John Joseph Fautenberry was born in New London, Connecticut on July 4, 1963. His father was a former Marine and police officer, and his parents separated shortly after his sister was born. He was raised by his mother through two further marriages, ignored by his stepfathers and beaten for trifles; one account has him beaten for confusing potato salad with tomato salad. He described nailing his own and his sister's blankets to their beds with an imaginary hammer so that they could not be taken away in the night.
He worked as a long-haul trucker, and the killings follow the roads. Over about five months he killed in four states. In November 1990 he shot Donald Nutley, whom he had met at a truck stop in Oregon, after the two went out shooting at targets. In New Jersey he killed a fellow trucker, Gary Farmer. In February 1991 he shot Christine Guthrie, a bank teller in Portland, after returning to Oregon from Ohio. In March 1991 he stabbed Jefferson Diffee at Juneau in Alaska.
The Ohio murder is the one he was condemned for. On February 17, 1991, near Cincinnati, Joseph Daron Jr, a forty-six-year-old truck driver from Milford and a father of two, picked him up hitchhiking. They drove to a restaurant, and as Fautenberry was getting out he reached back into the cab and shot Daron twice with a .22 pistol. Court records say Daron pleaded for his life first. Fautenberry drove the truck to woodland by the Ohio River, left the body, and used the truck and the credit cards to get himself back to Oregon.
The people he killed had generally been friendly to him. Most were fellow drivers or people he had got to know on the road; Daron had simply stopped for a hitchhiker. Robbery was the motive throughout.
He was arrested on March 17, 1991, and confessed to all five killings in interrogation, giving detail that tied him to the scenes.
He then confessed to one more. There had been a murder in 1984 for which another man had already been convicted. Fautenberry said he had done it. That is the fact from this case that should not be lost in the arithmetic of the rest.
In Ohio he gave up his right to be tried by a jury, pleaded no contest in July 1992, and was sentenced to death by a panel of three judges. New Jersey convicted him of manslaughter for Gary Farmer and gave him life. Alaska took a guilty plea for Jefferson Diffee and gave him ninety-nine years.
His lawyers argued that he had brain damage and that the state should pay for a neuropsychologist to examine him, his last mental assessment being thirteen years old. The parole board recommended against clemency after a hearing in June 2009, Governor Ted Strickland refused it on July 8, and the Sixth Circuit and the Supreme Court both declined to stop the execution.
He was executed at Lucasville on July 14, 2009 and pronounced dead at 10.37 in the morning. He had no final statement, and shook his head when asked. He looked at neither the victims' families nor his spiritual adviser. No family or friends of his own were present; his visitors the day before were his lawyer and a Catholic priest, and he had refused several offers to telephone his sister. Six people watched on behalf of the families, among them Gary Farmer's mother. Joseph Daron's daughter, who was four when her father was killed, came to the prison but chose not to watch, and said afterwards that she had come to know it was real and it was over.
The count here is five confessed, of which three produced convictions in three different states, and the 1984 murder he confessed to on top. Some sources give five and some give six, which is that same distinction stated as a range.