father built in 1987. Gene lived on the adjoining property, 200 feet from Robert’s house. Lydia lived just two miles down the road.
“[Robert] was a homebody,” Lydia said. He lived with his wife, Vickie, as well as Vickie’s daughter and granddaughter, on just over 35 acres of land.
Lydia says as time went on, they continued to try to care for Robert and spend time as a family. “He liked having family around at the holidays and celebrating,” she explained.
But that all came to an end by February 2011 when Robert vanished.
Lydia and her husband were expecting company that night for dinner. She was caught up in cleaning when she remembered to check in on Robert. “It got to be after 12 o’clock, and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I haven’t even called up there to check on brother this morning,’” she remembered thinking.
She called Vickie at 12:32 p.m. While on the phone, Lydia learned that Robert wasn’t in the house, so she says she asked Vickie if someone could go look for him.
Robert’s large property borders a clear cut — a clearing where a pine thicket had been cut down in the summer of 2009 — leaving behind a mess of tree stumps and roots. “He loved the outdoors,” Lydia said. “I never worried about him wandering off.” But she was concerned he could be stuck somewhere outside.
Then, according to Lydia, Vickie said she spotted Robert in the clear cut near the road and was going to get her car and drive over to pick him up. About a half hour later, Lydia says, she got a voicemail from Vickie that Robert was missing, so she grabbed her horse and rode over to the house.
When she got there, a neighbor was already in the clear cut searching for footprints in the mud. Another neighbor’s son called 911 at 1:12 p.m., and the Yell County Sheriff’s Office was dispatched to the residence. The state police were called in to assist the sheriff’s office. Sergeant Jake Bartlett, of the Arkansas State Police, spoke with Dateline on behalf of both departments. He says Vickie told responding officers “she looked through the clear cut and saw her husband, Robert Cox, near a pile of brush/trees,” and that Vickie, her daughter, and granddaughter “all reported they searched for Robert on foot.” Vickie and her granddaughter also reported they “searched additionally by ATV/vehicle,” Bartlett said.
Lydia described the scene as mass confusion. “I’m also thinking to myself, ‘How in the world could he have walked off and gotten very far in the shape that he was in?’” she said. “My mind was just spinning. I couldn’t grasp it.”
The city of Havana, made up of fewer than 300 people, came together to look for Robert. One neighbor’s son was a pilot, and another neighbor down the road had a private plane. The plane was up in the air searching for Robert within 30 minutes of his disappearance.
Sergeant Bartlett says five sets of K-9 teams were on the scene that day and about 60 law enforcement officers searched the surrounding area on horseback and ATVs. A dive team took on the ponds and wells. By 10 p.m., ASP had also provided two helicopters for thermal imaging.
Lydia and her neighbor rode their horses along the whole clear cut. “There’s nowhere for him to go,” she said.
The search for Robert continued the next morning. Nothing was found.
“Everybody’s coming up to me and coming up to my husband and saying, ‘No, this just doesn’t make any sense,’” Lydia told Dateline. “There’s no way Robert could have got out and, you know, vanished in thin air.”
Dateline reached out to Vickie, her daughter, and granddaughter for their recollections of the day Robert vanished, but hasn’t yet received a response.
In March 2011, the Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division helped the Yell County Sheriff’s Office recreate the scene and conduct interviews. “Initial interviews were conducted with the family,” Sgt. Bartlett said. Officers canvassed the neighborhood as well. Potential witnesses were re-interviewed as recently as spring 2025. Bartlett would not provide additional details or comment on whether his department believes foul play is involved in Robert’s disappearance.
In May 2025, Lydia connected with missing persons advocate Colleen Nick. Colleen is the Founder and CEO of The Morgan Nick Foundation, which she created after the 1995 kidnapping of her 6-year-old daughter, Morgan, in Alma, Arkansas.
Colleen helped Lydia sponsor a K-9 search and rescue team to look for Robert. Dateline spoke with Caleb Landers, the chairman of the board and K-9 handler for the 3R K-9 Search Foundation. Caleb has been working in search and rescue for nearly two decades and started the foundation in 2023. The name underscores their mission, with “3R” representing Rescue, Recover, and Reunite.
“I’ve always been interested in the dog side of it,” Caleb told Dateline. “K-9s are a great resource if they’re appropriately trained. And, you know, being able to help provide some answers for families is, I mean, that’s the main reason we all do it.”
This second large-scale search for Robert began on May 4, 2025. Fourteen agencies and teams were represented, including the Yell County Sheriff’s Department and Arkansas State Police. A total of five K-9 handlers and nine K-9s were involved in the search.
“The dogs that we used are trained for what we call human remains detection. So they’re searching for the odor of human decomposition,” Caleb explained.
The search included approximately 296 acres surrounding Robert’s property, and lasted about 22 hours.
Nothing was found that would help locate Robert.
“Ever since that search, it just, like, emotionally drained me to a point that I — that I haven’t been in a long time,” Lydia Carter told Dateline. Despite that, she hopes to bring Caleb and law enforcement out for another search soon.
Robert’s case remains active 15 years later. “We’re treating it as a missing persons investigation, as far as Arkansas State Police is concerned,” Sgt. Bartlett told Dateline.
Lydia is still hoping for answers. “Everybody he met just loved him, liked him, enjoyed being around him,” she said. “My most important goal is for Robert to be found and be brought home and put to rest properly.”
Robert is 5’10” and 130 lbs. He has brown and gray hair, a gray beard and mustache, and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing gray sweatpants, gray tennis shoes, and either a navy hoodie or dark blue and gray flannel shirt. He would be 72 years old today.
If you have information about Robert’s whereabouts or the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, please contact the Yell County Sheriff’s Department at 479-495-4881.
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