The Paperboy
It was early on a fall morning in Bellevue, Nebraska, a few miles south of Omaha, on Sunday, September 18, 1983. Thirteen-year-old Danny Joe Eberle had arisen early, around six, and was delivering the Omaha World Herald newspaper to seventy of his neighbors. He’d left his home on Valley Drive on his bike, with the intent of getting done and getting back as quickly as possible. So when he failed to come home from his job, his parents began to worry. It wasn’t like him to not let them know if he was going somewhere. And there was an added concern: The route supervisor had roused Mr. Eberle from sleep to let him know that Danny Joe had not finished the job. People were complaining.
The Eberles called around to people who knew him, but no one had seen him. That made them apprehensive, so they went outside to see if he was around and just hadn’t told them. But Danny Joe was nowhere to be found and his brother, who also had a paper route, had not seen him, although he recalled having been followed recently by a white man in a tan car. He had no idea if that was connected.
The events of that morning would rock the small town of just over 30,000 residents. They would soon learn that there was a killer in their midst who could strike during the day without anyone noticing.
The story is told from different angles by reporter Mark Petitt in A Need to Kill and Robert Ressler, who was called in to consult on the situation, in Whoever Fights Monsters. Criminologists and psychologists have also discussed the case, and Colin Evans used it to demonstrate a specific type of forensic investigation. Details of the following incidents were also summarized in an appeals document, and one author penned a novel, A Perfect Evil, inspired by what happened in Nebraska as that year came to an end. The residents knew it as a 116-day siege.
As Colin Evans notes, Danny Joe had gone out without his shoes, which was his preferred way to travel, and had picked up his papers at a convenience store and rolled them there in a parking lot to place into his delivery bag. He had then set off to start his route but made just three stops that morning. When Danny Joe’s absence was investigated, his bicycle was located at his fourth stop, inside the gate of the cyclone fence around a dentist’s home. Folded newspapers, undelivered, were there as well, in his bag. But not Danny Joe. It appeared that he’d arrived, been distracted, and then abducted. But there was no sign of a struggle.
The Eberles notified police and instigated a manhunt around the immediate area, going to each person on Danny Joe’s route, and to other areas that may have attracted him, but nothing turned up that day. They continued with the search, going from building to building, house to house, but no one had seen Danny Joe with anyone. He had simply vanished. In all, Pettit says, some 130 officials made up the search team. Despite this impressive response, no clues were found, and day became evening, so when darkness fell, the search was called off.
The next day, the police went over a large area in town and fanned out into the fields around town. Monday went by, and then Tuesday, with no progress. No one came forward to say they’d seen something, and nothing else belonging to Danny Joe had been found. They could only hope he hadn’t been killed and tossed into the river, for then they might never find him.
On Wednesday, they finally had a break. One of the searchers called out that he’d found “the package” — a code word to investigators. Danny Joe’s body was located off a gravel road about four miles from where he’d left his bike. He was clad only in his underwear. He’d been stripped, killed, and dumped into some weeds that were tall enough to have barely hidden him. He had been stabbed nine times, front and back, and his ankles were bound with rope. There was reason to believe that before he’d died, he had been tortured. He had likely been alert for several minutes before he bled to death and knew that he was being killed.
Because there were impressions from pebbles on the body, but not many where it had been dumped, it seemed that Danny Joe had been moved from one spot to another. Police officers got busy with the crime scene.
The investigators documented the scene, looked for evidence in the surrounding area, and searched for Danny’s clothing. That this child had come to such a terrible end depressed them and they were determined to find the perpetrator.
Because the murder involved a child, and because President Reagan had recently put murders and the kidnapping of children under federal jurisdiction, the local police called the FBI office in nearby Omaha. They responded by sending Special Agent John Evans to the scene. He also referred the case to the FBI’s newly formed Behavioral Sciences Unit. The unit had known some success with assisting local jurisdictions with multiple murders, including providing some ideas that helped to close the case on the Atlanta child murders in 1980. But they were largely an unknown to police departments, and behavioral science was itself suspicious to hardened cops.
Special Agent Robert Ressler traveled to Nebraska to talk with the authorities there, and he describes his experience in his book (and to this author). He’d been on his way to a homicide seminar when he got the call and went immediately to Omaha. From the few details he heard about a missing newsboy, he was reminded of another case — a missing newsboy in Des Moines from the year before, who had never been found. He wondered if there was a connection.
It’s always important to understand the town demographics when such incidents occur. Bellevue was a Midwestern small town, largely reliant on employment from the nearby Offutt Air Force Base, where the Strategic Air Command was situated. Danny Joe’s father had once been in the Air Force. It was a tight-knit community where people normally felt safe.
What Ressler particularly liked about being involved in the investigation from the start was getting to see things firsthand. That way, he could decide which items were important and which items might just complicate the process. When he arrived in Omaha, he went to see the site where Danny Joe’s body had been found. He was looking for specific clues.
There were a number of signals that the killer was not overly concerned with concealment, which indicated compulsive behavior, or something he could not easily control. Ressler thought it was significant that the perpetrator had left Danny Joe’s body in a place where he might have been seen. It was a dead-end road, but not far from an area where people would have been driving. In addition, the offender had picked Danny Joe up during the early daylight hours, and he hadn’t bothered to take his prey further down the road to dump him in the river. To the offender, the body could be found fairly quickly, and his behavior indicated that he did not care. Even if it had still been dark when he left the body there, someone passing by could easily have spotted him or his vehicle in that spot. It was high-risk behavior.
The news reports the next day indicated that Danny Joe had been stabbed, but Ressler said it was worse than that. He lay face-down in the weeds, his hands and feet bound behind his back with a rope. His mouth had been closed with surgical tape, which was also used around his ankles and wrists. His clothing, except for his undershorts, had been removed, and he’d been stabbed multiple times. He’d also been hit in the face and his neck was slashed. Under the tape over his mouth, according to the medical examiner’s report, a pebble had been found. That indicated that the boy had been a captive for a short time somewhere other than where he was found rather than killed quickly at this site. In that case, it seemed most likely that he’d been murdered shortly before he was found. While it appeared to have been a sexual crime, there was no evidence of outright sexual assault before or after death.
Other boys, including Danny Joe’s brother, reported that a man in a tan car had followed them in the days before the abduction. He’d never approached them, but in light of these circumstances, it now appeared to be suspicious. He might have been scoping out the area and making his selection.
Investigators got busy trying to find the source of the pebble found in Danny’s mouth. If they could identify an area that contained such pebbles, they might be able to find more evidence, and possibly the missing clothing. They did locate a potential source, but around the same time, the ME admitted that he’d made a mistake in his report. He had mixed up Danny Joe’s case with another one, and no pebble had been found in Danny Joe’s mouth. That was both disappointing and frustrating for investigators. They had thought they were closing in on a potential lead.
Given all the information — what little there was — Ressler put together a preliminary report of his impressions. The Behavioral Sciences Unit had an approach that had not often been tested, but Ressler felt confident that, from his long experience with the Army’s CID and his investigative years with the FBI, he could give a fairly accurate idea of the type of offender the task force, composed of the local and county police and the FBI, might be looking for.
Given the witness reports from the boys, Ressler knew that he ought to be on the lookout for a white man in a tan car. He added, based on his knowledge of sexual predators, that the man was probably young, in his late teens to early twenties. Danny Joe had been abducted from a white neighborhood, and no one had reported a suspicious stranger, which seemed unlikely if a black, Asian or Hispanic male had been hanging around. Ressler believed that the lack of a report confirmed his instincts that this had been a white man. It seemed possible, since there was no sign of resistance or a struggle, that the man was either friendly and non-threatening or that Danny Joe had known him and felt safe.
There was also reason to believe that the perpetrator was not experienced with killing. In fact, Ressler ventured to say this was his first time: “I thought it had to be his first murder.” It might also be the case that there had been more than one male operating together — one to lure the boy, one to hold him down during an assault. The method of dumping suggested panic rather than experience, but the perpetrator was more than likely familiar with the area, because he knew abut the dead-end road. Ressler did not believe that Danny Joe had been bound while held captive.
Besides being local, the perpetrator was thought to be in possession of no more than a high school education. He was likely employed in a job that required few skills. While the crime had likely been preplanned, it seemed to lack follow-through, as if only one part of the fantasy had been worked out, which showed a lack of intelligence as experience. Because it seemed to have been a sexual crime without penetration, it seemed likely that the perpetrator was driven by fantasies but not by experience, except for some forced molestation of younger children when he was a child. He was probably single and likely had a mental imbalance or emotional problem that had long been part of his life. He was deviant, to be sure, but it was not altogether clear in what manner.
In terms of what to look for, Ressler thought that, given the possibility that Danny Joe was held captive somewhere for a couple of days, the perpetrator might have missed some time at his job, if he was employed. “This last characteristic I suggested because of my interviews with murderers,” Ressler wrote. “Many such as [David] Berkowtiz had told me that the right time around the murder was quite important to them, so that they had absented themselves from their usual routine before and after it.” In addition, the perpetrator might try to inject himself into the investigation, ostensibly to assist, but actually seeking information. In that case, if a drawing was made, it should be kept within the law enforcement community.
The fact that he’d been out that early in the morning suggested that he might have been up all night drinking, and that he had no one to report to. Substance abuse might have empowered him to actually commit the crime. Ressler thought that he’d considered dismembering the body, but had decided instead to dump it. His killing seemed tentative and spontaneous rather than clearly planned. The killer had also made some unusual wounds on Danny Joe’s leg and shoulder, possibly to conceal a bite mark.
Ressler delivered his ideas in a round-table format to the core group of investigators. He indicated that the perp was probably a loner with latent homosexual tendencies who worked in some capacity that brought him close to children, such as a coach or Boy Scout leader. He did not believe the man was a serial killer.
The task force put surveillance on the dump site, Danny Joe’s grave, and the general neighborhood from which the boy had disappeared in the hope that the killer might show up to relive the experience. Shortly after the funeral service, says Pettit, a man called the Eberle home to ask if Danny Joe could come outside and play. (There is no mention of that call in any source.) Danny Joe’s mother did not recognize the voice and there was no way to trace the call. Nothing else occurred and no one was arrested. Danny Joe’s grieving family was left to wonder if someone would be made to pay for what had been done.
The bindings and the rope used on Danny Joe were sent to the FBI lab for analysis, as were some strands of hair that appeared to be from a source other than Danny Joe. The rope proved to be unique and difficult to identify.
A week after the murder, a young man was picked up for molesting two young boys. Pettit uses the pseudonym Alvin. The case against Alvin looked pretty good: He failed a polygraph, lied about his alibi, a sample of his hair was consistent with the hair found on Danny Joe, and he had suspicious items in his home, such as a rope, tape, and a knife. To the task force, he seemed to match the kind of person they were looking for, but Ressler, who had watched him being questioned, believed he was not the guy.
The task force was in a tough position, because they just weren’t certain. They did not want to get the wrong person, but they also wanted justice for Danny Joe and his family, as well as closure for the community and a restoration of the feeling of safety. In the end, thanks to sparse evidence, they decided against charging Alvin for the crime.
They then questioned known pedophiles in the area, including an Air Force major who liked cruising for boys and a gay man who persuaded boys to undress for photographs. They checked out one person after another, but found nothing to incriminate any of them in the case. The lack of evidence was frustrating and eventually, the murder of Danny Joe Eberle became a lower priority. It seemed that whoever had done this had managed to slip away. He might not even be from the area. They could only hope that, whoever he was, he would not strike again. But that was too much to hope for.
Newton describes the second incident. On December 2, two and a half months after Danny Joe Eberle was murdered, Christopher Walden was walking to school when he disappeared. At least two witnesses had seen him get into a tan sedan with a white male. Walden, 12, had lived in Papillon, Nebraska, which was in a different town, but only three miles from where Danny Joe had been found. He was the son of a military officer at Offutt. While the FBI had decided there was no connection between the newsboy missing from Des Moines (who still had not been found) and Danny Joe, this new incident appeared to have more similarities. Almost at once, when Chris could not be found, they believed that the same killer had struck twice.
The witnesses, both women, were put under hypnosis to try to get more details about what they might have seen. They offered descriptions of the man with Walden, saying he was of similar build, short, thin, and young. One person remembered that he’d also been wearing a woolen cap, pulled down over his forehead, although the other recalled no cap. One had seen the license plate, and with her memory more focused in a trance, she offered the first seven digits. But that gave the detectives the task of checking out over a thousand vehicles in Nebraska with those numbers. It could be a time-consuming task, with no guarantee that she had even recalled the numbers correctly. Hypnosis is not perfect, and it later turned out that both women had gotten several key details wrong.
Two days later, two pheasant hunters came across Christopher in the woods, in a dense area five miles from town. They recognized his photo from the papers and called the police. He was clad only in his underwear and had been repeatedly stabbed. In addition, after death, his throat had been cut so deeply that it had nearly removed his head. There was also a strange mark on him, a figure of some kind carved into his torso. Some called it a star pattern, and in court documents later it was referred to as resembling a plant. Clearly the boy had been aware of what was happening to him as he bled to death from seven stab wounds. If this had been done by the same killer, and there was good reason to believe it had, then he was escalating in his violence. Two sets of footprints going to the site and one leaving indicated a sole offender. After an examination, it was found that there had been no sexual penetration.
Ressler received the call once again. John Evans told him that another boy had been abducted and murdered in the Omaha area. When the crimes were compared, it was found that the two boys had been similar in height and build, so they might have attracted the offender by appearance. Ressler revised his profile to indicate that the killer was probably in his twenties and said again he was likely not very large. Both boys had also been abducted and taken away in a vehicle. Both were forced to strip, and neither were sexually assaulted. Ressler viewed this as “a killer’s anger with himself” and a denial of his homosexuality. In his book, he says that he went out on a limb to say that it could be an enlisted man who does mechanical work and is not intellectual. He reiterated that this person would likely be involved in some occupation dealing with children.
Yet there were differences, too. Ressler thought that Danny Joe had been held captive and then killed, while it appeared that Christopher had been taken and killed immediately, right there were his body was left. Danny Joe had been left in a fairly visible place near a road, while Christopher’s body had been better concealed. Danny Joe’s clothing had been taken, while Christopher’s was piled near the body. Danny Joe had been bound with rope and tape, but Christopher had not.
Ressler and Evans decided to tell the media to warn parents and children about someone lurking around schools and churches — any place where children might congregate. A warning might make people extra cautious, because both FBI agents believed that the killer might strike again during the holidays, when more children were out playing. The task force practiced a quick response to any indication that the man was in the area.
The FBI technicians were busy trying to learn the origin of the rope that had been found on Danny Joe. It had been braided with several colors and was not available in any of the local stores. That made the rope more interesting and more frustrating. Unique ropes such as this one were helpful, because their distribution was limited. Yet this rope was so unusual that no one could figure out where it originated, according to Colin Evans in The Casebook of Forensic Detection.
Rope is made by twisting yarns in specific ways to strengthen them, and the type of yarn used can help to identify a manufacturer, although the more common the yarn, the less likely that one can be certain that one piece of rope had the same origin as another that looks like it. This rope had several colored yarns and an unusual construction.
The FBI set about checking with every rope manufacturer in the country, as well as abroad, seeking help from Scotland Yard. They even went to dealers in the Far East, but each attempt was frustrated. No one seemed to have ropes that matched their sample. Fortunately, another incident gave the investigation an entirely new direction.
On January 11, 1984, a staff member of a preschool spotted a young man driving around in the area, seemingly scoping it out. The town was on the alert for such people, especially after the reports of a white man in a car following young boys, so the woman took note of his license plate number. (Ressler says he was loitering, but Evans indicates he was driving by and when he saw her write down his number, he stopped and demanded that she give him the paper. Pettit says he was driving by and got out of the car to ask her for directions, and she memorized the number to write down later.) She later reported that he said he would kill her and, when she eluded him, he ran to his car. As he fled the scene, the woman ran for help and called the authorities.
The car was not tan, as they had hoped, and did not have a matching license plate number, but they went to work on this tip anyway. At least she knew that the car she’d seen was a Citation. They traced the vehicle, says Evans, to a dealership that had rented the car to John Joubert, a twenty-year-old enlisted man at the Offutt Air Force Base, while his own car was under repair. That was interesting. He had another car, and it turned out to be a tan-colored Nova sedan. The license plate contained two of the seven digits (some sources erroneously say all seven) reported by the witness under hypnosis. It appeared they had a real break in the case and they rapidly prepared themselves.
As they learned more about John Joubert’s background, a warrant was issued to arrest him and search his quarters. That search turned up an important item: rope that seemed consistent with the rope used to bind Danny Joe. A search of Joubert’s car turned up more rope and a large hunting knife (Ressler says this was in his quarters). There was also a stack of racy detective magazines, and Ressler indicates that one contained a story about the murder of a newsboy. While DNA analysis had not yet been discovered and applied in criminal cases (that was two years away), the rope proved to be essential in making the case. Because of its unusual composition, it was nearly as good as other types of identifying evidence, such as a fingerprint.
Joubert was arrested and charged in the murder of Danny Joe Eberle. That same day, the FBI indicated that the rope from the Danny Joe Eberle murder had likely been made for the military in the Far East. That fact would soon become crucial.
A comparison of Ressler’s profile against Joubert’s situation showed that Ressler had gotten a number of things right. Joubert was 20, resided at least temporarily in the area, was sexually disturbed, was an enlisted man who worked with radar, was of a slight frame (five-foot-six and slender), and was good with his hands. He was also, according to Evans and Pettit, an assistant scoutmaster, which gave him access to boys. He hadn’t been at it long, but long enough to have become good friends with the scoutmaster and one of the boys in his charge.
In fact, before his interrogation, says Pettit, John Joubert asked to speak to the boy and reassure him that he’d never been in any danger. That cleared the way for a confession, which was precipitated by two things.
The investigators showed Joubert the rope they’d removed from his room and car, noting that it was extremely rare. He resisted this notion at first, but admitted that he’d gotten it from the scoutmaster, who had brought it back from Korea. (As it happened, the FBI had just discovered that the rope was from Korea.) He seemed taken aback that it could place him at a crime scene.
While he was vulnerable, Lieutenant Jim Sanderson of the Sarpy County Sheriff’s Department approached him with a way to make an admission without fully committing himself to a full confession. He talked with Joubert about his “bad” side, the part of himself that compelled the good part to do something he knew to be wrong. It wasn’t long before Joubert was ready to admit to everything.
He said that he’d killed the two boys and told the detectives interrogating him that he would likely kill again. He seemed relieved that they’d stopped him. The FBI confirmed that the rope in Joubert’s possession and the rope used to bind Danny were microscopically identical. Given how rare the rope was, it would make a solid case. They also compared a hair from Joubert’s car to both victims and found it to be consistent with Danny Joe’s hair sample. On January 12, Joubert was charged with two counts of murder and held for trial. But the trial never happened. On July 3, after initially pleading not guilty, he pleaded guilty to both counts.
There were several psychiatric assessments of Joubert at this time, and Pettit includes three of them. Ressler discusses another. He was variously labeled as obsessive-compulsive, sadistic, and suffering from schizoid personality disorder. This meant that he had strange beliefs, but was not psychotic. They noted how he managed to distance himself from the atrocity of his crimes and didn’t care much about anyone. He blamed his mother for many of his childhood problems, and had developed a ritualized approach to the murders. Yet all of them concluded that he knew that what he was doing was wrong and that he had a certain degree of control over his behavior. That made a mental illness qualification of his sanity untenable: He had not been psychotic at the time of the crimes.
A panel of three judges decided that, given the senselessness and brutality of the crimes, and the fact that he had killed the boys to evade detection, Joubert should be executed.
But the story wasn’t over. Joubert had lived elsewhere, and his case in Nebraska was making authorities in Portland, Maine, take another look at one of their own cases. Ressler says that he was showing slides about the case to a group of police officers during the fall of 1984 and one of them recognized the similarity to an unsolved crime in his jurisdiction. Ressler adds that while he’d initially said that the Eberle murder was the offender’s first, he’d revised his opinion after learning more about Joubert.
Two years earlier, on the evening of August 22, 1982, Richard “Ricky” Stetson, eleven years old, had gone out jogging in Back Cove, not far from his home in Portland. His family had passed by him in the car, so they knew where he’d been the last time they spoke to him that day. He didn’t return by dark, and they looked everywhere for him, to no avail. They knew that something terrible had happened, so they called the police.
Witnesses who had been in the area of Back Cove that evening recalled seeing the red-headed boy in the gray sweats out jogging. Many of them also recalled that another young man with dark hair was riding behind him on a ten-speed bicycle. Someone else, says Pettit, saw that young man riding in the opposite direction shortly before nine o’clock, and he was alone. But it was dark out now and difficult to see, so the police decided that a search would have to wait until daylight.
The next morning, a man driving along highway I-295 spotted a body by the side of the road, near a bridge. The male decedent appeared at first to have been the victim of a hit-and-run, but it became clear that he’d been stabbed to death and that there had been some attempt to undress him. His jogging pants were pulled over his hips, and his sweatshirt seemed to have been removed and put back on. The victim was young Ricky Stetson.
The autopsy indicated that Ricky had died from strangulation, resulting in asphyxia. He had also been stabbed in the chest, and there were bite marks on him made by human teeth, which had been slashed over with a knife, as if to obliterate them. But the bruise from the bite showed that the killer had a distinctive set of teeth, which would make a comparison possible, should they find a suspect.
A suspect was charged with murder, but his teeth did not match the imprint and there was no conclusive evidence against him, so after a year and a half, he was freed in 1984.
That’s when the detectives learned about the arrest of John Joubert.
Hair samples and dental impressions made the case against him. Dr. Lowell Levine, the director of the Forensic Science Unit for the New York State Police, confirmed that Joubert had bitten Stetson. Joubert was indicted for the boy’s murder. It took nearly another five years, but Joubert was finally convicted late in 1990, and sentenced in Maine to life without parole. Should his sentence in Nebraska ever be commuted, and should he get parole, he would have to go to Maine to serve his time. In other words, he’ll never get out of prison.
When Joubert was six, his parents were going through a difficult divorce but apparently did not discuss it with him. His father kept the house and Joubert moved with his mother and sister into a small apartment in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He spent a lot of time with a babysitter and fantasized about killing and cannibalizing her.
It didn’t help matters that he never fit in with other kids and ended up spending a lot of time alone and lonely. And though he was often near his father’s house when he stayed with the sitter, he was not allowed to see him. His anger and bitterness grew, especially as his mother controlled every aspect of his life and laid down strict rules for him. Then, in 1974, she moved the family to Portland, Maine.
Joubert asked to go live with his father, but his mother would not hear of it. So he remained in a place where he was unhappy, picked on, and increasingly isolated. He turned inward to entertain himself and continued to develop his violent fantasies.
When he was thirteen, Joubert went for a bicycle ride and slammed a pencil into a young girl’s back. As she cried out in pain, he felt stimulated and sexually aroused. No one caught him, so this experience became one that would make him feel powerful and give him fodder for fantasies. But then he’d want more. The daydreams were insufficient. So the next time, he armed himself with a razor blade. He mounted his bike and went looking for a girl. When he spotted the right target, he rode by quickly and slashed her.
In later adolescence, he also beat up an eight-year-old boy one day, attempting to strangle him. The boy fought and got away, but Joubert had learned from that incident how much he enjoyed turning the tables and becoming the bully. He enjoyed the sense of power and control he’d experienced. It was something he’d rarely felt and he wanted more of it. Approaching the kid had been easy, and he’d very nearly killed him. He then approached a girl, learned how little fear children had of strangers, and eventually armed himself with a knife.
He stabbed or slashed a few people, who survived his attacks, and never got caught. In fact, he became the “Woodford Slasher,” Pettit writes, and that made him feel quite bold. The police had even stopped him but had failed to ask any probing questions. To Joubert, attacking others was easy enough to do, and because it was satisfying and he could get away with it, he planned to continue. But two years went by before he struck again. Before joining the Air Force, he attacked once more, and this time he killed a boy: Ricky Stetson. Joubert left the area and went to Texas, then Nebraska. He put the incident behind him, and it was not something he would admit to, despite how many details he offered about the other two murders.
When Joubert finally gave up his story, he talked about how he’d approached Danny Joe Eberle. He’d seen the boy rolling the newspapers and had followed him as he started his route. At the fourth house, he’d approached him, pulled out a knife, clamped a hand over his mouth, and made him get into the car. Anyone could have seen them. They had walked across a parking lot and were visible together for long enough for Joubert to grow nervous. But Danny Joe didn’t resist. He did what he was told. Joubert told him to get on his face on the ground (hence the pebble impressions), and while he was doing this, Joubert retrieved the tape and rope from his car to bind and gag the boy. Then he picked Danny Joe up and placed him inside the trunk. No one had seen them, and now he was safe. He had a victim all to himself and no one was the wiser.
He drove out to the gravel road, came to a stop, and went around to open the trunk. The boy inside looked terrified, which made him feel in control. But it was getting light outside and there was a chance that someone would come by and see them. He removed the rope and ordered the boy to take off his outer clothing, which he did. He also begged for his life, but Joubert was oblivious. He told Danny Joe that he was going to die. He took out his knife and stabbed the boy in the back. Then he stabbed him in the chest several times until the boy died. For good measure, he bit Danny Joe on the shoulder and leg. On top of those marks, he left a star pattern, carved with the knife. He knew that bite marks could give someone away.
Contrary to the profile, he’d done this all quickly after the first encounter. It had been an ambition, a fantasy, and now it was done. He’d also worked alone, and it had not been his first. Wiping his hands and the weapon clean, he tossed Danny Joe’s clothes into a ditch and then dragged his body into some weeds. He knew he’d have to get out of there in short order, but he wanted to place the body out of sight. He’d gotten what he wanted: a helpless victim that he could cut and kill as he pleased. He’d enjoyed it. He needed now to go somewhere and relieved the sexual tension it had engendered. Memories of the begging alone would entertain him for quite a while, along with his true crime magazines. He returned to his room and masturbated. But as with all predators, the experience was never ultimately satisfying. It wasn’t long before he planned another one.
With the Chris Walden murder, Joubert had left the barracks early that morning, intent on finding a child. He’d felt a growing need to kill someone. He knew where kids in town got on the bus, and he’d targeted a young girl, but when he arrived, she was not there that freezing December morning. So he changed direction and headed for a nearby elementary school. That’s when he spotted Chris. Joubert approached him to ask for directions.
It was a high-risk maneuver. Others were walking to school as well, and people were driving. But Joubert showed Chris his knife sheath and ordered him to get into the car. The frightened boy obeyed, although Joubert was not much bigger than him. Joubert ordered him to the floor, even as people drove by and looked at them, and then he drove to an isolated area near the railroad tracks. He told Chris what to do and Chris acquiesced, although he was crying and clearly scared.
Joubert ordered him to undress, and though there was an icy wind, the boy removed each item of clothing, one at a time, and placed them neatly in a pile. Joubert told him to leave his underwear on, but to lie down. Chris refused, which surprised Joubert. Thus far, people had usually complied with his orders. And this time he had no rope or tape with him to bind his victim. Chris resisted him and they struggled, but Joubert managed to overpower the boy. Then Chris rolled away, so Joubert stabbed him with his knife. Chris screamed and Joubert kept stabbing until his victim lay still and bleeding. Finally, he sliced through the boy’s neck, to ensure that he was dead.
In The Murderer Next Door, psychologist David M. Buss, from the University of Texas at Austin, has done an in-depth analysis of factors involved in the development of the many types of murderers. Factors that correlate with criminality and delinquency (but might not cause them), he says, include:
- impulsiveness
- sensation-seeking
- childhood aggression
- lack of empathy
- deficit moral reasoning.
Males score higher on these traits than females. Buss also discusses the important role of fantasy. He calls it “homicidal scenario building,” and indicates that it can be a key factor in a situation resolving in murder. That includes daydreams, internal dialogue, planning, and any type of envisioning of killing another person. He believes that there is some evolutionary benefit to us to be able to do so, and claims that at some point in their lives most people have fantasized about murdering someone. That means, says Buss, that our brains have specialized circuits for considering murder as a solution to a problem. Simulation often works to relieve the tension, but for some people, it becomes a rehearsal for action.
In searching through an archive at the Center of Forensic Psychiatry in Michigan of 375 murderers from the past fifteen years, he found that roughly 72% showed evidence that the killer had indulged in homicidal ideation before committing the crime. A study of serial killers in 1989 by Prentky, Burgess, and others indicated that 86% of them had described having such fantasies on a recurrent basis prior to each murder. In many cases, they had seen someone at random and begun to draw that person into their fantasies, or they had been the brunt of someone’s behavior that they could not tolerate. Rather than deal with it in a socially appropriate manner, they used it to hone their anger and target the person with specific violent acts.
Joubert certainly experienced this. He had fantasies about murder at a surprisingly young age, and then began acting on them by stabbing and slashing little girls. Ressler describes “cognitive mapping” as a concept from psychology that indicates how certain people may become habituated to viewing the world in a specific manner. “It determines how the individual gives meaning to the events that happen in his world,” he writes. “Deviants may allow themselves to indulge in fantasies as they develop their cognitive mapping procedures. Antisocial people tend to develop an increasingly more hostile framework for how they deal with others, and others with them. Thus, their map determines the roads they take, and the roads they take tend to confirm their maps. So they get used to this and it becomes the foundation for how they fantasize and/or rehearse for murder.”
Although he was speaking in general, he also provided perspective specifically on Joubert (both in his book and told to the author of this article, as well as to Pettit).
Ressler attempts to understand what may have been at the base of Joubert’s early assaults. He’d had a friend with whom he’d developed a latent homosexual relationship. They grew quite close, but during one summer, Joubert went away. Upon his return, he learned that his dear companion had moved to another town. He was unable to find out where his friend had gone, and his mother offered no help. She apparently told him to get over it. So the stage was set: Joubert grieved over the loss of the friend, felt lost, and developed anger toward a female who symbolized authority and assistance but who hindered him from assuaging his pain. Soon afterward, Joubert began attacking young girls. Ressler apparently believes that the mother’s unsympathetic actions were instrumental in that. She had also refused to take Joubert to see his father after they were divorced, which added fuel to his smoldering fire.
So Joubert had crossed a line from fantasy into action and also seemed to be on a slippery slope toward more potent assaults.
Just as interesting is Pettit’s approach to Joubert. He begins his book with a show of sympathy but ends it with genuine concern for the families of the victims and not much for Joubert. He wasn’t happy with Joubert’s resistance to admitting to the murder in Maine, so he described Joubert’s behavior in such a way as to indicate that he did more or less admit to it. “It was as if he wanted to tell me straight out, to get it off his conscience, but couldn’t. I took his answer as a yes.” Apparently Joubert had believed that confessing the other two crimes ought to have spared him the death penalty, and when he was sentenced to die, he decided to say no more.
Nevertheless, Pettit was summoned to Maine during Joubert’s trial to be grilled on the stand for what Joubert may or may not have said to him. Joubert’s public defender accused Pettit of brokering information for the police, which he denied. He nevertheless “felt caught somewhere between justice and Joubert.”
Joubert’s story is told by Mark Pettit, a journalist who was keen to get the details. Over a period of two years, he followed the story and wrote to Joubert’s public defender and to Joubert to get an exclusive, which he describes in A Need to Kill. Clearly, he got the story, although Joubert was dubious and a bit anxious about how an interview might affect his chances of getting a new trial.
Pettit’s ambivalence over getting such a story, teetering between horror over what the man had done, sympathy for those who had lost children to a monster, and an attempt to be objective about his interview subject, is mirrored by others in similar positions.
Most famous is the tale, told by Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer, about author Joe McGinness and convicted Green Beret Killer, Jeffrey MacDonald. McGinness was being sued for libel by MacDonald, who’d invited him onto his team and given him access to his entire story in the belief that McGinness was going to show the world that he was innocent. He learned too late that McGinness believed that he was guilty, and MacDonald felt that McGinness had duped him so he could get an insider’s scoop on the case for his bestselling book. About that case, Malcolm writes that the journalist is often deceptive in the interests of the reader, which may then sacrifice the interests of the subject.
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on,” she wrote, “knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” They act toward the subject as if they intend to be sympathetic, but then write something that may be in complete opposition to that appearance. Often, the subject suffers for it once the piece is in print. And while that is the journalist’s right in the interests of truth and objectivity, Malcolm writes, they must not engage in “gratuitous two-facedness,” which she believed McGinness did. The morality of journalism on subjects like murder is almost always a tightrope act, and care must be taken to develop the story with as much integrity as possible. Objectivity is one thing, but outright deception for one’s own purposes is another. To some extent, every journalist who approaches a killer to attempt to tell his story must weigh these factors.
Perhaps the only journalist who did not have to consider both sides was Sandy Fawkes, who wrote Killing Time about her encounter with serial killer Paul John Knowles. She did not know he was a killer when she met him, although he assured her that a book about him would make her career. Once he was captured, she did write his story (recently reprinted), and because she’d never promised him anything, went ahead and told his story the way she wanted, including the fact that he was a poor conquest in bed.
But some journalists are pulled in without having made the choice, or after they’ve become less certain they want to write the story.
Journalist Michael Finkel learned that fugitive and family killer Christian Longo was posing as him when he was arrested, so he approached Longo after his conviction and wrote True Story, a book about both the case and his experience of being impersonated by Longo.
The Adversary, by Emmanuel Carrère, who had corresponded with Jean-Claude Romand in France, is a more poignant story along these lines. Romand had begun his path into criminality with a small lie, when he said he’d passed his final medical exams. He got away with that, and through a succession of frauds, devised the persona of a humanitarian doctor and researcher for the World Health Organization. He offered “investment opportunities” to his family and friends, and with their money, he supported a nice lifestyle for his wife and two daughters. Then, pressured by questions he couldn’t answer, he pretended to have cancer. When pressure mounted, on January 9, 1993, Romand murdered his wife, children, parents, and dog—allegedly to “spare” them the grief of realizing his deceptions. Psychiatrists decided that his lies had staved off despair. They diagnosed him as suffering from narcissism, mythomania, and an immature character.
Carrère assured Romand that he wanted to “understand as much as possible what had happened” and offered sympathy about Romand’s situation, although he personally felt extreme repugnance over the crime. He claimed he wanted to “show the terrible forces at work.” When Romand eventually accepted the invitation, Carrère found himself wondering what he’d gotten himself into. “Now the case and especially my interest in it rather disgusted me.” He admitted to guilt over not feeling guilty, but went ahead with his plan, adopting the right tone of “pathetic and sympathetic gravity” to gain Romand’s trust. It didn’t hurt that he pretended to accept Romand as himself a victim. And he did end up feeling genuine sympathy for the man, but in light of Romand’s life of lies and a certain amount of self-blindness, Carrère always wrestled with his ambivalence. In the end, Roman seemed to him a mixture of “blindness, cowardice, and distress.” The writing of the story, in the end, “could only be a crime or a prayer.”
On Joubert, Robert Ressler more or less had the last word.
Having waited for the legal processes to be completed, Ressler went with another agent to interview Joubert as part of the prison studies being conducted by the BSU. He’d learned that Joubert, now 28, had spent his time drawing on tissue paper renditions of his fantasies about violence with boys. “One depicted a boy by the side of the road, hog-tied,” he said, “and the second was of a boy on his knees as a man slid a knife into him.”
Joubert was reluctant to talk, but did offer useful information about stresses he’d experienced before he’d begun to have such violent fantasies, and just before he killed. In two instances, he had lost close friends, which had confused and frustrated him. It confirmed Ressler’s impression that stress had been instrumental in the development of violence.
When Ressler asked about the biting, Joubert explained his fantasies of cannibalism from childhood. He had attempted to obliterate the impressions by slashing through them in each victim. He admitted to getting excited by detective magazines at an early age, and had simultaneously learned from them what to do to avoid being caught. The boys who had most attracted him had resembled him at the age when he’d initially been aroused by thoughts of murdering other boys. In a sense, he was killing himself over what perhaps seemed most shameful to him.
As a favor, Joubert requested a set of the crime-scene photos, but Ressler would not comply.
In 1995, Joubert appealed his death sentence in Nebraska and the circuit court reviewed it. Joubert’s points included the fact that the court’s wording of the aggravating factors was unconstitutionally vague. A federal district court agreed, and the State of Nebraska appealed the decision. Joubert cross-appealed, but his claim that the wording of aggravating factor of “exceptional depravity” was vague was found to have little substance, since he clearly had displayed sadism in his torture of both boys. He had also, contrary to his denial, clearly killed them to avoid detection. Joubert offered other complaints as well, including ineffective counsel and the idea that the death penalty is discriminatory, but the court did not take the latter point seriously. One justice dissented, but the death sentence was upheld, and on July 17, 1996, John Joubert was executed.
Alex Kava, who had lived through the town’s ordeal when she was just out of college, was inspired to write a novel A Perfect Evil. She started it the year Joubert was executed. “I was surprised,” she says on her Web site, “to find how easily I could remember the raw emotions and the sheer panic surrounding those murders.” She watched a tape of Joubert’s last interview, went over newspaper accounts, and read the available books in preparation to detail how such an event can paralyze and transform a community.
In the end, it seems, Joubert’s short-lived rampage affected many lives.
Buss, David. The Murderer Next Door. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Carrère, Emmanuel. The Adversary. New York: Picador, 2000.
Evans, Colin. The Casebook of Forensic Detection. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.
Fawkes, Sandy. Killing Time. NY: Taplinger, 1979.
Finkel, Michael. “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Vanity Fair, June 2005, excerpted from True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Giannangelo, Stephen. J. The Psychopathology of Serial Murder: A Theory of Violence. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.
Kava, Alex. A Perfect Evil. (novel) Mira, 2001.
Joubert v. Hoskins. 94-3687/94-3849, District Court of Nebraska, January 25, 1996.
Malcolm, Janet. The Journalist and the Murderer. New York, Knopf, 1990.
Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. New York: Checkmark Books. 2000.
Pettit, Mark. A Need to Kill. New York: Ivy, 1990.
Prentky, R. A., Ann Burgess, F. Rolous, et al. “The Presumptive Role of Fantasy in Serial Sexual Homicide,” American Journal of Psychiatry. Vol. 146, 1989.
Ressler, Robert. Whoever Fights Monsters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Vronsky, Peter. Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. New York: Berkley, 2003.