On November 9, 2002, 20-year-old college student Josh Guimond left a small party without a word and was never seen again. Two decades later, his loved ones still have no answers. Unsolved Mysteries Volume 3’s “What Happened to Josh?” revisits the case, offering several theories that attempt to explain Guimond’s suspicious disappearance. Not surprisingly, Reddit sleuths have also contributed to the conversation, and several of their hypotheses align with those presented in the episode.
Two witnesses reported seeing him walking on the bridge near Stumpf Lake on the campus of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, right around the same time he abruptly departed a poker gathering. A police K9 unit also traced his trail to the bridge, and one bloodhound led them down to the water. What seemed most likely is that Guimond, who had been drinking at the party, fell into the lake. However, after an extensive search effort, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office concluded that his body was not in the water.
Suspicions soon turned toward Guimond’s roommate, Nick Hydukovich, with whom friends heard him arguing the night before he went missing. There was speculation that it was over Hydukovich starting a romance with his high school sweetheart, Katie Benson, months after they ended their four-and-a-half-year relationship. Hydukovich and Benson both appeared in the Unsolved Mysteries episode and denied they were ever more than friends, aside from kissing once or twice. Still, they were together the night Guimond went missing, and there were inconsistencies in their timelines. Meanwhile, Hydukovich backed out of a scheduled polygraph test, explaining in the Netflix true-crime series that he didn’t want to risk a false positive.
Netflix
As pointed out both in the series and by a Redditor, St. John’s was in the headlines one month before Guimond disappeared for settling a dozen cases of sexual abuse by monks at the Abbey on campus. According to CBS News, Guimond’s father, Brian, learned that the monks, who were credibly accused of past abuse, supervised both his son’s dorm and the one where he was last seen.
Unsolved Mysteries recounted the family bringing in their own bloodhound team that traced Guimond’s scent to St. John’s Abbey, but no further evidence was found there. (Police were also “skeptical” of that specific K9 team’s accuracy at the time.) Brian believed that his son was researching the monk’s sexual misconduct, but investigators found nothing on his computer pertaining to that.
Still, it was Guimond’s computer that gave investigators what they believe to be their most probable lead. Though someone entered his dorm room days after his disappearance and ran an internet washer, in 2008, new technology allowed police to recover the deleted files. They discovered that Guimond had been spending time on Yahoo! Personals, chatting online with other men and sometimes portraying himself as a female.
Their belief was that Guimond was exploring his sexuality and looking for “casual encounters” online. Around the same time, there were two separate campus reports of a man driving an orange Pontiac Sunfire dropping off other men on campus — including one who ran away when security approached the vehicle. They were able to locate the driver, but he didn’t provide any additional information, and the car was destroyed before an investigation could be conducted.
Toward the end of the Unsolved Mysteries episode, investigators posit that the “most likely avenue or theory” is that someone Guimond met on a dating site is responsible for his disappearance. Now, nearly two decades later, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office is seeking new leads to help solve Guimond’s case. On October 21, 2022, they released a collage of 28 men’s dating profile photos that they found on Guimond’s hard drive, which was also shown in the Netflix episode.
“These individuals remain unidentified, and they may be able to provide information related to Joshua’s disappearance,” reads the post, asking anyone who recognizes any of the men, or knows anything about Guimond’s disappearance, to contact their office.
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