Norvel Robert Nelson III, a 37-year-old white male known to family and others as Bobby or Bob, was last seen on January 5, 2012, in Mineral Point, Missouri, in Washington County. He had gone there to collect his wife’s belongings from a trailer where she had stayed at some point, a seemingly ordinary errand that became the last confirmed point of contact in his life.
At the time he disappeared, Norvel was described as 5 feet 10 inches tall and about 150 pounds, with blond or strawberry-blond hair, hazel eyes, and a full beard. He was legally blind, and some sources also noted that he had short-term memory loss, details that made his disappearance especially concerning because they could have affected his ability to navigate safely or communicate his needs.
Bobby’s absence was not in keeping with his normal pattern. According to case information, he kept in touch with his mother at least once a week, but after January 5, 2012, that contact stopped. The silence was alarming because it broke a routine connection that his family could rely on, and no confirmed communication from him followed. When he was last known to be seen, he was reported to have been wearing a gray sweatshirt, blue jeans, and blue tennis shoes or sneakers. Identifying features included a scar on the left side of his face running from his forehead to his ear, tribal tattoos on both arms, hazel eyes, and the visual impairment noted in official and missing-person summaries.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office handled the investigation, with the agency case number listed as 20120094, and NamUs listed the case as MP14025. The case was entered into NamUs after Bobby went missing, and public missing-person information repeated the same central facts: he was last seen in Mineral Point, he had gone to retrieve belongings from the trailer, and his family had not heard from him afterward. The Missouri State Highway Patrol’s missing-person resources directed the public to the investigating agency for information, while NamUs served as a centralized record for the case and for identifying details that could help connect Bobby to tips, sightings, or remains.
For years, Bobby’s case remained a painful unresolved disappearance, with few publicly available details about what happened after he went to Mineral Point. Public summaries consistently described the circumstances as limited and focused on the same narrow window: the trip to gather his wife’s belongings, the trailer connected to that errand, and the sudden end of contact with his mother. The lack of public detail did not diminish the significance of the case; rather, it reflected the quiet and difficult nature of many long-term missing-person investigations, where families are left to live with uncertainty while law enforcement preserves whatever information may be necessary for the investigation.
In March 2022, more than ten years after Bobby was last seen, human remains were found on private property in northern Washington County. Local reporting stated that Sheriff Zach Jacobsen first released information about the discovery of remains earlier that week, and on March 10, 2022, Sheriff Jacobsen and Coroner Hatfield released information identifying the remains as Norvel Robert Nelson III. Other online case summaries also reported that the remains of Norvel Robert “Bobby” Nelson III had been found on private property in northern Washington County, bringing an end to the missing-person portion of the case.
Bobby’s case is therefore no longer an active missing-person case; he was located deceased. The available public information does not provide a full account of what happened to him between January 5, 2012, and the discovery of his remains in March 2022, but it does establish the broad course of the case: Norvel Robert Nelson III, a 37-year-old man from Missouri who was legally blind and known affectionately as Bobby, was last seen in Mineral Point while trying to collect belongings from a trailer; he stopped contacting his mother despite their regular weekly communication; his disappearance was investigated by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office and recorded in NamUs; and, after a decade of uncertainty, remains found in northern Washington County were identified as him, giving his loved ones a measure of resolution while leaving the public record with only a limited explanation of the circumstances surrounding his death.Last Seen: Jan 5, 2012
