Johnny Gosch

All witnesses, purchase of interest, and suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Beyond the Shadows Podcast in the darkest corners of our universe live spaces where even the light won't go, places where terror and the unknown lurk always waiting. Join Ryan and Scott on the Beyond the Shadows Podcast as we pull back the curtain and peer into the darkness. We'll examine hauntings, true crimes, mysteries, UFOs, exorcisms, reincarnations, mysteries, and all things dark. Join us as we go Beyond the Shadows Shadow. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now on true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome to Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. Thank you so much for joining. As per usual, let's go ahead and dive in to right now in true crime, I want to go over just a few little small case updates, and then we're going to get into the episode because it is a long one. So Lori Valo trial updates. Her complice case scheduling is going to be on February twenty first of twenty twenty four, soon, really soon. Her final trial management conference is going to be on July twenty fifth of twenty twenty four, and then our girls going on trial on August first of twenty twenty four, and they are planning for the trial that lasts about a month or so. So she is facing charges in the attempted murder of her former nephew, I guess, her niece's husband, Brandon Moodreau, and the murder of Charles Valo. So it is going to definitely get real and we are again on our way to getting justice for all of the people that were so so wrongly taken away by this heinous hatus human. In other news, other trial news, Donald Adelson is going to be going to her trial September thirtieth. This is going to be the biggest year for trials, Like the latter half of the year is going to be wild. We have Chad, we have Lori, we have Donna. It is going to be insane. Will definitely keep you updated on that. And if you don't know the Adelson case, Dan Markel, you were going to know all about it by the end of summer, because I am doing Dan Markell for my summer series. I've already started trying to research some and get everything in order, but it is a lot and it is very overwhelming. I don't know why I do this to myself. Last summer I did Valo. This summer, I'm doing Adelson and Dean Markel, and it's going to be really interesting because these people never the Adelson's never stop. They are unhinged to their core and they never stop. So it's going to be interesting. I feel like doing the summer series because still things are starting to pop out, and are there going to be more arrests? I wonder I really do all right? Moving on now to our next thing. They finally have released a official sketch in the murder of Rachel Morin. I had covered her case previously. She is the gal who was murdered on the jogging trail, the Ma and Pad Trail in Maryland. This happened last August. I did an episode on her because I was worried that her case was at risk of going cold because they did have DNA that they were able to gather that match back to DNA from another crime that happened elsewhere, and they were able to link it, but they don't have anyone actually to link to that DNA at this time. So they had like video of this guy, just like the back of him and the side of him. So from that they have been able to come up with a composite sketch of the person that they believe murdered Rachel, and I feel like they did a pretty good job with it. I did share it on my social media and I'll be sure to share it again. But it's important that we circulate the hell out of that composite sketch because that person is out there, and that person is dangerous. They've done bad things in the past, They've killed Rachel. They're more than likely going to strike again, and we need to stop them before they do. In Adam Montgomery case News right now, the trial is going on. He is on trial for the murder of his daughter, Harmony, and there's been a lot going on in the trial. His estranged wife has been on the stand and she's been giving her whole testimony. She has been on the stand since Friday. She has a lot to say and there's so much to even catch up on. But it is all really really, really really bad stuff. The way that Adam treated everybody that was around him, and especially treated Harmony, and you know, obviously ended up taking her life. Allegedly. He's on trial for it. He has not been convicted yet, but it's all just really really sad, and because it does deal with the death of a child. I'm not going to go into details, but cameras are allowed in the courtroom, so all of that is available if you so wish to go and listen to the in depth details that they go into in this trial. It's really got I got to the point last week where I just had to switch it off because it was really really too much for me and I could not handle it. And it's hard, I feel like sometimes to be a true crime podcaster because you are so in it, and you're in it all the time, and you're trying to keep up with everything, and then you have the very real side of it, where you have these victims you're speaking of, and you have their family members who are often looking up these cases and they might reach out to you, and it really just makes it so much more real to me. And I feel like it's so important to be respectful and do things the right way, and there is a time and a place, and we all have our boundaries and we all have our issues, and I definitely think Harmony's murder was so horrific and horrible, just like with Tylee and JJ again a horrific and horrible crime. The details aren't important. What's important is that they get justice, the people who did these horrible things to these people are brought to justice, and that we honor them and remember them and do what's right by them. Because some of these details are really really disturbing, and I know not everyone can listen to that stuff. I typically am able to not be bothered by it, but there are days that I'm bothered by it and I have to take a step back. And even though I'm a true crime podcaster and I love true crime I have since I was like three, there is days that I have to take a step back. And we all are human at the end of the day. And that is all I'm going to say about that. I feel like there's always a way to go about things like this in a respectful manner, and that is what I'm trying to do. Last thing I want to talk about real quick. We had a shooting in Houston on Sunday at one of our big churches, Lakewood Church, and it was a situation where this person walked in to a church with their child and their intent was to harm people. They had something strapped to their chest and they were there to inflict pain and harm. Luckily, there was some off duty police officers who were there working security who spotted it starting to go down and intervened and were able to take out the suspect. Unfortunately, the child that was with this person was hit, really unfortunate. Never should have happened. And then there was another bystander who was also hit, I believe shot in the leg. He has been released from the hospital. The suspect is dead now. The suspect is complicated and I do not know super well enough to talk about it in details, but there is a gal here locally. I talked about her a lot during when I did the Rudy story that I talked about forever and ever and ever. She was a big part of that whole story, and she did some digging. And her name is Grizzy, and she's the best, and I love her, and she's where I get all of my local news from because she is on it. She's on the scene. She is there. She is ready to tell you what she knows. So she found out that this person who is called Genesee Moreno, she also has she has many, many, many, many aliases, but was allegedly born a Jeffrey Moreno and not even Moreno, Jeffrey something or another and then morphed into Genesee Moreno. And it's like this whole thing. So the child that was with her is her previous husband's child. Her previous husband is a sex offender, hence why he didn't have custody. I don't know where the baby mama is. I don't know w any dadaam it's there, But somehow or another, Genesee ended up with this child. Now, she never should have been allowed to have access to this child, but we know that things fall through the cracks, and sometimes bad people are given access to kids, regardless of if it's their own flesh and blood. I e. Josh pal So if you don't know Josh Pall's story, I will be telling it at some point in time. So Genesee has this child. She's living in Conroe with her mother, and there's nothing but trouble and complications. Many neighbors have reported different altercations and interactions and had issues with genesee and harassment, and there's like a whole laundry list of police reports and this and that, struggles with mental health stuff and antismatic rants, like lots and lots of things, lots of bad things, and somehow or another, this woman was able to enter this church and commit these horrific crimes. And it will forever blow my mind that even though there is a pay per trail of all of these things that have occurred, and police reports and multiple arrests and all of the things, that she still was able to walk into Lakewood Church and try to inflict harm on a really really large congregation of people with a child in tow. It's unfortunate. It never should have happened. It never should get to that point. And we can argue gun control all day. I see both sides a lot of the times. But regardless, bad people are going to find a way to do things, regardless if they do it with a gun, a knife, a car, a bomb. It doesn't matter. If bad people want to do bad things, they're going to find a way. I definitely don't think that this person should have been able to walk into any place and purchase a gun legally. It never should have happened. I don't know if that's what is being said here. I'm not sure of the details in regards to that, but given her documented history of mental health issues and her online rants and all the other things, she never should have been allowed to have purchased a gun legally, if that's what happened. So I'll definitely keep you guys updated on this. Grizzy is doing the Lord's work and trying to find out all the info that she can on this person and exactly what happened, just because we're all trying to make sense of it. It is something that never should have occurred. And regardless of where you are, you always need to be extra hyper aware of what's going on around you, who is around you, and an escape plan if something were to go awry, because you never know these days if something is going to go awry. So with that, we are going to go ahead and end right now in your Crime Drag Racers are going by again fantastic and we're gonna get started with today's episode. All right, new episode Today. On Monday, we talked about twelve year old Michelle, who went missing from the Woodlands, Texas, and today we're going to talk about a twelve year old paper boy named Johnny Gosh who went missing from Des Moines, Iowa. So Johnny's story caught my attention. Johnny was actually one of the first kids that was placed on the mill carton as a missing person, a missing child. So we are going to tell his story. So John David Gosh was born November twelfth of nineteen sixty nine to his parents, John and Noreen Gosh in Des Moines, Iowa. He was a normal twelve year old boy and he was pretty responsible for being twelve. He liked to earn his own money, so he had taken a job as the neighborhood paper boy, and to his friends and family, he went by the name Johnny. He was in seventh grade at Indian Hills Junior High and was the youngest of three children. He pretty much got along with everybody. He was friendly. At Indian Hills Junior High. He was on the football team, and he had also taken some karate lessons extracurricularly and knew how to defend himself. So typically on Sundays that would be the day that Johnny would go do his paper route, and he was very dedicated to this. Him and his dad went together and it every Sunday. Johnny would get up in the morning, he would wake up his father John and they would go get the papers, load them into the wagon, and then they would go on about their day and deliver the papers. So this was customary. Johnny and John always did this together. So on Sunday, September fifth of nineteen eighty two, for whatever reason, Johnny got up that morning around five forty five and snuck out of the house, taking only his dog with him. Now, his dog was a miniature doc soon named Gretchen, and like I said, this was out of the ordinary for Johnny to leave on his own. He normally would go with his dad and do this paper route. So the circumstances that set up the day that Johnny went missing are very different from the normal circumstances of a Sunday morning for the Gosh family. So that morning, around seven point thirty, Johnny's parents awoke to their phone ringing and it was one of Johnny's customers wondering why the paper hadn't been delivered. And at this point, Gretchen, the dog is back home, so Johnny's parents don't really even question that Johnny isn't there. They think, oh gosh, Johnny overslept. Let me go wake him up and we'll be right there to deliver you your morning paper kind of thing. Johnny was very responsible, even though he was only twelve, he was very responsible, and he had been doing this paper route for about a year and there had never been a time that he didn't come through and deliver the papers that he needed to deliver on Sundays. So John goes in to wake Johnny up, and to his surprise, Johnny is not in his room and is nowhere to be found. So, of course, you know, your mind doesn't automatically go to something horrific has happened to my son. My son is now missing, something happened to him. John gets dressed and went outside. He started going in the direction of where the Des Moines register offices where they would typically pick up the papers to go on about the paper route. And this was like less than two blocks from where the Gosh has lived. So it was there that he found Johnny's red wagon which he used to carry the newspapers in and there were thirty seven papers inside of the wagon. Indicating that he hadn't made any stops along his paper route that morning because he had to deliver to thirty seven customers and there was thirty seven newspapers still in that red wagon. John really didn't know what was going on, but he knew he had to deliver the papers, so he quickly completed the paper route, delivered those thirty seven papers, went back home, told his wife, Noreen, what was going on, and immediately Noreen called the police and said that Johnny was missing. So Noreen has been very very public about everything that happened after her son was reported missing and the law enforcement interactions that she had. She has a book called Why Johnny Can't Come Home. She has been very very critical of what she says is a slow reaction time from the authorities. And back then when somebody was missing, even if it was a child, it doesn't matter. The authorities would not classify Johnny as a missing person until seventy two hours had passed, which is such a big problem, especially in child deduction cases, which this is a child deduction case. I don't care what anyone says the Des Moines Police Department, whatever the heck they're thinking, back in nineteen eighty two. This was a child deduction case, and they did not use their time wisely, thinking that the first twenty four hours of a child abduction case is key. You have to get your eyes on that child to prevent something bad, bad, bad from happening. And they wouldn't let Nouren and John have this missing person's on their son until seventy two hours had passed, and Nouren said that when she first called the police that to report what had happened, it took them a whole forty five minutes to even get there, and immediately they wanted to classify Johnny as a runaway and that's what they thought, So unfortunately, his case kind of got shoved off to the side because they're like, oh, he just ran away. He's twelve, he ran away. So they did begin a search for Johnny. There were about thirty police officers who initially helped search for him, and a lot of the community friends and family of the Gosh's all kind of chipped in to try to help figure out what had gone on. And they were really hoping that Johnny would just kind of show up, like maybe he went off and was hanging out with a friend or something else happened and he would just come back. So as they are doing the search for Johnny, authorities are trying to figure out where he was last seen. Because he had left the house so early that morning, they had figured out they wanted to know who had last seen him, if there was any people around him, and kind of get the last credible sighting of Johnny. So there were a couple of other paper carriers that worked for the Des Moines Register that would report seeing Johnny at the place where you would go and get your papers, but that was the last time they ever saw him. There was a guy named Mike who was fifteen years old who also had delivered, and Mike said that Johnny and him met up along their way to pick up their papers, and they picked up their newspapers and then they both headed off in separate directions to go to their respective paper routes. Now, one thing that Mike said that I think is interesting is that he said, while they were walking to pick up their papers, he had noticed that there was a man in a dark blue car that had driven by them three times, and he had stopped a couple of times in there to ask for directions to eighty sixth Street. But again Mike didn't really think much of it. He just was offering this as a potential lead, and then he said, once the two kind of parted ways, he did see Johnny talking to a man that was wearing a baseball cap, but he didn't know if it was the same man that he had previously seen in this blue car. But again, a really really credible piece of information to kind of go off of. And this man is described as being kind of like a stocky man and his car was a blue two toned car. So we have a little bit of a lead here as to what might have happened to Johnny. And there was another witness who is named John Rossi, and he saw a man in a blue car talking to Johnny and thought that something seemed off about the situation. Even at one point Johnny had told John Rossi, like, this man has asking for directions, do you mind if you help us? And John Rossi did look at the license plate, but he couldn't recall the license plate number. He kind of immediately felt like this was not like a good situation. I don't know if he just had a bad vibe or what, but He still to this day hopes that he will be able to recall what that license plate was. He says, I keep hoping I'll wake up in the middle of the night and see that number on the license plates as distinctly as night and day. But that hasn't happened. Because this is a really really, really really good lead, like this could be the smoking gun. So they say, so, there was a private investigator that was hired by the Gosh family, and according to this private investigator, they say, Johnny walked a block north where his paper route typically started, and then there was a paper boy who noticed that there was a man following Johnny, and a neighbor that was in the area heard a door slam and then saw a silver Ford Fairmont speed away from where Johnny's wagon was found. So, in my opinion, we're looking at a child abduction. We're potentially looking at a couple of people more than just one. We do have some potential witnesses who maybe saw the part of the abduction where they were trying to trap Johnny, distract Johnny, get Johnny to forget about what he was doing, to ask for help with this person asking for direction, And it's really scary that this all happened in the early morning hours of a Sunday morning. Now, going back to the guy from the paper route that saw Johnny talking to this random man. The dog Gretchen was with Johnny at the time, and everyone said, typically if Johnny was surrounded by somebody that might have been not familiar or Gretchen was intimidated by this person, that Gretchen would have been barking if she felt threatened by this person. But she was just standing there, not really doing anything, not making a scene. So everyone thought that whoever this man was that Johnny was talking to, it was somebody that was familiar to Johnny, which I think is a really interesting aspect of this case because it could have been somebody that Johnny knew that ended up abducting him. So, like I said, initially police did believe that Johnny was a runaway, but they did soon change their tune and thought that maybe he had been abducted. Just listening to these other accounts and eyewitnesses, they thought, well, maybe he was abducted, and they kind of changed their tune. But they weren't really able to establish a motive, and there wasn't really any evidence of anything, so they didn't have any people to really go off of. Now, obviously hindsight's in twenty twenty four. You see two different types of men or two different vehicles talking to a twelve year old boy, and you don't really have to think very hard as to what motive is because unfortunately, creeps exist. They existed back when Johnny was kidnapped, and they exist now. In twenty twenty four, were just a lot more aware of it, and I think law enforcement is a lot more aware of it now than they ever were back then. Nobody from Johnny's inner circle family, the person that he worked for at the Des Moines Register, thought that Johnny could have run away. And Johnny's boss, who is lu Cook, he is the district circulation manager for the Des Moines Register. He had told police that Johnny was always really reliable. He was a really really nice boy, very well mannered. He's got a good record, good service record, good collecting record, good sales record. He's a responsible boy and always has been. And this I think is very important. Johnny wouldn't have just abandoned his newspapers and his wagon and run away because he was even though he was twelve he was very very responsible. And there was also a thing that would happen if they didn't deliver their newspapers. They would be charged seventy five cents for each paper that they didn't deliver, which back in those days was a heck of a lot of money. And Johnny didn't deliver any of his papers, which would mean that he would have to pay twenty seven to seventy five. And they said, Johnny's never owed money before, He's never missed one delivery. He was very very meticulous about making sure that he went to each of the homes on his route. So the people that Johnny worked with, and obviously his family and the people in the surrounding community did think one hundred percent that Johnny had been kidnapped. Noreen had also pointed out that Johnny didn't take anything with him. He left all of his belongings at home, all of his money at home. He had recently bought himself a motorbike and a new pair of sneakers, and those things were left at home. So she was trying to argue if he had voluntarily ran away, these are the things he would have taken with him. But the authorities remained Steadfast that they thought potentially that he could have been kidnapped and abducted, but there wasn't any evidence of this, so they didn't really explore, in my opinion, those avenues because they just assumed, well, he might have been abducted, but he probably just ran off on his own. So there wasn't a whole lot of urgency to this matter in trying to figure out what happened to Johnny. And they even did say in the beginning that we don't think it's foul play. He's just listed as a missing person. So you can kind of see what the Gosh family is up against in regards to law enforcement here. Like I said, they later do change their tune, but in the beginning of this, they were very set that Johnny just left on his own, and they weren't exploring those other avenues that it obviously to us is so obvious that this kid was abducted, but that's not where their heads went for whatever reason. So there was a lot that went on in the subsequent years in regards to sightings of Johnny and different things. I'm going to talk about all of that in a minute, but there was a sighting of Johnny in Tulsa, oklahom And this is what Noreene Senderen said that somebody spotted Johnny in Tulsa, and it was basically a situation where there was a young boy who was yelling to a woman for help before being dragged off by two men. Do I feel like this should have been investigated to the fullest? Absolutely? Do I think it was? I do not. And that is unfortunate because that isn't a good situation. Regardless if a little boy is asking for help and then two men drag this person off, we should be investigating it, regardless of if it is Johnny or it's not Johnny. So in nineteen eighty four, they officially put Johnny's picture on a milk carton. There was another des Moines, Iowa registered paper boy who was named Eugene Martin. He had also gone missing. He went missing in nineteen eighty four, and they put their picture side by side on the milk carton and these were two of the first children that were featured on the milk carton as missing children. The Des Moines Register also offered up a five thousand dollars reward leading to information in regards to Johnny's disappearance. And another thing that's interesting they did find obviously, they found the wagon with Johnny's newspapers in it, but they didn't find the Des Moines registered newspaper bag, which was like a yellow bag that Johnny also had with him that was nowhere to be found. So that is still a piece of evidence that could exist out there and could potentially lead to finding Johnny. So there was a psychic that was brought in, and this psychic was brought in by the West and Wine Police Department, and her name was Greta Alexander. She was a self proclaimed psychic and she had assisted with some previous investigations for law enforcement. So she said that she believed that Johnny was alive but was being held somewhere against his will. Well, but she didn't really have any ideas as to wear. But Johnny's parents obviously are so holding on to hope that at this point Johnny was still alive and they wanted a type of sign that their son was still alive and out there. Noreen did have a kind of a hunch that she thought, for whatever reason, that Johnny might have been abducted by members of the Way International, which is a religious cult that was in the area at that time, and she said there are a number of them that do abduct young people. They do. I've checked, but there wasn't really a source of where she got this information. An investigator said that they didn't think that there was any cults that would kidnap a child who was unrelated to them. And I'm calling bs on all of that because that is just like something that cult members would do because they have no souls and they hide behind this religious mentality that they're doing everything they're doing for the Lord and they do not think right. So, yeah, they could very well be abducting children. I'm just putting it out there. And Noreen also said that she had been contacted by a man who basically threatened her life and she thought he was just trying to scare her into giving up the search for her son. She said that he had called her and said, because of what you said on television, your life is in danger, and she thought that this guy was one of the people from the cult. And I one hundred percent believe her and think that she is right. Sorry, I'm backtracking a little bit here, but I feel like this stuff is important Noreen also got a phone call from a male who said he was a member of the Way International and said that the group had Johnny, and Noreen said she was instructed to deliver twenty five thousand to ninth and Crocker Streets in Iowa if she wanted to get her son back, and she called the police and they were able to track it down and just determine that the address wasn't even a real address, and a few days later they arrested three teens from Iowa for making this phone call. And it was obviously a hoax. Because Noreene and John were so in the media trying to get the word out about their son, they unfortunately became targets for all of the horrific, horrific humans that wanted to mess with them and give them false hope about their son. And it's just really unfortunate that things like this happened back then, and they still happened to this very day. And I can't imagine making that decision in your daily life to be such a horrible person to a family that's already grieving. But regardless, these teens were charged with harassment and that was that John and Noreene also said that two days before he went missing, Johnny was speaking with a police officer and he had I don't know how he came across his police officer, but regardless, he was talking to this police officer and had told his parents that he wanted to be a police officer when he grew up. And at this point, his parents are thinking that this police officer semi matched the description of the man seeing seen in the area right before Johnny had vanished, and they thought that this officer potentially could have been involved in this their son's disappearance, and they were very much trying to identify who this person was, and they said that they got nothing but kicked back from the West And Police department as to who this person could have been. The private investigator did think that they had identified the man who they thought was potentially holding Johnny captive, but they didn't want to show this information with the Western Wayan Police department, and basically the dad said, we don't want them to mess it up, and that's why we're holding this information private. And as frustrated as John and Noreen were with the police department, the police department were equally as frustrated with them because they kept telling them, you can't be putting this much information out into the media about everything that is going on with the search for Johnny because it could jeopardize the future efforts to prosecute And they also didn't understand why the couple refused to involve police after they said that this investigator of theirs was able to find out who potentially had Johnny. I get it because police really didn't seem to take this seriously, and I think that John and Noreen were just doing everything they could on their own to try to solve this. And I get why they didn't want to involve law enforcement because they really hadn't done much for them leading up to now. So I do understand that I see both sides. I do feel like police could have done a heck of a lot better on the front end, and I don't know, it's just a complicated situation. One of the lead investigators on the case is Chief Cooney. He said, quote, I really don't give a damn what Maurine Gosh has to say. I really don't give a damn what she thinks. I'm interested in the boy and what we can do to find him. I'm kind of sick of her end quote, which really isn't a good look, Chief Cooney. It's really not like regardless of that, you need to be working together as a team and not at odds on either side of things. In my opinion, the authorities all felt like the Goshs were just completely against them, and even when they felt like they tried to get them to cooperate and do like in depth interviews, it just couldn't happen. They were just very defensive about everything and really just gave law enforcement trouble with every single thing, which, like I said earlier in the investigation, they weren't very warm and fuzzy toward the Goshes, so I understand why the Goshes kind of felt this way. Noreen and John were one hundred percent sure that they thought that Johnny was still alive, and they thought that he was abducted by two men and put into like a child prostitution type of situation. And she said that they knew what they were doing. It was slick and highly organized, and Noreen and John at this point thought that they had pretty much figured out what had happened to Johnny. Another odd interaction that happened. This was shortly after midnight February twenty second of nineteen eighty four. Noreen said she received three brief phone calls from a boy who had pleaded for her help before the line completely cut off and went dead. Now, John was out of town on business at the time, but Noreen said that she was one hundred percent sure that the voice on the other end of the line was her son. He did sound like he had potentially been drugged and was having trouble, like saying different words, but she knew in her heart of hearts that this was Johnny. And unfortunately, the calls were all really, really short, so police were not able to trace it back to where these calls potentially could have come from. Nourene and John speculated that they thought that whoever had Johnny was moving him around from place to place to place in order for him not to be spotted so they could continue on the run with him. They did a lot of public media appearances. They were on Good Morning America, they did all of the shows. And it was also in nineteen eighty four when this other kid who I mentioned earlier, Eugene Martin, went missing. Now his disappearance was very very similar to Johnny's disappearance. Eugene was thirteen years old and kind of went missing in this way. He also worked for the Des Moines Register. It was just very coincidental, but the authorities took Eugene's disappearance very very seriously from the start and treated it like an abduction versus a runaway. So that is how Eugene's story was different than Johnny's. By this point, Noreene had said that there had been at least a dozen sightings of Johnny and he was usually seen in the Southwest and was always with a unidentified male, and there were different witnesses that said that Johnny was now six feet tall, he had long hair, and he always had slurred speech, kind of like he was like over medicated or drugged, and walked with a limp. And Noreene said, this is obvious that he's been beaten by whoever these people are, and she is sure that this is him and john and Noreene very much wanted to be advocates for Johnny, and they wanted to talk about out promoting child safety and making sure parents are aware of how to protect their children from predators. Like this was nineteen at this point, it was nineteen eighty four, so there wasn't a lot of talk about this kind of stuff back then, and they really became champions trying to figure out what happened to their son, and not just that, but also spreading awareness to other parents and just trying to advocate in general. And they realized, like it might be too late for us, but maybe we can help another family and prevent this from happening to someone else. So they became those people, and they did this all while they continued to work their full time jobs, and they just became super advocates for everything as far as their son went. They researched child kidnapping and the sexual abuse and exploitation and child pornographic studios and prostitution rings. They had really deep dive into all of the stuff before this stuff was even well known. Today in twenty twenty four, that stuff is obvious, like we know that stuff goes on, although still nobody really talks about it, which bothers me to my core. But back in nineteen eighty five, when they're in the midst of dealing with the abduction of their son, all of this stuff was not like it is now. They had to do their research, and there wasn't the Internet, so they couldn't do Internet research. They had to do their research on their own and really learn about this stuff to bring this stuff to light. In July of nineteen eighty five, John and Noreen had told reporters that they had been given a dollar bill that had Johnny's signature on it and the words I Am alive on it, and there was a woman that had received this dollar bill in change in Iowa, and they thought immediately that it was genuine, and they had handwriting experts look at it and they did determined that the bill was definitely Johnny's handwriting. And at this point, Noreen and the family and all of the community had helped raise four hundred thousand dollars in reward money because they wanted to try to negotiate with whoever had Johnny to give him back and they could have this reward money. Unfortunately, you put out large reward money like that and you're gonna open yourself up to scammers, and that is exactly what happened. There was many circumstances where John and Noreen were contacted by people claiming to have Johnny and it was all just a hoax to give them false hope, also try to extort money out of them. Like it was a horrific, horrific time for the Goshes as it was dealing with everything, and then add on people giving them false hope that their son was going to be returned to them, only to have them have their hopes up and Johnny never returned home, so the case pretty much goes cold. They are still doing everything they can as far as John and Nouringo to try to figure out what happened to Johnny and to get him home. In June of nineteen eighty eight, the FBI released an age progress picture of Johnny showing what he would look like as an eighteen year old, and John and Doreene were pretty pleased with this age progress photo and they thought that it did look like what they thought Johnny would look like. They saw some resemblance to people that were in their family. In April of nineteen ninety one, Greta Alexander, the self proclaimed psychic, came back and offered to help in the investigation, and at this point she said she believed that Johnny had been killed and was dead and his body was buried in a shallow grave in a remote area in Des Moines, and detectives did kind of explore this and try to look, but they came up empty handed. John and Noreene still thought that their son had been abducted as part of this child pornography. And in July of nineteen ninety one, there was an inmate in Nebraska prison named Paul Banaki. He was convicted of sexually abusing three miners. He told a private investigator that he was one of the four men who participated in Johnny's abduction, but it was later said by a Nebraska grand jury that he was not a credible witness. He had twenty eight different personalities, and his psychiatrist had testified that he was incapable of telling the truth. So again we come up with another dead end. John and Marene, however, thought that this guy was being truthful, and Banaki's lawyer, who is named John DeCamp, also said that he thought he was telling the truth. He said his account didn't match up ninety percent or ninety five percent, it was one hundred percent. He never varied, never changed his story. He gave a description of what Johnny was wearing the things that he had on his shirt and the different scars that Johnny had on his body. So according to Bonaki, he last saw Johnny in nineteen eighty nine. They said that he was sold to a pedophile in Colorado and was renamed Mark. He grew into a six foot four man and his hair was dyed black. He was then shipped to the Netherlands, where a prostitution was legal. Banaki didn't exactly know why Johnny was still being kept once he was an adult, if it was like child pornography related, but that is Banaki's claim, and I feel like, if nothing else, it's worth looking into now. Banaki did have like several personalities, and investigators did question him and did find that only one of the personalities is the one that was saying that this had happened, and all the other personalities denied it. So there was again nothing credible in those regards, at least according to authorities. I probably feel differently about it. So the tenth anniversary of Johnny's disappear and comes, and John and Noreen at this point are very torn because they of course want their son to be alive, but they can't imagine if Johnny has been held all of this time, the amount of torture that he's gone through. John and Noreen would later divorce just about a year later. They filed for divorce after twenty six years of marriage. They were amazing in my opinion, I think they did amazing at staying together despite the odds of having something so horrific happen. They navigated eleven years of their son's disappearance as a unit, and I think that is amazing. In September of nineteen ninety seven, it is now fifteen years since Johnny has been missing, and Noreen is still holding out hope that Johnny is still alive and is living under a different identity. Now, this is where it gets super interesting. In February of nineteen ninety nine, Noreen came forward with story. She claimed that Johnny had visited her at her Westmoine, Iowa apartment in March of nineteen ninety seven, but she never told anyone because Johnny, this person who had visited her, said that it would put their lives in danger. She said he showed up at her door at two thirty in the morning, accompanied by an unidentified man, and she said, we talked for an hour or about an hour and a half, and Johnny would look over to the other person for approval to speak. Now, this is pretty shocking to come out, first of all, two years after the fact, and it's such a interesting standpoint to say that Johnny and another man were in your apartment speaking with you for an hour. Police didn't really know what to make of this, and they said that if this was the case, that Johnny needed to come forward and go to police rather than trying to hide his identity and who he is now this claim when it came out, ex husband John said he was very skeptical of her account of seeing Johnny, and he accused her of making it up and said that if Johnny had really returned to Des Moines, he would have gone to the home where he grew up, not to a random apartment that Noreen was now living in. And Noreen basically said john was just jealous because their son had come to visit her instead of him, which we're starting to get messy here and I'm not feeling the vibes. So of course the detectives get this information, they make several public appeals for Johnny to reach out to them, but they never got any concrete evidence that he was still alive. And in August of two thousand and six, Noreen had received several photographs in the mail and she believed that they were of Johnny shortly after he was kidnapped. In one of the photographs, he was on a bed with two other young boys and all three of them were bound and gagged. Again, where did these photos come from? This is just such an interesting case. She turned the photographs over to the police, and they did say that the boy in the picture was not Johnny. These photos were identified by police in Florida in the late nineteen seventies, and they said that it was not foul play. It was just a few boys that had claimed that they were simply having a contest to see who could escape their bindings the quickest. Noreen very much disputed this and said that Johnny was in the photograph. And she said that she also was contacted by the mother of one of the other boys in the picture, and this kid had gone missing around the same time as Johnny. So, like I said, this case is very messy. There is a lot happening in all avenues. There's so much going on I don't even know what to think about it. In September of twenty twenty two, it marked the four disappearance, sorry, the fortieth anniversary of Johnny's disappearance. And there's not really a whole lot more out there than there was on day one, besides all these other random things that have happened in the midst of everything, but nothing leading to solid, concrete evidence as to where Johnny is. Norine still says she knows exactly what happened. He was kidnapped off the streets for the purpose of putting him in a pedophile ring, and she said she is still so angry about the way the investigation was handled and she did not trust the police at all. She even refused to provide a sample of her DNA for the National Missing Person's Database because she was suspicious of what the police would do with the information. Now, john did give his DNA willingly and hoped that it would eventually lead to them being able to identify where Johnny is. And john still does believe that Johnny was kidnapped, but didn't know if the abduction had had a anything to do with child pornography, but regardless, he wanted to figure out what happened to his son. Noreene said that she wants nothing more than to see her son one more time, but not if it meant risking his life. If he is still alive. I want Johnny to know that I love him, but I'm not going to try and force him to come home to something that would get him hurt, and that hurts. As of August of twenty twenty three, Johnny has been missing for forty one years and we do not know if Johnny is alive or dead. His mother still remains one of his greatest advocates and says that Johnny did visit her in nineteen ninety seven and she thinks that he is still alive somewhere living under an assumed identity. I do have some age progress photos of Johnny and I am going to share all of those, including pictures of him as a young boy. And when Johnny went missing, he was wearing black sweatpants, a white sweatshirt with Kim's Academy written on the back, and blue flipflops. He has a birthmark on his chest and a scar on his tongue. He has blue eyes and light brown hair. At the time of his disappearance. He was five seven and weighed one hundred and forty pounds. If you have any information about Johnny's disappearance, please contact the West and Wayne Police Department at five one five two two three three two one one. And Holy Molly, that is the most probably one of the most insane cases I've ever covered because of all of the twists and turns and the different possible sightings and the whole pedophilia ring of it. All back in the eighties so unheard of, but obviously it was a thing. I'm not denying that it was a thing. People just didn't talk about it. And that is the story of Johnny Gosh. He is still missing. Like I said, I do have age progress photos of him and I'm going to share those. But it is very possible that Johnny is still out there living under a different name. Was he taken into some type of cult mentality situation and that's where he's been since. We really don't know, but it's worth, in my opinion, the possibility of exploring that. But I'm going to share all the pictures of Johnny on my Instagram and Facebook pages, so please check those out and share this episode with anyone especially in the Iowa area if you have any connections to Des Moines. Johnny honestly could be anywhere at this point, but it's important that we share and try to get the word out and try to just get some peace and justice for Johnny and bring peace to Nowene and john after all of these years they've been put through holland back trying to figure out what happened to their son. So thank you guys so much for listening, thank you for joining me for a hundred EPs episodes on this unsolved adventure that I'm going on, and I can't wait for the next hundred. So thank you, guys. I appreciate you, and I will see you guys next week for a new episode. Bye.