Missing Paperboy Johnny Gosch’s Mom Felt ‘Weight Lifted’ when Ohio Women Escaped Captors

Noreen Gosch felt a heavy burden lift from her heart Monday when breaking news alerts streamed across the television screen that three women missing for a decade in Cleveland, Ohio, had escaped from their captors.

“You feel like, even though it’s not your children, a weight has been lifted,” said Gosch, whose son Johnny was kidnapped 30 years ago from a West Des Moines street corner as he prepared to deliver the Des Moines Sunday Register.

“Some other parent had some good news for a change,” she said. “I didn’t know the families, but we all belong to the same club we were all forced into because of what happened to our children.”

Johnny Gosch’s kidnapping has never been officially solved, though his mother says her investigation revealed that he was kidnapped into the ugly world of human trafficking.

On the 30th anniversary of Johnny’s disappearance in September, Patch revisited the case in "Iowa's Missing Kids: Innocence Abducted." Read these and other stories on Patch:

Innocence Abducted: Noreen Gosch Blinded by Ugly World of Child Sex Trade (Part 2 of a Series)

Johnny Gosch’s Mom ‘a Pioneer’ in Protecting Children (Part 3 of a Series)

What I Learned About Us from Noreen Gosch: Editor’s Notebook

Want more? Go to Patch’s Iowa’s Missing Kids topics page.

It wasn’t until Gosch returned home and began learning more about the release of the women – Amanda Berry, 27; Georgina "Gina" DeJesus, 23; and Michelle Knight, 32 – that the same questions that have nagged her for 30 years began piercing her heart again.

“Why couldn’t we have had some startling news like this for Johnny, or for Eugene Martin and Marc Allen?” Gosh questioned. “I knew why.”

Gosch believes there was a cover-up regarding the disappearance of her son and the other two boys. Eugene Martin, another Des Moines Register paperboy, disappeared under eerily similar circumstances as Gosch’s son almost two years later. On Easter Eve 1986, Marc James Warren Allen never came home after visiting a friend.

Gosch: Recent Cases Offer Validation

Gosch has been openly critical of police handling of her son’s disappearance, saying authorities never properly pursued leads and treated his disappearance as a runaway – a response that still unleashes a sharp tongue that underlies her her acrimonious relationship with law enforcement over the past three decades.

“I didn’t know finding my son would be a do-it-yourself project,” she told Patch last year.

Gosch said that each time a kidnapping victim is freed after being held in captivity – as was Jaycee Dugard, held for 18 months, and Elizabeth Smart, held for nine months  – there’s a message for law enforcement.

“They need to be a lot more thorough,” she said. “They need to listen with an open mind.”

For other families with missing children, the women’s escape may provide hope in what many parents are told is a hopeless situation after years pass without a break in the case, Gosch said.

“Elizabeth Smart was freed because someone recognized her,” Gosch said. “Jaycee Dugard gained her freedom after 18 years. They are not all dead. They are very much alive somewhere, many times being held by some depraved maniac.”

Veil Lifted Again on Human Trafficking

Gosch believes that Johnny is alive and visited her in her West Des Moines home March 1987, but said that it would be unsafe for him to return home because it would place Gosch and her other children at risk because his captors were still alive and active in a ring of pedophiles who kidnap children for sexual gratification.

Cases like her son’s and others lift the veil on the ugly world of child sex trafficking, Gosch said.

This is amazing,” she said. “How many more kids have been taken off the streets in the U.S.A. in the same condition that we didn’t know about? They are probably in every state, and it all goes back to pedophile activity.

“People don’t want to hear it because it is so ugly,” she said. “We know there are human traffickers, but we don’t always know who they are or what they wear. Are they the people who stand next to you in the grocery store? People shut down and they don’t want to know.”

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