Episode 41 Brian Shaffer · Part I — “Vanished in Plain Sight”

The tape rolls, the escalator hums, and a doorway becomes a stage where nothing happens and everything changes. In Part I, we stay inside the hours before the disappearance—dinner with his father, a bar-hop back to the Ugly Tuna, a quick call to Alexis, and the camera frame at 1:55 a.m. that swallows a six-foot-two med student three weeks after the death of his mother, Renee. We rebuild the minute-by-minute timeline, walk the under-construction service corridor the cameras barely touched, and follow the first 72 hours as Columbus searched rooftops, dumpsters, riverbanks, and storm drains. Along the way, we translate what 2006 technology could (and couldn’t) do: analog PTZ lenses, looping tapes, and a nine-second blind sweep that turned into a nineteen-year question. No theories yet—just the night itself, the search that followed, and the stubborn gap between what the footage shows and what the evidence should have left behind.

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Episode 40- Johnny Gosch · Part IV — “Aftermath, Advocacy, and the Echoes Still Heard”

Noreen’s living-room walls are lined with boxes now—press clippings turned amber, government letters, and the dog-eared notebooks she once carried into every interview. In Part IV we sit with the aftermath. We trace how one family’s search grew into a national crusade: milk-carton photos, the first AMBER-style alerts, and the “Johnny Gosch Bill” that re-wired how police log a missing child. We unpack the victories that stuck, the reforms that stalled, and the personal toll of steering a movement while the central question—where is Johnny?—remained unanswered. Then we widen the lens: what today’s advocates still borrow from Noreen’s playbook, how social media both amplifies and distorts a case, and why investigators keep an open file more than forty years on. No neat endings here—just the resonance of one disappearance reshaping the very idea of “missing” in America, and the quiet hope that the next call might finally close the circle.

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Episode 39- Johnny Gosch · Part III — “Networks, Narratives, and the Open File”

The map on the wall is crowded: arrows, names, and theories that try to connect Johnny’s disappearance to something bigger. In Part III, we step through those rooms one by one—the organized-ring narrative, claims of institutional cover-up, links proposed to other Des Moines cases, and the photographs and papers that seemed to promise certainty—and ask what survives contact with the record. Along the way, we translate how cold-case work actually moves today: rebuilding the corner-minute timeline, “vehicle archaeology,” careful re-interviews, digitizing old lead cards, and what would genuinely shift the case’s posture now. No appeals, no shortcuts—just the difference between stories that explain and evidence that endures.

#TrueCrimePodcast #UnsolvedMysteries #CreepyStories #Vanished #MidnightMysteryArchive #MissingPerson #unsolved #coldcasefiles #unsolvedcase #creepystories #johnnygosch #humantrafficking #thefranklinscandal #desMoines #Iowa