Something’s been bothering me here for the past several days, which I’m not sure has been raised previously. If it has, I apologize and ask for the All-Father’s forgiveness.
The problem for me is the interrelationship between two independent assumptions — namely that the Gosch and Martin cases are so inextricably linked that the same perps are responsible for both disappearances, and that Gosch Sr. had something to do with his son’s kidnapping and degradation.
As for the former, I can definitely see the relationship given the nature of the two victims and the manner in which they each disappeared, right down to the fact that they were both alone on the mornings they were taken, and that only their papers were ever really found.
As for the latter, the claim is that Gosch Sr. started getting a series of weird, short phone calls just weeks prior to JG’s disappearance. The last one supposedly came in the dead of night just hours before the boy was to have set out on his route. Lo and behold, JG disappeared the very first time he was not with his father. Ergo, the logic runs that these short phone calls were contacts between Gosch Sr. and the abductors, which is why the kidnapping was able to be done so professionally and so neatly. In other words, the father knew the son would be alone, he informed the kidnappers, and they took him.
But then, if JG and EM are inextricably linked, who was the familial contact between the perps and any member of EM’s family? EM’s stepbrother wasn’t with the boy for the first time ever, and this happened to be the very day EM was caused to disappear. Are we to assume the stepbrother was somehow involved, or are we to assume that Gosch Sr. also had a hand in this kid’s abduction? If so, where’s the evidence? Was there somehow a connection between the Gosch and Martin families that existed before the latter boy was taken?
While I’m at it, I have another problem. Gosch Sr. was supposed to have been the first person from the Gosch family ever to be in touch with Paul Bonacci with regard to his confession that he had a hand in the abduction of the Gosch boy. Gosch Sr. supposedly passed off another woman as NG when he went to visit Bonacci, who just happened to be accompanied by John Decamp. NG supposedly didn’t find out about this until some time in late ’91. Yet one year later there was a CBS Evening News broadcast about the Gosch case ten years later, and as far as I can recall, JG’s parents were still together, and there was no indication at that time that Gosch Sr. was part of the conspiracy. More importantly, NG didn’t divorce Gosch Sr. until some time in 1993, as I recall. I haven’t had a chance to read her book yet, so I’m wondering if anyone who has done so knows whether NG has addressed this time discrepancy, or indeed whether there was a previous connection between the Gosches and the Martins that existed prior to EM’s disappearance.
Otherwise, it seems to me that the simplest answer might just be the one we’re looking for. To wit, nobody in either the Gosch or Martin families had anything to do with the disappearance of these kids. Instead, the common denominator here is the fact that both boys were paperboys for the Des Moines Register, thus begging this question: Which person or persons were known to these boys prior to their disappearances, and is it at least remotely possible that this person was somehow affiliated with the Register in some fashion? Hell, I dunno, did they have any of the same customers? Mayhap the answer lies in that direction, and mayhap their corpses really are in Iowa somewhere. Mind you, I’m not saying that it didn’t happen the way NG, Jimmy Gibson, Paul Bonacci et al said they did. I’m just throwing things out there against the wall to see if they stick.
“We all have choices, and that’s the cold hard truth.”—George Jones
