Echo Michelle Lloyd has been missing since Mother’s Day 2020. The 47-year-old mom of four’s disappearance still has investigators in central Missouri searching for answers.
This is a case that has never left our thoughts here in the Benton County Sheriff’s Office,” Sheriff Eric Knox wrote in a March 2024 update.
Lloyd was first reported missing on May 15, 2020, when her daughter informed authorities that she hadn’t seen her mother in two weeks, according to the sheriff. She was last seen at a Dollar General in Climax Springs, Mo..
The daughter, Kelsey Smith, told NBC’s Dateline that she had first driven to her mother’s home in Edwards, Mo., on May 10 to bring her flowers and a Mother’s Day card, having last spoken to her the day before. When she discovered Lloyd wasn’t home, she tried to call and got no answer. She left the card and flowers on the porch.
“It was just odd,” Smith told Dateline. “When the house phone went to voicemail, I knew something wasn’t right.”
Five days later, Smith went back to her mother’s home and started banging on the door, she told Dateline.
With still no answer, Smith decided to break into her mother’s house.
“I could tell someone else had been there — someone, but not my mother,” Smith told Dateline. “It wasn’t ransacked, but there was a pile of trash… and food with mold. That’s not like my mother at all. She’s OCD. She wouldn’t have left the house like this.”
Smith also told the show her mother’s cigarettes, purse and her wallet containing her ID were all inside the home. But her phone, medications and car keys were missing.
A concerned Smith told local outlet KY3 her mother would not have left her family behind.
“She wouldn’t just walk away from her family,” Smith told the station. “My son was just one month old when she disappeared. She loves her grandbabies. She’d never leave us, and she’d never leave her grandbabies.”
Mary Dubray, Lloyd’s cousin, told KY3 that the family suspected “foul play.”
“We don’t feel that she decided to leave her life or is gone of her own free will,” she reportedly said.
Authorities have not said if they suspect foul play. In his update, Knox recalled the investigation into Lloyd’s disappearance.
“The scene, however, raised more questions than we had answers for,” Knox said “… [A grid search] produced no answers that would help us to locate Echo or help determine what had happened to her.”
The case has since been turned over to the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control.
Lloyd is 5-foot-4, has brown hair, brown eyes and weighs between 100 and 110 pounds. KY3 reports that she has a tattoo that says ‘Let it Be’ with birds on her forearm, and one on her wrist with names of her four children, Kelsey, Kace, Kaitlyn, and Kylie.
The most recent post on the Facebook page “Bring Echo Home” is dated Dec. 31, 2023, in which Lloyd’s family says they are still seeking information.
“As the year 2023 comes to a close my heart breaks a little more knowing we still have no new information on the disappearance of Echo Lloyd,” the post reads. “People do not just disappear. We. Want. Answers.”
Anyone with information is asked to call the Benton County Sheriff’s Office at 660-438-6135, or the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse at 573-526-6178.
