Johnny Gosch

Johnny Gosch was a twelve-year-old paperboy in West Des Moines, Iowa, who vanished on his early Sunday round between six and seven in the morning on 5 September 1982. He was never found. His face became one of the first ever printed on a milk carton, and his disappearance helped awaken a whole nation to the reality of missing children. This is a life cut off at the threshold, and it deserves to be spoken of gently.

His Sun was in Scorpio, the sign of survival and of the phoenix, placed in the seventh house of the other, the bond between one person and another. His Moon lay in Capricorn in the ninth house, the placement of the child who grows up quickly and of a strong maternal thread; his mother, Noreen, spent the rest of her life searching, refusing to let his name fade. An Aries Ascendant gave the outward mask of the young pioneer, the boy first out the door at dawn. A chart can only ever describe a temperament, never a fate imposed by others, and nothing here explains or excuses the wrong done to him. What endures is a mother's love and a boy remembered.