“We’d gotten our animals together and had our first garden. Bills were almost paid off,” Connie Ballard told Dateline. “He had no reason to walk away from his life.”
Connie’s husband, 56-year-old Larry Bob Ballard, has been missing since April 27, 2023.
Connie told Dateline that she and her husband met 17 years ago when she worked as a dog groomer. “I walked into my office and to the right of me was this guy standing there,” she recalled. Connie said when he left, she asked her co-worker about him. “I said, ‘Terry, who was that?’ And she said, ‘That’s Bob Ballard. He’s going to be sharpening my blades and stuff.’ And I said, ‘Really? Did anybody ask me if I needed my blades sharpened?’”
Four years later, the couple was married and settled into their home in Douglasville, Texas. “If you ever met him, he treats you like he’s known you forever,” Connie said of her husband. “He doesn’t meet a stranger. He’s always bubbly and happy and loves to make people laugh.”
Connie last saw her husband on Wednesday, April 26. “He got up that morning, came in, woke me up and told me he was going to the feed store,” she remembered. “He said, ‘Do you want me to stop and get you cigarettes on the way back?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’”
Connie told Dateline she quickly realized that something was off. “I got up and I thought, I must have overslept -- because he doesn’t get up before me. So I sit there, and I fixed me a cup of coffee and I text him and said, ‘You might want to stop and get some coffee creamer, too,” she said. “Well, he never answered me. I tried calling him, he never answered me. Then I got a feeling in my stomach that he wasn’t going to answer me,” Connie said, tearfully.
According to Connie, her husband struggled on and off with substance abuse, so she assumed he might be off doing drugs. “He finally answered the phone on Thursday around 2 p.m. Said, ‘I’ll be home when I get the truck unstuck.’”
Connie told Dateline that Bob got his truck stuck on the side of the road in Douglassville and needed her brother to come help him. “So my brother went down there,” she said.
Around 11:30 p.m., Connie said her brother came back — but Bob wasn’t with him. “I said, ‘Where’s Bob?’ He said, ‘He didn’t want to leave the truck down there. He got the truck unstuck, but the tire was off the rim.’”
According to Connie, Bob’s truck was extremely important to him. “Welders are like that because that’s what they work out of,” she explained.
“So I got up and I called him,” she said. “He said, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Your brother’s going to bring me a tire.”
The next morning, on Friday April 28, Connie’s brother got up early to bring Bob a tire. But when he arrived, Bob wasn’t there. “He called, he said, ‘Bob’s not here.’ So I went down there. He wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to do,” Connie told Dateline.
She said when they looked in Bob’s truck, all of his belongings were still inside. “He left his wallet, his phone, his cigarettes, his dip, everything in the truck. His beer, everything,” Connie said. “Like he just vanished.”
Connie reported Bob missing.
According to a Facebook post from the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, Bob was last seen on Thursday April 27 around 11 p.m., on CR 2116 at CR 2188 where his truck got stuck. The post goes on to say that he was “on foot walking towards the area north of Douglassville around Hwy 8 and CR 2122.”
Dateline reached out to the Cass County Sheriff’s Office for the latest updates in Bob’s case but has yet to receive a response.
Connie told Dateline that there were several searches done for Bob. “The game warden brought his dog out on Saturday (the 29th.) They were doing, like, a live search, and they walked down the road, came back and they didn’t find nothing,” she said, adding that bodies of water were searched as well.
But there was no sign of Bob.
Connie told Dateline that investigators are now looking into getting Bob’s cellphone records. “The last thing was that he was supposed to be getting a warrant done to get [the] geofence on Bob’s phone,” she said.
One thing Connie said she knows for sure is that her husband wouldn’t just take off. “It wasn’t like him to leave his truck after he said he wasn’t going to,” she said. “He knew my brother was going to be there with the tire.”
Connie said she’s still hoping Bob will walk through their front door. “I think he’s going to come walking down the driveway and come tell me some stupid story about being gone,” she said. “This just doesn’t make sense.”
Bob is 5’8”, 200 lbs., with hazel eyes and graying blonde hair. He was last seen wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and work boots.
Anyone with information about Bob’s disappearance is asked to call the Cass County Sheriff’s Office at 903-756-7511.