John Fautenberry confessed to killing five people in four states over about five months, from November 1990 to March 1991. He was a former long-haul truck driver who had worked for a company based in Portland, Oregon. By the account the Supreme Court of Ohio drew from his own statements, he shot a man he met at a Portland truck stop, a fellow trucker in New Jersey, a Cincinnati-area father who gave him a ride, and a woman he met at a party in Portland, and then stabbed a man in Juneau, Alaska, where he was arrested. The court found that he carried out each murder "simply as a means to facilitate his trip across the country."
Only the Ohio case carried a death sentence. In July 1992 he waived a jury and pleaded no contest in Cincinnati to the aggravated murder of Joseph Daron Jr., and a three-judge panel in Hamilton County sentenced him to death that September. He had already pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Alaska, and the Associated Press reported that he was convicted of manslaughter in New Jersey and given a life sentence there. After seventeen years of appeals he was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville on July 14, 2009. He was 45.
Little is known of his early life beyond what witnesses said at his 1992 sentencing hearing. A family friend testified that his childhood was difficult and marked by abuse and rejection, first from his father and then from two stepfathers. His maternal aunt described the same abusive home and said he had lived with her in his early twenties, when she found him cooperative, thoughtful and kind. A woman who had been his stepmother, and later his girlfriend, described him as kind and caring, though sometimes overly protective, and acknowledged that he drank and used drugs often.
In his own unsworn statement to the panel, Fautenberry spoke about good and bad memories from childhood, including physical and emotional abuse of both himself and his mother by his father and stepfathers. He said 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 lawyer in 2009, Dennis Sipe, told the Associated Press that he had served in the U.S. Navy. Before the killings he had one felony conviction, for carrying a concealed weapon, and at least one misdemeanor, according to the Supreme Court of Ohio. His date and place of birth have not been reported.
In 1990 he drove trucks cross-country for a Portland company. In early November he told a supervisor he was quitting because the hours were too long, and he spent the next few days loading and unloading trucks at a truck stop in Portland.
At that truck stop Fautenberry met Donald Nutley. The Associated Press later described their meeting the same way: the two men met at the truck stop and went target shooting together. According to the Ohio court's summary of his confession, Nutley invited him to shoot near Mount Hood, east of Portland. Fautenberry shot him there, took about $10,000 in cash, and left. Nutley's body was found in April 1991. Little more is known of his life, and no Oregon charge in his death has been reported; it stands as a killing Fautenberry confessed.
In early February 1991, according to the court, at a truck plaza in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, Fautenberry met Gary Farmer, a fellow truck driver, and got into Farmer's truck. He shot Farmer and took his wallet.
The Associated Press reported in 2009 that he was convicted of manslaughter in Farmer's death and sentenced to life in prison. The date and court of the New Jersey case have not been reported.
By mid-February Fautenberry had spent time in the Cincinnati area. On February 17, 1991, he left his sister's home in Cincinnati and began hitchhiking on Interstate 275. Joseph Daron Jr. stopped and offered him a ride. The Associated Press gave Daron's age as 46 and his home as Milford, a Cincinnati suburb. The Supreme Court of Ohio described him as the father of two young children, "a devoted father and religious man."
Fautenberry told Daron he was trying to get to Columbus. Daron drove about twenty miles out of his way to take him near the junction with Interstate 71, where he might find another ride. There, the court found, Fautenberry shot Daron. He took Daron's wallet, cash, credit cards and car, and used them to travel back to Oregon. The panel that sentenced him noted that he had taken even Daron's Bible.
The Supreme Court of Ohio wrote that Daron "lost his life because he stopped to offer appellant some assistance." The sentencing panel called the crime "plotted, vicious, persistent and utterly callous," pointing to the twenty-mile detour Daron made for a stranger, the two shots, and the theft of his belongings.
Fautenberry reached Portland on February 24, 1991. That evening he met a friend at a bar, and the friend invited several people back to his apartment for a party. One of them was Christine Guthrie, described by the Associated Press as a Portland bank teller. The next day she and Fautenberry drove to the coast at Rockaway, Oregon, and stayed there for a few days.
On the way back, according to the court's summary of his confession, he shot her. He took her bank card and her address book, in which she kept the card's code, and used them to withdraw cash. Her body was found in April 1991. As with Nutley, no Oregon charge in her death has been reported.
From Oregon, Fautenberry went north to Juneau. In early March 1991, the court said, he worked on a fishing boat there and drank heavily. He met Jefferson Diffee, whom the Associated Press identified as a Juneau man. On March 13, 1991, he stabbed Diffee to death.
Alaska police arrested Fautenberry shortly after Diffee's death. Soon after his arrest he gave four statements to different law enforcement officers. In them he described each killing, where it took place and where the bodies could be found. Officers who later testified for the state in Ohio said he cooperated, confessed to all five deaths, and helped them locate the bodies and other evidence.
The investigators who testified at his Ohio sentencing included Larry Ott, a special agent of the FBI, and two state officers, Thomas Nelson and Walter Bowman. Six law enforcement witnesses in all appeared for the prosecution.
In Alaska he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Diffee's death. Margaret Berck of the Alaska Public Defender Agency later testified in Ohio that he had received 99 years, and that he would have to serve at least 66 years before any early release.
On March 27, 1991, a Hamilton County grand jury returned a five-count indictment against Fautenberry for the death of Joseph Daron. Two counts charged aggravated murder, each with a specification that the killing was part of a course of conduct involving the purposeful killing of two or more people and a specification that it was committed during an aggravated robbery, along with firearm specifications. The other counts charged aggravated robbery, theft of a motor vehicle and theft of a credit card. The Hamilton County prosecutor, Joseph T. Deters, and an assistant prosecutor, Christian J. Schaefer, handled the case for the state. H. Fred Hoefle and Peter Pandilidis represented Fautenberry on his appeal to the Supreme Court of Ohio.
Fautenberry waived his right to a jury. On July 23, 1992, a three-judge panel accepted his pleas of no contest to all five counts. Having heard the facts he admitted and read the transcripts of his confessions, the panel found him guilty on every count. The Associated Press, in its 2009 reports, described the plea as covering two counts each of aggravated murder and grand theft and one count of aggravated robbery.
At the mitigation hearing that followed, the defense presented its lay witnesses on videotape: the family friend, the former stepmother, the aunt and the Alaska public defender. Its main witness was a psychologist, Dr. Nancy Schmidtgoessling. She found that Fautenberry was of average intelligence and showed no sign of organic impairment. She diagnosed a mixed personality disorder with narcissistic and antisocial traits, but said that this was not a "mental disease or defect" in the legal sense. She also testified that the killing would probably have gone on had he not been arrested in Alaska.
Fautenberry then gave his unsworn statement. He closed it by expressing sorrow for what he had become and by asking for a life sentence, so that he could work with abused children.
The state's six law enforcement witnesses testified to the five deaths and to his confessions and cooperation. Victim-impact statements were also put before the panel from Daron's family, from Daron's employer and from the arresting officer, and each of them asked that Fautenberry receive the maximum sentence.
On September 14, 1992, the panel unanimously sentenced him to death for the aggravated murder of Joseph Daron. It imposed consecutive prison terms on the remaining counts, apart from those merged. The panel found two statutory aggravating circumstances: a course of conduct involving the purposeful killing of two or more people, and a murder committed during an aggravated robbery. It gave no mitigating weight to his age, 27 at the time of the murder, or to his prior record, and it acknowledged his confessions and cooperation; the Supreme Court of Ohio later said that cooperation deserved little weight.
The First District Court of Appeals in Hamilton County affirmed the convictions and the sentence. Fautenberry then appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio as of right. The case was submitted on March 22, 1995, and decided on July 5, 1995, in State v. Fautenberry, 72 Ohio St.3d 435. Justice Resnick wrote the opinion. Chief Justice Moyer and Justices Douglas, F.E. Sweeney, Pfeifer and Cook concurred; Justice Wright concurred in the judgment only.
The court took up seven propositions of law. Its main finding of error concerned the victim-impact statements. Under the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Payne v. Tennessee, evidence about the victim and the effect of his death on his family could be heard, but the recommendations from family members, the employer and the officer about what sentence to impose went beyond what Payne allowed. The court held that admitting them was error, but not reversible error, because nothing showed that the panel had relied on them. A footnote observed that an Ohio law that took effect in October 1994 allowed a victim to make a sentencing recommendation, but did not extend that right to family and friends.
The court rejected his other arguments. It held that the panel had not relied on aggravating circumstances outside the statute when it described the nature of the crime, that it had considered the mitigating evidence, and that any error in listing mitigating factors he had not raised was cured by the court's own independent review. It also rejected his challenges to the constitutionality of Ohio's death penalty statute and his argument that the sentence was disproportionate because ten other defendants in the county had not received death sentences.
In its own review of the sentence, the court found that the two aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating factors beyond a reasonable doubt. It gave "little or no weight" to any of the statutory mitigating factors. It found the death sentence neither excessive nor disproportionate, and affirmed.
Fautenberry's case then went through further state and federal review. On December 1, 2008, the Associated Press reported that Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters had asked the Supreme Court of Ohio to set an execution date, saying Fautenberry had exhausted his state and federal appeals. His request was one of five then pending before the court.
The execution was set for July 14, 2009. In the weeks before it, his lawyer, Dennis Sipe, tried to win a new mental examination. Fautenberry's last mental assessment had been in 1996, thirteen years earlier. Sipe argued that his client had brain damage from an accident in childhood and from an injury during his Navy service, that he should not be executed, and that the state should pay for a neuropsychologist to examine him so the findings could support his clemency petition.
The state parole board voted unanimously to recommend that clemency be denied, and Governor Ted Strickland refused clemency the week before the execution. Sipe told the Associated Press that the governor's office had said it would still accept new information.
In federal court, U.S. District Judge James Graham in Columbus denied the request for state-paid expert help. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to overturn that ruling on Friday, July 10, 2009. Graham rejected a request to reconsider the next day, and the appeals court affirmed again on Monday, July 13. On the morning of July 14 the U.S. Supreme Court, without comment, refused to delay the execution.
On Monday, July 13, 2009, Fautenberry was moved from the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. A prison spokeswoman, Andrea Carson, described him as compliant but not talkative. He watched television and listened to the radio, ate a special meal he had asked for, and slept from about 11:30 that night until 6 the next morning. He turned down several chances to telephone his sister. His only visitors were his lawyer and a Catholic priest, with whom he spent several hours. The Associated Press reported that no relatives or friends planned to visit him.
He was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday, July 14, 2009, and pronounced dead at 10:37 a.m. The Death Penalty Information Center lists his execution as the 1,170th in the United States since 1976, carried out with the three-drug protocol that began with sodium thiopental. He was 45.
Five deaths rest on his own confessions, but the legal outcomes differ. Only the killing of Joseph Daron was tried in Ohio, by no contest pleas and a panel's finding of guilt, and only that killing carried the death sentence. He pleaded guilty in Alaska for Jefferson Diffee. For Gary Farmer, the Associated Press reported a manslaughter conviction and a life sentence in New Jersey, without giving the date or the court. For Donald Nutley and Christine Guthrie in Oregon, no charge has been reported, and those two deaths stand as killings he confessed.
The Ohio plea is described in two ways. The Supreme Court of Ohio lists two counts of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, theft of a motor vehicle and theft of a credit card. The Associated Press described the plea as two counts each of aggravated murder and grand theft and one count of aggravated robbery.
Daron's age and home differ in the record. The Associated Press gave his age as 46 and his home as Milford; the court gave neither.
The 2009 claim that Fautenberry had brain damage was never tested by a new examination. The psychologist who examined him before his 1992 sentencing found no organic impairment, and the federal courts declined to order state funding for another assessment.
1990: Fautenberry drives trucks cross-country for a Portland, Oregon, company.
Early November 1990: He quits the job, citing long hours, and works for cash at a Portland truck stop, where he meets Donald Nutley.
November 1990: Nutley is shot near Mount Hood, Oregon (confessed).
Early February 1991: Gary Farmer, a fellow trucker, is shot in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.
February 17, 1991: Fautenberry leaves his sister's home in Cincinnati and hitchhikes; Joseph Daron Jr. gives him a ride and is shot.
February 24, 1991: He reaches Portland in Daron's car and meets Christine Guthrie at a party.
Late February 1991: Guthrie is shot after a stay at Rockaway, Oregon (confessed).
Early March 1991: He works on a fishing boat in Juneau, Alaska.
March 13, 1991: Jefferson Diffee is stabbed to death in Juneau.
March 1991: Alaska police arrest Fautenberry; he gives four statements describing the five deaths.
March 27, 1991: A Hamilton County grand jury indicts him for the murder of Joseph Daron.
April 1991: The bodies of Nutley and Guthrie are found in Oregon.
Alaska, date not reported: guilty plea to first-degree murder of Diffee; 99 years.
July 23, 1992: He waives a jury and pleads no contest in Hamilton County; a three-judge panel finds him guilty.
September 14, 1992: The panel unanimously sentences him to death.
March 22, 1995: His appeal is submitted to the Supreme Court of Ohio.
July 5, 1995: The Supreme Court of Ohio affirms the death sentence.
1996: Date of his last mental examination, according to his lawyer in 2009.
December 1, 2008: Prosecutor Joe Deters asks the Supreme Court of Ohio to set an execution date.
July 2009: After the parole board unanimously recommends against clemency, Governor Ted Strickland denies it in the week before the execution.
July 10, 2009: The Sixth Circuit refuses to overturn the denial of funds for a neuropsychologist.
July 13, 2009: He is moved from Youngstown to Lucasville.
July 14, 2009: The U.S. Supreme Court refuses a stay; he is executed by lethal injection at Lucasville and pronounced dead at 10:37 a.m.