Episode 31: Joshua Guimond
Joshua Guimond: The St. John's University Student Who Vanished Without a Trace
On November 9, 2002, Joshua Guimond got up from a poker table at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, walked out the door — and was never seen again. Two decades later, the disappearance of Joshua Guimond remains one of Minnesota's most confounding unsolved missing person cases: no body, no confirmed suspect, and a trail of evidence that only gets stranger the deeper you dig.
Who Was Joshua Guimond
Joshua Guimond wasn't just another college student. He was the valedictorian of his class and senior class president at St. John's, an all-male university in Collegeville, Minnesota. He volunteered with the Special Olympics, was known as athletic, outgoing, and endlessly good-humored, and had been voted most likely to succeed by his classmates. Josh had his future mapped out: law school, a legal career, and — in his own words — the presidency of the United States somewhere down the line. His roommate, Nick, described him as one of the most responsible, driven people he knew, which is exactly why Josh's disappearance made no sense to the people who loved him.
What Happened the Night Joshua Guimond Disappeared
On the night he went missing, Josh had two options: head to his friend Katie's apartment, or join a small poker game with friends. He chose poker, arriving at the party around 11:30 p.m. after having brunch with Nick earlier that day. His dorm keycard logged him back into his apartment briefly at 11:06 p.m. — investigators believe he stopped home to grab more beer before returning to the game.
The party itself was low-key. Josh was in good spirits, laughing, playing cards. Sometime around midnight, he stood up from the table. A few people thought he seemed drunk. Everyone assumed he was headed to the bathroom.
He never came back.
Nick didn't think much of it when Josh wasn't home by 2 a.m., figuring he was still at the party. But by the next morning, with Josh still missing, it started to feel wrong. Nick checked Josh's AIM status and found it had been idle for exactly as long as Josh had been gone — meaning he hadn't slipped in and back out unnoticed. Calls to friends from the party and to Josh's girlfriend turned up nothing. Josh had also missed a mock trial meeting that morning, wildly out of character for someone as reliable as him.
By Sunday night, a dean at St. John's was calling Josh's mother directly, urging her to report her son missing. She called police at 11:42 p.m. on November 10, 2002 — more than 24 hours after anyone had last seen her son.
The Search for Joshua Guimond Begins
When police searched Josh's dorm room, nothing was out of place. His keys, glasses, contact case, and car were all still there. Nothing missing, nothing disturbed. Because it looked, on the surface, like a college student who simply hadn't come home, investigators initially treated the case without much urgency — a decision that would frustrate the Guimond family for years to come.
That changed quickly once a K-9 unit picked up Josh's scent trail from his apartment toward the road — and lost it near a bridge by the water. Two witnesses independently reported seeing a man matching Josh's description walking on that same bridge between 12:10 and 12:30 a.m. When they glanced back moments later, he was gone. No cars passed. No one else was on the bridge. He'd simply vanished.
By November 11, multiple law enforcement agencies had joined the search, using horses to comb the campus grounds and surrounding ravines. By Thursday, Josh's family and friends were brought in to help. Investigators began dragging the lake between the party and Josh's apartment, working under the theory that he'd ended up in the water — but had to suspend the search as Minnesota's winter set in, halting all campus search efforts for the season.
Unsatisfied with the pace of the official investigation, the Guimond family hired their own private investigator and bloodhound. That dog tracked Josh's scent to an unexpected location: St. John's Abbey, a monastery on campus where several monks also served as instructors.
St. John's Abbey and a Disturbing Connection
St. John's Abbey came with a troubling history of its own — multiple reports of sexual abuse that the university had reportedly worked to keep quiet. According to Nick, Josh had actually been researching the misconduct for a school paper in the weeks before he disappeared and was outraged by what he'd uncovered. The night he vanished, Josh and Nick had reportedly discussed the abbey and what was happening there. Investigators were never able to draw a confirmed connection between the abbey and Josh's disappearance, but the timing has never sat comfortably with those following the case.
There was tension closer to home as well. A roommate reported overhearing an argument between Nick and Josh the night he disappeared, reportedly about Katie. Nick told police he'd left Katie's apartment around 2:30 p.m. and keyed back into his dorm room at 2:42 p.m. — but Katie says he actually left roughly an hour earlier than that. When police asked Nick to take a polygraph, he initially agreed, then declined at the last minute, citing concerns about false positives and the fact that polygraphs aren't admissible in court. The timeline discrepancy and declined polygraph kept Nick on investigators' radar, though no evidence has ever tied him to Josh's disappearance.
Search efforts resumed the following spring, with Josh's father even taking to the lakes himself in a kayak alongside police divers. Josh was never found in the water.
The Wiped Computer and Secret Online Profiles
Because early theories centered on drowning, investigators didn't initially seize Josh's computer. By the time they obtained it, with help from Josh's father, they discovered someone had run data-wiping software on it just days after his disappearance — erasing files and browsing history that wouldn't become recoverable until 2008.
What they eventually uncovered reshaped the entire case: multiple online profiles believed to belong to Josh, including two under female identities used to chat with men. It raised an unsettling new theory — what if someone he'd been messaging discovered the deception and reacted violently? Yet no one close to Josh, then or now, believed he was gay or secretly meeting up with men, and investigators noted that his dorm room had effectively been left accessible to anyone in the chaotic first days of the search, complicating any theory built solely on computer activity.
One more loose thread has never been resolved. Campus security repeatedly flagged a vehicle parked in dark, low-traffic corners of campus. On one occasion, a college-aged man bolted from the car into a wooded area as security approached. On another, a second young man was seen in the passenger seat. Each time, the driver told the same story: he was dropping off a student from another school. When police went looking for the vehicle to examine it further, they discovered it had already been crushed.
Where the Joshua Guimond Case Stands Today
More than twenty years later, Joshua Guimond has never been found, and no arrest has ever been made. A missing person case involving one of St. John's most promising students has unraveled into a web of half-answers: a scent trail that ends at a bridge, a wiped hard drive, an abbey with something to hide, and a car that will never tell investigators what it saw.
Join Sam & Briana through the full timeline, the theories that have circulated for two decades, and what's left to uncover in one of Minnesota's most persistent cold cases.
Spark up some Dancing Gorilla and settle in.
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