One year ago tonight,
Joshua Guimond vanished from an apartment near St. John's University...
It's been five years since a St. John's student was last seen...
This week marks 15 years since Josh Guimond went missing...
The St. John's junior
disappeared while walking home from a party.
He hasn't been seen since.
I think Josh had secrets just like everybody else has secrets.
But I don't care what Josh was doing.
We just want our friend.
That night, Josh was at a party
playing poker with some friends at a dorm on campus.
Josh arrived at the party around 11:30 at night that evening.
And sometime before midnight,
people start realizing that Josh isn't there.
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.
Josh just wasn't at the party anymore.
And there's no answers.
He's just gone.
- Graduation. - Oh, yeah.
He was so proud of his speech.
I remember him being just, like, working on that speech so hard.
I remember that. Yeah.
That's when him and Katie were helping with the Special Olympics.
- Oh, yeah! I forgot about that. - Yeah. Yeah.
Here's Katie and Josh from prom.
- That's a nice picture. - I really love that one.
Our first couple of the evening
is Senior Class Treasurer, Katie Benson,
escorted by our Senior Class President, Josh Guimond.
Josh and I grew up together. We went to school together.
In our sophomore year of high school, we started dating.
So Josh was my high school sweetheart.
He was very handsome, blond with blue eyes.
He was athletic. He had a great sense of humor.
And I think a lot of people didn't see that side of him
because he always came across as very confident and studious.
Oh, my gosh. Look at how serious he is right there.
You guys both look so grumpy.
- Everyone else in the picture is smiling. - Everybody else is smiling!
Josh and I, we met when we were in about second grade
and then became really close at the end of high school.
After that, we still stayed close.
Josh was nominated as "most likely to succeed"
in our high school class,
and I really believed that he would have succeeded.
Josh liked to have a lot of fun. He was outgoing.
He was always happy and smarter than he should have been.
Thirteen years ago, we were branded as special from the very beginning.
We were the Class of 2000...
Josh was interested in being a lawyer.
And even as a kid, you can tell by the way he would talk to you
when you'd talk to him about things.
He would always be questioning.
Society may change, but good, solid teaching never will.
As soon as Josh was gonna turn 35,
he was running for the next presidential election.
Hey, Josh!
He planned on going to law school once we finished college,
and then from there, he was going to be a lawyer.
And then he would be a politician.
And eventually he would be the president.
When we went to college, we decided to go to similar schools.
I went to the College of Saint Benedict, which is all-female,
and he went to St. John's University.
St. John's is an all-male school.
They are two separate campuses but a joint college,
so we were able to have classes together and continue our relationship in college.
My sophomore year, I joined the mock trial team with Josh,
who was a year behind me at St. John's.
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.
As we got to know each other better, we realized we had a lot in common.
My senior year, his junior year, we were roommates,
and I was one of his best friends at the time he disappeared.
The last time I saw Josh was the week before
down at Macalester College, watching the mock trial.
He won a number of awards, and I told him, "Yeah, you did real good,"
told him I loved him, and said, "We'll see you next time." You know?
And that was it.
On Saturday, November 9th, 2002,
Josh and I went to brunch together.
And at some point, we got an invitation from Katie to say,
"Do you guys wanna come over and hang out with me and my roommates?"
And so I thought, "I'll go over to Katie's and hang out with them tonight."
But Josh also got an invitation from some other friends
who were playing poker that night at another guy's apartment.
So the last time I saw him would have been after dinner,
probably 6:30, 7:00.
He was with his friend Alex in our apartment.
I said, "Hey, I'm gonna head over," and Josh said, "Yeah, okay. Have fun."
And I said, "You guys have a good night too."
"We'll see you later." And that was it.
I think it was sometime a little after 2:00 a.m. when I left Katie's apartment.
I went home. I went upstairs. I noticed Josh wasn't in his room.
But I just said, "Oh, he must still be at the party."
The next morning,
I saw he still wasn't there.
And I thought that was weird.
I checked my AOL Instant Messenger.
His account had been idle for probably over 12 hours.
All I could think of is, like, "Where is he?"
I talked to Greg and Alex,
because he was with both of them the previous night,
but they didn't know where he was.
I think it was probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon,
and Nick called me and asked if I knew where Josh was
because he had said Josh missed the mock trial meeting.
I remember thinking that was very out of character.
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.
So I was... I was really worried.
I got a call from the Dean of Students
Sunday night at 10:30 on November 10th,
and he said, "You need to report your son missing."
"His friends haven't seen him since last night."
I was extremely scared and freaked out.
Immediately, I knew it was a very serious situation.
You're not thinking much at that point in time.
Your only kid's missing.
You don't know what to do.
The call from Joshua's mother reporting Joshua's disappearance came in
November 10th at 11:42 in the evening.
The Sheriff's Office did do a search of his apartment.
I would classify it more as just a walkthrough than anything.
It wasn't locked down at the time.
They were looking for signs of a struggle, signs of any type of criminal activity.
Might even be looking for suicide notes
or anything that would kinda lead a clue to his whereabouts.
But it looked like a normal college kid's room.
The TV had still been on.
There was nothing that seemed out of the ordinary
or anything of a criminal nature.
They looked at some of his personal effects, like his wallet.
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.
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.
So we knew he hadn't driven anywhere.
And I saw Josh's eyeglasses and contact cases still present.
And that, to me, would be something that you'd for sure take
if you were gonna maybe try to go start a new life or something somewhere.
You gotta wear your contact lenses to get around,
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.
There was no reason to believe that anything else had happened.
It was not uncommon for kids
to just spend the night somewhere other than their dormitory.
So we talked to Joshua's friends and roommates
to help track his movements and activities the night before his disappearance.
Josh and his friends were in Josh's apartment at St. Maur House.
They left the apartment to go to the party at 75 Metten Court,
which was about a five-minute walk away.
We do know that Joshua's key card was used to access his apartment at 11:06,
which we believe was him
going back in to the apartment to retrieve a few more beers.
And that was the last time Josh key-carded back into his apartment.
St. John's University is a really small campus.
I mean, student body of 2,000.
There's not a lot of distance between any of the buildings.
Joshua's dormitory, St. Maur House,
is more in the central, middle part of the campus.
The Metten Court Apartments where the party was
is more on the northern border of the campus.
There's a lake that stretches through the campus that would keep you
from going directly from the Metten Court apartments to St. Maur house.
The poker party that Joshua went to was a pretty small gathering, ten to 12 kids.
Some of them knew who Josh was but didn't know him terribly well,
and there was some people who didn't know him at all
and just met him that evening.
They said he showed up at the party between 11:30 and 12:00,
and that Josh had a few drinks, and was playing cards.
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.
He was having a great time. He was joking around.
He was acting like his normal self at the party.
Some thought that he had been intoxicated.
Some thought he was still sober enough
to be able to walk, and talk, and keep control of himself.
Eventually, they saw Joshua get up from the table,
and nobody really paid attention to where he was going.
According to people at the poker party,
he just got up and left the party without saying anything to anybody.
One person stated that they believed he was going to the bathroom.
In this case, both the apartment front entry door and the bathroom
are kind of in the same direction.
So if someone wasn't paying attention, they wouldn't know which way he was going.
I can't remember any time that he had done that previously,
where he would have just left without saying goodbye.
The Josh I knew would tell the people that he came with that he was leaving.
That first night of the investigation,
a tracking dog was called in to track Josh's scent.
It led to that pathway that is between Metten Court Apartments
and St. Maur house.
And the trail kinda stopped there.
At the time of Josh's disappearance,
I was a crime and courts reporter for the St. Cloud Times newspaper
in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Within hours of Josh disappearing,
I was made aware
that they had a missing persons case at St. John's University.
They brought in bloodhounds pretty quickly after Josh disappeared,
and I believe one of the bloodhounds hit on an area on a bridge
that would have been on the path from the card game to where Josh lived.
And they found two witnesses.
Through our investigation, we identified two witnesses that were students.
One was a St. John student. One was a St. Ben's student.
So, basically, a guy and a girl.
Between 12:15 and 12:30,
they were walking down the road towards the Metten Court Apartments.
When they got down in that area, near the footbridge by Stumpf Lake,
they noticed a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt with blue jeans,
and the overall physical description matched that of Joshua's.
They continued to walk, and when they looked back a second time,
that person wasn't there any longer.
That was about the same time that Josh left the party.
So it is believed that that was Josh.
The witnesses didn't report seeing anything or anyone else.
No other people, no other cars, no indication of what might have happened.
He just... he up and vanished.
There's nothing to lead us in one direction or another.
He's here one minute and gone the next.
Josh is missing. His friends didn't know where he was.
Nobody had seen him.
So I was extremely worried because it was out of character,
and it was not Josh.
There were numerous agencies involved in the search efforts.
The Stearns County Sheriff's Office was the lead investigative agency.
The National Guard was eventually called in
to help with searches because the college campus part itself,
where students would go, was relatively small,
but the area owned by St. John's was massive.
St. John's University is a private college campus on several hundred acres.
It's in a rural area in Stearns County.
It's just a lot of ground to cover, from swamps to lakes
to wooded, hilly, thick terrain.
Tuesday, they brought in the horses,
and they searched the campus and the ravines.
And then, on the third day, Wednesday,
they let us search with them, and they broke us up into groups.
- Shouldn't we go back up here then? - What?
We're going to... We're going to the footbridge.
I went out physically searching, walking around the campus.
There was hundreds of people there.
It was probably the biggest search effort that I've ever seen.
Probably would be the biggest search effort in the county.
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.
I wanted to know what happened to him.
I wanted him to be found. I just...
I didn't wanna be the one who found him.
Joshua Guimond is still missing tonight...
The FBI was brought in rather early in the case.
Authorities in Minnesota and Wisconsin have a disturbing mystery on their hands.
At the time that Josh disappeared,
there was several college-aged students that were missing.
All were about the same age, vanished at night.
Could the unsolved disappearances be linked?
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.
Chris Jenkins disappeared after a Halloween party
at this bar in Minneapolis.
Six days later, Michael Noll, a 22-year-old college student,
vanished after celebrating his birthday at a party in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
You know, these are all young men.
People like Josh who are successful, driven, ambitious...
...all within a hundred-mile radius of Minneapolis.
But two other key elements tie the cases together.
Alcohol and water.
The Michael Noll 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.
Connecting things that aren't connected can really screw up the investigation.
Both local law enforcement and the FBI say
while they haven't ruled out a connection,
there's no evidence the disappearances are related.
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.
During the initial searches for Josh, K9 was brought in,
and the dog led us down to the water by the bridge.
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."
The searches included dragging for a body, divers in the water,
boats where we're using sonar technology...
Seeing that lake being dragged
was like the most surreal, probably awful memory I have.
I'm out here looking for my best friend
that the police think is at the bottom of this lake.
I couldn't believe the craziness of it and the gravity of it,
and it just takes a toll.
But as winter set in,
there was 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.
So we did suspend the search activities in the waters,
and we were just waiting till the spring.
You know, as fall turned into winter,
it was really frustrating because it felt like
there were no more search activities on campus.
It felt like everything sort of stopped, and there was really nowhere else to look.
Kinda felt helpless.
I was asked by people at St. John's
how I would feel about having somebody else move into Josh's room.
But I said, "No." I didn't want that to happen.
I thought that that was a really awful idea.
It was hard, even 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."
I'm not sure how I finished that semester when Josh disappeared.
It was unimaginable.
He and I had a class together that semester, and I...
I never went back.
Guimond 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.
Josh is out there somewhere.
There's been no body found, so we got no reason to believe he's dead.
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,
and he wanted answers to what happened to his son.
Around that time, the family brought in a bloodhound to help with the search.
Is that the third, second or third time she's been there?
It's not uncommon for those bloodhounds to be able to
pick up the scent long after an individual has gone missing.
Weeks and months afterwards.
This dog traced Joshua's scent from Metten Court to Stumpf Lake,
then to Josh's apartment at St. Maur House,
then to St. John's Abbey.
St. John's University is a fairly unique institution.
It's a religious college.
There's a monastery on campus, and some of the monks are professors.
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.
More allegations of clergy sex abuse at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville.
Today, in Stearns County Court, two civil lawsuits were filed
alleging abuse of students dating back some 40 years.
Today, another victim stepped forward,
claiming a monk molested him inside the school.
This is the fourth lawsuit filed against a monk at St. John's Abbey.
Before he disappeared,
Josh and I talked about the sexual abuse scandal at the abbey,
and Josh was just irate about it.
He was very upset that that kind of thing was happening
and that it had been covered up.
Brian had told us that he believed Joshua was doing research
into the sexual misconduct, specifically for a research paper.
Now, we looked at his computer.
We saw other research papers,
but I didn't see anything pertaining to that.
So when the search led to the abbey with the bloodhound...
She's casting right over here.
...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 kinda deal with it.
See where she wants to go?
Brian Guimond asked that the search continue inside the abbey,
and they were denied access.
Later, our office was called,
and we were able to obtain consent to search through the abbey with the dog.
Now she wants to go back over there, back up to the abbey.
The dog found Josh's scent inside the abbey
near the rear of the building, but no evidence of Josh was ever found.
Bloodhounds can be trained to do any number of things,
tracking and trailing old scents,
finding human remains if they're trained for that,
but they aren't always accurate.
And our office was skeptical of that particular dog team at the time.
There are about a dozen pedophile priests living on campus at a monastery
not far from where I'm standing.
So far, nothing in this investigation
has connected them with Guimond's disappearance.
I believe that if somebody did something to Joshua
that had any connection to that campus whatsoever,
we're never gonna find him ever.
Not even a body. Ever. Because they're too secretive.
In the glow of the evening light...
...I guess wondering if I'm ever gonna see him again or...
or know what happened.
The sound of a family still hoping, still praying for something lost.
Others have been found,
the ones who disappeared around the same time.
Chris Jenkins, a U of M student, his body found in February of 2003.
Michael Noll, a student from Wisconsin, his body found a month later.
Chris Jenkins and Michael Noll, both were found in the bodies of water
that they were near when they disappeared.
The other two college students' deaths
were determined to be not linked to Josh's disappearance.
As those other students were located,
it became even more ominous that Josh was still missing.
Because both Chris Jenkins and Michael Noll
were found in bodies of water,
it seemed like we would find Josh.
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.
And 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 gonna trap him.
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.
It was just a very stressful and tense time, just wondering like,
"Is today gonna be the day?"
In the spring,
the Sheriff's Office started searching the waters right away,
and areas around waters,
eventually diving multiple times in multiple bodies of water.
And I remember Brian was searching the lakes.
And he's out there in a kayak.
And I just couldn't get over the thought that
what if his body floated up right next to that kayak?
I mean, what would you do as a father?
If their theory was right,
he should have been right there in the water.
We should've walked right there, and there he is. "Okay, end of story."
But that wasn't the case.
When the Sheriff's Office got done with their search efforts,
they concluded that Joshua was not in the water.
When Joshua's body didn't surface...
there were so many theories about what could've happened to him.
I think the most prevailing theory
was probably that somebody that knew Josh or was close to Josh
did something to Josh.
Could be a friend. Could be a roommate.
During our investigation, one of Josh's roommates told us
that he'd heard an argument between Nick and Josh earlier that night
before Josh went missing.
And the argument involved Katie.
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.
When Josh disappeared, we had only been broken up for a couple of months.
Right after Josh disappeared, there was a lot of speculation about
whether or not Nick and Katie were together,
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?
I think Nick and I did have a level of attraction toward each other.
He and I did consider dating.
You know, we were close.
We discussed, you know,
"Do we wanna try to have some sort of relationship other than just friends?"
But I wouldn't call it a romantic relationship with Katie.
I think we kissed one, maybe two times, and then we decided, "You know what?"
"This isn't a route we wanna go right now."
Katie and Nick both mentioned in their statements to us
that they talked about Nick's desire to date Katie.
Nick also drew our attention in the investigation
because his timeline of his whereabouts that evening
differed from Katie's original statement to us.
Nick told us he left Katie's apartment at about 2:30.
And keycard records on campus showed he keyed into his dorm room at 2:42 hours
on the morning of the 10th of November.
In a statement with Katie, she told us he left at 1:00 or 1:30.
So you've got over an hour of unaccounted time there
when the drive between both campuses is roughly seven to ten minutes,
especially at that time of night.
What he's telling us at that point did not match up with what Katie said.
Nick was asked to take a polygraph by our office.
Initially, he told us that he would consider,
and when that polygraph examination was scheduled, he chose not to take it.
I told them, "No, because that's not gonna do anybody any good."
"I don't want there to be some false positive
because they're simply not reliable."
There was a reason they're inadmissible in court.
I don't think it's necessarily abnormal or very strange
that someone in that capacity wouldn't take it.
The fact that he then declined it and canceled after the fact is...
is a detail that we must consider.
I don't believe I was 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 was, "They're not going in the right direction
because this is the one direction I can say with certainty is the wrong one."
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 gonna find Josh.
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.
Early on, I felt like there were some people at the party
who had seen him right before he disappeared,
that I just got this sense that,
"Are they telling me the whole truth, the full truth?" You know?
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 gonna tell anybody?
That always stuck in the back of my head.
They're kids with goals and aspirations.
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.
But if something happened at the party,
I don't think it's possible to keep ten or 12 kids silent on it.
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.
In the days that followed the investigation into where Josh went,
the investigators were still looking at additional physical evidence.
After that initial search,
our office didn't remove the computer or the hard drive or anything
from Joshua'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.
So we got access to the computer from Brian, and we were able to see
that somebody had used an Internet washer on Joshua's computer
several days after his disappearance.
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.
This Internet washer
was something that had not been done previously on this computer.
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.
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.
All the kids in that apartment could have had access to his computer
and anything else.
I was careful not to do anything on his computer,
and I didn't wanna disturb anything,
because it struck me as something that may be significant,
and I was not going to be messing around with it.
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.
We did everything together. We went to college together.
We started the next chapter of our life together,
and I guess I just assumed that it would be the same when we graduated.
It took me a long time to realize and accept
that Josh was actually a missing person.
I kept expecting him to be at class
or to show up at mock trial or just to... to just be back at campus.
It took me a long time to really accept that he might not come back.
He was my best friend, and up here on campus, he was my family.
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.
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.
It's been five years since a St. John's student was last seen.
No one knows exactly what happened to Josh Guimond.
Still, his family and friends hope for his return.
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.
When we looked at this case and didn't have any specific thing
directing us to what happened,
almost everything was considered.
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.
But in 2008,
additional technology started giving me
some new investigative things to look at,
some different possibilities.
I took that hard drive 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.
We learned the Internet washer
that we found on Joshua's computer in 2002
would only delete browser history, cookies, things of that nature.
It wouldn't wipe out a ton of data.
So we still had the vast majority of the contents of the computer.
We looked at his emails, which was pretty mundane, normal stuff
that you would expect to see on a college kid's computer.
Um...
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.
We identified three different profiles
that we believe were used by Josh.
One of which has part of his name and a zip code for the area he lived.
And then two other ones portray himself as a female.
One is "CoochieCoo2002" and the other one is "GwenGirlBigJugs."
We know with follow-up with the individuals later on
that he was chatting online with men and portraying himself as a female.
The examination of Joshua's computer
leads me to believe he might have had some secrets
he didn't wanna share with people.
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.
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.
And nobody that we interviewed really had any belief or information
or any indication that he was homosexual or transgender.
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.
I never saw any sign that he was gay.
So that would surprise me considerably.
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?
What would that cause someone to do if they found that out?
Certainly would be embarrassing.
Would it drive you to the point of saying, "I wanna find out who did that"?
"I wanna go meet that person. Do I wanna go do harm to that person?"
I don't know what it would cause people to think. That crossed my mind.
One of the theories is that Josh potentially met someone
on an instant messaging chat site,
ended up chatting with them ahead of time to line up maybe some sort of meet-up,
which could explain why he left in the middle of the night.
Maybe meeting with someone that he maybe didn't fully know,
and something happened to him.
So we looked at 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.
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.
And there was two incident reports 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.
There are several other areas on campus that are dark, not well lit,
little more remote on the outskirts of campus
that aren't used typically at night,
that people would frequent for meetings or hookups.
The places the car was seen were consistent
with that kind of hookup area.
Campus security stated in the incident reports
that when they drove up to the vehicle,
they noticed a college-aged male
get out of the front passenger seat and run off into the darkness.
Life Safety, in their first report,
detailed that the person that took off running was a college-aged male.
They weren't able to tell much more than that.
But in the second report,
Life Safety was able to speak with another college-aged male
who was in the front passenger seat of that vehicle.
Life Safety detailed in both reports
that the passenger in the front passenger seat
was not identified in either case.
The incident reports specifically state what the vehicle was,
and they described it as an orange Pontiac Sunfire.
They had obtained a license plate number, a vehicle description,
and in one instance, had stopped and spoken with this individual.
He told them he was dropping off a student on campus.
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.
And we had an interest in finding the vehicle
to see if there would be forensic evidence
indicating whether this individual had any contact with Joshua.
Unfortunately, it's not available to us because that vehicle has been crushed.
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.
If this person is frequenting the campus,
we wanna know if he had any encounters or interactions with Joshua.
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.
Investigators have reviewed some of the identified male photos
from Josh's Yahoo! user account,
and that individual in a Pontiac Sunfire was not found to match any of those.
I do think that Joshua's computer activity,
and specifically being on Yahoo! Personals,
might have contributed to his disappearance.
It seems probable he was on a dating site or trying to meet people,
and I think it's probably our most likely avenue or theory.
When we imaged the hard drive, we saw a lot of different images,
and some of them are directly linked to his Yahoo! Personals site.
We have quite a few photos we would like the public's help in identifying
so 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.
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.
It's important to me personally.
Disappointment in this case is...
The road ahead is a long and difficult one.
Fortunately, we've been very well equipped
to celebrate the conclusion
of the last chapter of the first volume of our lives.
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we would be 20 years later
and still have no idea what happened to him.
Josh'd be 39 now,
and I would assume he would...
be a lawyer if not a senator already.
He was gonna go to some elite law school, maybe Yale,
and then come back to his hometown of Maple Lake, open up his law practice.
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.
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."
And he said, "I'll do that for you, Mom."
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 'em to light.
He's our son.
We wanna know what happened to him. We love him.
It doesn't make any difference. He's...
He's my son.
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.
I feel like her spirit was trying to get in touch with someone.
I think she wants to be found.
How did the boat get out that far? What happened that day?
He clearly wasn't killed in that boat.
There's zero biological evidence in there.
This was not a suicide. This is a murder.
The entire place was cleaned. They were just gone.
There's nothing left. There is no playbook for kidnapping.