Still no answers, 20 years later

Twenty years ago on Nov. 9, 2002, SJU student Joshua Guimond went missing around midnight. Guimond was leaving a card party at the Metten Court apartments and was presumed to be returning to the Maur House apartments, where he lived.

Twenty years later, Guimond’s case is attracting new statewide and national attention with two new podcasts and a Netflix episode examining the unsolved case. Just in the last few weeks, the Stearns County Sheriff ’s Office has received many new tips, according to their website, in the case after the Sheriff ’s Office released new images of unidentified men on Guimond’s computer who they hope can provide information about his disappearance.

“Right now is the most I’ve heard anyone talk about it,” said CSB junior psychology major Abby Ashmore, who researched Guimond’s case last spring for her capstone project. “I think by just bringing awareness to it will hopefully stir up some more leads.”

The Record recently interviewed several alumni, students and investigators about the 20-year mystery.

“There were no signs of him,” said Jacob Jantzer, a current sociology professor at CSB+SJU who was a junior at St. John’s at the time of Guimond’s disappearance and helped with the searches. “The searches eventually stopped and life just kind of went back to normal.”

On Nov. 9, 2002, Nick Hydukovich, Guimond’s roommate, arrived at their apartment around 2:45 a.m, and Guimond was nowhere to be found. He was first reported missing around 4:20 p.m. the next day by his roommates. Guimond’s parents were not notified about his disappearance until approximately 9:45 p.m, nearly five hours after the first report was filed, according to the timeline posted on Josh Newville’s “Simply Vanished” podcast website. Guimond’s friends and Life Safety began searching campus at 10 p.m. on Nov. 10, and the Stearns County Sheriff ’s Office was notified of his disappearance around 11:30 p.m., by Guimond’s mother. A deputy arrived on campus at midnight, and Guimond’s parents arrived two hours later.

“The tone of campus at that time was very unsettling,” Jantzer said. “Part of it was the context. Jacob Wetterling was still unfound, the sexual abuse scandals in the Abbey were in the news around the same time and another college student had also gone missing in the Cities around that time as well. People were very suspicious.”

Originally, due to the route Guimond was presumed to be taking, police felt there was a strong chance that he had drunkenly stumbled off the path and fallen into the lake near the sidewalk they thought he would have been walking on. For months, they pursued this theory.

In addition to officials dragging East and West Gemini Lake, Stumpf Lake and Lake Sagatagan, the Guimond family requested that the Trident Foundation, one of the best underwater search and recovery teams in the country, also dive in the lakes. They too found nothing. Jantzer participated in the searches for Guimond as a student volunteer, along with his partner Amanda Janzter, who is a current professor of psychology at CSB+SJU as well.

“They had us get into big groups and line up shoulder to shoulder, and then walk through a whole field or a chunk of the woods. I remember doing that once or twice, along with Amanda, and certainly all my friends did, too,” Jantzer said. “While we were out there, we’d be thinking about the possibility of someone finding him, and also just waiting to hear anything about him from campus. But as time dragged on, we never heard anything.”

Twenty years later, Guimond has yet to be found, and the case remains open.

**Who was Josh?**

Born in Redwood Falls and raised in Maple Lake, Guimond grew up as the only child of Brian Guimond and Lisa Cheney. Guimond had been dating his high school sweetheart, Katie Benson, throughout college up until a few months before he disappeared. However, the two remained close friends after they broke up, according to Benson in her interview with “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Inspired by his godmother, a former Minnesota State Representative, and his grandfather, the District Five Redwood County Commissioner, Josh wanted to pursue a career in law and politics and was already active within his high school and community. He acted as the student body vice president and often participated in school board meetings to advocate for his peers, according to his political autobiography published on the “Simply Vanished” website. As a junior political science major at SJU, Guimond was also involved with mock trial and the Pre-Law Society clubs on campus.

Those who knew Guimond described him as motivated, kind, trustworthy, confident and studious. His high school class even voted him as “Most Likely to Succeed,” according to his friends and family interviewed in the “Unsolved Mysteries” episode. Initial reactions to the disappearance

SJU Life Safety issued a campus-wide statement via email on the morning of Monday, Nov. 11, informing students and the campus community that Guimond had been missing since Saturday night. They requested that anyone with information come forward.

Five years later, on Nov. 20, 2007, Julie Seifert, a senior psychology major at the time, put together a missing person’s analysis that was published in the St. Cloud Times. In her analysis, Seifert considered the likelihood of each of the possible causes of Guimond’s disappearance, including voluntary disappearance, mental breakdown, accident, suicide, homicide or sex crime. Seifert rules out a voluntary disappearance because of the extensive planning and sophistication that would have allowed Guimond to carry this out successfully.

Likewise, there was no evidence of said planning on his computer or elsewhere in his personal belongings. Guimond also left behind his glasses and car keys—important personal items that one would think necessary to take with them if they had planned on leaving for an extended period of time. Likewise, Seifert says that suicide is also unlikely. Usually, suicide victims do not go to extreme measures to prevent or delay the discovery of their remains. Because St. John’s and surrounding areas had been searched thoroughly and a body hasn’t been found, it is highly unlikely suicide is a possibility, she said.

There is also insufficient evidence for a mental breakdown, according to Seifert, as Guimond did not exhibit any signs of psychological instability or disturbance. While not entirely impossible, it is more likely that he would have been found if he was in a cognitively compromised state. The next possibility Seifert talks about is an accident, such as stumbling into the lake. While this is entirely possible and was the leading theory for years, this became increasingly less likely as time went on and no remains were ever found. This is especially true after the extensive searches done on the St. John’s campus, lakes and surrounding areas, she said.

The final two possibilities Seifert discusses are homicide and sex crime. In a standard homicide case, Seifert notes that personal cases are often the reason for foul play. If Guimond had an enemy, someone that wanted him gone or any sort of interpersonal conflicts, this could be a very real possibility if the offender managed to carry out the crime while going undetected. While foul play could have played a role in Guimond’s disappearance, Seifert notes it is also possible an offender could have had a sexual motive. If he was meeting in secret with someone whom he thought he could trust in the middle of the night, this could also be a very real possibility, she said, especially if Guimond had plans that no one knew about.

After taking this into account along with the limited information that existed about the case, and while thoroughly searching the St. John’s campus and surrounding areas, investigators hit a wall. For many years, investigators pursued the accident theory due to the lack of information and evidence for any other possibility. It wasn’t until much later that investigators publicly acknowledged that foul play was a possibility.

[Initially], “there wasn’t any reason to believe anything had gone wrong. We thought Josh had maybe slept somewhere else on campus that night… based on the evidence we had, we couldn’t say for certain that he was missing,” Stearns County Lietenant Victor Weiss said.

Weiss came onto the Guimond case in about 2008. He said that the case has been actively worked on for the entirety it has been open and that it has remained a top priority for the Stearns County Sheriff ’s Office. The Guimond case came 13 years after Jacob Wetterling disappeared. The St. Joseph 11-year-old was kidnapped and abducted at gunpoint in 1989. The Wetterling case remained unsolved for 27 years until an Annandale man confessed to killing him in 2016.

“If I could change anything about how the [Guimond] case was worked initially, it would be to treat it as if a crime had been committed early on,” Weiss said. “I think they considered foul play right away, but I think that they let other theories prevail that seemed, at the time, more plausible.”

Weiss said that because his remains have yet to be found, no one can say with certainty what happened to Guimond, which makes it difficult to focus on just one theory.

“It was taken very seriously right away. We brought in other agencies like the FBI, the BCA and the National Guard very early,” Weiss said.

Recently, however, the Stearns County Sheriff ’s Office released images of people that had allegedly been found on Guimond’s computer to the public on Friday, Oct. 21. They released these in hopes of identifying the individuals pictured.

“We’ve had those images for a while. We tried various methods on our own to identify the people in the images. We don’t know why they’re on Josh’s computer; we’re just trying to identify these people so we can go talk to them and find out if they have any information related to the case,” Weiss said.

Investigators are usually hesitant to share information about the case with the public to avoid jeopardizing the integrity of the investigation, according to Lt. Weiss.

**Other cases to consider**

There were a number of other people around Guimond’s age that went missing around the same time, including Chris Jenkins and Michael Knoll.

Twenty-one-year-old Chris Jenkins disappeared in the early hours of Nov. 1, 2002, in Minneapolis. He was later found dead in February 2003. His body was recovered in the Mississippi River and his cause of death was presumed to be drowning, but no one knows why he entered the river, according to ABC News.

Michael Knoll was a 22-year-old college student who disappeared on Nov. 6, 2002, after celebrating his birthday at a bar in Eau Claire, Wis. His body was found the next spring in a nearby lake, although no one knows for sure why he entered the lake, according to ABC News.

Another theory that was considered was the possibility that a serial killer was involved. The idea of the Smiley Face Killers’ involvement was brought to light by local news stations KSTP-5 and KMSP-9. The Fox 9 investigators included a list of 22 young men who had disappeared on the I-94 route. The alleged serial killer group was speculated to be involved in dozens of killings throughout the Midwest from the late 1990s to the 2010s.

However, there is little evidence to support this theory. The common tie between the victims of the alleged crime group involved bodies in nearby bodies of water, and Guimond was never found in the water or swampy areas surrounding SJU. The other common factor linking some of these cases together was a smiley face at the scene where about a dozen of these men supposedly went missing, but there was no smiley face found in Guimond’s case.

According to the “Unsolved Mysteries” episode “What Happened to Josh?,” a new Netflix episode just released last month, the Stearns County Sheriff quickly ruled out a serial killer or a serial killer group as potential perpetrators. However some are still convinced his disappearance has something to do with the group.

Some suggested that the cases could be connected. Aubrey Immelman, a psychology professor at CSB+SJU, believed that both Guimond and Wetterling’s abductions could have been connected via sex crimes in the Stearns County area. Both were young, white and males, who had disappeared within about 10 miles of each other, albeit 13 years apart.

When Wetterling’s kidnapper and murderer was later apprehended in 2016, law enforcement ruled out the connection and concluded that Jacob Wetterling’s kidnapping was isolated from Guimond’s disappearance. Because a voluntary disappearance and suicide are unlikely to be the cause of Josh’s disappearance, investigators have been forced to follow new leads, especially those involving foul play.

It is possible that someone close to Guimond was out to get him. It is also equally likely that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, based on the analysis done by Seiffert. Likewise, St. John’s is no stranger to perpetrators of sexual abuse. Since the early 1980s, some monastic members of the St. John’s Abbey have been accused of sexual abuse.

At the time of Guimond’s disappearance, the Abbey was in the thick of multiple civil lawsuits involving members of the monastery, while more information regarding the sexual abuse within the monastery walls was coming to light.

**Student reactions**

Ashmore completed her capstone project on the Guimond case last spring for Immelman’s Personality Assessment and Criminal Psychology class.

“Throughout the entire process [of the project], the most surprising thing was that nobody really knew about it, and the people that do, don’t talk about it,” Ashmore said. “Not only is this person one of our own, but it’s concerning no one talks about it. For a campus that focuses so much on community, I wondered why are we weren’t talking about this more.”

In her project, Ashmore created a podcast that can be found on Immelman.net, detailing the theories and psychological context behind Guimond’s disappearance with the information that was available at that time.

“This is my third yearon campus, and I didn’t know about [the Guimond case] until last year when Aubrey brought it up in class,” Ashmore said. “The research process was really difficult because of the lack of information, but that’s also what made it all the more interesting and made me more passionate about it.”

Before the release of Josh Newville’s podcast series “Simply Vanished,” which extensively investigates and discusses Guimond’s case, along with the episode “What Happened to Josh?” on Netflix’s “Unsolved Mysteries,” Guimond’s name was rarely mentioned on campus, other than a small plaque that hangs in a hallway of Sexton.

“I’m just really happy [the case] is getting more attention now. I did not think there was going to be this much buzz around the case. It’s becoming mainstream. If it takes a drama TV show for people to start talking about it and make it relevant, then so be it,” Ashmore said.

As a result of the increased publicity on the case, current students are beginning to learn about the case and talk about it.

“Because there was so little communication of the information that was found, there was a lot of room left for speculation,” Ashmore said.

However, alumni are more familiar with the Guimond case. On May 9, 2004, SJU senior psychology major Colt Blunt wrote an opinion in the St. Cloud Times about Guimond, with help from then-CSB seniors Megan Bjerke, Benson and fellows Katrina Samlaska, Kate Dantoff and Sara Enright.

“Joshua Guimond would have been graduating today if it hadn’t been for his disappearance… Bodies don’t disappear unless someone makes them,” Blunt said. “It is difficult to accept the idea that a healthy young man may have been taken from us. Society has a much easier time buying the abduction of a female. However, in the past two decades, we have seen the disappearance of two healthy young males within a five mile radius: Jacob Wetterling and Josh Guimond.”

Additionally, concerns about safety at St. John’s had been raised before Guimond disappeared. In a letter to the editor submitted to The Record on April 24, 2002, SJU junior Kevin Devoy called on SJU to install more security cameras on campus after a vandalism incident in Flynntown.

“My former high school has cameras, but our college has yet to take similar precautions to ensure student safety. So, I say again, what is it going to take before CSB+SJU really does something? The school should look at these incidents and realize it is only a matter of time before something worse happens that poses real safety issues,” Devoy said.

**Recent media coverage**

Guimond’s case has been gaining a lot of traction in the media lately with the release of the “Simply Vanished” podcast, and the Netflix Original “Unsolved Mysteries” episode, “What Happened to Josh?” On Oct. 25, Netflix released an “Unsolved Mysteries” episode titled “What Happened to Josh?.” The episode explores the case as a whole, as well as different theories the police have had over the years regarding the disappearance.

Both Guimond’s parents were interviewed, as well as Weiss, Hydukovich and Benson. Andrew Struffert, a Stearns County investigator, also provided commentary and filled in some of the details in Guimond’s case. The episode dives into the search for Guimond in the surrounding campus lakes, as well as the bloodhounds that were brought in to track Guimond’s scent.

Some of the initial theories in the case are explained in depth, while interviews from both Hydukovich and Benson shed more light into who Guimond was as a person, a friend and a student. Overall, the episode aims to give viewers general knowledge behind the case and search for Guimond while reminding the community how important he was. It ended with an all-too-familiar plea to send in any information the general public may know regarding Guimond.

On June 26, the first episode of a new podcast, “Simply Vanished,” was released to the public. Led by attorney Josh Newville, the podcast aimed to provide a deep dive and investigative commentary into Guimond’s disappearance.

“This case resonated with me for a lot of reasons, but the biggest was that Josh reminded me so much of myself. I was only a year and a half younger than him, we were both extremely interested in politics and the law and were similar in terms of personality as well,” Newville said in an interview with The Record.

In the podcast, Newville explores different leads and theories presented throughout the almost 20 years Josh has been missing. He interviewed Josh’s parents, relatives, close friends and other anonymous sources to lay out all the information leading up to and after the disappearance.

“I was blown away with how little coverage this case had in 20 years. I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t new information being uncovered,” Newville said.

Newville said he wanted to start the podcast in an effort to bring Josh’s case more attention and possibly provide the investigative team with more information from the anonymous tip line they established. In his own investigation, Newville learned about multiple instances of men from outside of campus attempting to lure Johnnies into their cars late at night, both in Collegeville and St. Joseph.

“Officials at St. John’s knew about at least one of those incidents at the time, but you won’t find a single piece of information that was floated publicly to suggest that was a possibility, nor to advise students and the public about this,” Newville said.

Newville thinks that the St. John’s administration has been too quiet about this case and other instances on campus. He feels that the university should have been more forthcoming about such incidents to help students stay alert and hopefully prevent further issues from arising.

“I fully understand that Stearns County has the lead on this case, but Josh Guimond was their student. The fact that they didn’t take a more active leadership role in trying to not only bring attention to his case, but to help figure out what happened to him, I think is very pathetic,” Newville said.

The only public place on campus that St. John’s has made any mention of Guimond, as of now, is in the hallway of Sexton, where a small plaque hangs with a picture of Guimond next to a poem written by his former roommate, Hydukovich, along with the number for the Stearns County Sheriff ’s Office. Newville said he feels that St. John’s can do more.

“Even if it’s just holding small events to raise awareness to the fact that Josh is still missing… if you look back over the last 20 years, St. John’s has not done that,” Newville said.

When asked to respond to Newville’s statements, SJU spokesperson Michael Hemmesch said the school has worked with authorities and “continues to participate in any requests from Stearns County.”

Ultimately, Newville wants to help the Guimond family find the closure and justice they deserve and honor Josh’s legacy both in his personal and budding professional life. He hopes to see more openness from St. John’s and recognition of the Guimond case moving forward.

“Sadly, there are no clearer answers today than there were 20 years ago,” Hemmesch said in a statement. “We will continue to hold Josh and his loved ones in our prayers and do all we can to bring answers and peace to his family.”

SJU Faith hosted a candlelit vigil and prayer for Guimond on Wednesday for the 20th anniversary of his disappearance.

If you have any information about Guimond’s disappearance, please contact the Stearns County Sheriff ’s office at 320-259-3700 or submit an online tip through the Stearns County website. Those who choose to submit tips have the option to remain anonymous.