Who Took Johnny

The film lacks real journalism. At the time the Faded Out podcast was out yet, and I don't think Yellow Bags comments were on Iowa Cold Cases yet. However there were still articles about the pedophile ring that was busted out of Des Moines. There were articles on Frank Sykora, Wilbur Millhouse, and that guy at the mall. The policeman in charge ended up in some scandals too. It wasn't sexual, but still, it shows the police department was corrupt. The filmmakers simply followed Noreen's mess of conspiracy theories. This film lacks any really investigating. All it did was keep Johnny's name out there, and in a way it gave light to Eugene and Marc, but most people only talk about Johnny. I can see why the film was taken off Netflix. Faded Out, the comments on Iowa Cold Cases, articles from the time, and even reddit threads have done more for this case than this film ever has.

I have been reading about this case heavily since I retired several years back along with two others closer to my home. The reason they seem hard to believe is they seem to incredible to be true.

They say knowledge is power. This documentary brings together years of information from Noreen Gosch and others and presents it in a digestible, yet, scary format. Human trafficking has been going on we have been doing see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. That does not work anymore. Whether or not you have children this is a documentary that will give a baptism into the world of Noreen Gosch and the outright defiance she faced in getting even the slightest bit of help for her son. Yet, she persevered so other did not have to suffer her boy's fate. I highly recommend watching this documentary, it is eye opening and inspirational.

Who Took Johnny? is a spooky time. This documentary reaches back to 1982, when Johnny Gosch, a West Des Moines, Iowa paper boy, was abducted. Noreen, his mother, has powered on with the search since then up until now. The film initially follows the inaction on part of the local law enforcement to effectively identify Johnny as a missing person (the law used to require 72 hours for the kid to be gone), and initially wrote his disappearance off as him running away. After a couple years of the community turning up nothing, the imprisoned Paul Bonacci turned up to say that he had helped kidnap Johnny into the horrendous world of child sex trafficking. Because he was diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, however, law enforcement eschewed this lead and never questioned him, despite the facts he knew about Johnny's body that convinced his parents that this was indeed what happened to their son. The Devil's in the details with this one, as the world of child sex trafficking becomes exposed and entangled in the different facets of the investigation, centered in Omaha, Neb., 10 hours away. Who Took Johnny? has an Unsolved Mysteries vibe to it (creepy, I know), scary as much as it is informative about the issue of missing children. It's definitely worth a watch if you can see it.

I've watched this movie and I do not believe that the boy tied up in the photos is Johnny. Also I feel that there almost certainly has to be a connection with the two missing paperboys from the same area. The pattern of similarities in the cases is too compelling. Any FBI profiler would tell you that. Clearly (in my opinion) as with many small towns and small cities the local law enforcement was incompetent and not very interested in solving Johnny's case. One last thing: I am highly suspicious of Johnny's Mother. I do not believe her when she says she met her son at her front door in the 1990s when he was 27. Her story does not ring true. In any case I don't believe this case will ever be solved. Of course the same was said of the Etan Patz case but eventually, decades later, it was solved.

This is a powerful piece of work from the RUMUR team of Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley. Anyone with and even probably without kids can identify with the abject terror of having your child disappear without a trace, so it is utterly wrenching to watch people to whom this has actually happened try to figure out how to come to terms with the most profound loss we can imagine. To compound the horror of it all, the film documents with a pretty high degree of confidence what most likely happened to Johnny Gosch: that he was swept up into human trafficking, which more or less means child prostitution and pornography. It ain't pretty, but that's why it is almost necessary viewing. As Gogol so famously said, we can't blame the mirror if our mug is crooked, and "Who Took Johnny" is a mirror that, sad to say, is much less distortive than we would all like for it to be. Watch it.