Also, I don’t, as others have, completely discount Paul Bonacci’s claims. I didn’t see the original AMW show with JG’s profile on it in November of 1992, but I did see the one in May of ’93. Made a special point in doing so, actually. My objective observation is that if PB was in fact lying, then he knew an awful lot about that house in Colorado, and his reactions seemed a little bit too real to be totally discredited. And Jimmy Gibson, the guy who was interviewed and on that same show, seemed to know a little too much about JG, at least if you take what NG knew of her son before, so I can’t discount his claims either.
I’m also not sure that NG is off her nutter, as some people have accused her of being. Every time I’ve ever seen/heard her in an interview, she does not rave or rant, and she seems calm and relatively stable. All her claims have been reasonably consistent and unvarying for me to say that she’s unbalanced. I therefore cannot say with absolute certitude that JG never visited her in ’97 as she claims. Unless JG and/or the friend who was with him on that night is posting here anonymously and in disguise, I don’t believe any of us on this thread ever saw the visit happen (or not) to reach such an absolute conclusion. I know I wasn’t.
Looking at the record as a whole, therefore, leaves me with some tentative conclusions. For one, I’m not bothered by the fact that there were no witnesses to the visit. I live in a condo/apartment building with nineteen floors, and I daresay the most of us just mind our own business except, that is, for some people who don’t seem to have a life of their own, but that’s another matter altogether. So if JG came to her new home in the middle of the night, my respectful submission is that he probably planned it for weeks so that there would be no visits, especially given what allegedly happened to him.
I’m also not bothered by the fact that she waited to reveal this purported visit until she was in open court. My guess is that she was probably deposed beforehand, and that if her testimony at the hearing/trial was inconsistent with that deposition, she’d be charged with perjury. Why bother with that? And her behavior in open court is entirely consistent with instructions supposedly given by her son not to reveal the visit unless she had to. Avoiding a perjury charge to me is sufficient compulsion.
Finally, I note that in a Des Moines Register article of February of ’99, Gosch Sr. claimed not to believe his former wife’s account of their son’s ’97 visit. He claimed that had JG in fact returned to Des Moines, he would have gone to his childhood home. I say not necessarily. Remember that NG was on the Lisa Gibbons show in Dec. of ‘96 — a show I did not see — and gave her new address publicly. She also let JG know, should he be watching, that she was still looking for him. I submit that either he or someone close to him saw the show, and maybe that’s how he was able to get to NG’s new home. Furthermore, if Gosch Sr. had a hand in his son’s disappearance and horrid life thereafter, I wonder that JG might have come upon this information in the years in which he was a captive of this alleged pedo ring. If your father did that to you and you came to know of this, would you want ever to see him again? Just a suggestion, and an open question that you can answer however you want.
I have to be fair, I suppose. In a former life before I moved to the Twin Cities, I used to be an appellate court attorney, and we used to have to review briefs and records from lower courts and make recommendations for the panels of judges sitting on the appeal. You have to know that an appeal can turn on a dime; that is, a single page in the record, a single fact, can shake the plaintiff’s or defendant’s case. You can also find a factum that you think may do the same, but it turns out to be a red herring.
I’m probably going to go all over the map on this one because I have a lot of thoughts on the subject. But I’m going to try to be fair to JG’s father in this posting. Namely, if I believe he’s the scum of the earth and had a hand in the ruination of his son’s life, (or possibly worse), I cannot simply point the finger of suspicion upon him just because he wasn’t with his son for the first time ever when JG was delivering his papers. The stepbrother of EM (Eugene Martin) was also not with him the first time ever, and EM got taken the same way as JG, to my understanding. In the Wetterling case, no parental figures were with the boys when JW was snatched. Years ago, Etan Patz of New York City, one of my old home towns, was taken while walking alone for the first time to his schoolbus stop. Kevin Collins of California was waiting for a bus — alone. Ilene Misheloff was coming home, I believe, from ice-skating or something, and again had no parental figures with her.
Again, I could go on all day and all night here. But my point is that while it may be that you have to look at a parent or guardian in the first instance with suspicion every time a child goes missing, when there’s evidence suggesting the parent’s non-involvement, at least up till a certain point, I don’t think you can safely say that a parent is always involved just because he or she wasn’t there when the kid got nabbed. You’ve got a lot of heartbroken people out there looking for their sons and daughters, and the last thing you want is overkill where suspicion on a parent or other figure is concerned.
“We all have choices, and that’s the cold hard truth.”—George Jones
