Yesterday, CNN published an incredibly detailed and harrowing article by Thomas Lake, “An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His [80-year-old] mother is still on the case.”

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/us/johnny-gosch-missing-iowa-boy-cec-cnnphotos/

I have studied and followed this tragic case, as well as the Franklin scandal, for a long time. Johnny Gosch, age 12, vanished on an early morning in September 1982 while on his newspaper route in West Des Moines, Iowa. It is another one of those horrifying investigations where “countless hours of police work had led nowhere near the truth.” His mother is Noreen Gosch. She has been through a “special” kind of hell. The kind where you lose your child to a monster or monsters, have no answers, and get fucked over by most of the police and some in the “true crime” and “just get on with your life” communities. 

The reasons for Johnny’s disappearance would be fiercely debated. Theories would proliferate. Some would call it an impenetrable mystery, insisting that countless hours of police work had led nowhere near the truth.

Johnny’s mother would open a parallel investigation, one that continues to this day. In August 2023, not long before her 80th birthday, she pointed to her own skull and said, “I’ve got pretty much all of it in the file cabinet up here.”

By then she had named the names of more than half a dozen alleged perpetrators or potential suspects, none of whom had been arrested in her son’s case. She’d been ignored and dismissed, threatened and ridiculed, but Noreen Gosch kept searching for answers. The loss of Johnny changed the way she saw America. She said it convinced her of the corruption in our institutions, the injustice in our justice system, the breathtaking power behind the men who took her son. A force none other than evil itself.

The Gosch case is a vast labyrinth, full of wonder and terror, a place so dark you can barely see your hand in front of your face. I spent several months there while reporting this story, trying to reconcile Noreen’s findings with those of the authorities, hoping to gather all the objective facts. Many of those facts remain undiscovered.

And so, a warning: Any conclusion you make about the fate of Johnny Gosch will require some combination of guesswork and faith. Most people who study the case eventually settle on one of the following two theories.

You can choose to believe that Johnny was murdered soon after his disappearance, even though no killer has been identified and no remains have been found.

Or you can believe Noreen Gosch, who says she saw Johnny years later, very much alive, and talked to him just long enough to know why he had to disappear again.

CNN, Lake, 12-15-23

Hopefully, you are a reader not a skimmer and hopefully you have not lost the ability to read and consider more than a blurb on social media. Read Lake’s article and consider the corrupt police chief in this case, Orval Cooney. That should make your blood run cold. This man is comparable, but perhaps much worse than the fuck up police chief involved in the Gilgo Beach serial killer investigation, Suffolk Co. New York PD chief James Burke. (Google The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer, New York Times, Oct. 19, 2023. Corrupt district attorney added to the mix.). In early 2003 Noreen Gosch and attorney John DeCamp were preparing a lawsuit against Cooney for his misconduct in the Gosch investigation, when the POS had the good sense to take himself out with a sudden heart attack at age 69. There is more about Cooney in this YouTube interview with Noreen Gosch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrYAb5DFEyE .

Over the decades, many have opined in the OCCK case that a police officer was involved. Two names, Robert Van Hengel (ATF agent and suspect in the murder of Gail Webster in 1978), and Richard Clayton (Detroit PD, buddies with Arch Sloan), immediately come to mind. There are no doubt others who are “candidates,” but the OCCK investigation would never touch any of these suspects in any kind of depth. 

Lake asked police to comment for this article.

(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.”)

Sound familiar?

The frightening and likely correct theory Noreen Gosch developed in her search for the truth and to make it safe for her son to come forward is this:

Her son was kidnapped. The kidnappers were part of a sex-trafficking ring. She believed it had ties to a sexual-blackmail operation, in which her son said he’d been forced to participate, and it was all so big, so powerful, so pervasive, that the authorities would never solve it, would never arrest anyone, because, as Noreen had come to believe, this is America, where some people are sacrificed because others are above the law.

CNN article

Some people are sacrificed because others are above the law. Such sacrifices include Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich and Tim King. People like L. Brooks Patterson and Richard Thompson knew this equation decades ago. Collateral damage must be expected, but not attach to them. ”We [think we] know how hard this has been for the families . . .,” BUT . . . . That it is so difficult to even read an entire article like Lake’s is part of the reason this sacrifice continues.