Summary
“What Happened to Josh?” explores a genuinely compelling mystery while also functioning as an even-handed piece of documentary filmmaking.
This Unsolved Mysteries season 3, episode 6 recap for the episode titled “What Happened to Josh?” contains spoilers.
Well, this one’s a doozy.
Easily the best episode of Unsolved Mysteries Volume 3 thus far, “What Happened to Josh?” functions not only as a legitimately compelling mystery but an even-handed piece of documentary filmmaking, collecting a wide range of testimony from both Joshua’s family and friends and law enforcement professionals who worked on the case — which, by the way, is still on-going 20 years later. In fact, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office only recently provided an update in the hope of acquiring more information. One suspects that having the story told in this Netflix series is an attempt at doing that too.
Unsolved Mysteries season 3, episode 6 recap
Josh Guimond was a promising 20-year-old student at St. John’s University with aspirations of becoming the President of the United States — his family and friends seem confident he would have achieved that goal. His graduation speech bookends the episode and sounds like the words of a statesman, a stand-up, intelligent, confident, and principled young man who everyone seemed to like.
Josh disappeared after attending a campus poker party, for seemingly no reason. Nobody had any inclination about where he might have gone or why he might have slipped away without saying anything. No evidence supported the idea of foul play, no body was ever found, and potential suspects were thin on the ground.
An early theory was that Josh might have been the victim of a serial killer who was thought to be active in the area at the time, snatching other handsome college-age men off the streets. But their corpses turned up in bodies of water, and Josh’s didn’t, despite official efforts to drag nearby rivers and his father kayaking up and down them in the hopes — though perhaps that’s not the right word — his son would bob to the surface.
After a while, Josh’s friend Nick became a suspect. An argument had been overheard between him and Josh about Josh’s long-time girlfriend, who Josh had recently separated from and Nick had become romantically involved with. When Nick was asked to take a lie detector test, he refused, insisting that he didn’t want a potential false positive to distract from the investigation. But interestingly, Nick participates in the episode, speaking fondly of Josh. So, too, does his ex-girlfriend, who can barely hold back tears in several scenes.
The case takes a surprising turn when investigators discovered that, after Josh’s disappearance, his campus computer had been “washed” with the aid of software designed to delete browsing history and cookies — though crucially not files. Further investigation of the computer yielded information about Josh’s habit of frequenting Yahoo! Personals, where he would engage with women and men, the latter while catfishing as a woman. The pornography on his hard drive was both heterosexual and homosexual, though nobody who knew Josh remotely suspected him of being gay.
Nevertheless, the most prevalent theory — one which still persists today, which is why Stearns County Sheriff’s Office is sharing pictures of men on his hard drive who he interacted with online — is that he had arranged a hookup with someone who subsequently killed him. But was it a man or a woman? Was it revenge for Josh posing as a woman during online communications? Perhaps, on the back of “What Happened to Josh?”, we might find out. But it’ll be 20 years too late.
