In the early morning hours of Sunday, Sept. 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch vanished while delivering copies of the Des Moines Register. Two years later, 13-year-old paperboy Eugene Wade Martin disappeared under virtually identical circumstances on the south side of Des Moines. These cases terrified residents of Des Moines and Iowa, many of whom believed that the Midwest—a “safe,” and implicitly white, place—ought to be immune from “this type of terrorism,” as one local put it in 1984. “This city and this geographical area are supposed to be comfortable, safe places to raise children, work and lead productive lives,” he wrote in a letter to the Register.
Gosch and Martin disappeared amid an intensifying moral panic concerning “stranger danger” and child exploitation. They joined other high-profile cases—namely those of Etan Patz in Manhattan (1979), Adam Walsh in South Florida (1981), and Kevin Collins in San Francisco (1984)—to distort Americans’ understanding of the threats confronting the nation’s children. Publicized by concerned politicians, bereaved parents (such as John Walsh and Johnny Gosch’s mother, Noreen), and an increasingly tabloidized news media, these cases and the inflated statistics surrounding them drastically exaggerated the “stranger danger” threat. (Some insisted that 50,000 or more children fell victim to stranger kidnapping in the U.S. each year.) The media and political emphasis on these sorts of cases seemed to imply that white children like Gosch and Martin were most likely to be victimized. Yet stranger kidnappings were and remain extremely rare (fewer than 300 cases annually), and children of color have long been underrepresented in news media coverage of missing children.
Present-day accounts often trace the origins of the 1980s “stranger danger” scare, which still haunts parents today, to the Etan Patz and Adam Walsh kidnappings. But the lesser-known kidnappings of Gosch and Martin played a crucial role in stoking this panic and the parental anxieties associated with it. Even though Gosch and Martin were never seen again, and their cases were never solved, they live on—not only as cautionary tales for Iowa parents and children, but also as potent symbols of endangered white childhood. That’s partly because Gosch and Martin were the first missing children to be featured on the sides of milk cartons. After two Des Moines dairies began placing missing children’s photographs, including Gosch’s and Martin’s, on their products in the fall of 1984, the practice caught on in the Midwest and then nationwide. All told, some 700 dairies took part, producing and distributing approximately 3 billion milk cartons adorned with images of missing kids. At a moment of national economic and political uncertainty, as fears of familial and national decline abounded, the image of imperiled white childhood resonated far and wide, from the prairies to the sea. The consequences have been dire.