This is what I had been alluding to in my first post. The fact that Johnny had been such a big kid combined with the strange coincidence of his having gone missing the very day that had been his first day out alone on his route, makes me wonder if any alternate theory to pedophilia has ever been explored.
It’s difficult to know in regard to what Mrs. Gosch recounts to take seriously and what with a grain of salt, but her assertion that there was at least one witness to a man having taken photographs of the boy not long before the presumed abduction might be accurate. I would have to assume that the police have already investigated along these lines, though.
In regard to the photos, I believe the original ones with the three boys were pretty much what the Florida police investigator claimed they were. He offered no reason why such pictures had been taken, though the anonymous letter the police received claimed that they had been taken in Tampa as the result of three boys challenging one another to an “escape contest.”
My take on that is that the letter writer had been one of the three boys, now grown, and either feeling guilty at the apparently sick attempt at a joke played on a grieving mother or was simply embarrassed as hell at seeing such pictures of himself made public and hoped they would fade away when exposed as frauds.
I don’t buy the “escape challenge” (around 1979/1980) explanation the letter writer had improvised. I think that in retrospect the man who had written the letter now realizes that he and his buddies had been conned into posing for such pictures by the man (the investigator referred to) who had taken them and staged the scenes so he could later indulge himself in his perverted fetish using them as models. Since there was no nudity or sexual acts involved, he could indulge himself with legal impunity.
I would guess that all subsequent photos sent to Mrs. Gosch were by copycats, maybe some of them by kids themselves. (“Hey, Jimmy! You want to be on a big website?!”
