John Joseph Joubert IV was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on July 2, 1963. His parents divorced when he was six and he moved with his mother and sister to Portland, Maine in 1974. He was not allowed to see his father. A teacher who knew him well described his mother as cold and manipulative and said he was kept on a very tight leash. He was a paper boy and a Boy Scout, and by his own later account he was already imagining killing.
As a teenager in Portland he attacked children in the street, stabbing them with a pencil and later a knife, and got away with it. The nickname the Woodford Slasher comes from that period.
On August 22, 1982 he took eleven-year-old Richard Stetson from a jogging path in Portland, tried to remove his clothes, and stabbed, strangled and bit him.
He finished school, enlisted, and was posted to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where he also led a Boy Scout troop. On September 18, 1983 thirteen-year-old Danny Joe Eberle was abducted at the start of his Sunday paper round in Bellevue, driven to farmland, tied and stabbed repeatedly. His body was found three days later. On December 2, twelve-year-old Christopher Walden disappeared on his way to school; Joubert drove him to railway lines outside town, made him undress, and killed him when he refused to lie down. That body was found three days later too.
On January 11, 1984 he approached the director of a church nursery school in Bellevue and threatened to kill her. She ran, and memorised his licence plate. Police traced the car to Joubert and charged him the next day. A search of his barracks at Offutt turned up rope of the same unusual type found on Eberle's body, which the FBI established had been manufactured in South Korea for the American military. He confessed.
He first pleaded not guilty, then pleaded guilty to two counts of first degree murder. Evaluations described obsessive compulsive traits and a schizoid personality, but he was found to have been sane at the time, and a panel of three judges sentenced him to death. Maine, which has no death penalty, tried him for the Stetson murder after impressions showed his teeth matched the bite mark on the boy's body; he was convicted in 1990 and given life.
In 1995 his lawyers argued in federal court that the aggravating factor of exceptional depravity used to justify the death sentence was unconstitutionally vague. The courts rejected it, holding that the torture of Eberle and Walden met it. He also asked the Nebraska Pardons Board to spare his life so that researchers could study him.
Asked by the Omaha World-Herald why he had killed the boys, he said it was the power and the domination and seeing the fear, and that this was more exciting than causing the harm. He described the murders as the end point of years of fantasy.
He was executed in the electric chair at the Nebraska State Penitentiary at 12:29 in the morning on July 17, 1996, aged thirty-three, the second person put to death in the state since it restored capital punishment. He apologised in his final statement and said he did not know whether his death would change anything or bring anyone peace.