Missing children in the Heartland
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed May 25th as National Missing Children’s Day in the wake of many high-profile child abduction cases, starting with Etan Patz’s disappearance in Manhattan May 25th, 1979. In this excerpt from Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, Paul M. Renfro looks at the case of Johnny Gosch who went missing early in the morning on Labor Day, 1982 in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Around six in the morning on Labor Day Sunday, 1982, Johnny Gosch and a fellow paperboy picked up their allotments of newspapers from the local United Methodist Church in West Des Moines. Gosch, a husky, freckled thirteen-year-old with a mop of light brown hair, departed the church with the other paperboy, and they diverged on their respective routes. Johnny’s dachshund Gretchen walked beside him.
Soon after the boys left the church, “a man wearing a baseball cap and driving a dark blue car . . . asked both boys, in separate conversations” for directions to the same location. The other paperboy, “whose frightened mother asked that his name not be used” in newspaper accounts, saw Johnny speaking to a man near the intersection of Forty-second Street and Marcourt Lane. In the predawn darkness, the young carrier could not determine whether this was the same man who had asked Johnny and him for directions earlier. An adult neighbor corroborated the boy’s version of events, confirming that, as the paperboys had, he too had provided directions to a man in a blue car. Witnesses disagreed on what happened next. Some insisted that a man followed Johnny around a street corner before snatching him. Others claimed they heard a car door slam and tires screech before watching a vehicle run a stop sign and travel northbound toward Interstate 235 “at a high rate of speed.” In addition to the blue vehicle, another witness recalled seeing a silver Ford Fairmont around the time of the disappearance. For all of this eyewitness testimony, the presumed abduction generated little physical evidence. Gretchen the dachshund returned home, unscathed, without Johnny, and his father found the boy’s wagon still full of newspapers two blocks from the family home.
Johnny Gosch’s disappearance made Iowa parents and children anxious.
The Gosches initially applauded the law enforcement response to Johnny’s disappearance. One newspaper report indicated that between twenty-five and thirty area law enforcement officials had searched for Johnny within a few hours of his disappearance. A television news segment stated that forty city police officers, Polk County sheriff’s deputies, and state highway patrolmen had conducted similar surveys of the area on that Sunday. The following day — Labor Day Monday — Boy Scouts, sheriff’s officials, other law enforcement authorities, and approximately one thousand volunteers scoured the area for Johnny’s body or any clues that might lead to his recovery. The “[s]omber searchers,” as the Des Moines Register characterized them, “anxiously” combed through “woods and parks, fields and ditches,” vacant lots and apartment buildings — but ultimately found nothing. John Gosch, Johnny’s father, nonetheless praised the West Des Moines police force, calling its work “fantastic.” “They are working overtime like I’ve never seen anybody in my life work before,” he attested. Yet the official investigation yielded few leads in the days following Johnny’s disappearance. Police publicized their search for two vehicles: a “blue over blue” full-size car with Warren County, Iowa, license plates and a silver late-model Ford Fairmont with a large black stripe at the bottom. The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) shortly thereafter announced that its officials had discovered a photograph depicting a Ford Fairmont similar to the one spotted at the scene of the disappearance. But the authorities’ failure to locate either vehicle drew the ire of Johnny’s parents and shook their confidence in the investigation.
One month after their son went missing, the Gosches expressed frustration with law enforcement officials for their inability to find what John Gosch called two “distinctive” automobiles and for their insistence that the Gosches submit to polygraph testing. The relationship between the Gosches and the police deteriorated from there, as Johnny’s mother Noreen honed a harsh, law-and-order rhetorical mode that she has reconfigured and rearticulated since 1982. In October of that year, she called the office of Iowa governor Robert D. Ray and left a message with his administrative assistant. The secretary’s handwritten note, which she presumably placed on the governor’s desk after she finished speaking with Gosch, read: “There is a ‘white-washing’ job being done as far as what is being done [sic] . . . considering class action suit because of ways [the case is] being handled. Wants someone with ‘clout’ to demand their file [sic].” Noreen Gosch phoned Governor Ray at least once more in 1982 to cast aspersions on the police investigation. The Gosches’ distrust of authority, coupled with their belief that “the police ha[d] reached a dead end,” drove them to seek the assistance of private investigators.
The Des Moines Register kept tabs on its two thousand young carriers, conducting periodic checks on their routes and issuing emergency whistles to each of them.
Johnny Gosch’s disappearance made Iowa parents and children anxious. Just a few days after Johnny went missing, Noreen observed “how many mothers were stationed along the way, escorting their children home” from school. She claimed that Johnny’s case had “created a sense of panic in people, and rightly so.” This “sense of panic” revealed itself the weekend after Labor Day, as young paper carriers set out on their routes amidst drastically heightened security. Police established checkpoints around the site where Johnny had vanished, questioning motorists and looking out for any suspicious activity. Many parents accompanied their children as they delivered papers. The Des Moines Register kept tabs on its two thousand young carriers, conducting periodic checks on their routes and issuing emergency whistles to each of them. A local television report featured a spokesman from the paper who tried to reassure the public, and especially the families of young carriers, about the safety of the Register’s delivery program. “We’re very, very concerned about creating some unnecessary panic amongst our carriers, and I hesitate to use the word ‘panic,’ but, uh, we don’t want to unnecessarily scare a carrier.” He continued: “Newspaper work traditionally has been a good learning experience for young people, and this is an unfortunate situation. It’s the first [child carrier abduction] that I’m aware of in the Des Moines area.” The spokesman aimed to restore community members’ faith in not only the Register but also in the security of young carriers and their tradition of paper delivery. Gosch’s presumed abduction was an aberration, he reminded viewers, one that did not warrant any “unnecessary panic.” Still, the attention that Johnny Gosch garnered in the state and nationwide suggested to many Iowans that his case was not peculiar but rather part of a national scourge about which they had previously been blissfully ignorant.
Paul M. Renfro is Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University.
