Joshua Guimond

Joshua Cheney Guimond, born June 18, 1982, was a 20-year-old junior political science major at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. A former high school valedictorian and class president from Maple Lake, he was an honor student active in mock trial. On the night of November 9, 2002, Guimond was playing cards with friends at an apartment in the Metten Court dormitory. Around 11:45 p.m. he left without announcing that he was going, though he had implied earlier that he had somewhere to be. The walk back to his own residence in St. Maur House would have taken only a few minutes and crossed a footbridge near Stumpf Lake. Two witnesses later reported seeing him on that bridge between roughly 12:15 and 12:30 a.m., and activity on the computer in his room continued until about 12:32 a.m. He never made it home: his eyeglasses, contact lenses, credit cards and car were all left behind, and he missed a mock trial event the next day, prompting friends and family to report him missing.

The Stearns County Sheriff's Office led the investigation, assisted at various points by the FBI, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the Minnesota National Guard and hundreds of volunteers, who combed the university's roughly 2,500 acres of woods and lakes. Because the campus is surrounded by water, early theories held that Guimond, who may have been mildly intoxicated, had fallen into Stumpf Lake or nearby Gemini Lake and drowned. Repeated dives, sonar sweeps, underwater cameras and a 2003 search by the Trident Foundation found no body and no physical evidence, leaving investigators doubtful of the drowning theory.

A later forensic examination of Guimond's computer, reported around 2008, recovered deleted browser data showing that information about creating fake identification had been erased and that he had been communicating with men through Yahoo! Personals, in some instances using a female persona. According to investigators, this raised the possibility that Guimond had arranged to meet someone online and was picked up near the bridge, either willingly or by force. In October 2022, days before the 20th anniversary, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office publicly released a collage of 28 images of unidentified men found on his computer, asking for the public's help identifying them as potential witnesses or persons of interest.

The case drew renewed national attention in 2022 when Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries revival featured Guimond's disappearance, generating more than 200 tips, though according to authorities none has resolved the case. Guimond's father, Brian Guimond, has long argued that his son met with foul play, pointing to the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling in the same county and to the October 2002 settlement of sexual abuse lawsuits involving monks at Saint John's Abbey; the sheriff's office has said there is no credible evidence linking the abbey to the disappearance. In December 2021, Brian Guimond sued the sheriff's office seeking access to the investigative file, but the suit was dismissed in 2022 after the office argued disclosure could jeopardize a future prosecution.

As of the case's 21st anniversary in November 2023, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office stated that the investigation into Joshua Guimond's disappearance remains active, and tips connected to the released computer images were still being received as of 2025. No trace of Guimond has ever been found, and no one has been charged in connection with his disappearance.