"Unsolved Mysteries, Season 2": A Possibly Gay/Trans Catholic College Boy Vanishes

 

The new season of Unsolved Mysteries, on Netflix, is once again filled with "perfect" heterosexual nuclear family husbands and wives with dark secrets.  Only one so far has gay potential:

On November 9, 2002, Josh Guilmond, a student at the conservative Catholic St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, went to a poker party at a friend's apartment.  After about half an hour, he got up and left; the other guests thought that he was headed for the bathroom.  He was never seen again.  But he left his glasses and wallet back in his dorm room, so obviously he wasn't planning to vanish.

Bloodhounds tracked his scent to a bridge over the lake that divided the two parts of the campus.  Maybe he slipped and fell in, or jumped in.  But dredging the lake turned up nothing.

The prime suspect was Josh's roommate, who was starting to date his ex-girlfriend.  They had an argument earlier that day, and there was an hour of missing time in his activities that night.  Investigators quickly abandoned that lead.

Josh was writing a paper on the sex abuse scandal going on among the monks at the college.  Maybe he learned too much?  A bloodhound tracked his scent to the monks' residence.  But a search revealed nothing incriminating.

And why did someone enter Josh's room two days after he disappeared and wipe his computer clean?

The case fizzled out until 2009, when advances in IT technology allowed the researchers to retrieve most of the files on Josh's hard drive.  They found "heterosexual and homosexual" porn, and the logs of chat rooms, where Josh had pretended to be a girl.  Maybe he left the party early because he was meeting a guy for a hookup, and things went wrong. 

If you were pretending to be a girl, or were embracing a transgender identity, shouldn't you let your partner know beforehand?  But a conservative Catholic college student 20 years ago might not have had way to learn the basics.  

Josh's family and friends were shocked at the new revelations: "But he never said or did anything suggesting that he was gay or trans."  You probably wouldn't, not until you were ready to come out.  But was it a gay/trans hookup that went wrong.

Think about it: a "girl" offers to meet you on campus.  You drive over in the middle of the night, but all you see is a boy.  Won't you think that you were being stood up, and drive away?

Besides, Josh didn't take his coat, glasses, wallet, or keys.  You would certainly take some of those along on a hookup.  I'm going back to the priest coverup theory.