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One year ago tonight Joshua Gimo vanished from an apartment near St. John's University

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in Tullis.

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It's been five years since a St. John's student was last seen.

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Last week marks 15 years since Joshua Gimo went missing.

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The St. John's junior disappeared while walking home from a party.

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He hasn't been seen since.

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I think Josh has secrets just like everybody else has secrets.

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But I don't care what Josh was doing.

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We just want our friend.

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I'm not sure if you can see it.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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I'm not sure.

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That night Josh was at a party playing poker with some friends at a dorm on campus.

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Josh arrived at the party around 11.30 at night that evening.

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And sometime before midnight people start realizing Josh isn't there.

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A couple of people at the party had noticed a male get up and leave but they weren't quite sure if it was Josh.

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Josh just wasn't at the party anymore.

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And there's no answers.

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He's just gone.

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Congratulations.

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He was so proud of his speech.

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I remember him being just like working on that speech so hard.

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I remember that.

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When I was with him and Katie we were helping with the Special Olympics.

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Oh yeah.

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I forgot about that.

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Here's Katie and Josh from prom.

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That's a nice picture.

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I really love that one.

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Thank you.

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Josh and I grew up together.

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We went to school together.

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In our sophomore year of high school we started dating so Josh was my high school sweetheart.

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He's very handsome.

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Blonde with blue eyes.

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He was athletic.

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He had a great sense of humor.

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He was very confident and studious.

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Look at how serious he is.

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You guys look so grumpy.

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Everyone else in the picture is smiling.

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Josh and I met when we were in second grade and became close at the end of high school.

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After that we stayed close.

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Josh was nominated as most likely to succeed in our high school class.

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And I really believed that he would have succeeded.

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Josh liked to have a lot of fun.

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He was outgoing.

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He was always happy and smarter than he should have been.

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13 years ago we were branded as special from the very beginning.

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We were the class of 2000.

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Josh was interested in being a lawyer.

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And even as a kid you can tell by the way he would talk to you when you talked to him about things.

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He would always be questioning.

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Society may change, but good solid teaching never will.

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As soon as Josh was going to turn 35 he was running for the next presidential election.

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He planned on going to law school once we finished college and then from there he was going to be a lawyer.

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And then from there he would be a politician and eventually he would be the president.

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When we went to college we decided to go to similar schools.

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I went to the college of St. Benedict which is all female and he went to St. John's University.

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St. John's is an all-male school.

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They are two separate campuses but a joint college.

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So we were able to have classes together and continue our relationship in college.

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My sophomore year I joined the mock trial team with Josh who was a year behind me at St. John's.

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Josh struck me pretty quickly as someone who I knew I could trust, a very intelligent person and a very easy person to get along with.

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As we got to know each other better we realized we had a lot in common.

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My senior year, his junior year, we were roommates and I was one of his best friends at the time he disappeared.

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The last time I saw Josh was the week before down at McAllister College watching the mock trial.

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He won a number of awards and they told him yeah he did real good, told him I loved him and said we'll see you next time, you know.

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And that was it.

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On Saturday, November 9th, 2002, Josh and I went to brunch together and at some point we got an invitation from Katie to say hey do you guys want to come over and hang out with me and my roommates tonight.

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And so I thought you know I'll go over to Katie's and hang out with them tonight.

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But Josh also got an invitation from some other friends who were playing poker that night at another guy's apartment.

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So the last time I saw him it would have been after dinner, probably 6.37.

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He was with his friend Alex in our apartment.

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You know he said hey I'm going to head over and Josh said hey okay, have fun and I said yeah you guys have a good night too, we'll see you later and that was it.

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I think it was sometime a little after 2 a.m. when I left Katie's apartment.

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I went home, I went upstairs, I noticed Josh wasn't in his room.

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But I just said oh he must still be at the party.

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The next morning I saw he still wasn't there and I thought that was weird.

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I checked my AOL instant messenger, his account had been idle for probably over 12 hours.

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So all I could think of was like where is he?

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I talked to Greg and Alex because he was with both of them the previous night.

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But they didn't know where he was.

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I think it was probably 2 or 3 in the afternoon.

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And Nick called me and asked if I knew where Josh was because he had said that Josh missed a mock trial meeting.

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And I remember thinking that was very out of character.

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I knew something was wrong, I knew something had happened to him or something was preventing him from coming back because I knew he wouldn't have just left on his own.

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So I was really worried.

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I got a call from the Dean of Students Sunday night at 10.30 on November 10th.

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And he said you need to report your son missing.

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His friends haven't seen him since last night.

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I was extremely scared and freaked out.

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Immediately I knew it was a very serious situation.

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You're not thinking much at that point in time.

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You're only kids missing, you don't know what to do.

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The call from Josh was mother.

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Reporting Josh was disappearance came in November 10th at 11.42 in the evening.

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The Sheriff's Office did do a search of his apartment.

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I would classify it more as just a walk through.

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Than anything it wasn't locked down at the time.

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They were looking for signs of a struggle, signs of any type of criminal activity.

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Might even be looking for suicide notes or anything that would kind of lead a clue to his whereabouts.

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But it looked like a normal college kid's room, you know, the TV had still been on.

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There was nothing that seemed out of the ordinary or anything of a criminal nature.

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They looked at some of his personal effects, like his wallet.

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Some of those things might give you an indication if he left and planned to be gone for a little while, if he packed a bag or anything like that.

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I remember his keys were there and we looked and checked and his car was still in the parking lot where I remember him last parking.

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And so we knew he hadn't driven anywhere.

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And they saw Josh's eyeglasses and contact cases still present and, you know, that to me would be something that you'd for sure take if you're going to maybe try to go start a new life or something somewhere.

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You got to wear your contact lenses to get around.

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So with the contact lens case being open with no contact lenses in it, we just figured he didn't come home and that he was still somewhere on campus.

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There's no reason to believe that anything else had happened.

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It was not uncommon for kids to spend a night somewhere other than their dormitory.

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So we talked to Josh's friends and roommates to help track his movements and activities the night before his disappearance.

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Josh and his friends were in Josh's apartment at St. Maurer House.

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They left the apartment to go to the party at 75 Meton Court, which was about a five minute walk away.

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We do know that Josh's key card was used to access his apartment at 1106, which we believe was him going back into the apartment to retrieve a few more beers.

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And that was the last time Josh key carded back into his apartment.

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St. John's University is a really small campus.

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I mean, student body of 2,000.

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There's not a lot of distance between any of the buildings.

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Josh was dormitory at St. Maurer House.

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It's more on the central middle part of the campus.

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The Meton Court apartment where the party was is more on the northern border of the campus.

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There's a lake that stretches through the campus that would keep you from going directly from the Meton Court apartments to St. Maurer House.

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The poker party that Joshua went to was a pretty small gathering, 10 to 12 kids.

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Some of them knew who Josh was but didn't know him terribly well.

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And then there was some people who didn't know him at all and had just met him that evening.

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They said he showed up at the party between 1130 and 12.

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And that Josh had a few drinks and was playing cards.

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I talked to a lot of Josh's friends who were at the poker party with him and the way they describe him, he was in a good mood.

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He was having a great time. He was joking around. He was acting like his normal self at the party.

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Some thought that he had been intoxicated and some thought he was still sober enough to be able to walk and talk and keep control of himself.

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Eventually they saw Joshua get up from the table and nobody really paid attention to where he was going.

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According to people at the poker party, he just got up and left the party without saying anything to anybody.

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One person stated that they believed he was going to the bathroom.

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In this case, both the apartment, front entry door and the bathroom are kind of in the same direction.

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So if someone wasn't paying attention, they wouldn't know which way he was going.

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I can't remember any time that he had done that previously where he would have just left without saying goodbye.

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The Josh I knew would tell the people that he came with that he was leaving.

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That first night of the investigation, a tracking dog was called in to track Josh's scent.

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It led to that pathway that's between Met and Court Apartments and St. Mauler House.

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And a trail kind of stopped there.

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At the time of Josh's disappearance, I was a crime and court supporter for the St. Claude Times newspaper, St. Claude, Minnesota.

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Within hours of Josh disappearing, I was made aware that they had a missing person's case at St. John's University.

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They brought in blood hounds pretty quickly after Josh disappeared and I believe one of the blood hounds hit on an area, on a bridge,

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that would have been on the path from the card game to where Josh lived.

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And then they found two witnesses.

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Through our investigation, we identified two witnesses that were students.

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One was a St. John's student, one was a St. Ben's student, so basically a guy and a girl.

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Between 1215 and 1230, they were walking down the road towards the Met and Court Apartments.

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When they got down in that area near the footbridge by Stumpf Lake,

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they noticed a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a pair of blue jeans.

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And the overall physical description matched that of Josh was.

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They continued to walk and when they looked back a second time, that person wasn't there any longer.

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That was about at the same time that Josh left the party, so it is believed that that was Josh.

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The witnesses didn't report seeing anything or anyone else.

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No other people, no other cars, no indication of what might have happened.

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He just, he up and vanished, you know, there's nothing to lead us in one direction or another.

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He's here one minute and gone the next.

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Josh was missing, his friends didn't know where he was, nobody had seen him,

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so I was extremely worried because it was out of character and it was not Josh.

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There were numerous agencies involved in the search efforts.

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The Sterns County Sheriff's Office was the lead investigative agency.

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The National Guard was eventually called in to help with searches because, you know,

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the college campus part itself where, you know, students would go was relatively small,

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but the area owned by St. John's was very small.

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St. John's University is a private college campus on several hundred acres.

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It's in a rural area in Sterns County.

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It's just a lot of ground cover from swamps to lakes to wooded, hilly, thick terrain.

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Tuesday they brought in the horses and they searched the campus to see if they could find a way to get there.

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Tuesday they brought in the horses and they searched the campus and the ravines.

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And then on the third day, Wednesday, they let us search with them and they broke us up into groups.

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I went out physically searching, walking around the campus.

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There was hundreds of people there.

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There's probably the biggest search effort that I've ever seen.

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Probably would be the biggest search effort in the county.

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I was scared to death because we're looking for our friend in this brush for whatever we could find and we didn't see anything.

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I really wanted to know what happened to him. I wanted to be found. I just...

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I didn't want to be the one who found him.

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Joshua Game-O is still missing tonight.

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The FBI was brought in rather early in the case.

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Authorities in Minnesota and Wisconsin have a disturbing mystery on their hands.

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At the time that Josh disappeared, there were several college-age students that were missing.

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All were about the same age, vanished at night. Could the unsolved disappearances be linked?

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There was a theory that a serial type killer was traveling up and down the Mississippi River here and abducting these people and killing them.

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Chris Jenkins disappeared after a Halloween party at this bar in Minneapolis.

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Six days later, Michael Knowle, a 22-year-old college student, vanished after celebrating his birthday at a party in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

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You know, these are all young men, people like Josh, who are successful, driven, ambitious.

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All within a hundred mile radius of Minneapolis.

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But two other key elements tie the cases together, alcohol and water.

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The Michael Knowle and Chris Jenkins cases happening at so close to the same time added confusion to Josh's case that maybe wouldn't have been there if there hadn't been so many other things happening.

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Connecting things that aren't connected can really screw up the investigation.

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Both local law enforcement and the FBI say while they haven't ruled out a connection, there's no evidence the disappearances are related.

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Are their stories connected? At this point, all they know and all we know for sure is that their children are nowhere to be found.

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During the initial searches for Josh, Canine was brought in and the dog led us down to the water by the bridge.

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So the thought was, did he fall in the water? Did he go down to the water? Was he intoxicated and stumbled? You know, he may be in the water.

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Our searches included dragging for a body, divers in the water, boats where we're using sonar technology.

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Seeing that lake being dragged was like the most surreal, probably awful memory I have.

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I'm out here looking for my best friend that please think is at the bottom of this lake.

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I couldn't believe the craziness of it and the gravity of it and it just takes a toll.

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But as winter set in, there was some thought because the water was so cold, in some instances freezing over early on that if Josh was in the water, his body may never surface until the water temperatures rose.

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So we did suspend the search activities in the waters and we would just wait until the spring.

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You know, as fall turned into winter, it was really frustrating because it felt like there were no more search activities on campus.

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I felt like everything sort of stopped and there was really nowhere else to look. It felt helpless.

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I was asked by people at St. John's how I would feel about having somebody else move into Josh's room.

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But I said no, I didn't want that to happen. I thought that that was a really awful idea.

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It was hard even just seeing that closed door every day because it was sort of symbolic of that's Josh's room but now it's just this closed door.

218
00:20:28,760 --> 00:20:34,760
I'm not sure how I finished that semester when Josh disappeared. It was unimaginable.

219
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He and I had a class together that semester and I never went back.

220
00:20:42,760 --> 00:20:52,760
Gimo was last seen about midnight as he left a party. There was search after search, no sign of him. His family pleaded for police to do more.

221
00:20:53,760 --> 00:20:57,760
Josh is out there somewhere. There's been no body phones. We got no reason to believe he's dead.

222
00:20:58,760 --> 00:21:06,760
To be honest with you, I don't think Brian was satisfied with the direction we were taking the investigation, the speed in which we were doing the investigation, our attention to the investigation.

223
00:21:07,760 --> 00:21:09,760
And he wanted answers to what happened to his son.

224
00:21:13,760 --> 00:21:18,760
Around that time, the family brought in a bloodhound to help with the search.

225
00:21:18,760 --> 00:21:20,760
That's a third, second, third time since then.

226
00:21:21,760 --> 00:21:29,760
It's not uncommon for those bloodhounds to be able to pick up a scent long after an individual has gone missing weeks and months afterwards.

227
00:21:32,760 --> 00:21:47,760
This dog traced Joshua's scent from Metton Court to Stumpf Lake, then to Josh's apartment at St. Maurer House, then to St. John's Abbey.

228
00:21:49,760 --> 00:21:57,760
St. John's University is a fairly unique institution. It's a religious college.

229
00:21:58,760 --> 00:22:03,760
There's a monastery on campus and some of the monks are professors.

230
00:22:06,760 --> 00:22:15,760
At the time Josh disappeared, there was a lot of news stories coming out about things happening at the monastery or the Abbey at St. John's.

231
00:22:15,760 --> 00:22:20,760
More allegations of clergy sex abuse at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville.

232
00:22:20,760 --> 00:22:25,760
Today in Stearns County Court, two civil lawsuits were filed, ledging abusive students dating back some 40 years.

233
00:22:26,760 --> 00:22:30,760
Today, another victim stepped forward, claiming a monk molested him inside the school.

234
00:22:31,760 --> 00:22:34,760
This is the fourth lawsuit filed against a monk at St. John's Abbey.

235
00:22:36,760 --> 00:22:43,760
Before he disappeared, Josh and I talked about the sexual abuse scandal at the Abbey and Josh was just irate about it.

236
00:22:44,760 --> 00:22:47,760
He was very upset that that kind of thing was happening and that it had been covered up.

237
00:22:49,760 --> 00:22:58,760
Brian had told us that he believed Joshua was doing research into the sexual misconduct, specifically for a research paper.

238
00:23:00,760 --> 00:23:06,760
You know, we looked at his computer. We saw other research papers, but I didn't see anything pertaining to that.

239
00:23:06,760 --> 00:23:13,760
So when the search led to the Abbey, with the bloodhound...

240
00:23:14,760 --> 00:23:16,760
She's casting all right over here.

241
00:23:17,760 --> 00:23:26,760
When the dog started to get into more intrusive areas where the general public's not typically allowed, St. John's ended up contacting us to kind of deal with it.

242
00:23:28,760 --> 00:23:33,760
Brian Gimelan asked that the search continue inside the Abbey and they were denied access.

243
00:23:34,760 --> 00:23:41,760
Later, our office was called and we were able to obtain consent to search through the Abbey with the dog.

244
00:23:42,760 --> 00:23:45,760
Now she wants to go back over there. Go back up to the Abbey.

245
00:23:46,760 --> 00:23:53,760
The dog found Josh's scent inside the Abbey near the rear of the building, but no evidence of Josh was ever found.

246
00:23:54,760 --> 00:24:01,760
Bloodhounds can be trained to do any number of things, tracking and trailing old scent, finding human remains if they're trained for that.

247
00:24:01,760 --> 00:24:07,760
But they aren't always accurate and our office was skeptical of that particular dog team at the time.

248
00:24:08,760 --> 00:24:13,760
There are about a dozen pedophile priests living on campus at a monastery not far from where I'm standing.

249
00:24:14,760 --> 00:24:18,760
So far, nothing in this investigation has connected them with Gimelan's disappearance.

250
00:24:18,760 --> 00:24:31,760
I believe that if somebody did something to Joshua that had any connection to that campus whatsoever, we're never going to find them ever.

251
00:24:32,760 --> 00:24:36,760
Not even a body ever because they're too secretive.

252
00:24:39,760 --> 00:24:41,760
In the glow of the evening light.

253
00:24:41,760 --> 00:24:49,760
I guess wondering if I'm ever going to see him again or know what happened.

254
00:24:50,760 --> 00:24:54,760
The sound of a family still hoping, still praying for something lost.

255
00:24:55,760 --> 00:24:58,760
Others have been found, the ones who disappeared around the same time.

256
00:24:59,760 --> 00:25:03,760
Chris Jenkins, a U of M student, his body found in February of 2003.

257
00:25:04,760 --> 00:25:07,760
Michael Noel, a student from Wisconsin, his body found a month later.

258
00:25:08,760 --> 00:25:14,760
Chris Jenkins and Michael Noel both were found in the bodies of water that they were near when they disappeared.

259
00:25:15,760 --> 00:25:20,760
The other two college students' deaths were determined to be not linked to Josh's disappearance.

260
00:25:23,760 --> 00:25:30,760
As those other students were located, it became even more ominous that Josh was still missing.

261
00:25:31,760 --> 00:25:37,760
Because both Chris Jenkins and Michael Noel were found in bodies of water, it seemed like we would find Josh.

262
00:25:38,760 --> 00:25:49,760
When the spring came around, the theory was if Josh is in one of the lakes, the water will warm, the gases in the body will do their work and he'll float.

263
00:25:50,760 --> 00:25:59,760
And you know, I remember interviewing Katie who said she didn't like to see the ice forming on the lakes because if he's there, that's going to trap him.

264
00:26:00,760 --> 00:26:06,760
She didn't like to see the ice melting because that might warm the water enough to have him float and she didn't want that either.

265
00:26:07,760 --> 00:26:12,760
It was just like a very stressful and tense time, just wondering like is today going to be the day?

266
00:26:12,760 --> 00:26:25,760
In the spring, the Sheriff's Office started searching the waters right away in areas around waters, eventually diving multiple times in multiple bodies of water.

267
00:26:28,760 --> 00:26:36,760
And I remember Brian was searching the lakes and he's out there in a kayak.

268
00:26:37,760 --> 00:26:47,760
And I just couldn't get over the thought that what if his body floated up right next to that kayak?

269
00:26:48,760 --> 00:26:50,760
I mean what would you do as a father?

270
00:26:52,760 --> 00:26:57,760
If their theory was right, they should have been right there in the water.

271
00:26:58,760 --> 00:27:03,760
If we should have walked right there, there he is, okay, end of story, but that wasn't the case.

272
00:27:07,760 --> 00:27:14,760
When the Sheriff's Office got done with their search efforts, they concluded that Joshua was not in the water.

273
00:27:16,760 --> 00:27:23,760
Well when Joshua's body didn't surface, there were so many theories about what could have happened to him.

274
00:27:24,760 --> 00:27:31,760
I think the most prevailing theory was probably that somebody that knew Joshua was close to Josh did something to Josh.

275
00:27:31,760 --> 00:27:34,760
Could be a friend, could be a roommate.

276
00:27:35,760 --> 00:27:47,760
During our investigation, one of Josh's roommates told us that he heard an argument between Nick and Josh earlier that night before Josh went missing and the argument involved Katie.

277
00:27:48,760 --> 00:27:59,760
Josh and I dated for about four and a half years, but by our junior year of college, we decided to end our relationship and Josh and I broke up.

278
00:27:59,760 --> 00:28:03,760
When Josh disappeared, we had only been broken up for a couple of months.

279
00:28:04,760 --> 00:28:10,760
Right after Josh disappeared, there was a lot of speculation about whether or not Nick and Katie were together.

280
00:28:11,760 --> 00:28:22,760
If they were ever romantically involved, if that was possibly a motive for some harm gone to Josh or was Josh upset about them getting together after Josh and Katie broke up.

281
00:28:23,760 --> 00:28:31,760
I think Nick and I did have a level of attraction toward each other. He and I did consider dating.

282
00:28:32,760 --> 00:28:40,760
We were close and we discussed do we want to try to have some sort of relationship other than just being friends, but I wouldn't call it a romantic relationship with Katie.

283
00:28:41,760 --> 00:28:46,760
I think we kissed one maybe two times and then we decided this isn't a route we want to go right now.

284
00:28:47,760 --> 00:28:56,760
Katie and Nick both mentioned in their statements to us that they talked about Nick's desire to date Katie.

285
00:28:57,760 --> 00:29:06,760
Nick also drew our attention in the investigation because his timeline of his whereabouts that evening differed from Katie's original statement to us.

286
00:29:07,760 --> 00:29:12,760
Nick told us he left Katie's apartment at about 2.30.

287
00:29:14,760 --> 00:29:23,760
And keycard records on campus showed he keyed into his dorm room at 2.42 hours on the morning of the 10th of November.

288
00:29:24,760 --> 00:29:28,760
In a statement with Katie, she told us he left at 1.30.

289
00:29:29,760 --> 00:29:37,760
You've got over an hour of unaccounted time there when the drive between both campuses is roughly 7 to 10 minutes, especially at that time of night.

290
00:29:38,760 --> 00:29:42,760
What he's telling us at that point did not match up with what Katie said.

291
00:29:44,760 --> 00:29:53,760
Nick was asked to take a polygraph by our office. Initially he told us that he would consider and then when that polygraph examination was scheduled he chose not to take it.

292
00:29:53,760 --> 00:30:01,760
I told them no because that's not going to do anybody any good. I don't want there to be some false positive because they're simply not reliable.

293
00:30:02,760 --> 00:30:04,760
There was a reason they were inadmissible in court.

294
00:30:06,760 --> 00:30:12,760
I don't think it's necessarily abnormal or very strange that someone in that capacity wouldn't take it.

295
00:30:13,760 --> 00:30:19,760
The fact that he then declined it and cancelled after the fact is a detail that we must consider.

296
00:30:20,760 --> 00:30:34,760
I don't believe I was ever directly told that I was a suspect or person of interest. I had nothing to do with Josh's disappearance and all I could think of was they're not going in the right direction because this is the one direction I can say with certainty is the wrong one.

297
00:30:35,760 --> 00:30:50,760
I never gave that theory much credence and I was thinking if they keep looking at Nick, if they keep viewing him as a suspect and as their primary suspect and if they're not looking anywhere else, we're never going to find Josh.

298
00:30:51,760 --> 00:31:04,760
My initial thought is that it was some kind of an accident and somebody who was involved maybe tried to cover it up to avoid any kind of potential consequences.

299
00:31:05,760 --> 00:31:22,760
Early on I felt like there were some people at the party who had seen him right before he disappeared. I just got this sense that are they telling me the whole truth, the full truth?

300
00:31:22,760 --> 00:31:37,760
Or is there something that's not flattering, that's maybe embarrassing, that happened, that they just don't want anyone to know, that they just are never going to tell anybody? That always stuck in the back of my head.

301
00:31:38,760 --> 00:31:52,760
They're all kids with goals and aspirations and they've got their whole life in front of them if they know something or something happened, they have a future to protect. So it could be a motivation to hide or conceal something.

302
00:31:53,760 --> 00:32:00,760
But if something happened at the party, I don't think it's possible to keep 10 or 12 kids silent on it.

303
00:32:00,760 --> 00:32:22,760
I believe the kids at the party know more than they say for them to say, Josh just got up and said he was going to the bathroom and never came back. And nobody wondered where he was. It doesn't make any sense to me. There's more to it than what they're saying.

304
00:32:30,760 --> 00:32:38,760
In the days that followed the investigation into where Josh went, investigators were still looking at additional physical evidence.

305
00:32:38,760 --> 00:32:54,760
After that initial search, our office didn't remove the computer or the hard drive or anything from Josh's room. At the time, they didn't have any reason to believe that the computer would yield any information based on the direction they were going with that early investigation.

306
00:32:54,760 --> 00:33:04,760
So we got access to the computer from Brian and we were able to see that somebody had used an internet washer on Josh's computer several days after his disappearance.

307
00:33:06,760 --> 00:33:19,760
The internet washing program in 2002 was a program that was able to be installed from the internet onto the device which then would allow some files to either be deleted temporarily or deleted permanently from the hard drive of a computer.

308
00:33:20,760 --> 00:33:33,760
This internet washer was something that had not been done previously on this computer and it was obviously suspicious for us and something that we wanted to make sure we shed some more light on. It was not normal for Josh's use on the computer.

309
00:33:34,760 --> 00:33:49,760
After Josh disappeared, they didn't close his room off or anything so anybody could go in and out. So Brian made the decision to get all his stuff out of there within, I think it was two weeks of Josh being missing.

310
00:33:51,760 --> 00:33:57,760
All the kids in that apartment could have had access to his computer and anything else.

311
00:33:58,760 --> 00:34:09,760
I was careful not to do anything on his computer and I didn't want to disturb anything because it just struck me as something that may really be significant and I was not going to be messing around with it.

312
00:34:10,760 --> 00:34:24,760
It does seem odd that within days after someone goes missing, someone other than the missing person goes onto their computer and deletes files. But we don't know who and we don't know what the files were. So you just felt like there was more to that computer.

313
00:34:28,760 --> 00:34:37,760
We did everything together. I mean we went to college together. We started the next chapter of our life together and I guess I just always assumed that it would be the same when we graduated.

314
00:34:39,760 --> 00:34:55,760
It took me a long time to realize and to accept that Josh was actually a missing person. I kept expecting him to be at class or to show up at McTrial or just to be back at campus. It took me a long time to really accept that he might not come back.

315
00:34:56,760 --> 00:34:59,760
He was my best friend and up here on campus he was my family.

316
00:35:01,760 --> 00:35:13,760
I still remember graduation in 2003. It was for most of the people there. Obviously they're really happy. It's a joyous day. I felt none of that. I just wanted to be done.

317
00:35:14,760 --> 00:35:26,760
I missed him so much. It was like I lost a part of myself. We were really close and I felt a little lost without him.

318
00:35:29,760 --> 00:35:38,760
It's been five years since a St. John's student was last seen. No one knows exactly what happened to Josh Gimau. Still his family and friends hope for his return.

319
00:35:39,760 --> 00:35:48,760
It's worse now. It's worse because you know it's like this is the day that marks the fifth year that he's been gone and we have no idea what happened where he is.

320
00:35:48,760 --> 00:36:04,760
When we looked at this case and didn't have any specific thing directing us to what happened, almost everything was considered.

321
00:36:05,760 --> 00:36:17,760
And specifically in 2008 the thing that I began looking at was Josh's computer. Different people have looked at the actual original hard drive.

322
00:36:17,760 --> 00:36:28,760
But in 2008 additional technology started giving me some new investigative things to look at some different possibilities.

323
00:36:29,760 --> 00:36:39,760
I took that hard drive down to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, set it up in their lab and since that time that computer really has been the most central part of the investigation.

324
00:36:39,760 --> 00:36:51,760
We learned in the Internet washer that we found Josh's computer in 2002. It would only delete browser history, cookies, things of that nature. It wouldn't wipe out a ton of data.

325
00:36:52,760 --> 00:36:55,760
So we still had the vast majority of the contents of the computer.

326
00:36:55,760 --> 00:37:03,760
We looked at his emails which was pretty mundane, normal stuff that you would expect to see on a college kid's computer.

327
00:37:03,760 --> 00:37:14,760
The things that started to pique my interest that this could be a key to solving the case were he was spending time on Yahoo! Personals.

328
00:37:15,760 --> 00:37:25,760
We identified three different profiles that we believed were used by Josh, one of which has his partial part of his name and his zip code for the area he lived.

329
00:37:25,760 --> 00:37:33,760
And then two other ones portray himself as a female. One is Kuchiku 2002 and the other one is Gwen Girl Big Jugs.

330
00:37:33,760 --> 00:37:41,760
We know with follow-up with individuals later on that he was chatting online with men in portraying himself as a female.

331
00:37:42,760 --> 00:37:48,760
The examination of Josh's computer leads me to believe he might have had some secrets that he didn't want to share with people.

332
00:37:48,760 --> 00:37:59,760
Some of the things that were on his computer would lead you to believe that maybe he was looking for casual encounters of some kind, trying to meet people online that he didn't necessarily share with anyone.

333
00:38:00,760 --> 00:38:12,760
He might have been exploring his sexuality, but at the same time the pornography that he looked at and had on his computer ranged from heterosexual to homosexual pornography.

334
00:38:12,760 --> 00:38:19,760
And nobody that we interviewed really had any belief or information or any indication that he was homosexual or transgender.

335
00:38:19,760 --> 00:38:29,760
I don't think Josh was gay. I never got that impression from him. I wasn't aware of him exploring anything like that while we were together when I knew him.

336
00:38:29,760 --> 00:38:36,760
I never saw any sign that he was gay, so that would surprise me considerably.

337
00:38:36,760 --> 00:38:54,760
From looking at that account, your mind kind of wanders. What would you do if you were the person interacting with the profile he set up and you found out you were talking to a 20-year-old male college student at St. John's?

338
00:38:54,760 --> 00:39:01,760
What would that cause someone to do if they found that out? Certainly it would be embarrassing.

339
00:39:01,760 --> 00:39:13,760
Would it drive you to the point of saying, I want to find out who did that? I want to go meet that person. Do I want to go do harm to that person? I don't know what it would cause people to think. That crossed my mind.

340
00:39:14,760 --> 00:39:26,760
One of the theories is that Josh potentially met someone on an instant messaging chat site and ended up chatting with him ahead of time to line up maybe some sort of meetup which could explain why abruptly he left in the middle of the night.

341
00:39:27,760 --> 00:39:33,760
It may be meeting with someone that he maybe didn't fully know and something happened to him.

342
00:39:37,760 --> 00:39:47,760
So we looked at all of the St. John's life safety incident reports that they had back then. Life Safety Services is the name for the security staff on campus.

343
00:39:47,760 --> 00:39:57,760
So we're just looking for any complaints about suspicious activity, just to look for suspicious vehicles, suspicious people and people on campus that were not affiliated with the campus in any way.

344
00:39:57,760 --> 00:40:15,760
And there was two incident reports specifically that really piqued my interest. In both of those instances, there was a vehicle that Life Safety Services had seen in various different places on campus on two different nights in 2002 prior to Joshua's disappearance.

345
00:40:16,760 --> 00:40:30,760
There are several other areas on campus that are dark, not well lit, a little more remote on the outskirts of campus that aren't used typically at night, that people would frequent for meetings or hookups.

346
00:40:31,760 --> 00:40:36,760
The places the car was seen were consistent with that kind of hookup area.

347
00:40:37,760 --> 00:40:52,760
Campus Security stated in the incident reports that when they drove up to the vehicle, they noticed a college-daged male get out of the front passenger seat and run off into the darkness.

348
00:40:53,760 --> 00:41:02,760
Life Safety in the first report detailed that the person that took off running was a college-daged male. They weren't able to tell much more than that.

349
00:41:02,760 --> 00:41:09,760
But in the second report, Life Safety was able to speak with another college-daged male who was in the front passenger seat of that vehicle.

350
00:41:09,760 --> 00:41:16,760
Life Safety detailed in both reports that the passenger in the front passenger seat was not identified in either case.

351
00:41:17,760 --> 00:41:27,760
The incident reports specifically state what the vehicle was and they described it as an orange Pontiac Sunfire.

352
00:41:30,760 --> 00:41:37,760
They had obtained a license plate number, a vehicle description, and in one instance had stopped and spoken with this individual.

353
00:41:39,760 --> 00:41:42,760
He told them he was dropping off a student on campus.

354
00:41:43,760 --> 00:41:54,760
We have been in contact with the individual from the incident reports and he provided us the same explanation that he did at the time was that he was dropping off a student from another campus.

355
00:41:56,760 --> 00:42:05,760
And we had an interest in finding the vehicle to see if there would be any forensic evidence indicating whether this individual had any contact with Joshua.

356
00:42:05,760 --> 00:42:10,760
Unfortunately, it's not available to us because that vehicle has been crushed.

357
00:42:13,760 --> 00:42:24,760
We would like to identify the student he was with and ask how they met this individual, what the purpose of the meeting was, just to see if it's in any way related to Joshua's disappearance.

358
00:42:24,760 --> 00:42:30,760
If this person is frequenting the campus, we want to know if he had any encounters or interactions with Joshua.

359
00:42:31,760 --> 00:42:45,760
But also our Sheriff's Office is interested in speaking with anybody who had contact with this male individual in a Pontiac Sunfire orange in color or any other person who might have come on campus for whatever reason at that time.

360
00:42:45,760 --> 00:42:56,760
Investigators have reviewed some of the identified male photos from Joshua's Yahoo user account and that individual in a Pontiac Sunfire was not found to match any of those.

361
00:42:57,760 --> 00:43:05,760
I do think that Joshua's computer activity and specifically being on Yahoo! Personals might have contributed to his disappearance.

362
00:43:05,760 --> 00:43:15,760
It seems probable that he was on a dating site or trying to meet people and I think it's probably our most likely avenue or theory.

363
00:43:16,760 --> 00:43:24,760
When we imaged the hard drive, we saw a lot of different images and some of them are directly linked to his Yahoo! Personal site.

364
00:43:24,760 --> 00:43:38,760
We have quite a few photos that we would like the public's help in identifying so that we can go out and speak to these people to see if they have any connection to Joshua at all, if they've ever met Joshua and why they might appear on his computer hard drive.

365
00:43:46,760 --> 00:44:03,760
I hung Joshua's photo on the wall for everybody that's coming through this office because we still have this unsolved case and we have to have that constant daily reminder that it's there so it's not forgotten.

366
00:44:06,760 --> 00:44:08,760
It's important to me personally.

367
00:44:08,760 --> 00:44:15,760
Disappointment in this case is...

368
00:44:15,760 --> 00:44:33,760
The road ahead is a long and difficult one. Fortunately, we have been very well equipped to celebrate the conclusion of the last chapter of the first volume of our lives.

369
00:44:33,760 --> 00:44:40,760
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we would be 20 years later and still have no idea what happened to him.

370
00:44:40,760 --> 00:44:51,760
Josh would be 39 now and I would assume he would be a lawyer if not a senator already.

371
00:44:53,760 --> 00:45:00,760
He was going to go to some elite law school, maybe Yale, and then come back to his hometown of Maple Lake, open up his law practice.

372
00:45:00,760 --> 00:45:07,760
Oh, Josh would be the president of the United States right now if he hadn't disappeared. If not president, on his way to being president.

373
00:45:08,760 --> 00:45:25,760
I always told Josh, when you grow up in your big political career, just remember, I'm living in the west wing of the mansion and you're building your father a cabin way up north in the woods.

374
00:45:26,760 --> 00:45:29,760
And he said, I'll do that for you, mom.

375
00:45:29,760 --> 00:45:44,760
I think Josh probably had secrets. Maybe they got him killed? I don't know. I wish that whoever knew those secrets would come forward. Bring him to light.

376
00:45:44,760 --> 00:45:59,760
He's our son. We want to know what happened to him. We love him. It doesn't make any difference. He's my son.

377
00:46:14,760 --> 00:46:32,760
I remember my mom having dreams about some weird guy and some lady. I could see a dungeon and they're doing sadistic and weird things to this girl.

378
00:46:33,760 --> 00:46:40,760
I feel like her spirit is trying to get in touch with someone. I think she wants to be found.

379
00:46:41,760 --> 00:46:44,760
How did the boat get out that far? What happened that day?

380
00:46:45,760 --> 00:46:52,760
He clearly wasn't killed in that boat. There's zero biological evidence in there. This was not a suicide. This is a murder.

381
00:46:54,760 --> 00:46:59,760
The entire place was cleaned. They were just gone. There's nothing left. There is no playbook for kidnapping.

382
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You