Before dawn on Sunday, September 5, 1982, Johnny Gosch left home to begin his paper route in
West Des Moines, Iowa, a suburb of
Des Moines proper. Although it was customary for Gosch to awaken his father to help with the route, the boy took only the family's
miniature dachshund, Gretchen, with him that morning. Other paper carriers for
The Des Moines Register would later report having seen Gosch at the paper drop, picking up his newspapers. It was the last known sighting of Gosch that could be corroborated by multiple witnesses. Another paperboy named Mike reported that he observed Gosch talking to a stocky man in a blue two-toned car near the paper drop; another witness, John Rossi, saw the man in the blue car talking to Gosch and "thought something was strange." Gosch told Rossi that the man was asking for directions and asked Rossi to help. John performed a cursory search of the neighborhood around 6 a.m. He immediately found Gosch's wagon, still full of newspapers, two blocks from their home. By her estimation, police did not arrive to take her report for a full forty-five minutes. They turned up little evidence and arrested no suspects in connection with the case. Over the years, several
private investigators have assisted Gosch's parents with the search for their son. Among them are Jim Rothstein, a retired
New York City police detective, and
Ted Gunderson, a retired chief of the
FBI's
Los Angeles field office. In 1984, Gosch's photograph appeared alongside that of another
Des Moines Register paperboy, Eugene Martin, who had gone missing that year, on milk cartons produced by the Des Moines-based
Anderson Erickson Dairy. Gosch was among the first missing children who had their disappearances
publicized in this way.
Potentially linked cases On August 12, 1984, Eugene Martin, another Des Moines-area paperboy, disappeared under similar circumstances. He went missing while delivering newspapers on the city's south side. Over a year later, on March 29, 1986, the day before Easter, Marc James Warren Allen disappeared while walking to a friend's house down the street from his own residence. Media reports initially described Allen as the third Iowa paperboy to go missing in the 1980s, but a detailed piece about Iowa's missing people that appeared in the
Register on August 18, 2013, claimed that Allen had never been a paperboy. However, Allen's brother would later confirm that he was indeed a paperboy, but had not been working on a route at the time of his disappearance. Authorities were unable to prove a connection between the three cases, yet Noreen claims that she was personally informed of the Martin abduction a few months in advance by a private investigator who was searching for her son. She was told the kidnapping "would take place the second weekend in August 1984 and it would be a paperboy from the southside of Des Moines." ==Fraud by wire case==