Saturday, May 25, 2013
High-profile kidnappings like those involving Evansdale cousins Elizabeth Collins and Lyric Cook-Morrissey – and now Kathlynn Shepard – inevitably lead to talk of restoring the death penalty in Iowa.
Emotion-gripped cases like the abduction, sexual assault or murder of a child often provide a platform for capital punishment advocates to argue for reinstatement of capital punishment, abolished in Iowa in 1965. After the Evansdale cousins’ bodies were discovered, a pro-death penalty effort led by state Sen. Kent Sorenson, R-Milo, failed to gather much steam in the just-adjourned Iowa General Assembly, but the question lingers: Is the death penalty an effective deterrent? Capital punishment proponent Noreen Gosch, whose son was kidnapped three decades ago, argues that Iowa has “a kidnapping problem” and the perpetrators of those crimes would be less likely to abduct children in Iowa if they thought they would be executed. Opponents say …
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
The Oct. 19 conference in Des Moines will bring some of world's top experts on child abductions and human trafficking.
Noreen Gosch, the West Des Moines mother profiled last week in a series of Patch articles on the 30th anniversary of missing paperboy Johnny Gosch’s disappearance, will be one of the featured speakers at an Oct. 19 Preventing Abuse Conference in Des Moines. Also speaking at the organization’s 10th annual conference will be Drew Collins, the father of Elizabeth Collins, who disappeared in July with her cousin, Lyric Cook-Morrissey, after they went on an afternoon bicycle ride in the northeast Iowa town of Evansdale. Topics to be covered include child protection and abduction, human trafficking and the role of drug cartels in financing such operations. Gosch waded into the dark underworld of human trafficking as she searched for answers into…
"Each time the Johnny Gosch Law was used to help families in Iowa and the other states where it was passed it was a legacy left by Johnny for others."
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Wednesday, September 12, 2012
I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has helped during the past 30 years: The thousands of people came out and searched in the first few days after the kidnapping; the people brought food, comfort and kindness to our family; all of the volunteers who joined the Johnny Gosch Foundation, helping with every event which was planned to keep the case alive and promote awareness for the safety of all children; and the many thousands of people who have never stopped praying for my son and for my strength to continue. It has been a long struggle and I could not have done it without all of you. My sincere thanks and gratitude to everyone. Soon after Johnny was kidnapped, a woman called me, she had lost her daughter to …
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Is an Iowa mom whose son vanished 30 years ago so threatening that we persecute her?
Over the summer, I sat down with Noreen Gosch for several hours over several days. To be brutally honest, I expected to find a shattered woman, broken by 30 years of wondering and 30 years of being criticized for not only wondering out loud what happened to her son when he didn’t come home from his paper route, but for seeking answers to the questions that nagged her. I had already written pieces of the story on scraps of paper that I wadded up and recycled after my first meeting. Noreen Gosch has not been driven to madness by the disappearance and probable kidnapping of her son, although I’m not sure why. I suspect she has greater inner strength and courage than most of us can ever know, that we wouldn’t know we possessed unless we had to…
Saturday, September 8, 2012
“Every parent wants the best for their children and it breaks my heart to know that your innocence and childhood were robbed from you,” writes his mom, Noreen Gosch.
Editor's Note: Over the past week, Iowa Patches have observed the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of paperboy Johnny Gosch with a special series, Iowa’s Missing Kids: Innocence Abducted. Johnny’s mother, Noreen Gosch of West Des Moines, steadfastly maintains that her son was kidnapped and held in the dark world of child sex trade. Her private investigators assert the boy was almost certainly stalked and kidnapped by a nationwide ring of pedophiles trafficking children, a theory described by former Nebraska state legislator John DeCamp in his book, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska. In this open letter to her son, she expresses her hope that he is still alive, that he is happy and healthy, and living …
Thursday, September 6, 2012
A 30-year journey through a world that trades children profoundly changed Noreen Gosch, who discovered her true avocation – protecting children’s innocence – along the way.
Part 3 of a Series. Thirty years of studying the sinister world of human trafficking and child pornography have made Noreen Gosch a person of dark corners and shuttered windows, places she can sit in semi-seclusion and see what’s going on before anyone sees her. That’s what can happen to a mother whose son has been missing for 30 years, 30 years of wonder and fear about what may have happened to her 12-year-old son, Johnny, who vanished while delivering papers in his West Des Moines neighborhood. Gosch is just one mother of many: Some 2,185 kids are reported missing each day. Of the 5,354 people reported missing in Iowa in 2011, 4,593 of them were juveniles, according to an Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation report. Gosch’s eyes are …
Monday, September 3, 2012
Coming Tuesday, Iowa Patch takes a look at the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of Johnny Gosch and the kids now missing from every corner of Iowa.
When Iowa’s Johnny Gosch vanished on Sept. 5, 1982, while delivering the Sunday newspaper in his quiet West Des Moines neighborhood, everything changed – for law enforcement, for the newspaper business and certainly for his mother, Noreen Gosch. As the 30th anniversary of Johnny’s disappearance arrives, she couldn’t have guessed that her son’s very absence would shake Iowa from a sleepy cocoon of innocence in which children were thought safe doing something as idyllic as delivering newspapers or riding bicycles around a picturesque lake. But it did. It changed everything. That Norman Rockwellian image of a boy delivering the newspaper has been replaced with that of Johnny’s face on milk cartons, the low-technology equivalent of today’s …
Monday, July 30, 2012
The possible abduction of Evansdale cousins is a painful reminder of the day a West Des Moines newspaper carrier disappeared. Noreen Gosch remembers her loss from three decades ago, a case that remains unsolved.
The mother of an Iowa boy missing since 1982 said she got a “sickening feeling” in the pit of her stomach when she heard news that two eastern Iowa girls had vanished while riding their bicycles, a pursuit as iconic as youths delivering the morning newspaper once was. The news was salt in a wound that has never healed for Noreen Gosch, whose son Johnny’s abduction while delivering the Sunday paper in his West Des Moines neighborhood 30 years ago remains unsolved. She said she knew the girls' disapperance was “a kidnapping right off the bat.” And Gosch knew it would forever alter the lives of the families of Evansdale cousins Lyric Cook-Morrissey, 10, and Elizabeth Collins, 8, just as then 12-year-old Johnny’s disappearance on Sept. 5, 1982…
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Also, a Johnston school board member charges state campaign laws were violated and Waukee authorities ask residents to conserve water as Drought 2012 drags on.
Why nine? Because the Patch community includes nine sites in Iowa: Ankeny, Ames, Cedar Falls, Iowa City, Johnston, Marion, Urbandale, Waukee and West Des Moines. 9. After spending a year of military service in Afghanistan, Luke Jensen of Ames was treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The symptoms were so debilitating that after a night of drinking he swallowed all the medication he had. Now he's shared his story at a seminar for Iowa veterans and their families affected by PTSD. 8. Summer basketball kept Hawkeye fans entertained in Iowa City recently. Anthony Clemmons scored 30 points on a big second half, propelling his team to a 113-102 victory in the Primetime League Championship last week. 7. Urbandale authorities take door-to-…
Don Lloyd
1:18 pm on Saturday, May 25, 2013
Hang those S.O.B's! one trial and if convicted its over, no more cost to the tax payer and a length of rope can be used multiple times. These people generally pray upon young, naïve people. if the victims do survive they are the ones that will suffer a life time of wondering why nobody did anything to protect them. But if the perpetrator is dead that is one less of the worst kind of criminal to … more ›