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In many cases, monsters manage to hide in plain sight, possibly even presenting themselves as a polite, intelligent, soft spoken teenager who blends in so well that no one suspects a thing. Between 1982 & 1983, three young boys were abducted, tortured & murdered in two different states more than 1,500 miles apart. Their killer started young & escalated quickly. This is a story about how the scariest people are sometimes the ones who look perfectly safe.
On Sunday, August 22, 1982 at about 7:45 pm, 11-year-old Richard “Ricky” Stetson told his parents that he was heading out for a jog in Back Cove, a basin with a 3 ½ mile loop near his home in Portland, Maine. When he left the house on that gorgeous summer day, he said he wasn’t going to be gone long. Because their neighborhood was safe & filled with children on the go, his parents weren’t worried. Sadly, Ricky never came home. As night fell & he still hadn’t returned, his parents contacted the police to report him missing.
The next morning, a man was driving along a rural stretch of I-295 when he spotted a body lying along the grass near Tukey’s Bridge in Portland off of Baxter Boulevard not far off the jogging path. Authorities at the scene initially questioned if Ricky had died as a result of a hit-and-run, but his injuries would quickly rule this theory out.
Although there were no signs of sexual assault, it appeared that his killer had attempted to undress him as his sweatshirt looked as it had been removed & put back on. There was both internal & external evidence that proved he had been strangled both manually as well as with a ligature. He was also stabbed in the chest & there were human bite marks to his right leg that the killer clearly tried to conceal with criss-cross slashes over the injuries. Because this was something forensic dentists had never seen before, investigators considered this a signature crime, something very unique to the killer.
Many people had seen the red-headed, freckled boy wearing gray sweatpants as he jogged along Back Cove on Sunday evening. Multiple witnesses recalled seeing a dark-haired young man riding a 10-speed bike closely behind him while another saw the same young man riding in the opposite direction shortly before 9 pm. Philip Vezina, Ricky’s former neighbor had also seen the man & agreed to be hypnotized at the request of the police in order to create a sketch.
Although Portland investigators pursued every lead, a year went by before a suspect was apprehended. However, by February 1984, after 1 ½ in custody, 24-year-old Joseph Anderson’s charges were dismissed after his teeth were not a match to the bite mark found on Ricky’s body. With this, the case grew cold.
Little did investigators know, but by this point in time, Ricky’s killer had moved 1,500 miles across the country & murdered two more young boys.
A little over one year after Ricky’s murder, 13-year-old Danny Joe Eberle woke up at about 6 am to deliver 70 copies of the Omaha World-Herald on Sunday, September 18, 1983 in Bellevue, Nebraska. At the time, Bellevue was a small, midwestern town along the Iowa border that was largely reliant on employment from the nearby Offutt Airforce Base. The community was tight knit & residents normally felt safe.
As Danny Joe picked up his papers at a convenience store, rolled them up in the parking lot, placed them in his delivery bag & set off along the quiet streets of his neighborhood, it was still dark outside.
Sadly, no one, including Danny Joe, realized that a tan car was trailing slowly behind him, watching his every move. That morning, he would only have the chance to deliver 3 of the 70 newspapers he carried before a monster would abduct & murder him.
By midmorning, complaints started coming in after the majority of Danny Joe’s customers had not received their papers. When his father Leonard went out to look for his son, he found his bike abandoned by a fence at the fourth house along his route with papers stacked alongside it, but Danny Joe was nowhere to be seen. Knowing how proud his son was of his bike, Leonard knew that he would have never willingly left it behind.
After police were notified, a manhunt began around the immediate area while investigators spoke with each person along Danny Joe’s route. They went from building to building & house to house, but no one had seen him & no clues were found.
Danny Joe’s brother, as well as other boys about the same age, mentioned that a man in a tan car had been following them in the days before the murder. He never approached them, but investigators wondered if he had been scoping out the area, trying to make his selection.
It wasn’t until three days later, on Wednesday, September 21, when searchers found Danny Joe’s body off of a gravel road among some weeds about four miles from where his bike was found, not far from the Offutt Air Force Base. He was lying face-down in the weeds with his hands & feet bound behind his back with a rope while surgical tape covered his mouth. The binding had been tied so tightly that it cut through his skin, leaving deep grooves in his flesh. His cause of death was from blood loss as well as from hemorrhaging at the top of his skull that was caused from a harsh blow to the head.
Although he had been stripped down to his underwear there were no signs of sexual assault. There was a star-shaped pattern cut into his chest, he had been stabbed eleven times in the chest & back & dumped where he was found. There were also bite marks to his body that had slashes through them, just as there had been in Ricky’s case.
Because the murder involved a child & because President Reagan had recently put murders & the kidnapping of children under federal jurisdiction, FBI investigators were called in from nearby Omaha to assist in catching the killer.
Special Agent Robert Ressler had been on his way to a homicide seminar when he was called in & immediately headed to Omaha. As he analyzed the location where Danny Joe’s body had been recovered, he immediately noted that the killer had left him in a place where he could easily be seen. This suggested that the killer was of slight build & had been unable to move him farther. It also suggested they weren’t experienced & had likely been panicked. Ressler believed it could have been his first murder.
Although the street where Danny Joe was found was a dead-end, it wasn’t far from where people would be driving & even though he had been abducted when it was still dark outside, the killer could have easily been spotted by someone driving by. It’s likely the person was familiar with the area since they were aware of the dead-end road.
As had been the case with Ricky’s murder, other than the rope, no evidence had been left behind. Investigators brought in local troublemakers, sex offenders & pedophiles, but each suspect was quickly ruled out.
Meanwhile, the community of Bellevue were terrified, no longer willing to allow their children to play freely outside as they had always done before. Paper routes were either canceled or taken over by adults as police scrambled to find leads.
From the information he collected, Ressler knew to be on the lookout for a white man driving a tan car. Based on his experience with sexual predators, the man was likely young, in his late teens to early twenties.
Since Danny Joe’s bike had been found upright & without a struggle, this suggested the man was either friendly or non-threatening or that Danny Joe had known him & felt safe.
Besides being a local, the perpetrator had likely gotten no more than a high school education & may have been employed at a job that required little skills. Although the crime had likely been pre-planned, it seemed to lack follow-through which showed a lack of experience as well as intelligence.
Since Danny Joe was found in his underwear, the crime was likely sexually motivated even though he hadn’t been sexually assaulted. The killer seemed to be driven by fantasies rather than experience. He was likely single, a loner with a mental or emotional imbalance & because Danny Joe had been abducted so early on a Sunday morning, the killer could have been up all night drinking, something that may have empowered him to act.
The rope used to bind Danny Joe was sent to FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. for analysis & proved to be very unique & difficult to identify. Although the outside of the rope was basic white nylon, there were 24 different types of fibers & 106 different colored yarns on the inside made of various materials.
Less than three months later & under seven miles from where Danny Joe had been killed, 12-year-old Christopher Walden, the son of an Air Force officer stationed at Offutt Air Force base, disappeared on his way to school in Papillion, Nebraska on December 2. It was an eight-block walk that he had made countless times although it was the first time his mom allowed him to go alone since Danny Joe’s murder.
Two days later, on December 4, two pheasant hunters came upon his snow-covered, frozen remains deep into the woods in a grove of trees outside of town in the same area where Danny Joe had been stabbed to death.
According to his autopsy, Chris had been stabbed seven times, some of the wounds had been inflicted both before & after death. He wore only his underwear, his throat had been slashed to the point that he was nearly decapitated. There were carvings across the entirety of his chest & abdomen made with a sharp knife that resembled a plant with a stem & leaves. here were no signs of sexual assault & his clothing was found near his body.
After two young boys had been sadistically murdered in such close proximity to one another, the FBI believed that the same killer was responsible. Had this been the case, the killer was escalating in his violence. Because two sets of footprints led to the site of where Chris’ remains were found while only one left the scene, indicated a sole offender.
Two female witnesses came forward to report seeing Chris with a young, white male in a tan sedan just before he vanished. They were put under hypnosis in hopes they could better recall what he looked like. Although the image of the man was not vivid, they were able to work with a police sketch artist to create an image that was distributed among local media.
The man was young with a slender, short stature, approximately the same height as Chris. One of the witnesses recalled him wearing a woolen cap that was pulled down his forehead while the other recalled no cap. Although one was able to provide a partial license plate number for the tan sedan, it was in no concise order.
Understandably, the already terrified community had erupted into a full-blown panic after Chris’ murder.
With the evidence from Chris’ murder, Ressler refined his profile of the killer. Both boys were of similar height & build, suggesting that the killer was attracted to their appearance. Because each boy had been stripped down to their underwear yet neither had been sexually assaulted, suggested that the killer was angry with himself & possibly in denial of his homosexuality. Ressler believed that the killer was a young, white male who was sexually ambivalent.
It’s likely the killer was involved in extracurricular activities that put him in close contact with young boys, possibly coaching a sports team or leading a Boy Scout troop. Since they had the wherewithal to cover the bite wounds with a slash, they likely read police & detective magazines.
Just shy of six weeks later on January 11, 1984, Barbara Weaver, a school attendant from a Bellevue preschool noticed a man driving around & stopping on the street in front of the daycare. Feeling uneasy from the recent murders, she began writing down his license plate & was stunned when the man got out of the car & suddenly shoved her & threatened her with death before he ran back to his car & sped away.
After contacting authorities, she mentioned that the man in question resembled the police sketch she had seen circulating after Danny Joe & Chris’ murders. Thankfully she was also able to provide authorities with his license plate number that was traced to a dealership who rented the car to a 20-year-old man, John Joseph Joubert, who worked as a radar technician at nearby Offutt Air Force Base. His own car, a tan Nova sedan, was getting repaired.
Joubert matched a number of descriptions of Ressler’s profile; he was young at only 20-years-old, he lived locally, volunteered his time as an assistant scout leader, he read detective magazines, was sexually disturbed & had a slight frame standing at 5’6”.
When Joubert was brought in, investigators were met with a quiet, polite & cooperative young man. He calmly answered all of their questions, he had an explanation for everything asked of him & he denied having anything to do with Danny Joe or Chris’ murders.
However, when his quarters were searched, investigators found a rope that was identical to the bindings found binding Danny Joe’s arms & legs. It was manufactured in Korea & rarely used in the United States, making it an unusual type of rope. There was also additional rope as well as surgical tape & a hunting knife that matched what was used during the murders in his car & he was arrested that night.
With evidence & pressure building, Joubert confessed to Danny Joe & Chris’ murders, giving information that only the killer would know. He later voiced feeling relieved at being caught since he would have likely killed again. He indicated that he had been given the unique rope by his scout master who brought it back from Korea. They also found hair on the right floorboard of his car that microscopically matched Danny Joe’s hair.
On January 12, 1984 he was charged with two counts of murder & held on a $10 million bond pending trial.
Psychiatrists eventually diagnosed Joubert with a mixed personality disorder that included obsessive compulsive & schizoid traits, a lack of interest in social relationships & tendency toward a solitary life. Although he had strange beliefs, he was not psychotic, but he was able to distance himself from the atrocity of his crimes.
He blamed his mother for many of his childhood issues. Although he vehemently denied it, psychiatrists also classified him as a latent homosexual, a same-sex attraction that is usually unrecognized or actively denied. He indicated that he was a virgin.
On July 3, 1984, after initially pleading not guilty, he changed his plea to guilty to both counts & a panel of three judges sentenced him to death.
Because Joubert lived in Portland, Maine, authorities there were taking another look at their own unsolved cases. When Ressler was showing slides about Danny Joe & Chris’ murders to a group of police officers during the fall of 1984, one of them realized that the details were exceptionally similar to that of the murder of Ricky Stetson.
Based on the hair samples & tooth impressions from Ricky’s case, Joubert was indicted for his murder on January 10, 1986. In late 1990, he was sentenced to life in prison by the state of Maine, which does not have the death penalty.
John Joseph Joubert IV was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1963. He had a sister who was two years younger & their mother was described as controlling, cold & extremely manipulative. At 6-years-old, his parents divorced & while their dad remained in the family home, their mom moved him & his sister into a dilapidated apartment & forbade him from seeing his father.
Although he was highly intelligent with an IQ of 123 which was well-above average, he struggled in school as he was often bullied, being much smaller than his classmates. Wanting to be part of something, he decided to join the Eagle Scouts, but he remained alone much of the time, increasingly isolated & lonely.
At 11-years-old in 1974, his mom relocated him & his sister to Portland, Maine, leaving their father behind. It wasn’t long before he faded from their lives & he grew to loathe his mom, wanting to move back in with his father. While his mom worked as a bookkeeper, they lived in a two-family home in the middle-class Oakdale neighborhood.
His mother continued to control most of the aspects of his life, including what he ate, who he was friends with & where he went. Rather than nurturing him, she crushed his spirit with expectations, rules & silence. Despite these challenges at home, Joubert was a good student, an active member of the Eagle Scouts, a member of his high school track team & he played the clarinet in the band. From 12-17-years-old, he delivered newspapers in his neighborhood in order to pay his tuition at his all-boys Catholic high school.
Despite his innocuous activities, he turned inward to entertain himself & began experiencing sadistic, homicidal fantasies. These thoughts got so overwhelming that he considered murdering strangers that he passed on the street. He imagined binding & gagging them, should they resist. He dreamed of strangling his babysitter, who lived across the street, & consuming her body, thoughts he later attributed to seeing his father try to strangle his mother until she passed out. He later indicated that he had no memory of this incident since he had only been 4-years-old, but it was something his mother told him about after he was convicted of the murders.
In December 1979, at 16-years-old, Joubert began to put these sick fantasies into action. As he rode his green, 10-speed bike past a 6-year-old girl who was outside her house, he stabbed her in the back with a pencil. In January 1980, he approached a 27-year-old woman who was walking to class at the University of Southern Maine, covered her mouth & stabbed her in the side with a knife, puncturing her kidney. After having surgery at Maine Medical Center, she spent a week recovering in the hospital.
In March of that same year, 9-year-old Michael Witham was summoned into a wooded lot by Joubert who said he needed to ask him a question. When Michael got closer, he asked him his age, his name & where he lived & after he answered the questions, he turned to leave. This was when Joubert slashed his neck with an X-acto knife, causing a 2 inch wound that required 12 stitches & had been only inches from being fatal. Michael was only able to tell investigators that he had been attacked by a young white male in his late teens to early twenties.
Joubert enjoyed the sense of power & control, something he rarely felt, but wanted more of. He felt empowered by the fact that he hadn’t been caught & because it was satisfying & something he was able to get away with, he planned to continue.
The once-peaceful community was suddenly terrified of these random attacks & school officials instructed children not to walk home alone.
After graduating from Cheverus High School in Portland in 1981, he moved on to Norwich University in Vermont, but dropped out after completing only ten credits. Unable to find work in the summer of 1982, he decided to enlist in the Air Force in August, the same month that Ricky’s body was found. Ricky was his first victim, a murder he committed when he was only 19-years-old.
He soon left Maine, first going to Texas & then to Nebraska. When he finally confessed to the murders, he discussed how he approached Danny Joe Eberle. He first noticed him rolling his newspapers in the convenience store parking lot & began following him as the boy started his paper route. As Danny Joe reached the fourth house, he pulled out a knife, covered his mouth with his hand & made him get into his car.
Terrified, the young boy did as he was told. He bound him with rope, put tape over his mouth & placed him in the trunk. After he stopped along a gravel road, he stripped Danny Joe down to his underwear & began stabbing him in the chest & back until he was dead. He also bit the boy’s shoulder & leg, carving a star pattern into the mark with a knife since he knew that bite marks could identify him. He tossed Danny Joe’s clothes into a ditch, dragged his body into some short weeds & drove away.
From here, he drove to a nearby McDonald’s, washed the blood from his hands in the men’s room & ordered some breakfast. He then attended a Boy Scout meeting where he was an assistant troop leader. During the meeting, they discussed the abductions & he urged the boys to look after one another.
For Chris Walden’s murder, Joubert left the military barracks early that morning in search of a new victim. Knowing where kids got on the bus for school, he drove out to an area with his eyes set on a female victim. Once there, he realized the specific girl he had in mind wasn’t there on that frigid December morning, so he set out to a nearby elementary school. This was when he spotted Chris, who he approached & asked for directions.
Since other kids were making their way to school while adults were heading to work, this was a very risky move. He showed Chris his knife sheath & ordered him into the car. Although Joubert wasn’t much bigger than the 12-year-old, the terrified boy did as he was told. He drove out to an isolated area near the train tracks & ordered the boy to undress down to his underwear. When he told him to lie down, he was surprised when Chris refused & although a struggle ensued, Joubert managed to overpower him. This was when he began stabbing him & slashing his neck.
When Ressler asked Joubert about the biting, he explained his childhood fantasies of cannibalism. At an early age, he was fascinated by detective magazines, which is where he learned what to do to avoid getting caught. This was why he knew to attempt to obliterate the bite marks with a knife.
Not only had he confessed to killing Ricky, Danny Joe & Chris, but he also confessed to the random violent attacks within his Oakdale neighborhood of Portland, Maine.
During an interview from death row before his execution, Joubert indicated that he had chosen Ricky, Danny Joe & Christopher because they reminded him of himself when he was their age. He believes he specifically targeted them because it felt like he was targeting himself.
To those who knew Joubert, he never stood out, although the contrast between how he appeared & who he truly was, didn’t surprise the experts who have studied serial killers. According to Peter Smerick, a retired FBI criminal profile specialist who worked in the agency’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, They are not the Charles Manson types who people get scared of when they see them on the street, they are the type of people who blend in & don’t draw attention to themselves.
While in prison, he began writing letters to a woman from Ireland, 37-year-old Theresa O’Brien. According to Joubert, the two corresponded over the course of four years & since 1994, she visited him each spring. They were allowed to kiss on the lips at both the start & end of each of their visits & hold hands during their visits.
In 1995, Joubert appealed his death sentence in Nebraska, but it was upheld & for over a decade, he waited on death row. His waiting came to an end on July 17, 1996 at 33-years-old. On his final night, he ate a dinner that consisted of pizza with green peppers & onions, strawberry cheesecake & black coffee.
As he was guided toward the electric chair, he looked calm & sat down without resistance. He gave a brief apology after the guards strapped his arms & legs to the chair while the families of the victims sat only feet away behind a glass partition. This was a moment they had been waiting for, relieved that their son’s killer would never walk the streets or harm anyone ever again.
At 12:19 am, 2,450 volts coursed through Joubert’s body until he grew limp & still. After two jolts & several minutes, a doctor pronounced John Joseph Joubert IV dead.
Although he may have been gone, the scars the victims’ family members wore would never heal. Danny Joe’s parents never returned to their Bellevue home, unable to bear living in the same place where their son left on a Sunday morning to deliver papers & never came back. Every corner held his memory, too painful to stay.
Christopher’s mother kept her son’s room exactly as it had been on the morning he left for school, unable to even open the door. The room was frozen in time, waiting for a boy who would never see his 13th birthday.
After Ricky’s death, his father never recovered as friends indicate he was never the same man again after living through the pain of losing his beloved son.
Joubert hadn’t just killed three boys, he upended the lives of families who would never be the same, he shattered communities that no longer felt safe allowing their children to play outside & be free. He planned his attacks, watched & waited while they were out doing routine activities. They were jogging, delivering papers & walking to school. He looked like a child himself, a friendly neighbor you passed on the street with a smile & a wave. This case reinforces the fact that monsters don’t always look evil, many times they look like everyone else until they decide to show you exactly who they are.
Joubert once said that the moment before he acted was a moment that he felt invincible, untouchable. He felt like a god who was able to hold life & death in his hands, feeling powerful while his young victims were powerless. The three boys he killed were only just starting their lives, they were taken during ordinary moments when they should have been safe.
References:
- Wikipedia: Back Cove
- KCRA 3: The Boy Scout turned serial killer: The John Joubert story
- Daily News: How notorious serial killer John Joubert’s days of slaying children came to an end
- History: A 13-year-old newspaper delivery boy is found dead
- Studocu: Analysis of John Joubert: The Nebraska boy snatcher case study
- Prezi: Serial killer John Joubert
- The SMCC Beacon: Inside the mind of John Joseph Joubert IV: Part one
- Justia U.S. Law: State v. Joubert
- American Psychological Association: Latent homosexuality
- Murderpedia: John Joseph Joubert IV
- Medium: The quiet killer who hunted children for the fear in their eyes: A true story of John Joseph Joubert IV
- Fandom: Joubert IV John Joseph
- Crime Library: John Joubert, Nebraska Boy Snatcher
- YouTube: Forensic Files – Season 4, Episode 7 – Ties that Bind
- Sarpy County, Nebraska: Sarpy sheriff unveils Eberle-Walden crime victims memorial
