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The Twisted Unsolved Tale of the Johnny Gosch Abduction, Part 4: What Really Happened to Johnny?
Catch up on the series:
The Omaha Federal Credit Union Scandal: The Fall of a Rising Political Figure and His Potential Links to Pedophilia
The Johnny Gosch case was starting to go cold in September 1990. There were no new leads, no new sightings, and the Gosches were fighting to keep Johnny’s disappearance fresh in people’s minds.
But that was the month that the case took a turn that, to the Gosches, anyway, broke the case wide open.
Johnny’s parents tied their boy’s disappearance to a pedophile sex ring conspiracy almost immediately after it happened, but that theory exploded like napalm when a lawyer and former state senator named John DeCamp came forward with new information.
Some Background: The Franklin Credit Union Scandal
DeCamp was a lawyer for a man named Paul Bonacci, an alleged victim of a supposed child sex ring that was linked to a scandal involving the Franklin Federal Credit Union in Omaha.
In 1988, the credit union crumbled after it came to light that its director, Lawrence E. King, Jr., a rising star in the Republican party at the time, had embezzled nearly $40 million from the credit union.
But many claimed there was much more to the scandal than run-of-the-mill corruption and embezzlement. Politicians will be politicians, but this was far more nefarious. There were rumors that some of the most prominent figures in Omaha had attended depraved parties in which teenage prostitutes were offered to attendees.
A handful of young people accused King of arranging for them to be auctioned off for sex, flying them to the coast for the aforementioned parties, and giving them drugs and alcohol to make them more compliant.
