Disappearance of Johnny Gosch

Eugene Wade Martin (born August 17, 1970; disappeared August 12, 1984) was a paperboy in West Des Moines, Iowa, who disappeared without a trace between 5 and 5:45 a.m. at Southwest 12th Street and Highview Drive. He is presumed to have been kidnapped. He has a scar on his right knee and has had a broken right wrist.

On Sunday morning, August 12, 1984, 13-year-old Eugene Martin left his home at approximately 5 a.m. to deliver the Des Moines Register newspaper in the Des Moines area. He wore blue jeans, a red shirt and a gray pullover. Eugene normally delivered the papers with his older stepbrother, but on this day went alone. The Iowa State Fair was in town, and Eugene — who in his free time enjoyed football, fishing, skating, video games and TV — wanted to make some extra money. Witnesses said they saw Martin talking to a clean-cut white male in his 30s sometime between 5 and 5:45 a.m. at Southwest 12th Street and Highview Drive. Some stated the two appeared to be engaged in a friendly “father-son” sort of conversation, and others recalled seeing the teen folding papers and talking to the man sometime between 5:45 and 6:05 a.m. Between 6:10 and 6:15 a.m., Eugene’s bag was found on the ground outside of Des Moines with 10 folded papers still inside. When customers called to report not receiving their morning newspapers, the manager went out, found the bag and delivered the papers. At approximately 8:40 a.m., the search for Eugene began. He has not been seen since.

Federal agents said at the time there might be a “definite connection” to the disappearance of another Des Moines paper carrier — 12-year-old Johnny Gosch, who disappeared two years earlier on September 5, 1982 — and described the suspect as a “loner.”

Authorities said they were treating the Martin case as a kidnapping and had issued a nationwide bulletin for a man described as between 30 and 40 years old, 5 feet, 9 inches tall, clean shaven and with a medium build.

“Generally, the person is an introvert, a loner who may or may not be extra guilt-ridden on what he does but will not turn himself in,” said Herb Hawkins, special F.B.I. agent in charge of the Nebraska-Iowa field office in August 1994. Hawkins said some useful information was being gleaned from witnesses.

None of it panned out, however, and neither boy has ever been found.

In a July 2010 interview with WHO-TV Channel 13’s Aaron Brilbeck in Des Moines, Eugene’s aunt, Jeannie McDowell, said she believes the cases are connected, though shudders to think of what the teens may have gone through. McDowell also said she does not think Eugene is still alive.

“I hope that he died instantly. I hope he didn’t suffer much,” she told Brilbeck in the second of five cold case installments WHO-TV aired throughout the month. After losing his youngest son, McDowell said her brother, Don Martin, became withdrawn and spent all his time trying to find out what happened to his boy.

“Eugene was the baby,” McDowell said. “And when he left, it just killed my brother.”

McDowell said her brother went into his own little shell and didn’t want to speak to anybody. Still, day after day, he would read every paper and cut out clippings of anything that had to do with Gene. As he approached his 65th birthday in October 2010, Don Martin struggled with the cancer slowly eating away at his body as well as the final stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. Eugene’s mother, Janice, had recently died from diabetes without ever knowing what happened to her son. Despite the amount of pain he endured, McDowell believed her brother continued to hang on because of Gene. He needed some type of closure so he could go, she said. If he knew Gene was there “waiting for him,” he’d be able to let go and die in peace. Five months after the WHO-TV interview, Donald Martin succumbed to complications from colon cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease, and passed away on December 27, 2010. At one time, a $94,000 reward was offered — including $25,000 by the Des Moines Register — for information leading to the recovery of either Johnny Gosch or Eugene Martin. It, too, eventually went by the wayside as weeks turned to months, and then years with no viable leads.

James Rowley, the retired Des Moines police detective who worked the Martin case until his retirement in 2001, also recognized the similarities in the two cases but still has questions about how they are linked.

Why the two-year gap?” he stated in an August 12, 2009 interview with the Des Moines Register. That just wasn’t how it normally worked with serial killers and kidnappers. A criminal’s “growing appetite” for crime, he told the Register, doesn’t allow for lengthy holding patterns.

“Where was he before ’82?” Rowley asked. “Where was he between ’82 and ’84, and where was he after ’84?”

Another young Des Moines teen — 13-year-old Marc James Warren Allen — did in fact disappear from Des Moines in 1986. On March 29, 1986, Allen told his mother he planned to walk to a friend’s house down the street, but then just vanished. Rowley told the Register he has heard all the theories, conspiracy and otherwise, but that none made sense. He’d even traveled to Mexico and Canada to follow up on tips — chasing down somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 leads during the investigation — but found not one credible. Rowley, who worked more than 200 homicides and 50 bank robberies during his tenure as a police officer — helping to solve 80 percent of them — believes the clean-cut man near Martin’s home talked Eugene into leaving his route. Rowley said Eugene Martin’s case bothers him more than any others he’s worked. In his home garage hangs a poster of Eugene to remind him every day.

“This case haunts me,” he told WHO-TV’s Brilbeck when interviewed for the July cold case series. “It’s the case I’ll take to the grave.”

After nearly 30 years, the former detective still seems amazed they’d never had a solid lead in Eugene’s case. No bone. No fragment. No evidence.

Rowley said he takes the case personally and will leave Eugene’s poster up in his garage until Gene is found or the case is solved.

In a KCCI Channel 8 report that aired Aug. 1, 2014, Des Moines Police Department spokesman Sgt. Scott Raudabaugh said older cold cases are looked at on a yearly basis, and the department has a select group of officers who specifically look at very old cases.

“Certainly the serious cases are extremely important to Des Moines Police Department,” Raudabaugh said, adding that police will examine old pieces of evidence from cold cases with new technology like DNA testing.

“Everything that could be done was done to take advantage of technology that exists now that didn’t exist maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago,” he told KCCI. “If in any way we can develop a suspect and follow up on that we certainly do.”

Authorities were unable to prove a connection between the three cases, yet Noreen Gosch claims that she was personally informed of the abduction a few months in advance by a private investigator who was searching for her son. She was told the kidnapping "would take place the second weekend in August 1984 and it would be a paperboy from the southside of Des Moines."[18]

Marc James Warren Allen (born May 13, 1972; disappeared March 29, 1986). On March 29, 1986 — the day before Easter — 13-year-old Marc James Warren Allen told his mother he planned to walk to a friend’s house down the street but never arrived at the neighbor’s home and hasn’t been seen since.

Based on previous media reports, Allen initially was thought to be the third Iowa paperboy to vanish without a trace during the ’80s. Johnny Gosch, 12, of West Des Moines, disappeared September 5, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Eugene Martin vanished from Des Moines’ south side just two years later on August 12, 1984, under very similar circumstances.

Marc’s mother, Nancy Allen, admitted her son had been a handful; the teen had been shifted back and forth between her Iowa residence and his father’s Minnesota home most of his young life and he’d often get into trouble. But in late November 2010 — a week normally filled with family get-togethers, shopping and holiday activities — Nancy took time to speak with WHO-TV Channel 13’s Aaron Brilbeck about what it’s been like waiting so many years for answers and wondering about the fate of a young son who never quite seemed to fit in.

“It was hard because he had been living with [his] dad for a while and then came back and lived with me,” Nancy Allen said in the WHO-TV story broadcast Nov. 25, 2010. “His younger brother and older sister were real close and he wanted to be in there, in tight.”

They never got the chance for that to happen. The night before Easter in 1986, the teen left his southwest Emma Avenue home to hang out with friends and perhaps take in a movie just as his siblings prepared for a pizza dinner.

“He walked out the door and the kids were getting ready to have pizza and I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” Allen told Brilbeck. “The last thing he said to me as he walked out the door was ‘Save me some pizza, Mom. I’ll be hungry when I get home.'”

Nancy watched her son walk down the sidewalk, past the bushes, and then he was gone.

“He waved when he got to the bushes and I waved at him and that was that and I never saw him again,” his mother said.

In 1989, 21-year-old Paul A. Bonacci told his attorney John DeCamp that he had been abducted into a sex ring with Gosch as a teenager and was forced to participate in Gosch's kidnapping.

John DeCamp met with Bonacci and believed he was telling the truth. Noreen later met him and said he told her things "he could know only from talking with her son."[27] He said that Johnny had a birthmark on his chest, a scar on his tongue and a burn scar on his lower leg; although a description of the birthmark had been widely circulated, information about the scars had not been made public. Bonacci also described a stammer that Johnny had when he was upset.[7] The FBI and local police do not believe that Bonacci is a credible witness in the case and have not interviewed him.[13][7]

Bonacci accused Republican party activist and businessman Lawrence E. King Jr (b. 1944) who also served as director of the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska, of running an underage prostitution ring and victimizing him since an early age.[28][29]

In 1990, a county grand jury declined to charge King, finding the allegations to be "a carefully crafted hoax". Paul Bonacci and Alisha Owen were indicted on state perjury charges. A federal grand jury also declined to indict anyone for child prostitution but did return indictments against Owen for perjury and King for fraud related to the credit union;[30] the latter was accused of looting $40 million from the bank and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The bank was shut down in November 1988 when it was raided by the FBI, the IRS and the NCUA. King was released from prison in April 2001.

On February 27, 1999, the U.S. District Court of the District of Nebraska awarded Bonacci $1 million in compensatory damages and punitive damages. Bonacci had sued King, who failed to respond to the civil lawsuit. Thus a default judgment was entered against King, who ceased his appeal attempt in early 2000.[31]