Ankeny Man Recalls His Work to Help Find Johnny Gosch

Thirty years ago today , and authorities have never found him.

While police believe he was likely abducted, his fate is still unknown. Volunteers who helped Johnny's parents search for the 12-year-old boy are remembering their efforts this week.

“I think everybody could grasp the intensity of this; they just didn’t realize that it could go on like this,” Ron Sampson, former publisher of the Ankeny Press Citizen, told the Des Moines Register.

Sampson served as president of the Johnny Gosch Foundation after the boy’s disappearance. “That’s the unbelievable part. It’s been 30 years, and we still haven’t got our first clue.”

It wasn’t until a reader called him months after Johnny's disappearance that Sampson contacted the Gosch family. He went to a meeting about six months after Johnny’s disappearance, intending to interview the family and write one story.

“I guess you could say I was hooked,” Sampson told the Register. “I got so involved mentally — I suppose emotionally, too — that I just started going every Friday night and seeing if there was something new. Every Friday you thought there won’t be a meeting next Friday, because this will be solved.”

He told the newspaper that his own family provided the motivation needed to keep helping in the search.

“I would come home at night, and everything with my family would be normal,” said Sampson, who had two young sons at the time. “Nothing about (the Gosches’ lives) was normal, and it never would be until Johnny came home.”

Thirty years later, Johnny has yet to come.