Rick Hunter
Celestial
Johnny Gosch: The Strange, Tragic Story of the First 'Milk Carton Kid'
This article tells the controversial and tragic story of Johnny Gosch, a young boy who was kidnapped in 1982. His mother, Noreen Gosch, believed he was abducted into a satanic sex slave operation and never gave up hope of finding him.
thecrimewire.com
I assume everyone here is at least familiar with the Cliff's Notes version of this mystery. The disappearance of Johnny Gosch is one of those cases that, once it gets in your brain, just keeps going around over and over. It's also one where people keep building superstructures of conspiracies and cover-ups over the rather scant list of known facts.
I think it's also one where Occam's Razor is the safest bet. The actual facts suggest to me that the most likely explanation was that Johnny fell victim to a serial killer and probably didn't live long after he was grabbed. The 1960's-1980's were the golden age of serial killers in the USA. Most serial killers with big body counts of this era (Bundy, Gacy, Ridgway, etc ) were not convicted on all of their victims. This is especially true for the mobile killers like Bundy, he may have had over 100 victims.
The serial killer angle seems to be supported by the fact that two other boys with almost identical profiles vanished in the same area over the next three years, Eugene Martin and Marc Allen. And yet no strong local suspects ever emerged, as far as we are aware. This suggests to me that the perp passed through this area regularly but wasn't a resident and probably wasn't known to anyone in the area. Of course, mobility is what allowed Ted Bundy to avoid capture and pile up the victims for so long.
I think it would be promising to take a hard look at serial killers and/or sex offenders who were known to have crossed through this region of the country during these years and targeted white young males, especially those who got locked up after the Marc Allen disappearance in 1986. Someone like Ottis Toole, the number one suspect in the Adam Walsh case, is probably the culprit.