John Joubert was a young enlisted airman at Offutt Air Force Base in Sarpy County, Nebraska, when two boys from the county disappeared in the fall of 1983. Danny Joe Eberle, 13, was taken while he delivered newspapers in Bellevue in September. Christopher Walden, 12, was taken on his way to school in Papillion in December. Both were found dead within days. Parents in the area kept their children close, and the search for the killer drew in local police and the FBI's behavioral science specialists.
The case broke on January 11, 1984, when a teacher at a preschool in Sarpy County reported a man who had come to the school. Police matched the license plate she had noted, picked Joubert up at the base, and heard him admit both killings. He pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder that July, and a panel of three judges sentenced him to death in October 1984.
He was also charged in Maine, where he had grown up. In 1990 a Maine jury convicted him of the 1982 murder of Ricky Stetson, an 11-year-old Portland boy killed while jogging. After years of appeals in state and federal courts, Nebraska executed him in the electric chair on July 17, 1996.
Joubert was a Massachusetts native, according to the Associated Press, and he grew up in Portland, Maine. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court, summarizing the record in 1992, said he graduated from a local high school and worked at various jobs in the city before he left for the Air Force. The Nebraska Examiner, writing in 2023, also placed his high school graduation in Portland.
The court records say little more about his childhood, and they do not describe his family. What the records do fix is his age and his movements: he was 19 in August 1982, and he left Portland in December 1982, "just over three months after the Stetson murder," in the Maine court's words, to join the Air Force. He was later stationed in Nebraska.
Ricky Stetson was 11 years old and lived in Portland. On the evening of August 22, 1982, he went jogging around Back Cove in Portland and did not come home. A former neighbor saw him jogging along the cove that evening with an unknown bicyclist following him. His body was found the next morning. He had been stabbed and strangled.
No one was charged until January 1986. A few weeks after the killing, at police request, the neighbor was hypnotized by a private practitioner in Gorham to help him recall the bicyclist, and a police artist drew a sketch from his refreshed description. At that point, the Maine court later stressed, no one had suspected Joubert, and no one showed the witness any photograph or sketch of him.
The Maine court said only that the investigation came to focus on him "as a result of information supplied by several people who had been in the Back Cove area at the time of the murder." Who those people were, and what they said, has not been made public.
The Eighth Circuit described Joubert in 1983 as a recent transferee to the base. The Nebraska Supreme Court described him only as a member of the United States Air Force stationed there. Neither court gives his rank or his job, and the details of his service that appear in other accounts are not confirmed by the court records.
Danny Joe Eberle was 13 and lived in Bellevue. He had a newspaper route. On September 18, 1983, he went out to deliver his papers and disappeared. The Nebraska Supreme Court records that he was found on September 21, 1983. The three-judge sentencing panel found that he had been stabbed to death.
The courts later found that he had been restrained and held in an isolated place, that he was conscious for a significant period, and that he knew he faced death. Those findings supported the statutory aggravating circumstance for especially cruel murders that the panel applied to his death.
Sarpy County Sheriff Jeff Davis, speaking at a memorial event in 2023, recalled that forty years earlier "we were searching for a serial killer."
Christopher Walden was 12 and lived in Papillion. On December 2, 1983, he set out to walk to school and disappeared. He was found on December 5, 1983, according to the Nebraska Supreme Court and WOWT. The sentencing panel found that he had been stabbed to death.
The courts made the same findings about his last hours as they did for Danny Joe Eberle.
Two boys of about the same age had now been taken from neighborhood streets in the same county, about three months apart. The Nebraska Examiner, looking back in 2023, wrote that the killings caused near panic among parents and that families stopped letting children walk the streets alone. A Sarpy County resident whose daughter was ten at the time told WOWT that it was a frightening period and that she had been afraid to let her daughter walk to school. Mark Pettit, a former KMTV anchor who followed the case and later wrote a book about it, told KMTV in 2025 that people would not let their children out of their sight.
While the two Nebraska cases were open, FBI agents in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico applied their research on violent offenders to the investigation. Ann Burgess, who worked with the unit and later wrote about the case with Steven Matthew Constantine in the book A Killer by Design, has described the Nebraska case as an early test of criminal profiling in an active murder investigation. A 2022 Boston College article on her book says the team drew up a profile of the likely killer that helped officers apprehend Joubert, that the case drew national attention and was mentioned in the Congressional Record, and that it established profiling as a tool the FBI could offer local police.
The profile's contents, and how far it shaped the search, are described in memoirs and secondary accounts. The court records credit the arrest to the preschool teacher and the license plate check.
On January 11, 1984, Joubert was seen at a preschool in Sarpy County, and a teacher there reported him to police. The Eighth Circuit described the encounter as an attempt to force a preschool teacher into a school room, from which she escaped and called police. The Nebraska Examiner said he was arrested after threatening a preschool teacher in Bellevue, and WOWT has said he was accused of pulling a knife on her. The courts and the news reports do not name the teacher.
Police matched the license plate she reported and picked Joubert up at Offutt Air Force Base. Under questioning about the preschool incident, he made spontaneous admissions about the two boys. He then waived his rights and gave a tape-recorded confession. The Nebraska Supreme Court said the confession filled in facts that investigators had not yet found. According to the Eighth Circuit, the details were corroborated by the crime scenes and by physical evidence collected afterward.
On January 12, 1984, he was charged with kidnapping and killing Danny Joe Eberle and Christopher Walden.
Sarpy County charged Joubert with first-degree murder in each boy's death, along with two counts of kidnapping and two counts of using a knife to commit a felony. His lawyers moved to suppress his confessions. They wanted the motion decided before a jury was chosen, arguing that if prospective jurors were questioned about confessions that were later thrown out, he would be prejudiced and his bargaining position weakened. The trial judge, worried that publicity about the crimes would make a fair jury very hard to seat, said he was tentatively inclined to deny the suppression motion. He also said he would accept a guilty plea conditioned on the outcome of that motion, and that such a plea would not affect how he ruled on it.
The prosecution and defense reached a plea bargain. Joubert would plead guilty to the two murder counts. The State would dismiss the kidnapping and weapons counts and would not present evidence at sentencing that he had earlier killed a boy in Maine. On July 3, 1984, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. He pleaded unconditionally, so the suppression hearing was never held. The court warned him that an unconditional plea would end the suppression question, and it found that his confession and his pleas were knowing, voluntary and uncoerced.
A three-judge sentencing panel was convened under the Nebraska statute. The panel held a hearing and weighed the statutory aggravating and mitigating circumstances for each killing.
For the murder of Danny Joe Eberle, the panel found two aggravating circumstances: that the murder was committed to conceal the identity of the killer, and that it fell within the statutory circumstance for especially cruel murders or murders showing exceptional depravity. For the murder of Christopher Walden, it found those two and a third: a substantial history of serious assaultive criminal activity, based on the Eberle murder.
On the other side of the scale, the panel gave Joubert credit for his guilty pleas. For the Eberle murder it found that he had no significant history of prior criminal activity. For both murders it found that he had acted under extreme mental or emotional disturbance, but it gave that factor reduced weight. The Nebraska Supreme Court explained why, drawing on the testimony of a psychiatrist, Dr. Kentsmith. Testing, the psychiatrist said, showed an "amoral style" and an "inability to postpone gratification." In his view Joubert had killed out of "intellectual curiosity." He could control the mental stress he was under, so the disturbance did not carry full weight. The Eighth Circuit later noted evidence in the record that Joubert could control his behavior and choose not to act on his fantasies.
The panel sentenced him to death on both counts. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court gives the date of the death sentences as October 9, 1984.
Joubert appealed to the Nebraska Supreme Court. His lawyers argued that his pleas were not voluntary, that he had been promised a suppression hearing, that he had been led to expect life sentences, that the aggravating circumstances were not proved, and that the sentences were disproportionate.
The court rejected each argument in a per curiam opinion on December 29, 1986. It found that the pleas were "made freely, voluntarily, intelligently, and understandingly." The trial judge's remarks about a suppression hearing, it said, were "clearly in the alternative," not a promise tied to the plea. A suggestion that a guilty plea would earn "some consideration," it said, "falls far short of any suggestion of a promise" of life sentences. It upheld each aggravating circumstance, and in reviewing the exceptional depravity finding it applied a narrowed definition of that phrase taken from another case decided the same year, State v. Palmer. It stressed that weighing aggravating against mitigating circumstances "is not merely a matter of number counting," and concluded that the proven aggravating circumstances far outweighed the mitigating ones. Comparing the case with others, it found the sentences no greater than, and not disproportionate to, those in similar cases. Chief Justice Krivosha concurred in the result and wrote separately. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1987.
Joubert then sought postconviction relief in the Nebraska courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court denied his postconviction petitions on May 5, 1990, according to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
On January 8, 1986, a Cumberland County grand jury in Maine indicted Joubert for the murder of Ricky Stetson. He was on death row in Nebraska, and Nebraska officials were reluctant to release him while his appeals and postconviction cases went on. The attorneys general of the two states, the Maine court later found, tried in good faith for about four years to work out a transfer.
In September 1989 Joubert himself first asked to be sent to Maine. On November 7, 1989, he filed a speedy trial motion and formally asked that the Maine charge be resolved. In January 1990 the two states reached an executive agreement, and he was moved to Maine later that month. Trial was set for July 1990, then postponed about five months on his own motion.
The Superior Court moved the trial to Lincoln County. Jury selection began on October 2, 1990, before Justice Bradford, and the trial lasted nine days.
The State's case included three strands that the defense challenged and the appeal court later reviewed.
The first was the testimony of Mark Pettit, the Nebraska television journalist, who had interviewed Joubert several times in prison in Nebraska while gathering material for a book. Joubert had signed a release letting Pettit talk with him and use what he said for any "legitimate purpose." Pettit told the jury that when he asked Joubert whether he had killed Ricky Stetson, Joubert answered: "I can't lie to you. I can't say I didn't do it."
The second was evidence about the Nebraska case, offered to prove identity. Pettit testified about statements Joubert had made concerning the death of Danny Joe Eberle, and the parties agreed to a stipulation listing the similarities between the two killings: both victims were white boys of about the same age and height, both were on foot, both had been stalked, and both had been bound. The trial court admitted the evidence over objection and told the jury the limited purpose for which it could be used.
The third was the police sketch drawn from the neighbor's hypnotically refreshed memory of the bicyclist seen following Ricky. The neighbor testified, but he could not identify Joubert either from photographs in the news or in the courtroom.
On October 15, 1990, the jury found Joubert guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Joubert appealed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, raising five main points. The court, in an opinion by Chief Justice McKusick for a unanimous bench, rejected all of them on February 21, 1992.
On the 57 months between indictment and trial, the court applied the four-part speedy trial test from Barker v. Wingo. It found that most of the delay came from Nebraska's custody and from Joubert's own requests and motions, that Maine had not acted in bad faith, that he had asserted his right late, and that his claims of prejudice were speculative. "Joubert falls far short of showing any violation of his constitutional right to a speedy trial," the court wrote.
On the Pettit interviews, Joubert argued that the journalist had acted as an agent of the State. The court disagreed. Pettit had no working relationship with police and had not given them Joubert's statements; his purpose, the court said, "was entirely self-directed toward his goal of writing a book."
On the Nebraska evidence, the court held that it was relevant to identity, that the State had limited its presentation, that the jury had been properly instructed, and that the trial judge had not abused his discretion in finding that its value outweighed the risk of unfair prejudice.
On the sketch, the court declined to decide the general question of hypnotically refreshed testimony. Because neither the police nor the hypnotist had known of or suspected Joubert when the session took place, it found no risk that the witness's memory had been steered toward him. It also rejected a challenge to the 1989 Maine law that changed how sentences are reviewed. It called the evidence linking Joubert to the killing "overwhelming" and concluded that he had failed "to demonstrate any reversible error in his conviction for the 1982 murder of Ricky Stetson."
Nebraska set execution dates for Joubert in 1988, 1990 and 1991. Appeal courts stayed all three, according to Amnesty International, which campaigned against his execution.
After the state courts denied postconviction relief, Joubert filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska. He raised several claims: that the phrase "exceptional depravity" in Nebraska's aggravating circumstance was unconstitutionally vague, that the aggravating circumstances had been misapplied, that the plea had been coerced by the trial court's involvement, that his lawyer had been ineffective for failing to tell him the court would accept a conditional plea, and that Nebraska's death penalty scheme was arbitrary.
On October 11, 1994, the district court granted the writ on the vagueness claim. It held that "exceptional depravity," as the term was defined when Joubert was sentenced, was unconstitutionally vague, and that because the sentencing panel had relied heavily on it, the death sentences could not stand. It denied relief on his other claims. Both sides appealed.
A panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals received the case in June 1995 and ruled on January 25, 1996. Judge Beam wrote for the majority. The court reversed the grant of the writ and upheld the denial of relief on everything else.
Its main reason was procedural. In the Nebraska courts, Joubert had argued only that the evidence was insufficient to support the exceptional depravity finding; he had not argued that the phrase itself was vague. The vagueness claim, the court held, "was not fairly presented and is procedurally barred." He had shown no cause for the default, because the legal basis for the argument had been reasonably available, and he had made no showing of actual innocence that would excuse it.
The court added an alternative holding. Even if the exceptional depravity finding had been flawed, any error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, because the especially cruel finding and the other aggravating circumstances supported the sentences on their own. It was here that the court described the record: both boys had been restrained and held in isolated places, and each had been conscious for a significant period and aware that he faced death.
On the plea, the court found no coercion; the trial judge's willingness to accept a conditional plea was not an improper intrusion into plea bargaining. On counsel, the evidence was conflicting about whether Joubert had known a conditional plea was available, but the claim failed for lack of prejudice, since the confessions were not coerced and would not have been suppressed. On arbitrariness, the court relied on the Supreme Court's decisions in Gregg v. Georgia and Proffitt v. Florida and held that the possibility of mercy at other stages does not make a death penalty scheme arbitrary.
Judge Bright dissented. In his view Joubert had fairly presented the vagueness claim on direct appeal, and the sentencing panel had leaned on the vague clause so heavily that the error could not be harmless. "Reweighing, however, is a task for the Nebraska courts," he wrote. He would have upheld the writ and ordered a life sentence unless Nebraska provided a new sentencing.
Nebraska set a new execution date of June 28, 1996, at 12:01 a.m. Clemency in Nebraska rested with the Board of Pardons, then made up of Governor E. Benjamin Nelson, Secretary of State Scott A. Moore and Attorney General Donald B. Stenberg. Amnesty International objected that the Attorney General's office argued capital appeals while he also sat on the board, and it quoted his statement at a press conference that "there is no killer on death row for whom the death sentence is more appropriate."
On June 26, 1996, at 4:15 p.m., the board unanimously denied Joubert's application for commutation without a hearing and dissolved the stay of execution. Joubert had already sued the board in federal court, arguing that it had failed to consider his application properly, that its rules unfairly limited testimony at any hearing, and that the Attorney General's dual role as prosecutor and board member violated due process and the Eighth Amendment. The district court dismissed the suit.
On June 27, 1996, the Eighth Circuit affirmed and refused to block the execution. "It is well-established that prisoners have no constitutional or fundamental right to clemency," Judge Beam wrote. Nebraska's statute, the court said, gave the board discretion to grant or deny commutation "for any reason or for no reason at all," and the only interest it created was "the right to ask for mercy." The board had in fact considered the application, the court found, and Joubert had no protected interest in unbiased board members.
The June 28 execution did not go ahead. Amnesty International reported on July 2, 1996, that the United States Supreme Court had granted Joubert a stay tied to a constitutional challenge to the federal death penalty law President Clinton had signed in April 1996, and that the Court had then upheld the law and lifted the stay. Amnesty expected Nebraska to need up to two months to obtain a new warrant. Instead, it reported on July 9, the original warrant was still being applied, and the execution was set for July 17, 1996.
Nebraska executed John Joubert in the electric chair on July 17, 1996. Amnesty International confirmed the execution the next day.
Pettit kept writing about Joubert for decades. His book, A Need to Kill, gives an account of the case drawn in part from his prison interviews. In February 1988, according to the Associated Press, Joubert authorized prison officials to release to Pettit two drawings he had made on death row, which Pettit said depicted his continuing fantasies of killing children, so that a mental health professional could analyze them. Prison officials had confiscated the drawings and refused the request, citing his pending appeals. In 2013, ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of the murders, the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services again refused, citing state confidentiality laws, and Pettit sued the department to force their release. "These illustrations prove the state of Nebraska did the right thing by executing Joubert," he told the Lincoln Journal Star. Lee Polikov, the Sarpy County Attorney, who had been the county's chief deputy sheriff at the time of the killings, supported release: "It should be in the public domain."
In November 2025 Pettit released what KMTV called the final version of A Need to Kill, which reproduces the two drawings in color and includes colorized photographs of the victims. Behavior analysts who examined the drawings told Pettit they showed Joubert was a pedophile and a sadist, KMTV reported. Pettit said he had stayed with the case for about forty years to understand why it happened.
In April 2023 Sarpy County dedicated the Eberle-Walden Crime Victims Memorial at the east entrance of the Sarpy County Administration building in Papillion, and the Nebraska Examiner reported that fundraising would begin for a county fund, run by a foundation set up by the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office, to give grants to families of crime victims. Captain Jacob Betsworth of the sheriff's office said the project sought "to memorialize Danny Joe Eberle and Christopher Walden." In October 2023, forty years after the killings, residents held a show of about 200 classic cars and motorcycles to raise money for the Sarpy County Sheriff's Foundation, which supports counseling and other services for crime victims. Sheriff Jeff Davis said the foundation helps victims after the court cases end, because victims remain after everyone else has left the courtroom.
The case also has a place in the history of criminal profiling. In Ann Burgess's account, reported by Boston College in 2022, the Nebraska investigation validated the work of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit and helped make profiling a tool that the Bureau could offer local police.
Several claims in older accounts of the case are not supported by the court records or by contemporary news reports.
Earlier attacks. Some accounts say Joubert attacked other children in Portland with a knife, a razor blade or a pencil years before 1982 and was never caught. None of those attacks is confirmed by a court record or news report.
Family and upbringing. Detailed accounts of his parents' divorce, his relationship with his mother and his time in scouting appear in books and secondary sources, but not in the court records or the news reports of the case.
Physical evidence. Some accounts describe a rope found in his quarters and traced through the FBI laboratory, and dental comparison evidence in the Maine case. The court opinions say only that the confessions were corroborated by physical evidence and that the Maine evidence linking him to the killing was overwhelming; they do not describe the evidence in those terms.
The car. Accounts that witnesses saw a particular car in Bellevue and Papillion, and that Joubert was driving a rented car when the preschool teacher noted the plate, are not confirmed by the court records or news reports.
Motive. The courts recorded Dr. Kentsmith's psychiatric testimony, and Pettit and the analysts he consulted have offered their own conclusions. What Joubert said about his reasons, in interviews quoted elsewhere, has not been reported from a primary source.
August 22, 1982: Ricky Stetson, 11, is killed while jogging at Back Cove in Portland, Maine; he is found the next morning.
December 1982: Joubert, 19 at the time of the Stetson killing, leaves Portland to join the Air Force.
September 18, 1983: Danny Joe Eberle, 13, disappears while delivering newspapers in Bellevue, Nebraska; he is found on September 21.
December 2, 1983: Christopher Walden, 12, disappears while walking to school in Papillion; he is found on December 5.
January 11, 1984: A preschool teacher in Sarpy County reports Joubert; police trace the license plate and pick him up at Offutt Air Force Base, where he admits both killings and gives a recorded confession.
January 12, 1984: He is charged in the deaths of the two boys.
July 3, 1984: He pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder under a plea bargain.
October 9, 1984: A three-judge panel sentences him to death on both counts.
January 8, 1986: A Cumberland County grand jury in Maine indicts him for the murder of Ricky Stetson.
December 29, 1986: The Nebraska Supreme Court affirms the death sentences (State v. Joubert).
1987: The United States Supreme Court denies review.
1988, 1990, 1991: Execution dates are set and stayed.
September 1989: Joubert asks to be transferred to Maine for trial.
January 1990: Maine and Nebraska reach an executive agreement, and he is moved to Maine.
May 5, 1990: The Nebraska Supreme Court denies his postconviction petitions.
October 2, 1990: Jury selection begins in the Maine trial, moved to Lincoln County.
October 15, 1990: The jury finds him guilty of the murder of Ricky Stetson; he is sentenced to life imprisonment.
February 21, 1992: The Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirms the conviction.
October 11, 1994: A federal district court in Nebraska grants habeas relief on the "exceptional depravity" claim.
January 25, 1996: The Eighth Circuit reverses and reinstates the death sentences.
June 26, 1996: The Nebraska Board of Pardons denies commutation without a hearing.
June 27, 1996: The Eighth Circuit rejects his challenge to the board's procedures.
Late June 1996: The United States Supreme Court grants a stay, then lifts it.
July 17, 1996: Nebraska executes Joubert in the electric chair.
2013: Pettit sues the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services for release of Joubert's death row drawings.
April 2023: Sarpy County dedicates the Eberle-Walden Crime Victims Memorial in Papillion.
November 2025: Pettit publishes the final version of A Need to Kill.