Jon David Ganz

• Missing Since 04/05/2025
• Missing From Springfield, Missouri
• Classification Endangered Missing
• Sex Male
• Race White
• Date of Birth 11/29/1975 (50)
• Age 49 years old
• Height and Weight 5'10, 190 pounds
• Medical Conditions Ganz may have been having a mental breakdown at the time of his disappearance. Caution is advised when approaching him, as he has a history of violence.
• Associated Vehicle(s) Black Chevrolet Volt (accounted for)
• Distinguishing Characteristics White male. Brown hair, brown eyes. Ganz has eight tattoos, including a nude woman on his arm and a dragon on the back of his leg.

Details of Disappearance

Ganz was last disappeared from Springfield, Missouri on April 5, 2025. He and his wife had left Richmond, Virginia and driven to Springfield, and planned to spend a month looking for a new home to live in while their home in Virginia was being renovated.

Prior to his disappearance, Ganz had become "obsessed" with chatting with Gemini, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. He had only started using it two weeks earlier. He and his wife took separate cars from Virginia to Missouri, and he drove a black Chevrolet Volt. His wife noticed his driving was erratic and subsequently discovered he'd been talking to Gemini while driving.

When they arrived in Missouri, much of the central and eastern U.S. was under a flood watch, and more rainstorms were expected. Ganz left the Airbnb they were staying in an agitated state, saying there was going to be a bad storm and he needed to rescue his wife's stepmother, who lived seven hours away in Mississippi. His wife tried to stop him from leaving, but he drove away at 3:40 p.m., telling her, "This is it. You have to believe me. You’re not going to survive if you stay here."

His wife went looking for him less than an hour later, and couldn't find him. She called his stepmother, who didn't understand why Ganz was coming to rescue her as there was no flooding in the part of Mississippi where she lived. Both Ganz's wife and his mother, whom his wife called also, thought he might be having a mental breakdown.

Ganz's wife's stepmother spoke to Ganz on the phone and told him she was fine and did not need to be rescued, so he turned around and said he was going to Virginia to rescue his mother. Ganz's wife had a short series of calls with him and asked him to share his location through his phone or at least tell her what landmarks he was passing, but he was unable to do so. He told her he would be "wandering for 40 days and 40 nights" and that they were going to face "trials and tribulations." He also told her to "take Jesus" which his wife found alarming, as Ganz was normally anti-religious.

His wife went to a Missouri State Highway Patrol office for help, and they contacted the Butler County Sheriff's Office. Ganz's wife asked that they locate her husband and commit him to a psychiatric hospital, but the sheriff's office said they they did not consider Ganz to be endangered because he was "eating and bathing of his own accord".

The police asked Ganz's wife to call Ganz to ask where he was. He told her that he was in Palmyra, Virginia and had gotten stuck in the mud. Ganz's wife knew this could not be true because he'd only been gone for five hours by this point and Virginia was a fifteen-hour drive away from Missouri. She asked him how he had gotten to Virginia so quickly, and he said, "It's easy. You just make it happen." The Highway Patrol advised Ganz's wife to return to Springfield and file a missing persons report, which she did.

On the morning of April 6, the police found Ganz's Chevrolet Volt abandoned near the muddy Eleven Point River in Thomasville, Missouri, 135 miles east of the Airbnb. His keys, wallet, identification, electronic devices, suitcase, carry-on bag and emergency supplies he'd purchased were inside it, as was Ganz's only footwear, a pair of shoes and a mudstained pair of boots.

The police gave Ganz's phone to his wife, and she checked his Gemini history. He had begun using the chatbot on March 23, and at first the conversations with it were normal, but they became more and more bizarre as time passed.

He became focused on rescuing family members from what he thought would be a wide-scale flood and used Gemini to map out six days of rescues, but he thought the flood would last for 40 days so he had Gemini provide a plan for how to fill the other 34 days. He wanted to charter a 56-person bus to "save" his family and friends and take them "to the mountains." He called a charter bus company to find out how much it would cost to rent a bus for "40 days and 40 nights"; the cost was up to $100,000.

About an hour after leaving the Airbnb the day he disappeared, Ganz called a suicide and mental health crisis hotline; the call lasted three minutes and 28 seconds. At 8:40 p.m. that day, his car got stuck in the mud and the police helped pull it out. He told them he was cold, lost and tired, and they gave him directions to the nearest motel in West Plains, Missouri.

Within an hour, Ganz's car had gotten stuck in the mud again, seven miles from where it had gotten stuck before, and a woman saw him getting out of it. He told he was going to the river to wash up, and this is the last time anyone saw him. The police found his car there the next morning.

Ganz had begun using drugs at age twelve. When he was nineteen years old, he took LSD and then repeatedly stabbed his parents, killing his father. He pleaded guilty to murder and malicious wounding and served 24 years in a series of prisons in Virginia. He began corresponding with his wife from prison in 2010 and they married in 2013. He went to live with her after he was paroled in 2020. He seemed to do well after his parole and got a job installing electronics systems for car washes.

He had become drug-free while in prison, but began using marijuana in 2024 to help him sleep, and by 2025 he was using it heavily and trying to hide this from his wife. His wife and his mother both noticed he was not acting like himself prior to leaving for Missouri, and seemed to be on his phone constantly, sometimes staying up all night to talk to Gemini. He told his mother he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ganz's wife believes he may have been suffering from a phenomenon known as "AI psychosis", where a person loses touch with reality due to their over-reliance on AI technology, and that he is probably dead. His disappearance remains unsolved.