Disclaimer: The article contains mentions of assault. Reader discretion is advised.
Johnny Gosch was a 12-year-old paperboy in Iowa when he was reported to be missing in 1982. His missing case remains one of the most mysterious cases of disappearance.
According to CNN, a stranger in a blue car stopped by and spoke to Johnny Gosch before he went missing. The car was reportedly a Ford Fairmount and the man in it was a white probably in his 30s. He allegedly stopped Johnny to ask him for directions to 86th Street. As the young boy walked onto the 42nd street, he was being followed by a tall man. A little later, two other paper carriers came across Johnny on Marcourt Lane. He stopped his wagon and sat down for some reason, following which the carriers came back to find his wagon but not him.
A couple of hours after he was last seen by the carriers, Gosch’s parents began receiving calls that Johnny hadn’t delivered the newspapers that morning. His father left to complete all the deliveries and Johnny’s mother, Noreen Gosch contacted the police who allegedly took almost an hour to get there. Noreen Gosch’s search for her missing son began right then and has been continued over the four decades that followed.
In a conversation with CNN, Noreen Gosch expressed her lack of faith in the system that was triggered by the disappearance of her son. Orval Cooney, the chief of the West Des Moines Police Department, allegedly asked Noreen if Johnny Gosch had ever run away from home before even though it seemed evident to her that it was a case of kidnapping. Cooney, before becoming the chief of the local police department, was convicted of assault and intent to cause bodily injury.
When did Johnny Gosch disappear?
Johnny Gosch disappeared on September 5, 1982. According to the Iowa Department of Public Safety, he was reportedly missing on the very same day. The last seen time of Gosch was at 6 a.m. on the day of his disappearance. He set off to deliver newspapers to houses not far away from where he lived in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Six months following his disappearance, a woman had reported that she had spotted a boy named John David Gosch, panting and out of breath at a street corner, in Oklahoma. The woman wished to remain anonymous and claimed that she briefly interacted with Johnny before he was grabbed and taken away by two men. She was unaware of Johnny Gosch’s disappearance, suggesting she might have genuinely encountered the boy.
In February 1984, Noreen reportedly received a call from an anonymous caller. Someone who sounded like Johnny Gosch spoke to her. She told the caller to try to get away and reach out to the authorities. The call was followed by two brief calls from the same caller. However, the calls were untraceable even after she reported them to the police.
Noreen also implied that the authorities had not done enough investigation in the 72 hours following the disappearance. Although they did look in the woods nearby and the neighborhood, Cooney allegedly believed Johnny just ran away and didn’t take the investigation seriously.
Who Took Johnny was a 2014 documentary film that follows the disappearance of Johnny Gosch. It features interviews with the boy’s parents. It also includes statements from officers closely involved with the investigation and Johnny’s other family members.
