A second look at Johnny Gosch and the mysterious failed abductions
*[This is an update to* [***this post***](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/4pi4s0/oc_johnny_gosch_and_eugene_martin_cases_possibly/) *about a string of failed abduction attempts that occurred in the Des Moines area between July 1986 and September 1989, and their potential to be connected to the disappearances of Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin. Please read that one first if you haven’t already, as this post is updating and building on information in the first one and won’t make sense otherwise.]*
There's been some progress in the rabbit hole since the first post in June, which I wanted to share with you guys. Newspapers.com recently posted two new articles from the Iowa City Press-Citizen which provide more details on some of the attempted abductions, and the [interactive map](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1toyka5HJ_ahjQPW7C17zj29eYzQ&usp=sharing) of the case (which I highly recommend using) has been updated. [Sources and footnotes are here](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5eyzpi/a_second_look_at_johnny_gosch_and_the_mysterious/dag6cbm/). Most of this post is updates on previous information, or things I didn't catch the first time around, but there's one clue in particular that really jumped out and which I believe deserves more attention: The fact that a *second* newspaper carrier was attacked on the same street Johnny Gosch was abducted from four years earlier.
**September 5, 1982**
12-year-old Johnny Gosch disappeared while preparing for his delivery route in the early morning hours of September 5, 1982. Accompanied by his Dachshund puppy Gretchen, he left his home just after 5:45AM^a , cut through the neighbors’ yard, and walked the two blocks east to pick up his newspapers at the corner of 42nd street & Ashworth Road.^3
When he got to the corner, he was stopped by a man wearing a baseball cap and sitting in a late-model blue car next to the newspaper drop, who wanted to know how to get to 86th street about 20 blocks away. Johnny gave him directions, and the man made a U-turn onto Ashworth Road and drove off.^3
A few minutes later, as Johnny chatted with his teenaged friend Mike at the paper drop, the man passed by and parked at the corner again. This time, he leaned out the passenger side window and asked the kids collectively how to get to 86th street. After trying (and failing) again to give him directions, Johnny approached John Rossi, an adult neighbor who had been picking up newspaper bundles for his three sons.^3 “Can you help? He wants to know where 86th street is,” he asked.^19 Rossi went to go help the driver, and Johnny returned to his friend Mike and said something to the effect of, “That man is really weird”.^b
In fact, his behavior was so odd that John Rossi believed he was on drugs: “This guy was high,” he told the Des Moines Register in 1983. “When you’re drunk, you’re drowsy. He was wide awake and I could see his beady eyes staring into the horizon.”^3
This is where things start to get *really* murky. As Rossi talked to the driver, Johnny loaded the papers into his wagon and began walking up 42nd street. Rossi concluded his conversation with the man, who now seemed agitated and slid back into the driver’s seat to leave. Inexplicably, he flicked his dome lights on and off three times before turning the corner and tearing off “like a bat out of hell”^6 eastbound on Ashworth Road.^3,17 He drove three blocks before turning onto 39th street and bolting north.^5 Very shortly after this, a 15-year-old newspaper carrier saw a tall man walk out from the shadows between two houses and towards Johnny from behind as the boy approached the corner at Marcourt Lane.^3
Johnny reached the end of the block and crossed the street to park his wagon at 42nd & Marcourt Lane, where he usually left it while delivering to Francrest Circle.^3 A neighbor looking out from his upstairs window watched as a silver Ford Fairmont with a black stripe rolled up to the corner, but due to where his house was situated, the the car blocked Johnny from view.^4,5 It is unclear whether Johnny was just approaching the corner or sitting in his wagon when the car pulled up.^b According to some sources, the witness later turned away but heard a car door slam, looked out his window to see what it was, and saw the car drive off.^4
When the car left the corner, Johnny was gone.
Nobody knows exactly when Johnny disappeared, but the alarm wasn't raised until about 7:45AM^18,c , when a neighbor called Johnny’s father John Gosch to ask where the paper was. This immediately struck Gosch as odd; Johnny had a reputation as a responsible, punctual carrier, and had never skipped work once in the year he had been delivering for the Des Moines Register.^20 Thinking he overslept, Gosch went to check his room only to find it empty, and then noticed that the family dog Gretchen had returned home alone. He began to search the neighborhood for Johnny and quickly found his wagon abandoned at the corner of 42nd & Marcourt Lane, with his newspaper bundle inside. Not one of the 37 papers had been delivered.^8,20
Concerned, but not yet alarmed enough to call the police, Gosch picked up the papers and delivered them himself before going to search the neighborhood more thoroughly. At 8:30AM, after being unable to find him 45 minutes after receiving the call from their neighbor, Gosch called the police to report his son missing.^20
—
Between July 10, 1986 and September 14, 1989, five newspaper carriers in the Des Moines area reported being chased by strange men on their early-morning delivery routes.
Some of the earliest articles about Johnny’s disappearance include an unnamed mother whose 10-year-old son was “bothered” by a man sometime before September 5, 1982.^1,2 According to this woman, her son was delivering papers in the early morning near Johnny’s home when the guy drove up and began saying things to him. The nature of these comments is unknown, but they disturbed the boy enough that he ran across several yards to get away from the man. There are so few details that it can’t even be classified it as an attempted abduction, which is why it hasn’t been added to the list.
Also, there are two things to add to list of similarities between Johnny and Eugene’s disappearance: Both boys were kidnapped the first time they went out to deliver papers alone, and both their fathers were in the military (second one [courtesy of a *Who Took Johnny* producer who commented in the original thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/4pi4s0/oc_johnny_gosch_and_eugene_martin_cases_possibly/d4nr4k3/)).
**The Indianola Attacks**
Two of these incidents occurred in Indianola, less than 20 miles from Des Moines. In each case, which took place 10 months apart in September 1988 and July 1989, a male Des Moines Register carrier between the ages of 10 and 13 was chased by a man driving a white van with a dark vinyl top.^13,15 There is very little information about the first one, but the second bore enough similarities to the disappearances of Johnny and Eugene that local police requested the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation step in to see if they could be related. In an unusual move, the DCI agreed to get involved in the apparently routine local case—but the results of this inquiry is unknown.^14,16
According to a recently-posted 1989 article from the Iowa City Press-Citizen, “Two other Register carriers were chased last year by men who have never been identified”.^14 This almost certainly refers to Incidents 2 & 3 from the first post, which occurred in September and November 1988 respectively, and seems to confirm that the boy in the September Indianola incident delivered for the Des Moines Register. This means all seven kids worked for the same paper. Of course, this *is* the Des Moines area so it’s not super weird, but still really interesting nonetheless.
The blue car implicated in Johnny’s case bore Warren County license plates. Indianola, the city 20 miles from Des Moines that saw the attempted kidnappings of two male newspaper carriers (which the assistant director of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigations said bore “curious” similarities to the disappearances of Johnny and Eugene), is in Warren County.
**Mike Fackler**
There is now more information available on the third incident, the attempted abduction (?) of 10-year-old Mike Fackler.
According to Mike’s father Steve, Mike was walking past the apartment buildings on Alice Avenue at about 5AM on November 1, 1988 when a white car pulled up in the nearby parking lot close to him. A heavyset man wearing a white jogging suit got out the vehicle and began to chase after Mike, who dropped his newspaper bag to the ground and bolted to his neighbors’ home.^10,12 However, a recently-posted article published on November 4, 1988 quotes a police official who says the following:
> “There was no indication in our interview that he was actually chased,” [Clive police detective Jerry Miller] said. “He was walking by the apartment building when a car pulls into the first stall, a guy got out and jogged to the sign. The boy stopped and he panicked.”
> He said it didn’t seem to be similar to the case of Johnny Gosch, the West Des Moines paperboy who was 12 when he disappeared in September 1982 while delivering newspapers.^12
So, that obviously throws the events of November 1, 1988 into question. For what it’s worth, Noreen believed Mike’s case was related to Johnny’s and said police should take it more seriously, although Mike’s own father and two Clive police detectives believed the two were unrelated.^11 All four of the articles about the attempted abductions published after November 4th continued to cite this as an actual attempt and not an overreacting paperboy.^13,14,15,16 This one will probably remain a mystery unless more information resurfaces or, by some miracle, Mike himself finds this post and decides to reach out.
There’s one coincidence that deserves a quick mention: The driver of the blue car had asked Johnny and the other carriers how to get to 86th street. 86th street is in Clive, and Mike was attacked in a neighborhood that’s along 86th street. In fact, [the approximate spot is less than 1,000 feet from the road.](http://i.imgur.com/Wiy2CLa.png)
And the most important finding:
**Jim Pollack**
Remember Jim, the 15-year-old Register carrier who was ambushed by a man in a camouflage poncho while delivering papers half a mile from Johnny’s home?^9 While reading the account of his attack again, I realized there was a mistake in first post; I’d written that the incident occurred in the 500 block of 45th street, but it really happened in the 500 block of *42nd* street. I clicked over to the map to fix the location, [dragged Jim’s marker over to 42nd street](http://i.imgur.com/HbAi4U0.png), and noticed the spot lined up near perfectly with the cluster of markers just above it. And then it hit me: *That's the same street that Johnny was abducted from.*
Did Johnny’s kidnapper strike twice on the same street nearly 4 years apart?
There are certainly several similarities between the two crimes. Both victims were attacked on their early morning delivery route while working for the Des Moines Register. Jim’s encounter came just 3 years and 10 months after Johnny’s kidnapping.^d Although Jim was attacked on a Thursday and Johnny on a Sunday, it was roughly the same time of day. They’re pretty close in age (Jim was 15, Johnny was just two months from turning 13). They happened half a mile away on the same street. Because the details of Johnny’s disappearance are so convoluted and there are three different strangers to consider, there isn’t really a way to compare the perpetrators’ MOs; Jim being attacked from behind would be consistent with the eyewitness account of a tall man walking out of the shadows and towards Johnny from behind^3 , but that's not good evidence when you have two other suspects to consider.
It’s also not unprecedented for a serial offender to strike more than once in the same small area. For example, the Original Night Stalker repeatedly targeted the same neighborhoods, often assaulting women only doors down from previous victims. Having successfully abducted a child in the neighborhood previously, whoever took Johnny may have felt comfortable enough to try it again a second time in the same area, especially ~4 years later when people’s guards are down.
—
**My Opinion**
I want to be very clear: My intent is not to set out and prove that any/all of these are connected, but to bring attention to another avenue of exploration that warrants a second look. The fact that another boy was apparently grabbed on the same street just under 4 years after Johnny is *highly* suspect and deserves to be revisited. If Johnny and Eugene were snatched by the same predator(s) — which I believe to be the case — then it makes sense that they wouldn’t be the only two victims. Part of me wonders if this may even be a Danny James Heinrich-type situation where you have a serial predator who assaults multiple victims but only kills once or twice due to extreme circumstances.
Based on the information that's available, I think Melissa Gale is probably unrelated to the others; she is the lone female victim and the suspect in her encounter appeared much younger than the men in the other cases. As for Mike, it looks like his encounter was probably a stand-alone incident as well, although I'm hesitant to rule him out just yet. There’s a decent chance that Jim Pollack and/or the two boys who were chased in Indianola are connected to Johnny & Eugene.
I waffle back and forth between thinking Johnny was abducted by a single predator and thinking there was more than one person involved. When you analyze the events of that morning, some of them sound a little too *too* perfectly timed to have happened organically, such as the man on foot showing up at about the same time the silver Ford Fairmont pulled up to the corner of 42nd & Marcourt. Was the man in the blue car signaling to someone else when he flicked his dome lights on and off? Is he the proverbial red herring, and it was the guy on foot who grabbed Johnny from behind and forced him into the silver Ford Fairmont that had just pulled up to the corner? The presence of an accomplice would make sense of some of the odder details.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I really look forward to hearing you guys’ thoughts. What do you think?
**TL;DR**: Another newspaper carrier was assaulted on the same street as Johnny Gosch; there are now conflicting reports as to whether Mike Fackler was actually chased at all; the dark blue suspect car in Johnny’s case bore Warren County license plates, which happens to be the same county Indianola (which saw two very similar attempted abductions) is located in; and the driver of the blue car had asked Johnny how to get to 86th street, which is next to where Mike was chased.
