Johnny Gosch

On the morning of Sunday, September 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch left his home in the suburb of West Des Moines, Iowa, on his newspaper delivery route.

Around 7 a.m., his parents, Noreen and John, began receiving calls from neighbors complaining that their papers had not been delivered.

John found his son's wagon full of papers abandoned on the sidewalk a block and a half away. Johnny was gone.

Noreen and John immediately called the police to report an abduction, relaying reports from other paperboys who saw Johnny talking to a man in a car, but they were met with a sluggish response and skepticism from the authorities.

At the time, there was no legal distinction between a missing child and missing adult, and a person had to be missing for 72 hours for a report to be filed.

Within days, the Gosches organized search parties and contacted the FBI and the media, making persistent public appeals for Johnny’s return.

Johnny’s face was soon plastered on flyers, newspapers, and more.

Two years later, another Iowa paperboy named Eugene Martin disappeared. Anderson Erickson Dairy placed Johnny and Eugene's pictures on the side panel of their half-gallon milk cartons — the first time missing children’s faces had appeared in such a location.

Other dairy companies began to do the same, bringing the morbid consideration of child abductions to kitchen tables across the country.

Years passed, and still Noreen and John Gosch searched for leads, hiring private investigators and enduring cruel phone calls about Johnny’s fate from anonymous pranksters.

Over three decades have passed since Johnny Gosch’s abduction, and he is still missing. The ongoing crusade of his mother to find him — and to help prevent similar abductions — are chronicled in the film Who Took Johnny.