Who Took Johnny.
(The lack of a question mark in the title appears intentional.) This is a new release on Netflix. It's a 2013 documentary exploring one of the most famous missing persons cases in US history: the disappearance of Johnny Gosch from his Iowa neighborhood in 1982. Gosch and another Iowa boy--who may have been taken by the same person--were the first "milk carton kids."
This is a highly disturbing film, in part because of the subject matter but mostly because it offers up strange conspiracies that seem to draw a line between the lack of involvement by local police and the FBI and an extensive human trafficking ring that was (allegedly) operating in Des Moines in the '80s. The film sticks mostly to the particulars of Gosch's story, but I wanted to know more about the conspiracy--particularly why there would have been a cover-up at all, and why police seemed so determined not to investigate Gosch's disappearance. But those points are glossed over, and the doc pretty much runs like your run-of-the-mill disappearance narrative.
At the center of this is Gosch's mother, a woman who is by turns ferocious, intelligent, and possibly a bit unhinged. That last revelation comes in the film's final 10 minutes, when there's a weird twist (like the FBI thing, this isn't fully explored) that may or may not have actually happened.
Recommended if you enjoy true crime. But be warned--it has some horrendous undertones, and some images toward the end that are extremely haunting.
(The lack of a question mark in the title appears intentional.) This is a new release on Netflix. It's a 2013 documentary exploring one of the most famous missing persons cases in US history: the disappearance of Johnny Gosch from his Iowa neighborhood in 1982. Gosch and another Iowa boy--who may have been taken by the same person--were the first "milk carton kids."
This is a highly disturbing film, in part because of the subject matter but mostly because it offers up strange conspiracies that seem to draw a line between the lack of involvement by local police and the FBI and an extensive human trafficking ring that was (allegedly) operating in Des Moines in the '80s. The film sticks mostly to the particulars of Gosch's story, but I wanted to know more about the conspiracy--particularly why there would have been a cover-up at all, and why police seemed so determined not to investigate Gosch's disappearance. But those points are glossed over, and the doc pretty much runs like your run-of-the-mill disappearance narrative.
At the center of this is Gosch's mother, a woman who is by turns ferocious, intelligent, and possibly a bit unhinged. That last revelation comes in the film's final 10 minutes, when there's a weird twist (like the FBI thing, this isn't fully explored) that may or may not have actually happened.
Recommended if you enjoy true crime. But be warned--it has some horrendous undertones, and some images toward the end that are extremely haunting.
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