Unsolved Mysteries volume 3 recap guide: Episodes 1-9 explained

Unsolved Mysteries season 3 episode 6 recap: “What Happened to Josh?”

Unsolved Mysteries season 3, episode 6, “What Happened to Josh?” investigates the disappearance of St. John’s University student Joshua Guimond, last seen walking home from a party a little before midnight on November 9, 2002.

That night, Joshua went to a poker party at the Metten Court Apartments on the northern border of the college campus. He walked from his dormitory at St. Maur House, which was closer to the center of campus. Stumpf Lake resided between the two buildings.

Joshua arrived at the party around 11:30 p.m. and left before midnight. Once deemed missing, police bloodhounds tracked his scent along the bridge. A couple who had been walking on the bridge said they saw a college-aged male fitting Joshua’s description there that night, but when they turned around, he was gone.

When investigators searched Joshua’s room, there were no signs of anything suspicious. No suicide note or anything like that. Joshua had also left all his things behind, including his contacts, eyeglasses, and car, which makes it unlikely that he abandoned his school to run away or start a new life somewhere else.

Police considered that he might have drowned in Stumpf Lake, but a search did not turn anything up.

Was there an active serial killer in the area?

One early theory proposed an active serial killer type in the area because two other college-aged males had gone missing within a 100-mile radius of Minneapolis. Like Joshua’s disappearance, Michael Noll and Chris Jenkins were both ambitious young men who also vanished near a body of water. But later, Michael and Chris were found in the bodies of water near where they went missing, and Joshua still hadn’t been found. Police determined that their disappearances were not linked.

St. John’s Abbey

A unique attribute of St. John’s University is that it had a monastery on campus, and the monks were professors. Approximately 50 days after Joshua disappeared, his family hired another team of bloodhounds. One of the dogs traced Joshua’s scent to the abbey.

Around the time of Joshua’s disappearance, several news stories were coming out about things that had happened at the monastery, specifically allegations of sexual abuse.

Joshua’s roommate and friend, Nick Hydukovich, claims that Joshua was particularly angry about the scandal and supposedly working on a research paper on the subject. However, cops found no information about the topic on his computer.

It’s also worth mentioning that the cops were skeptical of the specific bloodhound team used in this instance, and they found nothing linking Joshua to the abbey once they got inside to investigate. Joshua’s mother, Lisa, believes that if anyone on campus had anything to do with Joshua’s death, they would never know because “they’re too secretive.”

Katie and Nick’s involvement

Another theory relates to Joshua’s roommate Nick Hydukovich and Joshua’s former girlfriend Katie Benson. Katie and Nick broke up before Joshua disappeared. At least one person claimed they overheard Nick and Joshua arguing the night before Joshua vanished.

There was a theory that Nick and Katie were romantically involved and thus had a motive to do something to him. In the episode of Unsolved Mysteries, Nick and Katie both admit there was some romantic attraction between them, but it didn’t go anywhere.

The cops also found a discrepancy in Nick’s statements regarding his whereabouts the night Joshua went missing. According to Nick, he left Katie’s apartment that night at 2:30 a.m. His keycard shows that he arrived back at his apartment and keyed in at 2:42 a.m.

However, Katie told the police that Nick left at 1 or 1:30 a.m., which would amount to more than an hour of unaccounted time since it only takes about ten minutes to get from her apartment to his, so their accounts did not align.

Nick admits he declined to take a lie detector test because he didn’t want to mess up the investigation with a false positive. “There’s a reason they are inadmissible in court.” Katie and Nick say they had no involvement in Joshua’s disappearance.

Yahoo! Personals

After the initial search conducted into Joshua’s disappearance, the cops did not remove his computer or tape off his dorm room. Joshua’s computer was left unattended. When the investigators returned to examine it, they discovered that someone had used an internet washing program on it a few days after Joshua disappeared.

In 2008, Lieutenant Vic Weiss, one of the investigators on the case, went back to re-examine the computer. Using new technology, he found things on the hard drive they previously missed. Vic discovered that Joshua had been spending time on Yahoo! Personals.

He had at least three profiles, one of which had his partial name and zip code, while the other two portrayed him as female. Joshua had been presenting himself as a female while chatting with men online. The cops also found a mixture of straight and gay porn on the computer. Joshua might have agreed to meet someone the night he went missing.

Assuming that Joshua had agreed to meet up with someone he met online, Weiss pulled incident reports from Life Safety Services. He found two particular instances of interest, each involving the same vehicle: an orange Pontiac Sunfire.

During one incident, campus security spoke with one of the passengers who claimed he was dropping a student off from another campus. Unfortunately, the Pontiac Sunfire had since been crushed, so the cops could not investigate it further and the passengers were never identified.