Stumbling into a 40-year Mystery

Through sheer happenstance, I was the first journalist to stumble upon the scene of a tragic set of circumstances, that 40 years later is still a deep wound on our state that time has not healed.

On the Sunday morning before Labor Day, my wife and I were driving to church in West Des Moines.  One block from the church parking lot, I saw some people and a few police officers standing on a corner.  It all looked calm.  I didn’t see any wrecked vehicles.  Nothing on fire.  So, I pulled into the lot, and as my wife walked into church, I – ever the nosy reporter -strolled down the block to ask one of those bystanders what was going on.  He told me the paper boy hadn’t come home from his morning delivery route.  In fact, the Sunday Registers were still stacked on the corner.  Did he run away, I asked.  Nobody knows – the neighbor said.  What’s his name?  Johnny Gosch.

Well, I thought, kids run away every now and then.  They usually come home after a while.  But, to be careful, I called the newsroom and suggested they send somebody out to get video and ask more questions.  Then, I went to church. 

It was September 5, 1982.  40 years have gone by, and nobody knows where Johnny is – at least the police don’t, and his parents don’t.  Neither do the rest of us.

I was the Sunday night anchor on KCCI-TV in those days.  I reported for my shift at 2:00 pm that day and found out the paperboy still hadn’t come home.  I grabbed the phone book – yes, the phone book – looked up the Gosch home in West Des Moines and placed a call.  Johnny’s mom, Noreen, answered the phone.  I asked if we could send out a reporter and photographer to interview her about her son.  She answered firmly – I’ve never forgotten this – something to the effect that we could come out and get a photograph of Johnny, but she wasn’t doing any interviews.  She said, “We not turning my son’s disappearance into a media circus.”  

A few years later, I sat in the newsroom watching a documentary on national television about the disappearance of Johnny Gosch.  Noreen didn’t know that first Sunday afternoon – she couldn’t know – how awful things would get for her and her family.  How Johnny’s disappearance would at times become the media circus of all media circuses.  This story had it all.  An unsolved mystery.  A little boy.  A grieving family.  A slow-to-react police department. Pictures on milk cartons. Private investigators.  Psychics.  Jailhouse hints dropped by a guy with multiple personalities.  A mother who quickly figured out that the way to keep the case in the public eye, and to keep pressure on police, was to keep her son’s story alive as long as possible.  She became adept at using media outlets’ competitiveness with one another to feed stories and watch others try to catch up.  In my view, some reporters in town exploited Johnny’s story to bolster TV news ratings.

Courtesy National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - a rendering of what Johnny Gosch would look like today at age 52

Forty years later and we still don’t know the answer to “Where’s Johnny Gosch?”  Noreen claims that he dropped by the house at 2:30 am about 15 years after his disappearance, to say he was alive and had been taken by a child sex ring.  It could be true.  Who knows?  If he’s alive, he would be 52 years old today.  I’ve often wondered why a grown man couldn’t do more to assure his parents he’s okay, but that assumes a lot.  It assumes he’s okay. It assumes he hasn’t suffered some psychological trauma.  It assumes he’s alive. 

Noreen is not your typical grieving mom.  She’s assertive.  She got under law enforcement’s skin with her demands.  She can rub people the wrong way.  But she’s also been a supportive person to other families who have had loved ones disappear.  She’s gotten laws changed for the better.  She has adapted to an unthinkable tragedy.  And she has never given up hope.  I’ve always had the utmost empathy for her.  She held it together far better than most of us would have under such circumstances.  

How life has changed in 40 years.  When Register paperboy Eugene Martin disappeared on a Sunday morning two years later, we all had to face the fact of something awful going on.  Something we’d prefer not to think about.  Some dark corner of society had visited our town and taken two kids.

They say time heals all wounds.  Not this one.  Life has moved on since Johnny and Eugene disappeared, but it’s still a deep wound on our community.  

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative now includes Ed Tibbetts, who covered politics for the Quad-City Times before becoming Editorial Page editor. He left the Lee Enterprises paper during a recent layoff.

Ed is the kind of professional journalist and observer we will all benefit from reading. When you subscribe to the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Roundup, you will find a weekly email featuring links to the members of our group listed below:

Iowa Writers Collaborative: Iowa Writers Collaborative

Here is the group so far. We are on the grow:

Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin

Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury

Dave Busiek: On Media

Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook

Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck

Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt

Dana James: New Black Iowa 

Bob Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture

Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land

Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi