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Minnesota college student Joshua Guimond disappeared one night in November 2002. What happened to him remains a mystery, but a new episode of the Netflix true-crime series Unsolved Mysteries could shed some new light on the case. So could a recent podcast, Simply Vanished, which digs deeper into Guimond’s disappearance and the theories surrounding the case. 

‘Unsolved Mysteries’ looks at the disappearance of Joshua Guimond 

Photo of missing Minnesota college student Joshua Guimond from Netflix's 'Unsolved Mysteries'
Joshua Guimond in ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ | Netflix © 2022

Guimond was a 20-year-old junior at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. On Nov. 9, 2002, he and some friends went to another student’s on-campus apartment to play poker. Shortly before midnight, he left the apartment. He never made it back to his dorm room. 

The next, Guimond’s friends realized he was missing and alerted campus security. A search was conducted, but the aspiring lawyer and politician has never been found. Initially, police suspected he may have fallen into a lake on campus and drowned. However, his body was not discovered during a search of the lake. One theory explored in the Unsolved Mysteries episode “What Happened to Josh?” is that the case might be linked to an ongoing sex abuse scandal involving the monks at St. John’s Abbey. Another is that Guimond vanished after meeting up with someone he met online. 

The host of the ‘Simply Vanished’ podcast has a theory about Joshua’s disappearance

Unsolved Mysteries isn’t the only recent look at Guimond’s disappearance. Earlier in 2022, Minneapolis attorney Josh Newville began examining the case for his podcast Simply Vanished. He thinks it’s possible Guimond was abducted – and that it might not have been an isolated incident. 

“Well, two theories that we are heavily pursuing at the moment–the first that we’ve already discussed on the podcast is there were a series of attacks, and stalkings, attempted abductions of college men in the area, not just in November of 2002, the same month that Josh went missing, but, really, in the years surrounding that as well. And so we are continuing to receive leads related to this theory,” he told MPR in July 2022.

Newville also said that he’d received “frankly, a pretty bombshell lead last night that I am currently working on running down and figuring out how to pursue that. But it does seem much more likely than we, I think, previously thought that this may have been an abduction. And that’s quite frightening. It’s kind of the stuff of your nightmares, frankly.”

Another episode of the podcast is coming in November 

Josh Guimond with a female friend in Netflix's 'Unsolved Mysteries'
Katie Benson and Joshua Guimond in ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ | Netflix © 2022
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In the most recent episode of Simply Vanished, which was released in early October, Newville talks to someone who believes she may have seen Guimond in Las Vegas a few months after his disappearance. He also speaks with a young couple who had a creepy encounter with a strange man near the St. John’s campus roughly 18 years after Guimond went missing. 

Newville is continuing to look into Guimond’s case. Episode 8 Simply Vanished is scheduled for release on Nov. 14, shortly after the 20th anniversary of his disappearance.  

Unsolved Mysteries Volume 3 Episodes 1-6 are currently streaming on Netflix. Additional episodes premiere on Nov. 1. 

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