On Sunday, September 18, 1983, thirteen-year-old Danny Joe Eberle set out on his Omaha World-Herald paper route in Bellevue, Nebraska, and delivered three of his seventy papers. At the fourth address his bicycle lay with the rest of the bundle, with no sign of a struggle. His brother, who also delivered papers, remembered being followed on previous days by a white man in a tan car. After a three-day search the boy was found in high grass beside a gravel road about four miles away, stripped to his underwear, his hands and feet bound, his mouth sealed with surgical tape. He had been cut across the body before he died and stabbed nine times. Because it was a kidnapping, the FBI came in.
The man who killed him had drawn a knife, covered the boy's mouth with his hand and walked him to his car. John Joseph Joubert IV was twenty, an enlisted radar technician at Offutt Air Force Base and an assistant scoutmaster with a local troop. The investigation looked at a young man arrested a week later for molesting two boys, who failed a polygraph and had a false alibi but did not fit the FBI profile, and at other known offenders, and it went cold.
On December 2, 1983, twelve-year-old Christopher Walden disappeared on his way to school in Papillion, about three miles from where Eberle had been found. Witnesses again described a white man in a tan car. Joubert had driven up beside him, shown him the sheath of his knife and ordered him in, then driven to railroad tracks outside town and told him to strip to his underwear. The boy did, then refused to lie down in the snow. After a brief struggle Joubert stabbed him and cut his throat so deeply he was nearly decapitated. His body was found two days later.
On January 11, 1984, Barbara Weaver, director of the Aldersgate preschool in the same area, noticed a young man driving around and began studying his license plate. He stopped, threatened her, and she pushed him away, ran inside and called the police. The car was not tan; it was a rental, traced to Joubert, whose own tan Chevrolet Nova was in the shop. In his barracks room agents found rope like the rope used to bind Eberle, an unusual kind the FBI traced to manufacture in South Korea for the American military. He said he had got it from the scoutmaster. He confessed to both Nebraska killings and was charged on January 12.
He had been born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on July 2, 1963. His parents divorced when he was six, and in 1974 his mother moved him and his sister to a run-down apartment in Portland, Maine. He was not allowed to see his father, though he wanted to, and came to despise his controlling mother. "My impression was that the mother was cold and extremely manipulative," said his high school band teacher and mentor, Rich Pitre. "He was under a very, very tight leash." He was an honor-roll student, played clarinet in the marching band, ran track and joined the scouts, and he was bullied by bigger boys for seeming meek and helpless. His fantasies turned to killing strangers in the street. At thirteen he stabbed a young girl with a pencil and was aroused when she cried out; the next day he slashed another girl with a razor blade as he biked past. In 1980, the FBI later established, he cut a nine-year-old boy and a female teacher in her twenties badly. He was never caught for any of it, and graduated from Cheverus High School in 1981.
On August 22, 1982, eleven-year-old Richard Stetson went jogging on the Back Cove Trail in Portland and did not come home. A motorist found his body the next day beside Interstate 295. His attacker had tried to undress him, then stabbed, strangled and bit him. Another man was arrested and held for a year and a half before his teeth were shown not to match the bite. Robert Ressler, the FBI's head profiler, and Dr. Ann Burgess had drawn up a profile of the Nebraska killer that fit Joubert in every respect, and when Ressler presented the case to a class at Quantico, a Portland police officer recognized the similarities. Bite mark comparisons tied Joubert to Stetson. Ressler and the Maine investigators came to believe he had joined the Air Force to get away from Maine.
He first pleaded not guilty in Nebraska, then changed his plea to guilty on two counts of first-degree murder. Psychiatric evaluations described obsessive-compulsive disorder, sadistic tendencies and schizoid personality disorder, but found he had not been psychotic, and a panel of three judges sentenced him to death on both counts. Maine, which has no death penalty, tried him for the Stetson murder, and in 1990 he was convicted and sentenced to life.
In 1995 his lawyers argued in federal court that the aggravating factor of exceptional depravity was unconstitutionally vague. The district court agreed; the Eighth Circuit reversed, holding that his torture of Eberle and Walden plainly showed it. He also asked the Nebraska Pardons Board to spare him so that researchers could study him. Asked by the World-Herald why he had killed the boys, he said it was the power and the domination and seeing the fear, and described the murders as the end point of years of fantasy.
He was electrocuted at the Nebraska State Penitentiary at 12:29 in the morning on July 17, 1996, at thirty-three, the second person executed in the state since it restored capital punishment. In his final statement he apologized and said he did not know whether his death would change anything or bring anyone peace.