Community Corner

Iowa's Missing Kids: Innocence Abducted

Coming Tuesday, Iowa Patch takes a look at the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of Johnny Gosch and the kids now missing from every corner of Iowa.

When Iowa’s Johnny Gosch vanished on Sept. 5, 1982, while delivering the Sunday newspaper in his quiet West Des Moines neighborhood, everything changed – for law enforcement, for the newspaper business and certainly for his mother, Noreen Gosch.

As the 30th anniversary of Johnny’s disappearance arrives, she couldn’t have guessed that her son’s very absence would shake Iowa from a sleepy cocoon of innocence in which children were thought safe doing something as idyllic as delivering newspapers or around a picturesque lake.

But it did.

It changed everything.

That Norman Rockwellian image of a boy delivering the newspaper has been replaced with that of Johnny’s face on milk cartons, the low-technology equivalent of today’s Amber Alert system. He was one of the first kids to get that dubious distinction in what has become a social epidemic: Some 2,185 kids across the United States are reported missing each day, including scores from Iowa.

Though Johnny is still listed as missing on the registry of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Kids – an organization that didn’t exist when he disappeared and came about in part because of his mother’s dogged determination – the cold case is for all practical purposes closed.

In the days ahead, Iowa’s Patches in Ames, Ankeny, Cedar Falls, Iowa City, Johnston, Marion, Urbandale, Waukee and West Des Moines look at how his and other abductions changed laws and police protocol, and what Johnny’s mother learned -- and what we all should know -- from her journey to find her son.


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