John Joseph Fautenberry was born in New London, Connecticut, on July 4, 1963. At his sentencing in Ohio, a family friend, his maternal aunt and a defense psychologist all described a childhood of repeated abuse and rejection, first by his father and then by two stepfathers; the psychologist, Dr. Nancy Schmidtgoessling, said he had been frequently abused, humiliated, rejected and finally abandoned by them, and carried extreme feelings of worthlessness, distrust and suppressed rage. The family moved between Ohio and Hawaii and settled in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, in 1983.
He told the court his drinking and drug use began in high school, led to his discharge from the military and contributed to everything falling apart in November 1990. His mother died of cancer in 1985. He drove trucks cross-country, and by 1991 had one felony conviction, for carrying a concealed weapon, and at least one misdemeanor. In 1986 he moved to Portland, Oregon. Olivia Priest, who had been his stepmother and later became his girlfriend, testified at his sentencing that she knew him as kind, caring and sometimes overprotective, and acknowledged his frequent drinking and drug use.
The killings follow the roads. In early November 1990 he quit his trucking job for a Portland company, complaining of the hours, and spent a few days loading and unloading trucks for cash at the Flying J truck stop in Portland, where he met Donald Nutley, forty-seven, of Waco, Texas. Nutley, who owned several guns, invited him to go target shooting near Mount Hood; they fired at bottles until about sunset, and as they walked back to Nutley's vehicle Fautenberry shot him once in the head with a .38, took about $10,000 in cash and left the body in the Mount Hood area, where it was found in April 1991. In early February 1991, traveling from Rhode Island to Ohio, out of money and in need of gas, he met Gary Farmer, twenty-seven, a fellow trucker from Springfield, Tennessee, at the Pilot truck plaza in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Farmer, according to Fautenberry, offered him food and money in exchange for sex; the Ohio Supreme Court recorded the offer as alleged. In Farmer's truck Fautenberry shot him once in the head with a .22 handgun, took his wallet and left the body in the cab.
The Ohio murder is the one he was condemned for. On February 17, 1991, he left his sister's home near Cincinnati with no money and no transportation and began hitchhiking on Interstate 275. Joseph William Daron Jr., forty-five, a divorced father of two young daughters from Miami Township, stopped and offered him a ride. Fautenberry said he was trying to reach Columbus, and Daron drove some twenty miles out of his way to a restaurant near Interstate 71 where he might find another ride. As he got out, Fautenberry reached back into the car and shot Daron twice in the right side of the chest with the same .22 he had used on Farmer. He drove to woods on the north bank of the Ohio River and threw the body there, where a motorist found it near River Downs on March 20, and used Daron's car, cash and credit cards to get back to Oregon; the sentencing panel noted that he also took Daron's Bible. The Ohio Supreme Court described Daron as a devoted father and religious man who lost his life because he stopped to help.
He reached Portland on February 24 and met a friend, Wes Halbrook, at a bar; Christine Anne Guthrie, thirty-two, a bank teller, was among the people invited back to Halbrook's apartment for a party. The next day she and Fautenberry went to Rockaway Beach and spent a few days at the Silver Sands Motel. On the drive back he took her into woods, saying they would find something interesting there, and shot her three times in the back of the head with a Jennings J-22 pistol. He took her bank card and the address book in which she kept its PIN and used them to withdraw cash. Her body was found near the logging settlement of Timber in April 1991. He left Daron's car at the Seattle-Tacoma airport and went to Juneau, Alaska, where, by the court's account, he worked on a fishing boat and drank heavily. There he met Jefferson Diffee, thirty-nine, a miner at the Greens Creek mine, and on March 13 went home with him, beat him, handcuffed him and stabbed him seventeen times. The Ohio Supreme Court found that he had committed each murder simply as a means of paying his way across the country.
Under surveillance since he was linked to Daron's car, he was arrested in his Juneau hotel room on March 17, 1991, with Diffee's bank card. He confessed to all five killings, giving detail that tied him to the scenes, and then to a sixth: the stabbing in 1984 of Richard F. Combs, twenty-five, a homeless man in Roseburg, Oregon, whom, by his own account, he met in a park and stabbed in the throat in a rage over losing his job. Another man, Michael T. Collier, had already pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the Combs case, though he had since recanted. The lead on Fautenberry was investigated and dropped. After a taped telephone interview with a Cincinnati television station, he cut his wrist with a razor and was found in time. He denied being a serial killer, saying he killed for money.
Shortly after his arrest he gave four statements to different law enforcement officers, describing the sites, how he had carried out each killing and where the bodies could be found. In Alaska he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for Diffee and received the maximum, ninety-nine years, with at least sixty-six to be served before any early release. A Hamilton County grand jury indicted him on March 27, 1991, on two counts of aggravated murder, with robbery and course-of-conduct specifications, and counts of aggravated robbery and theft of a car and a credit card. He waived a jury, pleaded no contest to all five counts on July 23, 1992, and after a mitigation hearing on September 14 a three-judge panel unanimously sentenced him to death. The defense psychologist found average intelligence, no sign of organic impairment and a mixed personality disorder with narcissistic and antisocial traits, but no mental disease or defect. In an unsworn statement he expressed sorrow for the person he had become and asked for a life sentence so that he could work with other abused children. The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed on July 5, 1995, finding error in the admission of victim-impact statements recommending a sentence but no grounds for reversal. In New Jersey he pleaded guilty in the Farmer case and got life; some reports give the conviction there as manslaughter.
His lawyers argued that he had brain damage and that the state should pay for a neuropsychologist, 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, the last refusal coming about two hours before.
He was executed at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility 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 afterward that she had come to know it was real and it was over.