Missing Iowa Girls a Painful Reminder to Mom of Johnny Gosch – In Case You Missed It

The mother of an Iowa boy missing since 1982 said she got a “sickening feeling” in the pit of her stomach when she heard news that two eastern Iowa girls had vanished while riding their bicycles, a pursuit as iconic as youths delivering the morning newspaper once was.

The news was salt in a wound that has never healed for Noreen Gosch, whose son Johnny’s abduction while delivering the Sunday paper in his West Des Moines neighborhood 30 years ago remains unsolved.

She said she knew the girls' disapperance was “a kidnapping right off the bat.”

And Gosch knew it would forever alter the lives of the families of Evansdale cousins Lyric Cook-Morrissey, 10, and Elizabeth Collins, 8, just as then 12-year-old Johnny’s disappearance on Sept. 5, 1982, inexorably changed hers.

“One day, you’re just a family living your lives, cooking dinner at night, doing whatever it was that was normal the day before that happened, and then everything’s changed,” Gosch said. “That part of it is overwhelming, because your life is altered.

“When something like this happens to any family, you do not know what you don't know yet,” she said. “You have no clue what’s going to take place with the onslaught of the press and people wanting to get word out.”

So she picked up the phone and called Drew Collins, Elizabeth’s father, and offered to help him put together “Plan B” for what the families are going to do to keep the story in the public consciousness “if leads dry up and there’s no one left to interview and nowhere else to search.”

Right now, media coverage functions as an unofficial international Amber Alert of sorts, but once there’s no new information, “it falls pretty flat and the families can feel pretty alone,” Gosch said.

Sept. 5, 1982: The Day Innocence Died

Johnny Gosch’s disappearance was a watershed case that changed not only laws governing how quickly police must respond to reports of missing children to how the newspaper is delivered to subscribers’ doorsteps  – mostly by adults now, no longer the “Paper Boy” who built savings accounts by throwing the morning paper onto doorsteps.

Gosch earned a reputation with police as a troublemaker, she said, for refusing to back down when investigators refused to classify Johnny’s disappearance as an abduction – even after she produced witnesses who saw people photographing Johnny and other paper carriers and a local attorney, who said he’d seen the kidnapping go down.

Much has changed since then.

Gosch advocated for and eventually helped pass the Johnny Gosch Bill requiring that police immediately investigate when foul play is suspected in a child’s disappearance, and at least eight states have passed similar legislation. Johnny Gosch was also one of the first missing children pictured on a milk carton, a photo that appears in the Life magazine coffee table book, 100 Photographs that Changed the World.

Realities Too Painful to Look At

Even with the awareness her son's disapperance provided, Gosch said Iowans are still reluctant to give up on the notion that bad things don’t happen in idyllic middle America, and it’s still a safe place for kids to deliver newspapers and ride their bicycles.

“Kidnappers can and do kidnap in our smaller towns because kids aren’t as street savvy,” she said. “It’s easier, and in Johnny’s case – and Eugene Martin’s and Marc Allen’s – they’ve gotten away with it.”

All three abductions occurred over a four-year period in various places in the Des Moines metro area, and some elements of their disappearances are similar. Martin was also a Des Moines Register paper carrier abducted while delivering Sunday papers two years after Johnny Gosch disappeared. Allen’s case also has been linked, though he wasn’t a paper carrier when he disappeared in 1986 while walking to a friend’s home to do homework.

Gosch said she prepared the Collins family for what sometimes happens when reality becomes too painful for the public to look at and the to extraneous issues, such as past and current legal problems of Lyric’s parents.

“They turn their attention elsewhere, because the main issue is so frightening,” she said. “It’s so scary to think that anybody could come into any town or area and take any of our children for any purpose. It’s every parent’s nightmare, so it’s easier for the mind to focus on something else.”

But Gosch said she’s seen the best of human kindness, too.

“Every day when I leave my home – every single day – someone walks up to me and says, ‘I’ve prayed for you and your son all these years',” she said “It’s 30 years later, and I don’t even know these people.”