The Jacob Wetterling Story: America's First 'Milk Carton Kids' (Part 3 of 5-Part Series)

In a cruel coincidence, the Sept. 3 news that Jacob Wetterling’s abductor, molester and killer had led investigators to the boy’s remains in rural Minnesota broke almost 34 years to the day that a child protection pioneer’s son — 12-year-old paperboy Johnny Gosch — was snatched a state away.

The last time anyone saw Johnny was Sept. 5, 1982, as he stood on a West Des Moines, Iowa, street corner with his dog, Gretchen, and waited for the bundle of papers that would fill his Red Flyer wagon. Nearly two years later on Aug. 12, 1984, under eerily similar circumstances and only a few miles away, 13-year-old Eugene Martin never came home from his paper route.

Both boys vanished without a trace. Both were carriers for the Des Moines Register. They didn’t know each other, but their faces made their way to America’s breakfast tables together. They were the “milk carton kids,” among the first missing children whose pictures were put on the sides of milk cartons in what was yesterday’s low-tech version of today’s Amber Alerts.

Combined, these two cases ripped the veneer from the notion that Midwestern children were safe doing something as all-American as delivering the Sunday newspaper — a job that, if you were a kid back then, put enough money in your pocket to go to a video arcade and save up for college, too. Small-town America was no longer a cocoon of safety.

About This Patch Special Report

Today, we offer our third installment in a five-part special report about the abduction and murder of Jacob Wetterling and other missing children in Minnesota and the Midwest. Previously in this report:

• The Jacob Wetterling Story: What Went Wrong (Part 1 in a 5-Part Series)
• The Jacob Wetterling Story: Are Parents Too Cautious (Part 2 in a 5-Part Series)

The investigations into the disappearances of both Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin long ago went cold, and the two cases were never officially linked by police. Neither was the disappearance of a third Des Moines boy, Marc James Warren Allen, 13, on March 29, 1986. The Allen boy wasn’t a paper carrier — he got permission from his mother to walk down the street to a friend’s house the day before Easter, but never showed up — and his disappearance didn’t receive the same national media coverage as the other boys’ cases.

“Missing Kids More Or Less Ignored”

Noreen Gosch, who still lives in the same Des Moines suburb where her son was abducted 34 years ago, says the Norman Rockwellian, “rural America nice” stereotype allows pedophiles to hide in plain sight. That certainly was the case with Jacob Wetterling’s killer, Danny Heinrich, of Paynesville, Minnesota, where the boy’s remains had been buried for 27 years, under the noses of investigators.

The Wetterling boy was with his brother and a friend when he was kidnapped on Oct. 22, 1989, and the report that he had been abducted was never doubted. The other boys, whom Heinrich let go, provided eyewitness accounts of what had happened.

But when Johnny Gosch vanished seven years earlier, no one could believe he had been kidnapped, least of all the at-the-time sleepy suburban police force in West Des Moines. It couldn’t be true. It was Iowa, and such things just didn’t happen there.

Noreen Gosch is infamous to this day for her stormy relationship with local police, who said Johnny had probably run away. Gosch is something of a force of nature. Insistence by police that her son voluntarily vanished still unleashes an acerbic tongue, and 34 years haven’t softened her contempt for investigators’ handling of her son’s disappearance.

In 2012, near the 30th anniversary of her son’s disappearance, Gosch told Patch that she threw a cup of steaming coffee in the direction of an FBI agent when he said there wasn’t enough evidence for federal authorities to enter the case. That was despite an eyewitness, now retired attorney John Rossi, who told investigators he had seen Johnny talking to a man in a car at the corner while he was waiting for his bundles of newspapers.

“If you’re not going to help me find my son, then get out,” Gosch recalled telling the agent. “Get out of my house.”

Rossi, who was helping his son with his route the morning Johnny disappeared, understands Gosch’s frustration. He insisted his own son quit his job after Johnny vanished. “If that had been my boy, I would’ve done more than Noreen did,” Rossi told Patch. “Until then, missing children were more or less ignored.”

Who Took Johnny Gosch?

Gosch figured that if anyone was going to find her son, it would have to be her. “I didn’t know finding my son would be a do-it-yourself project,” she told Patch. She hired investigators and waded into the poke-your-eye-out-ugly sex trafficking underworld she believes ensnared her son, and was shocked by what she discovered.

The sheer number of children who are forced to become sex slaves is jarring.

The U.S. State Department estimates that of the 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders every year, half are children. According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, 2 million children are currently subjected to prostitution in the global commercial sex trade. Human trafficking is a lucrative $32-billion-a-year industry, according to State Department data.

Gosch’s private investigator, Jim Rothstein, a retired New York City police detective and noted human trafficking expert, says Johnny’s fate is no mystery. He asserts the boy was almost certainly stalked and kidnapped by a nationwide ring of pedophiles trafficking children.

The theory is described by former Nebraska state legislator John DeCamp in his book, “The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska.” In it, DeCamp, a practicing attorney in Lincoln, Nebraska, claims that what looked like a financial swindle when federal agents shut down Omaha’s Franklin Community Federal Credit Union actually financed an elaborate $40 million operation that, among other illegal activities, stole children to supply rich and powerful public figures.

Variations of the story are laid out in astonishing and sometimes unbelievable detail on the Johnny Gosch Foundation website and in Noreen Gosch’s 2002 book, “Why Johnny Can’t Come Home.”

Rothstein steadfastly maintained every lurid detail is true, but “solving a case and being able to prosecute it are not the same,” he said.

When Kids Vanish Now

Abductions like the one Gosch says took her son away occur infrequently among the nearly 2,000 children reported missing every day in America, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a national clearinghouse and resource center founded in 1984. Of those, only about 115 are considered “stranger abductions.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was born from the heartache of parents like Gosch and John and Revé Walsh, whose 6-year-old son, Adam, was kidnapped from a Sears department store in Hollywood, Florida, on July 27, 1981. Adam’s severed head was found in a drainage canal off the Florida Turnpike two weeks later.

For Gosch, protecting America’s children has become a crusade, a life’s calling that has helped her bear the anguish of losing her son.

Her U.S. Department of Justice Department testimony was instrumental in establishing the NCMEC, which provides expert resources to families with missing children. In the past 32 years, the organization has fielded more than 43 million calls on its national toll-free hotline — (800) THE-LOST — and has assisted law enforcement in the recovery of more than 227,000 missing children.

In 1984, she was invited by former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter to share what she had learned about mob involvement in child trafficking before a U.S. Senate hearing on organized crime. She was one of the leading advocates for the Children’s Bill of Rights, an Iowa law that allows for video testimony when juvenile victims of sexual abuse testify against their offenders. Because of her, police both locally and nationally respond differently than they did 30 years ago.

The Johnny Gosch Bill, as the Iowa legislation she championed is known, struck down the provision that let authorities wait 72 hours before declaring a child missing. Now, they’re required to issue a report immediately, even if it seems likely the child will return home before dinner. The law, cloned by numerous other states as national awareness grew about dangers predators pose to children, took effect July 1, 1984.

It was used for the first time 43 days later when Eugene Wade Martin vanished.

Editor’s Note: This story was taken from interviews conducted by Patch editor Beth Dalbey in 2012 for a special report on the 30th anniversary of Johnny Gosch’s kidnapping that originally appeared on West Des Moines Patch. Read the full series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Gosch told Patch she’s still amazed that she found the strength to survive in the days after Johnny vanished.

“What would you do if it was your child, if it was your kid?” she said. “Would you go with the way the police department wants you to go, or would you want me?

“I have no regrets,. I made the best decisions at the time with the information at my disposal. I’m only disappointed that I wasn’t taken more seriously.”

Up Next in This Series

The discovery of Jacob Wetterling’s remains in September has raised new questions about whether his death could have been prevented.

The Jacob Wetterling Story: A ‘Cluster’ of Abuse in Paynesville (Part 4 in a 5-Part Series)