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13-year-old Eugene Martin worked as a paperboy on the south side of Des Moines, Iowa when he suddenly disappeared on the morning of Sunday, August 12, 1984. He had been delivering papers for The Des Moines Register on Southwest 12th Street & Highview Drive when he seemingly vanished. It’s assumed that Eugene was abducted but he nor his remains have never been found & his case has sadly gone cold.
Eugene Martin was born on August 17, 1970 in Des Moines, Iowa to parents Donald & Janice Martin. Shortly after Eugene’s birth, his parents divorced. He had two brothers & four step-siblings & lived with his dad & his stepmother, Sue Martin.
Eugene was known to love video games, Saturday morning cartoons, fishing, football & skating. He was described as a quiet & shy, but very polite boy & had only started working as a paperboy a few months before his disappearance with the goal of making spending money & had been really excited about the fair that was coming to town
On Sunday, August 12, 1984, Eugene left his house at about 5 am & the last time he was seen was between 5:30 & 6 am. His typical routine was to go out on his route with the help of his older step brother, but that morning, he headed out alone since his step brother was at a sleepover. At 5:15 am he went to his paper pick-up spot at Southwest 14th & Highview Street & grabbed his bag of papers from the driver. Many witnesses saw Euguene folding his papers & talking to a man in what they viewed as a normal, friendly conversation. This man has never been identified & was described as being clean-cut & in his thirties.
The Martin family wasn’t alerted to the fact that their son was missing until 7:15 am when they got a phone call informing them that a customer on Eugene’s route hadn’t received their morning paper. When the route manager went to check out the situation, he found Eugene’s bag on the corner with ten papers still folded inside, undelivered. Eugene was nowhere in sight so the manager went on to deliver the remaining papers himself. He then contacted the Martin family to make them aware of the situation.
When Don Martin, Eugene’s father, heard that his son hadn’t completed his delivery route, he was immediately concerned & went out looking for him. When he was unable to find him, he contacted the local police at 8:40 am to report him missing.
Eugene’s disappearance was eerily similar to another case in that very area when 12-year-old Johnny Gosch set out on his paper route two years earlier on September 5, 1982, in West Des Moines when he disappeared between 6-7 am. He headed out that morning with his red wagon & his dog, Gretchen, shortly after 5:45 am to deliver the Sunday edition of The Des Moines Register, the very paper that Eugene had been out delivering. He arrived at the street corner where a delivery man dropped off bundles of paper & he & another boy began to sort & fold them. The boys gave directions to a motorist & went on their respective routes to make their deliveries. Minutes later, the boy saw Johnny a block away, talking to a man, but he couldn’t tell if it was the man they had previously spoken with in the dimness of pre-dawn.
Just as in Eugen’s case, it was discovered that Johnny was missing when his customers complained that they hadn’t received their Sunday paper. His father quickly went out in search of his son & came across Johnny’s wagon, still full of papers, abandoned on the corner of his route. The family dog, Gretchen, soon returned home, but there was no sign of Johnny & he was reported missing at 8:30 am by his mom, Noreen. Johnny’s case is cold, but remains open.
Weeks after Eugene’s disappearance, a local grocery store began printing reward information with both Eugene & Johnny’s missing pictures on their paper bags. Soon after, a Des Moines milk company, Anderson Erikson Dairy, began printing pictures & short bios on the sides of their half-gallon milk cartons after an employee & friend of the Martin family suggested it. The campaign then spread to dairy companies in Illinois & California & in January 1985, the National Child Safety Council started their nationwide “Missing Children Milk Carton Program.” An updated picture of a missing child is the single most helpful element of finding a missing child as is publicly sharing the image. The milk program was ultimately phased out by the late 1980s when plastic jugs replaced cartons. Because of the slow distribution, the program proved only marginally successful in helping to locate missing children.
A third young boy in the area of Des Moines, 13-year-old Marc Allen, disappeared in Des Moines on March 29, 1986 when he left his home to walk to a friend’s house two years after Eugene’s disappearance. This equated to three boys in the same city between the ages of 12 & 13 over the course of four years. It was believed that these three boys were likely connected & possibly kidnapped by the same person or people, although this connection has never been found.
Eugene’s disappearance was immediately investigated & local searches began with volunteers from the community coming together to help. The FBI was called early on in hopes of bringing the teenage boy home safely. Police first questioned if maybe Eugene had left home after fighting with his family, but this was quickly ruled out & his disappearance was related to foul play.
Eugene was 5’0”, 110# with a scar on his right knee & he wore a cast on his right arm after he had broken his wrist. At the time of his disappearance, he was wearing a gray & white striped midriff t-shirt with red sleeves, jeans & blue sneakers. He had brown hair & brown eyes.
The Des Moines Register initially announced a $5,000 reward for any information that could lead to finding Eugene & it was later increased to $25,000.
Police questioned everyone on Eugene’s paper route to learn as much as they possibly could about his disappearance. They spoke with his supervisor & other paper boys as well. With this, police learned that a green car had been seen idling near 14th Street at about 5 am that morning. The driver was a white male with short, dark hair & appeared to be in his twenties or thirties. This was possibly the same driver who had been following young girls in the area. This man was tracked down & questioned; he said he was in the area as he had dropped his wife off at work. This alibi proved to be true & he was ruled out as a suspect.
As mentioned earlier, Eugene was also seen speaking with a clean-cut man in his thirties between 5 & 5:45 am at Southwest 12th Street & Highview Drive. The witness was unable to hear the conversation but described it as friendly. Other witnesses also corroborated this sighting.
A few days after Eugene vanished, the FBI announced that they believe this was a kidnapping case & indicated that they were looking for a man who they believe was connected to his disappearance. This man was described on a nationwide bulletin as being a loner, about 30 or 40-years-old, 5’9”, medium build with his hair shaved. This was the man that witnesses had seen speaking with Eugene early that morning.
Noreen Gosch, Johnny Gosch’s mother, had apparently been told by a private investigator that she’d hired that a kidnapping would take place during the second weekend in 1984 & would involve a paperboy from the southside of Des Moines. This PI was Sam Soda & he’d told Noreen this information a few months before Eugene disappeared, however, this was something that Soda denied & there was nothing to prove that he said this.
In 1984 Sam Soda, who was a Vietnam vet, exposed a pedophile named Frank Sykora, who worked at The Des Moines Register. The man was later fired from his job & pleaded guilty to sexual abuse charges. However, Sykora was not able to be linked to either Johnny nor Eugene’s disappearances.
Sam Soda was said to continually insert himself into the investigations of the missing boys & even passed himself off as law enforcement. He had been a person of interest for years as being potentially involved in Johnny’s disappearance. People also allege that he was involved in a human trafficking sex-ring based out of Des Moines though he was never charged with anything.
When the area around Euguene’s home & the location of his paper route were searched, no obvious traces of him were found. The search was expanded & included 25 police officers, 16 FBI agents in addition to volunteers that included neighbors, family & friends. Warehouses, parks, riverfronts & ditches were searched & missing persons posters were hung up around the area.
It became very clear to investigators that Eugene was no longer in the area & once again, expanded their search & began to focus on the rural areas that surrounded Des Moines. This included air searches & used a great deal of resources to find him, but these searches came up with no findings of Eugene.
Many theories about Eugene’s disappearance emerged & the fact that there were so many similarities to his case & Johnny Gosch’s case which only intensified the theories. It was speculated that the abductions had something to do with a pedophile ring within the city where children of a certain age would be abducted & be sold at ‘auctions’ to foreign buyers. Some speculated that Johnny was trapped in this ring for some time & on his release, he chose not to come home out of fear. Many suspected that Eugene faced this same fate.
Sadly, Eugene was kidnapped only five days before his fourteenth birthday & the Martins had planned a big party to celebrate the occasion. He was set to receive a brand new bike to use on his paper route, but sadly the party was canceled after he disappeared. Instead of celebrating his special day, the Martins sat by the phone, hoping & praying to hear good news that Eugene had been found.
The FBI instructed the family to hold vigil near the phone & they held out hope that they could have a belated celebration for Eugene’s birthday when he came home. Donald Martin vowed that if his son returned safely, his career as a paperboy would be over. Don had been working as a maintenance man at an apartment complex & his boss told them that he could stay home as long as he needed to await his son’s return.
A few days after Eugene vanished, someone called in a potential sighting & indicated that they’d seen a boy fitting Eugene’s description near Ankeny. When the police traveled to Ankeny Industrial Park, they were armed with spotlights & a helicopter & spent two hours searching the area. However, at dawn, the search was halted.
The Martin family believed in their hearts that Eugene was still in Des Moines because police immediately started their investigation upon his disappearance. This is unlike Johnny Gosch’s case where many law enforcement agencies still observed a 24-72 hour mandatory waiting period before starting an investigation. The Gosches went on to author & lobby for “The Johnny Gosch Bill” in Iowa which mandated immediate police response when a child was reported missing. Because of this bill which was signed into Iowa law on July 1, 1984, 43 days before Eugene’s disappearance, in Eugene’s case, police had quickly jumped into action.
Learning from Johnny’s case, the Des Moines PD sent out APBs, set up roadblocks & canvassed the neighborhood, all within an hour of his disappearance. The FBI were involved by that afternoon.
The Martin’s did not believe that Eugene would have walked off voluntarily with a stranger & suspected that someone may have stopped him & asked him for directions while he was delivering papers.
As the search continued, a total of $64,000 had been collected as reward money in hopes that it would inspire someone to come forward with information.
In February of 1986, nearly two years after Eugene’s disappearance, 43-year-old Wilbur Millhouse was arrested & received 6 charges of third-degree sexual abuse against him after two 15-year-old boys came forward to police & indicated he had sexually abused them. As the investigation began, police were able to trace a sexually explicit phone call between Millhouse & a 14-year-old boy. When his house was searched, police found a total of 2,200 names & phone numbers of area teenage boys. He had handwritten additional notes about the boys in the margins of his list. Some of them included yearbook photos as well as baseball rosters.
Millhouse had worked at The Des Moines Register until 1983 when he suffered a heart attack & decided to retire & stay home. His job as a circulation manager included recruiting paperboys for their routes. He admitted to police that the list of boys he’d compiled occurred during his time working for the paper. He often used fake names during his interactions with these boys in order to attempt to engage them in sexual conversation.
There was no way of knowing how many boys from his list that Millhouse actually interacted with, but police made parents aware of the situation so they could sit down & talk with their children. With this contact, additional boys came forward & indicated that they had been confronted by Millhouse on various occasions.
A former paperboy from The Des Moines Register came forward & said that in 1982 he was followed around by a man in a Ford Fairmont who was asking for directions. The boy, who is now an adult, posts online with the username Yellow Bag. His circulation manager was Wilbur Millhouse & at one point, he witnessed Millhouse talking to a man that he recognized as the person driving the Ford Fairmont. It was this boy’s belief that the driver was likely a pedophile who used the ruse in order to engage with young boys on their paper routes.
The man in the Fairmont was described as about 25-years-old with black hair, black eyes & a well-trimmed mustache. He wore a bright blue & orange paramedic-type jacket & spoke with a slight accent, maybe someone from the east coast. This man approached him in February or March of 1982 & seemed very aggressive & agitated. After he asked the boy for directions, he invited him to sit in his car since it was snowing heavily. The man seemed nervous & frequently checked his rearview mirror as he spoke with the boy.
He also said that Millhouse had tried to proposition him on multiple occasions & in one conversation, Millhouse indicated that he had known Johnny Gosch. During this conversation, he indicated that Millhouse said, “Nothing would have happened to Johnny if he would have just kept his mouth shut.” Millhouse reportedly died in 2015, but Yellow Bag believes that Millhouse was the “brains” of the Register’s pedophile ring while the man in the Ford Fairmont was the “muscle.”
Eugene’s father, Don Martin, sadly died in 2010 as he approached his 65th birthday as a result of cancer as well as Alzheimer’s disease & was never able to be reunited with his son or find out what happened to him. Not long after Eugene disappeared, Don & his wife divorced as the stress of Eugene’s disappearance had put a major strain on their relationship. Don’s sister indicated that after Eugene, who was the baby of the family, disappeared, Don became very withdrawn & spent all of his time trying to find out what happened to his boy. He was said to have gone into his own little shell & had no desire to interact with anyone. Day in & day out, he would read every paper he could & cut out clippings of anything that had to do with Eugene. Eugene’s mother Janice died from diabetes, also never knowing what happened to her son.
The main investigator in Eugene’s case, officer Jim Rowley, still had Eugene’s missing poster hanging in his garage, according to an interview in 2015. Other than the three people who had been on their way to Balloon Fest on the morning of Eugene’s disappearance & saw him talking to a man that appeared to be a father son conversation or the bag of the boy’s discarded newspapers, there have been very few solid clues. He had tracked down as many as 3,000 leads yet years continued to slip by with no sign of Eugene. During the height of the investigation, Rowley, who is now retired, went as far as Mexico & Canada to track down leads.
He acknowledges that both Johnny & Eugene’s cases are similar but questions how they’re linked. He wonders why there was a two-year gap between abductions since serial killers & kidnappers normally don’t work in that manner. Where had this person been before Johnny’s abduction in 1982? Where was he in the two years between abductions? Where was he in between 1984 & 1986 when Marc Allen was abducted?
The case remains open & contains decades of paperwork about evidence & leads. To this day, the case still haunts Rowley; something about the innocent act of a boy delivering papers on a Sunday morning hits him harder than a typical homicide he works. Rowley feels that the clean-cut man that Eugene was seen talking to ultimately convinced him to leave his route. It’s Rowley’s belief that both Eugene & Johnny disappeared at the hands of a pedophile & that they are both deceased, but he has not given up on finding out what happened. He refers to Eugene’s case as the one that he’ll take to the grave.
References:
- An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case
- Iowa Cold Cases: Marc James Warren Allen
- Medium: The disappearance of Eugene Martin
- We Are Iowa: Eugene Martin case remains open after 31 years
- Iowa Cold Cases: Eugene Wade Martin
- A&E: The paperboy abduction cases: The legacy of two Des Moines boys who are still missing
