John David Gosch was born on November 12, 1969 to his parents John and Noreen Gosch. Noreen had been married before, but her first husband passed away from cancer in 1965.
We believe that Noreen had two other children – a son and a daughter. Their details are not really available publicly. By the time Johnny was born, they were teens/adults. The Des Moines Register refers to them as the ‘three Gosch children’ – the older two were possibly adopted by John Gosch after their father passed from cancer?
Johnny and his parents were living in West Des Moines in September 1982. Johnny was said to be well-liked by his classmates. He played football and enjoyed karate. At the time of his disappearance, he was a student in seventh grade at Indian Hills Junior High.
An incident where Johnny took on bullies was reported by CNN. Four local boys would be mean to smaller children and would steal their lunch. Johnny saw this happening one day and he knocked down the bullies and helped the smaller child get home.
Johnny had recently picked up a paper route where he would drop off papers around the neighborhood. His father would generally help Johnny with the route. According to the Des Moines Register, Johnny was a reliable and prompt paperboy. He had won an airplane ride over Des Moines in a sales contest. Johnny would ask his older sister to drive him to the mall occasionally, and he would use his paper route money to buy model rocket supplies. He would often buy Noreen a single rose with his money.
There was an incident that happened around September 3, 1982 and it was reported in the media after Johnny disappeared. The family went to Valley High School to watch their older son’s football game. Johnny went to get some popcorn and did not return right away. John went looking for him, and found him under the bleachers, talking to a police officer. Noreen asked Johnny about the situation. Johnny told her the officer was very nice. Noreen thought it was strange that a police officer had called her son to go under the bleachers for a discussion.
Why did you go? she asked.
He was a policeman, Johnny said. Don’t you have to do what he says?
When they were leaving the ground, Johnny pointed out the police officer to Noreen.
John and Noreen had told Johnny that he was not to do the route alone. Despite this, on Sunday, September 5, 1982, Johnny left his home before dawn to start his paper route. He took the family dog, a miniature dachshund named Gretchen with him.
The last time that Johnny was seen by multiple people was around that time. He was seen at the paper drop, picking up his newspapers.
Some witnesses said they saw Johnny speaking to a man that morning. A paperboy named Mike said that he saw Johnny talking to a ‘stocky man in a blue two-toned car’ near the paper drop. A witness named John Rossie said that he saw the man in the blue car talking to Johnny and ‘thought something was strange.’
Johnny told the witness John that the man was asking for directions. Johnny asked John for help.
John has said that he did see the license plate of the vehicle, but that he was unable to recall it. He would later say “I keep hoping I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and see that number on the license plate as distinctly as night and day, but that hasn’t happened.”
After speaking to the man, Johnny walked a block north which was where his route was due to start. Another paperboy noticed another man following Johnny. A neighbor heard a car door slam, and saw a silver Ford Fairmont speed away from the area where Johnny’s paper wagon would be found.
Dawn on that day was apparently at 6.16am. So we can assume that Johnny probably left home around 6? By 7.45am, customers began to call the Gosch home, complaining that their papers had not been delivered.
John left the home and went to search for his son. He found Johnny’s red wagon full of newspapers, just a few blocks from their home.
Johnny’s parents immediately contacted the West Des Moines Police Department and reported that their son was missing. The missing person policy at the time meant that Johnny could not be reported until 72 hours had passed.
Despite the urgent phone call, the police did not arrive at the scene for 45 minutes.
“His dad went out and delivered all the papers,” Noreen said. “And then I had put a call in to the police, but we waited almost an hour for them to come.”
The police asked Noreen if Johnny had ever run away. She says police did little to investigate the case for days. Volunteers searched nearby woods for Johnny. Some of them reported that Police Chief Orval Cooney told them to go home because ‘the kid is probably just a damn runaway.’
There have been insinuations of a police cover up or involvement in the case.
After Johnny disappeared, Noreen made an appointment at the West Des Moines Police Department. She also went to the school board office and got a list of police officers who were providing security at the football stadium where the bleacher discussion incident happened.
Noreen took the list to the meeting with Police Chief Cooney. He had photos of the department’s officers laid out on a table. Noreen said that none of the photos resembled the man who had been seen talking to Johnny. She insisted that some photos must be missing. An official left the room and came back with more pictures. Noreen recognized one of these men as the police officer from the football game.
Noreen said that she showed copies of the security roster to the police chief. She has said that the chief started yelling and stamping his feet. Noreen said she wanted to question the officer about Johnny’s disappearance but was told by the chief that would not be possible.
As we mentioned, police initially apparently thought that Johnny had run away, but later changed their statement and said they suspected he had been kidnapped. They said they were unable to establish a viable motive.
A few months after Johnny disappeared, a possible sighting from Oklahoma was called in. A woman reported that she had seen a boy on a street corner. She said he was out of breath and asked for help.
“My name is John David Gosch”, he told her, before two men grabbed him and dragged him away.
It isn’t clear if the woman reported this incident at the time. According to CNN, she was unaware of Johnny’s disappearance until she saw his case on TV months later and recognized his photo.
According to a story from the Associated Press, the woman got in touch with a private investigator working for the Gosches. A spokesman for a Chicago-based firm called the Investigative Research Agency was quoted as saying, “We and the FBI checked it out. And we’re both convinced it positively was Johnny.” The AP story said an FBI spokesman declined to comment on an ongoing investigation.
Just after midnight on February 22, 1984, the phone at the Gosch home rang. Noreen answered. Someone said ‘Mom?’ Noreen has said that she thought it sounded like Johnny. Noreen said that the boy was slurring his words and asking for help. Noreen asked where he was, and someone hung up the call. The phone rang again twice within the next few minutes. Noreen told the person who she believed to be Johnny that she loved him, and that he should try to get away to a police officer.
Noreen told police about the calls but was told that they were unable to be traced.
Around a month after the calls, there were more reported sightings of Johnny, this time in Texas. Guy Genovese, a sheriff’s investigator in Nueces County, was quoted as saying, “I believe the boy is alive and I believe he can be found, but I’m not saying when or anything like this.”
Over the years, there have been some disappearances with many similarities to Johnny’s case.
On August 12, 1984 (almost two years after Johnny vanished), another paperboy from the Des Moines area vanished. Eugene Martin was 13 when he went missing while delivering newspapers on the south side of Des Moines. Eugene usually carried out his paper route with his older stepbrother, but on this day he went alone. Witnesses reported seeing him talking to a man in his 30s between 5am and 6.05am. Eugene’s paper bag with the newspapers still inside was found at 6.15am.
At the time of this post, Eugene remains missing.
In 1984 after Eugene disappeared, both he and Johnny had their photos put on milk cartons by a dairy in Des Moines. They were amongst the first children to have their cases publicized in this way.
On March 29, 1986, another teen from Des Moines, Marc James Warren Allen (13) told his mom that he was going to visit a friend who lived down the street. He never arrived and has not been seen since. Initial media reports said that Marc was the third paperboy to go missing. This is technically true – he did have a job working a paper route, but he was not working at the time he disappeared.
In 1985, Noreen received a letter from Robert Herman Meier II (19) from Saginaw, Michigan. The letter had been signed ‘Samuel Forbes Dakota.’ According to the contents of the letter, Robert said that he was a guard in a motorcycle club when Johnny vanished. He said that Johnny had been abducted as part of a child-slavery ring that was operated by the motorcycle club. He also alleged that Johnny had been sold to a ‘high-level drug dealer residing in Mexico City.’ Robert requested $11,000 (around $32k today) from the Gosches. Noreen and John sent him the money. He then requested $100,000 (around $285k today) and promised to return their son to him.
Robert ended up being arrested by FBI agents and he was charged with fraud by wire. After the arrest, Noreen criticised the FBI and said that nobody would be willing to negotiate a ransom with them if they truly had Johnny after the incident.
In 1991, Noreen got a phone call from a PI in Nebraska. This man worked with a lawyer whose client was in prison for child molestation. The inmate said that he had taken part in Johnny’s kidnapping.
The investigator offered to meet with Noreen and share tapes of information that he had with her. When he went to her home, he played tape recordings of a man named Paul Bonacci. Paul had a horrible childhood. He endured sexual and other abuse. As he was growing up, Paul became entangled with a man named Emilio, who produced child sexual assault material.
Paul said that in 1982, he went on a road trip with Emilio, and another friend Mike. They stayed at a hotel on the west side of Des Moines.
Paul said that it was during this trip that Johnny was abducted. He said he wasn’t exactly sure how Johnny was chosen, but “a lot of it had to do with the fact of the way he looked. Because the color of his hair and his eyes and everything. It could make them more money, I guess.”
Once Paul realized he had been drawn into a kidnapping, he tried to leave. But then, he said, “Emilio took me for a little drive, stuck a gun in my head on a dirt road and told me I either did this or he was going to blow my brains out right there and then.”
This info about the kidnapping is from CNN:
So Bonacci agreed to help with the kidnapping. Back at the hotel, the conspirators rehearsed the plan, which involved three vehicles and about half a dozen people. They arranged chairs to serve as models for seats in the kidnap car, and practiced where they would sit. Paul and Mike would be in the back. The driver would pull up to Johnny, ask him a question, then drive around the block. Then Paul would get out and ask Johnny a question. He was small and nonthreatening. As he later said, children are sometimes frightened by strange adults. “But [when] kids your own age are talking to you and stuff you normally aren’t frightened by them.” Paul said he was there to “lure him or get him close enough to the car where we could get him in.”
Paul said that they carried out the plan the next day. He said they knocked Johnny out by putting a chloroform-soaked rag over his face. They drove to Sioux City.
“That night at first Emilio and this couple other guys went into town to drink,” Bonacci said, according to a court transcript. “And they left me, Mike and Johnny in a room that had no windows on it. That they had locked from the outside of the room and stuff. They lock us all three in this room. And that night when they got back they ordered me and Mike to do some things with, sexual things with Johnny. And they filmed it so that they could sell the film or whatever they were going to do with it.”
“And then a couple of months later I got a chance to take a trip out to Colorado,” Bonacci said. “And that’s where I seen Johnny Gosch the second time. And at that point he was staying with a guy that I only knew as The Colonel. And it was a kind of a ranch house but it was out, had a raised floor, underneath there was a space that had been dug out. And that’s where they kept some of the kids at and stuff when they caused trouble or were bad.”
Noreen would eventually goto Nebraska to meet with Paul.
“Just tell me what happened,” Noreen said. “Please.”
“I feel so — I feel so bad about it,” he said, fighting back tears. “Because — of what they made me do.”
“Did you ever see any marks or anything on Johnny’s body?” Noreen asked.
“When we got him in there, he had a birthmark on his chest,” Bonacci said, “or a something on his chest, it was like a — looked like South America.”
Noreen knew he was right about that. Bonacci also knew about the scar on Johnny’s tongue, a reminder of the time Johnny bit his tongue after falling from a treehouse. And he knew about a burn mark on Johnny’s leg, near the ankle, from the time it touched the tailpipe of his older brother’s motorcycle.
According to CNN, Paul was never questioned by Des Moines police, despite these alleged confessions.
In 1993, Noreen and John divorced. Both would eventually remarry.
There was a very strange incident in this case in March 1997.
As we mentioned, Noreen had divorced and had moved into her own apartment. She was asleep in bed, when someone knocked on her door at around 2.30am.
Noreen got up and looked through the peephole. Two men stood in the hallway. She thought one looked like Johnny.
“It’s me, Mom”, he said. “It’s Johnny”.
“I had no warning,” she said. “He just showed up.”
He opened his shirt to show a birthmark on his chest.
“We talked about an hour or an hour and a half. He was with another man, but I have no idea who the person was. Johnny would look over to the other person for approval to speak.”
“He didn’t say where he is living or where he was going.”
Noreen would later give more information about this encounter to the media. “The night that he came here, he was wearing jeans and a shirt and had a coat on because it was March. It was cold and his hair was long; it was shoulder-length and it was straight and dyed black.”
Noreen would be asked why she did not call the police about the visit. “Well, who the hell would call the police that didn’t do anything in the first place?” she asked. “Why would I do that? No. I wouldn’t put my son in danger from them again.”
Noreen did offer to call the PI who had told her about Paul Bonacci, but she said that terrified Johnny. He asked her not to and said he would leave immediately if she did.
This info about the visit is from CNN:
She says Johnny told her he’d been pulled off the sidewalk into a car, where he lost consciousness. When he woke up in a basement, he was bound and gagged. Johnny was scared, and started crying. He saw another young man. It was Paul Bonacci. And Paul told him, Just do what they tell you and it will be all right.
Johnny didn’t tell his mother the details of his sexual abuse. But according to Noreen, Johnny told a story that echoed Paul Bonacci’s story: Johnny said he was locked in the basement for days, until a man came to buy him from the kidnappers. The man counted out a large sum of cash on a table. He was known as The Colonel. Noreen says Johnny told her he was taken away, moved around the country, and used to sexually compromise businessmen and politicians.
Johnny told Noreen that he was on the run from the people who took him. He said he wasn’t sure if visiting her was a good idea because he had been told that she would be killed if he contacted her.
Johnny then stood up and said he had to go. Noreen hugged him and watched him leave. This may be the last time I’ll ever see him, she thought to herself.
Tom Boyd was a detective who worked on Johnny’s case. CNN asked him what he thought about this alleged visit.
“It’s Noreen’s statement to me. And that’s what she told me.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I — I don’t want to call Noreen a liar. Noreen is likely grieving the loss of her — her son. It seems weird, yes. And I’ve always just kind of thrown the question back. ‘Well, I don’t know. Do you believe it?’”
He chuckles.
“And there’s a weird factor to it. So that’s what makes it hard to believe. But I don’t want to call Noreen a liar.”
In 2003, Noreen was preparing to file a lawsuit against Orval for misconduct on Johnny’s case. He suffered a heart attack and died before that could happen.
In September 2006, Noreen reported that someone left photographs at her front door.
One color photo shows three boys bound and gagged. She says that a black-and-white photo appeared to show Johnny with his mouth gagged, his hands and feet tied, and an apparent human brand on his shoulder. A third photo showed a man, possibly dead, who may have something tied around his neck.
Noreen stated that the man was one of the “perpetrators who molested [my] son”.
She would later say that the first two photos had originated on a website featuring child pornography.
On September 13, an anonymous letter was mailed to Des Moines police.
Gentlemen,
Someone has played a reprehensible joke on a grieving mother. The photo in question is not one of her son but of three boys in Tampa, Florida about 1979–80, challenging each other to an escape contest. There was an investigation concerning that picture, made by the Hillsborough County (FL) Sheriff’s Office. No charges were filed, and no wrongdoing was established. The lead detective on the case was named Zalva. This allegation should be easy enough to check out.
Nelson Zalva, who worked for the Hillsborough County, Florida Sheriff’s Office in the 1970s, said the details of the letter were true and adds that he also investigated the black-and-white in “1978 or 1979”, before Johnny vanished “I interviewed the kids, and they said there was no coercion or touching. … I could never prove a crime,” Zalva said.
In 2023, Noreen spoke to CNN regarding her thoughts about the police involved with Johnny’s case.
“The police chief was corrupt,” she said. “I know a lot more about him.”
The chief at the time that Johnny vanished was Orval Cooney. When Orval was 17, he was among five youths accused of severely beating another teenage boy. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. He later joined the Marines and worked as an upholsterer before becoming a police officer.
Orval was appointed to be chief of the West Des Moines PD in 1976.
This info about his time as chief is from CNN:
Early in 1982, the Des Moines Tribune published an astonishing piece of investigative journalism. The reporters interviewed 18 employees of the West Des Moines Police Department, including 14 of the 20 patrol officers, who alleged that Cooney had “beaten a handcuffed prisoner, compromised a burglary investigation implicating one of his sons and threatened and harassed his own officers. They say they have smelled alcohol on his breath when he was on the street at night checking up on them and that they’ve seen beer cans in the vehicle he uses.”
The report said the department had no Black employees, and cited three employees who said they heard Cooney say “he would never hire a Black or a woman as an officer.” The sources also accused Cooney of repeatedly using the N-word.
The city opened its own investigation, which spared Cooney and instead found wrongdoing by the whistleblowers. Two officers were fired, allegedly for misdeeds committed months earlier, and several others were reprimanded. A Tribune editorial complained that “the city officials who launched the investigation might have had a whitewash in mind from the beginning.” Cooney kept his job. He was still chief that September, when Johnny Gosch disappeared.
(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.”)
CNN also spoke to Paul Bonacci in 2023. He said that as far as he knew, Johnny was alive with a family of his own. He said he had seen Johnny 15-20 times, with the last time being in 2018. He said that Johnny was in hiding and was afraid to come out and tell his story. “He’d be killed,” Paul said. “That’s what he’s afraid of. He’d be silenced.”
SOURCE LIST
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/us/johnny-gosch-missing-iowa-boy-cec-cnnphotos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Johnny_Gosch
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/us/johnny-gosch-missing-iowa-boy-cec-cnnphotos
CLIPS USED IN THE PODCAST EPISODE