Living about two hours or so from Des Moines at the time, I remember the disappearance of Johnny Gosch quite well. It scared my mother so much that she made my brother quit his paper route.
I've been following the case off and on ever since.
If I remember correctly, didn't his mother say that years later Gosch showed up at her house incognito for some reason?
The case is both horrifying and fascinating; so many theories.
Yeah, this is from his mother Noreen's website,
http://www.johnnygosch.com/history.htm:"In February 1999, in Federal Court testimony in Omaha Nebraska, Noreen Gosch testified that Johnny Gosch came to see her in 1997
[he would have been 27 at the time], providing information about his experience, asking for his mother's help and pleading for her to not reveal his visit.
[Then he vanished into the night, never to be seen or heard from again.] Johnny is now 36 years old
[at the time the site was made - he'd be 44 now]. After years of suffering tremendous torture and pain at the hands of his captors, being used and abused, he and several others escaped. They have been living in hiding under new identities... they fear for their lives. People ask ... why is it necessary for someone to hide and live this way..... It is simple, Johnny can identify many of the people involved and would be a threat to the very people who took him. He is known as the 'chameleon.' Why? Because he can so completely change his appearance. He would like to be a part of his family once again but it isn't safe."
This is the part where some of us get skeptical. He's 44 now. His case is well-known. After the fiasco during the Bonacci trial, key witnesses dying mysterious deaths before they testified, etc., he'd be put under high security and possibly even witness protection if he came forward. To just show up and say hi and bye and leave his mother in anguish is just sort of strange.
Many people believe Bonacci was making up the connection to Gosch to add more relevancy to his case. Gosch was 12, going through puberty and tall for his age when he was kidnapped. He didn't exactly fit the pedophile-victim profile. Many people think Noreen went off the rails with the whole connection to the Franklin cover-up thing, especially when she started accusing her husband of being part of it.
And that's not him in the photos of the kids who are bound and gagged. That doesn't even look like him. A sheriff's deputy in Tampa came forward and said those belonged to a case he was on in the '70s. AP covered it, I believe.
I don't know what to think.
Here's another pretty interesting thing on YouTube about it. Hell, you could search for Johnny or Noreen Gosch there and spend hours down the rabbit hole over there, if you ever feel so inclined. I did one day and wanted to pour bleach in my brain when I finally emerged from the YouTube coma:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXiKIlh3dqg