But Johnny was gone

January 2, 2024 1:11 AM

(The West Des Moines Police Department declined to release its full investigative case file, because the Gosch case is still an active investigation involving state and federal authorities, and declined to make any current investigators available for an interview. It also declined to answer my extensive list of questions about the case. But the agency did send me a statement, which read, in part, “We understand how deeply this case has affected the family, the community, law enforcement officials and the nation. This case will remain open, and we won’t stop investigating until we have closure and answers as to what happened to Johnny Gosch.”) from An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case [CNN] [CW: CSA, kidnapping, corruption, conspiracy]
posted by chavenet (30 comments total)

Well, that's a lot.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:56 AM on January 2 [2 favorites]

Very sad story. Lost me at the secret military blackmail honeypot program, though. That feels more like a story told by a kidnapper to keep their victim from trying to run away.
posted by Huggiesbear at 5:12 AM on January 2 [1 favorite]

Damn.
I was a West Des Moines kid, had a paper route at the same time, two neighborhoods over. This event really fucked a lot of people up for a long, long time.

While the story is outlandish, I think that it is pretty wild that it never mentions Eugene Martin, another paperboy who was also abducted under similar circumstances two years later.
posted by bathysaurus ferox at 6:00 AM on January 2 [26 favorites]

Wow, that local police chief really sounds like a piece of work. But the rest of the article seemed to kind of veer off the rails; even though I wasn’t particularly familiar with either case, bathysaurus ferox makes a good point that the Martin case was a strange omission here. This article is less credulous and place both cases in a larger context.
posted by TedW at 6:42 AM on January 2 [9 favorites]

I grew up 30 miles north of Des Moines and am the same age as he was (also was a paperboy). There is not a single person I grew up with that doesn't to this day know exactly who Johnny Gosch is. Eugene Martin by contrast...it's amazing what sticks and what doesn't.
posted by mcstayinskool at 6:56 AM on January 2 [5 favorites]

I will say that after the Epstein stuff came out, these types of narratives started to seem a lot more credible to me.

I'm agnostic about this one because there simply isn't coherent evidence (presumably because of the cops screwing up the case), but it turns out that there really was a professional procurer to the 1% who clearly, whether through blackmail or just kickbacks, had a lot of shady money, and that the 1% in question were people whose formal politics were, supposedly, quite various, but they all got together at the panderer's for good times....and used their power to try to protect themselves by protecting the panderer, who turned up dead after it was no longer possible to avoid legal consequences.

Like, all the rich people who were supposedly political opponents got together at a trafficker's and protected the trafficker as much as they could, and he got a lot of money from somewhere. There really was a massive creepy sex pervert rich people ring, it wasn't just some evangelical fever dream about the elites.

Could there have been an even creepier and more amateurish blackmail/trafficking scam organized in the midwest? Maybe; my belief that the very rich are complete monsters was only deepened by the Epstein thing. I mean, maybe not, absent further evidence one can't say.

What a terrible thing regardless.
posted by Frowner at 7:18 AM on January 2 [14 favorites]

>
I'm agnostic about this one because there simply isn't coherent evidence (presumably because of the cops screwing up the case), but it turns out that there really was a professional procurer to the 1% who clearly, whether through blackmail or just kickbacks, had a lot of shady money, and that the 1% in question were people whose formal politics were, supposedly, quite various, but they all got together at the panderer's for good times....and used their power to try to protect themselves by protecting the panderer, who turned up dead after it was no longer possible to avoid legal consequences.

But notably Epstein was targeting already vulnerable girls and young women, not kidnapping the children of middle class white families off the street. There absolutely are networks of criminals providing victims for the rich, either for personal or economic exploitation, but their victims aren't the sorts that the politically paranoid cryptofascists and true crime voyeurs are concerned about
posted by The Manwich Horror at 7:43 AM on January 2 [21 favorites]

Thanks for posting the link to that Slate article, TedW, it really does put the case in context.

As for the Johnny Gosch case as described in TFA, well... I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the idea that the mom is supposedly "still on the case" and that she also had him show up out of nowhere to visit her as a grown adult and then disappear again. There's been more than one case of this supposedly happening with other people who disappeared as children and turned up as adults that turned out to be hoaxes.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:51 AM on January 2 [2 favorites]

Reading TFA, I found myself thinking of earnest nutcases I have known, and have a notion why it was that police lost patience with Noreen Gosch and why they didn't want anything to do with Paul Bonacci. The Slate piece does indeed add some needed context.

None of which does anything to answer what happened to the kids.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:35 AM on January 2 [4 favorites]

As I was reading, I found the details that Paul Binacci shared about Johnny Gosch sort of compelling but then you have to wonder how many of those details Noreen shared in previous interviews that he might have heard or read.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:50 AM on January 2 [3 favorites]

Wait a second. This bit:

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Aquino was real, too. Before his death by suicide in 2019, he’d been a controversial figure. Aquino was accused in 1987 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a child as part of a major scandal at the Presidio Army base day-care center. Aquino denied wrongdoing and was not criminally charged. But according to a judge’s subsequent ruling, Army investigators found “there was probable cause to title LTC Aquino with offenses of indecent acts with a child, sodomy, conspiracy, kidnapping, and false swearing.”

“And I’ll have to admit I’m guilty of not taking some of that too seriously,” says Boyd, the retired West Des Moines detective. “I didn’t look into this Aquino character until much later and realized…his Satanic-cult-type worshippings, things of that nature.”

Am I right that Aquino was accused as part of the '80s satanic panic, which was completely fabricated? If so, that's an astonishingly irresponsible couple of paragraphs.

I don't know. This seems really likely to play into some very dangerous Q-Anon stuff, and while I don't discount the possibility that Johnny Gosch was kidnapped for purposes of sex trafficking, it seems a lot more likely that he was kidnapped and murdered and that Noreen Gosch is constructing the story that she wants to be true for entirely understandable reasons.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:26 AM on January 2 [7 favorites]

>Am I right that Aquino was accused as part of the '80s satanic panic, which was completely fabricated? If so, that's an astonishingly irresponsible couple of paragraphs.

Aquino really was a Satanist. First he was a member of LaVey's Church of Satan and subsequently founded the Temple of Set, which is a pretty typical post-Crowleyan esoteric group with a goth paint job. Unlike the CoS, the Setians do believe in the efficacy of ritual magic, but they obviously don't abuse children as part of their practice.

Which is all to say that while I can't prove Aquino definitely wasn't abusing anyone, if he was, his expressed religious beliefs had nothing to do with it.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 10:46 AM on January 2 [3 favorites]

> Am I right that Aquino was accused as part of the '80s satanic panic, which was completely fabricated? If so, that's an astonishingly irresponsible couple of paragraphs.

Aquino may have been caught up in the Satanic panic, but he actually was the founder of a Satanic cult (actually a Church of Satan splinter group) On edit jinx, but leaving a link.
posted by justkevin at 10:49 AM on January 2 [4 favorites]

Ok, but I'm not talking about whether he was a Satanist. It sounds like he was a public and high-profile Satanist. I'm talking about whether the allegations of sexual abuse were credible, or whether it was just that he was a high-profile Satanist and therefore got falsely accused of sexual abuse in the middle of a massive moral panic involving false allegations of Satanic sexual abuse. Because those paragraphs make it sound like there are reasons to believe that he was actually guilty of sexual abuse. And if he was a victim of false accusations in the middle of a moral panic, then that casts doubt on the larger conspiracy theory.

I dunno. I'm a little nervous about the potential to revive the Satanic Panic for the Q-Anon era.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:57 AM on January 2 [10 favorites]

I grew up in DSM during this era, both Gosch and Martin were just a little older than my brother and I. It did signal a change in the weather for many of us who were "Latch-key kids" or had lots of unsupervised time outside to "play". Every few years this pops up again with some possible small new unconfirmed detail, occasionally it will get a national broadcast or story.

of note: A few years after this ('89) Jacob Wetterling was abducted in Minnesota (tho that's been credibly solved after many years) - also reinforcing the "shattered tranquility" communities under siege story lines....
posted by djseafood at 11:06 AM on January 2 [4 favorites]

From TedW's Slate article:

Johnny’s father told the Register. “Every single [newspaper] was in his wagon.” AFTER delivering the papers his son never had the chance to distribute, John Gosch called the police around 8:30 a.m.

That some neighbors complained about their papers being late caused a father to ignore an abandoned wagon of his son while dutifully finishing the route just makes my head explode. If it were me I'd be lighting my town on fire trying to find him in the next nano-second.

The sentiment at the time was heavily about the surprise of this supposedly safe (and definitely not toxic) midwest US white culture. And this kind of positive self-appraisal is hardly diminished today in most places. I think we don't have any real appreciation for how culturally fucked we really are/were/have been for so long, maybe since the beginning.

So sad in ways small and large.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 12:03 PM on January 2 [4 favorites]

Mod note: One comment deleted. Please: "Refrain from making light jokes in a serious discussion."
posted by loup (staff) at 12:20 PM on January 2 [2 favorites]

That some neighbors complained about their papers being late caused a father to ignore an abandoned wagon of his son while dutifully finishing the route just makes my head explode. If it were me I'd be lighting my town on fire trying to find him in the next nano-second.

That's very unfair of you.

You don't know what was going through his head. Maybe he thought his son had skipped delivering papers to do something with friends? Maybe this sort of thing had happened before and the kid turned up later? We also don't know what prompted the father to finally call the police after delivering the papers. Maybe it finally clicked in his head that this time was different?

Most people don't have perfect information about every situation. It seems you have a more general axe to grind, but you can do that without victim-blaming the father.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:43 PM on January 2 [6 favorites]

That some neighbors complained about their papers being late caused a father to ignore an abandoned wagon of his son while dutifully finishing the route just makes my head explode. If it were me I'd be lighting my town on fire trying to find him in the next nano-second.

As would I, as would most people now. But I can promise you that in 1982 Iowa, this was a bog-standard parent response.
posted by corey flood at 1:09 PM on January 2 [8 favorites]

I question the wisdom of the reporter giving conspiracy theories this much airtime, and I also feel compelled to point out that this:

Everyone involved in Johnny’s case is either dead or much older than they were when it started.

Is really poor writing.
posted by chaiminda at 1:42 PM on January 2 [2 favorites]

After reading the Wikipedia article about Johnny, I really feel like the reporter left out some pertinent details. Maureen claims that she was told beforehand that Eugene Martin would be kidnapped, which seems even more out there than most of her thoughts about Johnny. I also thought of the Satanic Panic as I read, and I think it was irresponsible not to mention that in the article.
posted by chaiminda at 1:57 PM on January 2 [1 favorite]

I grew up in Iowa around this time and it really warped an entire generation's idea of what risky behavior was. Like we weren't allowed to have our names on the back of our Little League shirts for a few years because some stranger would use that information to kidnap you.

To this day, I feel a little weird every time I drive behind those vehicles that have all the stick figure families and their hobbies on the back window. THAT'S HOW THEY GET YOU!
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 2:04 PM on January 2 [4 favorites]

This gives a lot of context to the stranger danger fearmongering that was suddenly everywhere when I was in middle school (Ohio, early 80s), although it didn’t stop us from riding the bus, taking our bikes everywhere, and not being missed until we missed dinner. Meanwhile, our school custodian and a member of the church choir (whom we saw every day) were both credibly accused and prosecuted of abusing children in our school/church community.
posted by toodleydoodley at 2:47 PM on January 2

One of the private investigators who helped the Gosches look for their son was Ted Gunderson, a former Special Agent In Charge and head of the Los Angeles FBI and a conspiracy theorist.

Gunderson was involved in the McMartin preschool case, at the heart of the 1980s "satanic panic." He made numerous confident statements supporting the truth of the supposed abuse ring and became a "recognized spokesman on the dangers of satanic ritual cults."

Gunderson also wrote the best-selling book How to Locate Anyone Anywhere Without Leaving Home.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:53 PM on January 2 [6 favorites]

This 2022 article is a thorough recap. Forty years after the Johnny Gosch disappearance, fear continues to fuel conspiracy theories in Iowa and beyond

It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Noreen Gosch, Johnny’s mother, in fostering this misinformation ecosystem around her son. Determined to keep Johnny’s case in the public consciousness, Noreen is regarded as a tireless, dauntless hero by those frightened for their own children’s safety, or distrustful of authority. But Noreen, who is convinced her son is still alive, has also elevated sensational theories that muddy the waters between fact and speculation.

“What I believe about the case seems to change every time I deep dive about it,” wrote one Reddit user in the consistently active Johnny Gosch subreddit. “Logically, I know that there was very little chance Johnny survived long after being abducted. … I think it all goes back to Noreen. Either she should be institutionalized for the number of delusions and hallucinations she’d had as a result of her grief or she is truly onto something and owed a serious apology from those that never believed her.”

posted by kirkaracha at 3:59 PM on January 2 [6 favorites]

I think that it is pretty wild that it never mentions Eugene Martin
Gosch in 1982, Martin in 1984, and Marc Allen in 1986.
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:12 PM on January 2

OK, that link is a real eye-opener:

FBI special agent Herb Hawkins said drawing intense publicity to the case, as the Goschs had, is not generally advised. Too much attention can cause an abductor to panic, endangering the child. It can also make inside information that can be used to narrow down suspects part of the public narrative.

But the Goschs (who divorced in 1993) had other advisors telling them the opposite. In a rare interview in 2018, John Gosch Sr. recalled that Kenneth Wooden, who had written extensively on missing and murdered children and lectured on the topic at Iowa State University in 1981 and 1982, told Noreen, “Whatever you have to do to keep the story alive, do it, because if you don’t, law enforcement will move on with their lives and go on their merry way.”

“She really latched onto that,” John told podcaster Sarah DiMeo.

In her book, Noreen credits Wooden with setting her on the right course. Though there wasn’t evidence Johnny was sexually abused, Wooden convinced Noreen her son had likely fallen victim to a class of deviants known as pedophiles. He believed pedophiles were seeking to change the culture, and were gaining influence through organizations like NAMBLA — a barely existent group that never achieved notoriety outside of conspiracy theory circles and one memorable South Park episode.

In addition to satanic abuse and Pizzagate, we get MKUltra and David Icke, and at least one verifiable con man who exploited the Goschs financially by pretending that he had Johnny alive.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:23 PM on January 2 [1 favorite]

“I dunno. I'm a little nervous about the potential to revive the Satanic Panic for the Q-Anon era.“

I see QAnon as just an extension of the Satanic Panic, with a big scoop of Bohemian Grove conspiracy theories, reworked slightly for the Trump era. It’s truly all the same shit.
posted by cakelite at 5:48 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]

Yes, the Satanic panic never ended for a lot of right-wing evangelicals. The paranoia is a long term part of the evangelical rights psychology and worldview. It's like a reservoir of infection. When politics get particularly paranoid, the infection will become systemic, the way it has under Reagan and Trump.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 9:02 AM on January 3

Either she should be institutionalized [..] or she is truly onto something

What kind of nonsense black-or-white thinking is this? Those are not the only possibilities.
posted by axiom at 12:00 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]