Entertainment Jon Ganz committed a terrible crime in his youth, but he survived prison, fell in love, and was starting over. His new life unraveled in a way that nobody could have predicted Toward the end of March, Rachel Ganz had what she calls “a premonition of doom.” At the time, she couldn’t quite explain this foreboding. She and her husband, Jon Ganz, ages 45 and 49, respectively, were in the midst of what should have been a happy milestone: The couple were planning to move out of their small home in a downscale neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, to a nicer place in a more affordable city in the Midwest. They had rented an Airbnb in Springfield, Missouri — one of their top relocation choices — for the entire month of April, with the aim of exploring different neighborhoods and checking out some houses on the market while their own was being renovated ahead of its sale. But Jon seemed distracted, and not altogether himself, Rachel tells Rolling Stone. Out of nowhere, he had asked if the Airbnb was refundable. When Rachel openly wondered if he wanted to cancel the trip, he quickly dismissed the idea. A handyman who did plenty of home projects himself, he showed a peculiar lack of interest when a contractor they’d hired to work on their house wanted to go over details of the job. “Jon told him, ‘You do whatever you think is best,’” Rachel recalls. “He would never have done that originally, ever. Whenever we had work done, Jon always wanted to be here for it.” She had previously known him to be level-headed and laid-back in the face of life’s challenges — yet he now often talked about how stressed he was, and became incredibly aggravated over small hassles. Rachel was well aware of a terrible violent crime in Jon’s past, one he had strived to make amends for ever since. She could not have imagined, however, that his dreams of attaining salvation through altruism and technical genius had pushed him to the brink of madness. Jon has now been missing for nearly six months, and Rachel looks back at their last days together with profound regret, believing she could or should have prevented what happened. The Ganzes arrived at Jon’s mother’s house in Courtland, Virginia, with a trailer full of belongings to store. Rachel began to unload, whereas Jon went to the couch, pulled out his phone, and fired up Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. On March 23, a week earlier, he’d told Rachel that he’d seen a notification on his Google Pixel suggesting that he try it out. A tech junkie who made his living traveling the country to install electronic systems for car washes, he was instantly taken with the chatbot, sending Rachel screenshots of his exchanges and talking enthusiastically about its potential. On March 29, for example, he texted her, “This Gemini is exactly what I needed.” He suggested that he could use it to create a therapy app for her so she wouldn’t have to talk about her anxiety and depression with a human doctor. (She protested that she liked her therapist.) Jon had even gotten upset with Rachel when she’d been too busy packing up the house to read his latest texts about using Gemini to explore his career options and get financial advice. He was equally hurt when Rachel, trying to adjust his perspective on AI tools, forwarded him a link about how they can fabricate false and misleading content. “After that, he quit talking to me about it,” she says. So when Jon’s mom, Rebecca Ganz, gave him a hard time for sitting around on his phone instead of helping his wife unpack their trailer, Rachel told her mother-in-law that she may as well drop the issue — she assumed they wouldn’t get through to him. Jon’s mother tells Rolling Stone that he was “different,” “preoccupied,” and sometimes crying during that visit. “He would say ‘I love you, Mom,’ with tears in his eyes,” says Rebecca. “I had never seen that before.” At one point that week, she recalls, he told her, “You’ve got a really smart son here,” adding that he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “I said, ‘Is that right?’” She knew he was talking about whatever he was working on with his phone, but he never showed it to her, nor was she particularly interested. “I’m old-school,” she says. “I don’t even have a computer.” Rachel and Jon’s mom had recently discussed his mental health. “It was like, all of a sudden, has he gone schizophrenic or what?” Rebecca says. But she was used to Jon saying unusual things. And nothing about his infatuation with Gemini had raised red flags for Rachel. Jon had told her he was using it to assess future business opportunities in Springfield and asking questions about health and diets. He was also asking Gemini how he could achieve greater success while giving back to his community — seeking to understand “his mission in life,” as she puts it. Later, when she recovered his phone, she was astonished and horrified at how much deeper and darker Jon had gone in his chatbot conversations, sometimes staying up all night to use Gemini. Entertainment “He told me, ‘If anything should happen to me, release the AI.’” For no reason Rachel could discern, Jon delayed their departure to Springfield by an extra day, even though they were already paying for the Airbnb. He said there was no rush. They finally left on April 2, first stopping at a nearby park to walk their dogs, Rocky and Georgie. It was at this moment that Jon really started to scare Rachel. “Jon suddenly grabbed me, and he said, ‘I will always love you,’” she says. “And I said, ‘Well, I’ll always love you, too.’” It was “weird,” she says, that he phrased it that way. They continued their walk. A little farther on, Jon made a more cryptic remark. “He told me,” says Rachel, “‘If