The University Student Who Chatted With Men Posing As A Woman Before Mysteriously Disappearing - Joshua Guimond

Joshua Guimond was born on June 18, 1982.

The only child of Brian and Lisa is known to have spent his childhood and teen in Maple Lake, Minnesota where he enjoyed ice fishing and other outdoor activities.

Over time his parents separated but this was not a problem for him since they were always very united for the sake of their son.

His friends describe him as an athletic, outgoing boy with a great sense of humor. He was also very studious reason why he was chosen by his classmates as the one who was most likely to succeed in life.

Joshua was always interested in the laws so he joined the mock trials club in the hope of studying law one day and in the future to become a state representative in Congress. His relatives even jokingly told him that he would be president of the United States.

In 1998 during high school he started dating Katie Benson, his childhood friend. When the two graduated in 2000, Joshua enrolled in Saint John Catholic University for boys who was in Collegeville, Minnesota and Katie in Saint Benedict but in her case only girls. The distance between the two was 5km.

The couple continued to date but in their third year they broke up and a nice friendship remained between them.

So far everything is normal but what no one knew was that Joshua hid many secrets and maybe these were the ones that led him to mysteriously disappear at just 20 years old.

The disappearance:

On November 9, 2002, Katie invited Joshua and Nick (his roommate) to her apartment to hang out with her and her friends.

Nick accepted but Joshua decided to go to a party that his friend Nate was celebrating in the dormitories of Metten Court. It is known that he arrived there around 11.30 p.m. and that he was drinking beer and playing poker with about 12 people he almost didn’t know.

Everyone saw him in a good mood and playing jokes but suddenly at about 12 p.m. Joshua got up and left. The rest at first thought that he had gone to the bathroom, however, when they saw that he was not returning, they came to the conclusion that he had simply left without saying goodbye. Although this seemed strange to them, they didn’t worry much since his bedroom was nearby and even though he had drunk a little, he didn’t seem intoxicated.

The next morning, Joshua’s friends were surprised when he did not show up for the practice of the debate team. In addition, Nick said that he had not gone to sleep all night... For all this, they contacted the Stearns County Sheriff’s Department to report his disappearance. The university spoke with the boy’s mother to inform her of the situation and to report on her own.

Immediately the Sheriff’s Office began investigating Joshua’s disappearance. The first thing they did was check their bedroom and there they noticed that there was nothing out of the ordinary. The boy had left his coat, the keys, the wallet, his glasses, a case of contact lenses and his car was parked where he always was. On the other hand, his computer was turned on and on the desk there was a job about Alexander Hamilton that he was preparing for one of his classes. In short, it gave the feeling that Joshua had not planned to go anywhere for a long time.

The next step was to look for Joshua around the campus and the wooded areas. Here, in addition to the Sheriff’s Office, friends and family, the National Guard and the FBI also participated. Several divers drained the 3 lakes that surrounded the university area but without success.

During the operation they took a dog that tracked Joshua’s smell near the bridge that was between the room where he played poker and his own bedroom. It is known that this bridge was on the route that the young man should have done to return to his room.

The first important clue came from a couple. As they informed the agents on the night of the disappearance between 12.15 and 12.30 they saw a boy in a sweatshirt and hood crossing the bridge, but seconds later when they looked back he was no longer there and they didn’t see anyone else either.

Due to its physical characteristics, the couple was sure that it was Joshua.

Almost at the same time, Nick, Joshua’s friend and roommate, was interviewed by the police. The young man said that on November 9 he had breakfast with the boy and that he last saw him at 6.30 p.m before going to Katie’s house.

To this he added that when he returned to his room Joshua was not there and thought he would continue at the party.

But the police ran into the testimony of another boy who shared an apartment with Joshua and Nick. According to him on the night of the disappearance he listened to the two friends arguing about Katie because Nick wanted to go out with her and Joshua disagreed. The problem is that this boy couldn’t tell what time the discussion took place.

As if that were not enough, there were discrepancies between Nick and Katie’s versions. Nick said that he left the girl’s house at 2:30 a.m, and his access card to the bedrooms showed that he entered at 2.42 a.m.

However, Katie stated that Nick left her house at 1 or 1:30 a.m. Since the trip back to his bedroom would only take him 10 minutes, there was more than an hour in which if we trust Katie’s schedules, it was not known what the boy did.

Many pointed to Nick and more when he didn’t want to undergo the polygraph test. He argued that that test was not reliable and that it was going to confuse the investigation. For their part, the police never considered him suspicious and Katie always maintained that he was not involved in Joshua’s disappearance.

The investigation continues:

At that time in a strange coincidence, two other university students disappeared. This came to raise the theory of a serial killer but when months later they recovered the bodies they assumed that they had nothing to do with Joshua’s case.

On March 5, 2003, and seeing that the investigation was not progressing, the family took a dog to track the campus area. Interestingly, the dog followed Joshua’s smell from Metten Court to Lake Stumpf, passing through his apartment and ending at the back of St. John Abbey. After an exhaustive search, they didn’t find any clues about the boy.

Of this Abbey that was in the campus area it is important to mention that it began to be in the spotlight long before Joshua’s disappearance since it had a long history of abuse of minors by the monks who lived in it and that he was covered up. Joshua was outraged by this story, so much so that he considered doing some work on it.

The weeks passed without news of the boy. The office of the sheriff of Stearns County focused on a theory: for them on the night of the disappearance Joshua came out of the party and as something was drunk he tripped and fell into one of the lakes on campus. But since in the new aquatic searches they did not find any clues, they had no choice but to go in another direction and it must be said that this opened up a whole range of possibilities.

The researchers decided to focus on Joshua’s computer. A computer that, by the way, at no time was taken but stayed in the boy’s room without any control.

During the review of the device, the agents discovered that someone had manipulated it and deleted images from the hard drive. Knowing that this could be a key piece in the investigation in 2008, the computer was delivered to the Criminal Office for a more in-depth analysis. Thanks to this, they discovered several secrets of Joshua that perhaps had to do with his disappearance.

It seems that Joshua had used two Yahoo personals accounts to chat with men while pretending to be a woman looking for casual encounters. They also found adult material of men with men and with women.

Investigating more deeply, the agents discovered two facts that could be relevant to the case. Before the disappearance, an orange pontiac was seen roaming the campus area. On one occasion an agent approached this vehicle at the moment in which a college-age boy ran out of the passenger seat into the darkness.

The young man was never identified but the driver was and interrogated. According to him, he was only leaving one student. His car could not be checked because by then he had already gotten rid of it.

In October 2022, that is, 20 years after Joshua’s disappearance, there was an update on the case.

Thanks to the advances, the images that someone had deleted from the boy’s computer could be recovered. As you can see in the image they were all snapshots of young men that the police decided to publish in the hope that one of them will appear before them to give information. To date, none have done so and they have not been able to be identified either.

For some, these are the men Joshua was talking to from his personal Yahoo account.

Lieutenant Zach Sorensen said this about the pics:

“There are people in these photos who have nothing to do with this research, but what we don’t know is if there are people who have anything to do with this research. We have received more clues in the last three days than in the last three years.”

It’s been 20 years since Joshua Guimnond’s disappearance. Some believe that on the night of November 9 he suffered an accident, while others continue to maintain that in some way was involved on a foul play. Brian, his father, believes that the case will never be solved .

Theories:

As always in this type of case, I’m going to talk about the different theories that exist.

The first one I have already mentioned before and is that Joshua left the party and accidentally fell on one of the lakes on campus.

The problem is that the lakes and swampy areas were not only drained but were also checked with a sonar and they found no trace of the boy. Not to mention that at some point his body should have come to the surface.

The second theory arose from Joshua’s father and has to do with the monks of the abbey who years ago were involved in an abuse scandal. Let’s remember that one of the dogs also followed the boy’s trail there. Even so, they didn’t find any clue that led them to continue in this direction.

The third theory suggests that Nick, Joshua’s friend and roommate, was involved in his disappearance. To begin with, someone heard them argue about Katie and on the night of the events their times did not coincide. To this it must be added that he refused to undergo the polygraph test. For the authorities, this theory was not sustained, which is why they never had Nick as a suspect or person of interest.

In this type of case, there is always the possibility that the person has left voluntarily, which does not fit with Joshua. To begin with, he left important things like his glasses and his wallet. Not to mention that according to his friends he was looking forward to going the next day to the mock trial he had scheduled.

And finally there is the theory that almost everyone is inclined to and that has to do with their personal Yahoo account.

Maybe that night he went to meet one of the men he met through this account which would explain that he left the party suddenly. According to reports, Joshua presented himself to them as a woman, something that could have put him in trouble and at some point led him to death.

Recently, the sheriff of the county declared the following about the case:

“We are open to all kinds of possibilities. In general, a university student simply does not disappear from campus.”

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