Johnny Gosch

What happened

John David Gosch — Johnny — a 12-year-old Des Moines Register paperboy, set out in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, September 5, 1982, to start his paper route in West Des Moines, Iowa, accompanied by his dog, Gretchen, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. His parents learned he was missing after a customer called to say his Sunday paper had not arrived. His father found Johnny’s red wagon abandoned, still filled with bundles of the Des Moines Sunday Register.

Police and the community searched for the 5-foot-7 boy with light brown hair and blue eyes. NCMEC says Johnny is today presumed to have been abducted. The NCMEC poster notes that he was last seen delivering newspapers and that he has facial freckles, a gap between his front teeth, a birthmark on his left cheek and a horseshoe-shaped scar on his tongue.

Johnny was among the first of the so-called “milk carton kids” whose faces were placed on milk cartons, pictured next to another missing paperboy, Eugene Martin. More than four decades later, he has never been found. West Des Moines police say tips still come in every year and are fully investigated, and NCMEC has age-progressed his photograph to 51 years old. Johnny would be 57 years old today, and he is still missing.