Noreen Gosch: FBI Kidnapping Stings Must be Followed by Harsh Jail Sentences

Noreen Gosch, the Iowa woman whose dogged efforts to uncover the truth about what happened to her son 31 years ago created awareness that led to the establishment of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, is applauding the organization’s role in a nationwide FBI sting that led to the rescue of 105 children who had been kidnapped into an organized child sex trafficking ring.

“That is huge and I’m glad they are doing something that has yielded some results that might save some children,” said Gosch, whose son, Johnny, vanished from a West Des Moines street corner while preparing to deliver the Des Moines Sunday Register in 1982.

But until lawmakers adopt a zero-tolerance approach to offenders, children in Iowa and the rest of the nation remain vulnerable, she said.

“The last big arrest – 700 pedophiles – across several countries was in 2007; this is 2013, so it doesn’t happen often,” Gosch aid. “But it does give me some hope that they now realize we have a big problem that requires constant vigilance, but also action.”

Iowa Arrests in Sting Operations

Since 2003, Operation Cross Country has resulted in the identification and recovery of 2,700 children who have been sexually exploited, the FBI said. The FBI and its partnering law enforcement agencies say the sting operations have resulted in 1,350 convictions of those seeking to profit from the sexual exploitation of children.

Those convictions include a New Jersey man sentenced on sex trafficking and associated charges earlier this month in U.S. District Court for Iowa’s Southern District.

Johnelle Lewis Bell, 29, of Hammonton, NJ, was sentenced to a net term of 360 months in prison, to be followed by five years of supervised release, on the charges, which stemmed from a 2011 Operation Cross County Sting.

In the recent sting, 47  FBI divisions took part,  along with more than 3,900 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers and agents representing 230 separate agencies.

The FBI did not release the states involved in the sweep or say whether it included any cities in Iowa, but the Des Moines Register reported that 33 people were arrested in Council Bluffs in Iowa and two cities in Nebraska, Omaha and Lincoln.

Gosch, who will be recognized next month for her efforts to protect children from exploitation and abuse, said Iowa has a significant kidnapping problem. At the 2012 Preventing Abuse Conference in Des Moines last fall, speakers from National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said that from June to October 2012, there were more than 44 attempted abductions in Iowa.

“That’s a huge number for a state like Iowa, where so much of the population lives in farming communities and small towns,” Gosch said. “That’s more than Iowa has ever seen.”

Successful abductions during that period included Evansdale cousins Lyric Cook-Morrissey and Elizabeth Collins, whose bodies were discovered in December. They disappeared while riding their bikes in Evansdale on July 13, 2013.

Iowans Question Why Klunder Was Free

In another sensational abduction case in Iowa earlier this year, 15-year-old Kathlynn Shepard of Derby was abducted and killed. The suspect, Michael Klunder, committed suicide hours after he kidnapped Shepard and her 12-year-old friend, who escaped.

The girls’ abductor had a long criminal history, including at least three abductions, leading Gosch and others to question why he was free in the first place.

“How many will post bail and be back out and only get their wrists slapped, like Klunder?” Gosch said in an iinterview with Patch.

Iowa Sen. Jerry Behn, a  Boone Republican, has renewed his call for the death penalty for persons convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder, legislation that Gosch and other parents of missing Iowa children support.

Klunder was “an obvious danger to society,” Behn told KCCI this spring after the suspect’s suicide.

He had been sentenced to up to 41 years in prison, but served only about half that time because of Iowa’s good behavior law. In cases without mandatory sentences, 1.2 days are trimmed from the sentences of inmates for every day they serve without incident.

"Well, you know, they get life in Iowa, and life is life,” Gosch said in the KCCI interview. “ Well, apparently not. So I think, maybe some of the legislators would be happy to come forward and give us the reasons why the law works for some people and other are let off. And they're dangerous criminals," said Gosch.

Gosch said she hopes sting operations like the one the FBI announced Monday will become part of the FBI’s standard operating procedure.

“How many children have to perish before these sting operations become standard?” she said.

if law enforcement officials had taken seriously the intelligence she and her investigators gathered about her son’s disappearance, he might have been found, Gosch said.

“The thing that frustrated me from the very beginning was that they didn’t look for my son,” she told Patch. “They tried to call him a runaway, they threw up obstacles when I hired private investigators and it was my boy who suffered.

“We didn’t see a whole lot of action for years,” she said.

After her son disappeared, Gosch’s U.S. Department of Justice  Department testimony was instrumental in establishing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which provides expert resources to families with missing children and has assisted in the safe recovery of more than 175,200 children in the past 28 years.

Related: FBI Rescues 105 Kids from Child-Sex Trafficking Trade Johnny Gosch’s Mom Warned About