* * *
I was in Alabama, at yet another road school, in early December when I received a second call, directly from a distraught Johnny Evans. Another boy had been abducted near Omaha and found brutally murdered three days later. Our worst fears had been realized. I rushed to Omaha, once more without benefit of an overcoat, and was soon wading through the snow with Thomas Evans and many of the same people whose acquaintance I had made in September. At around 8:30 Friday morning, December 2, young Christopher Paul Walden, the son of an officer at Offutt Air Force Base, had been walking to school in Sarpy County, and was last seen getting into a car with a white male. Three days later, in the afternoon, Walden’s body was found by two bird hunters in a heavily wooded area five miles from the abduction site. He, too, was wearing only his undershorts and had been stabbed, and had his throat slashed so far that he was nearly decapitated. There was no question in the minds of any of the law-enforcement people who viewed the damage done to the Walden boy that the killer was the same person who had similarly savaged and mutilated Eberle’s body. The pattern of postmortem wounds on the second victim indicated that the killer was escalating his sadistic slashing of the victims. Christopher Walden had been the same height and age as young Eberle, but fifteen pounds lighter.
It was fortunate that the second victim was found just then, for a heavy snowfall had recently begun. Another few hours of snow would have completely covered the body and the tracks near it, making it highly unlikely that the body would have been located before the spring thaw. At that point, several other murders might have already occurred, and the clues to this one might have been degraded and no longer helpful.
In many cases, the scene where the abduction takes place is not the death scene, and the death scene may not be where the body is eventually found. That latter site is referred to as the crime scene, and invariably yields the most evidence. The abduction and murder sites may never be found. Victims are lured away from abduction scenes, and bodies are transported even farther in attempts to stave off discovery of the murder and any possible connection of the killer to the murdered person. Eberle had been killed somewhere else and his body dumped in the weeds near the river. This second victim was found many yards into the woods, but it seemed that the dump site was also the place where he had been murdered. Prints beside the body—almost covered by the snow—showed clearly that two sets of feet had walked to this site, and only one set had walked out. Walden’s clothes were piled neatly next to him. Clearly, he had been killed here. That in itself was an important clue, for it told me there was only one killer, and that he had been relatively slight of build. He had evidently forced Walden to walk into the woods where the murder was committed.
To my mind, the killer was an obvious coward. These teenaged boys were low-risk victims for him, akin to little old ladies, vulnerable victims, too young or too scared to resist someone who might be a few years older but not that much larger than they were. On the other hand, I had to recognize and take into account that this was an offender who had improved his MO since the first murder. I tried to get into the murderer’s mind and think as he had done. Let me attempt to replicate some of that thinking here:
The first one, I brought the props with me, the tape and the rope. Maybe they’ve sent such things to the FBI laboratory to be analyzed. I won’t use them again. I don’t need them, anyhow, because I’ve learned that I can control the victim through ruses, through mental pressure and threats. Maybe what I should do is take the kid a little farther into the wooded area. I certainly don’t want the kid’s clothing left in my car, where I left it the last time, so I’ll have him walk in clothed, then disrobe, and then I’ll kill him.
Such a level of planning on the killer’s part led me to revise my estimate of the killer’s age; I thought now that he must be in his twenties, not in his teens. The stripping of the child now stood out boldly as a sexual matter, not as a control action. That, combined with the lack of sexual penetration (now verified by a second instance), made me firm up my belief that the killer was asexual. I would have been surprised if he’d ever had a consenting sexual experience with a female. And if he had had a homosexual experience, it probably had occurred when he was about the same age as these victims had been. He would have difficulty associating with people in his own age group, though he might date because he was attempting to deny his homosexuality; if he did date, it would be significantly younger girls whom he could easily dominate. What we were seeing in these two murders was a killer’s anger at himself, expressed as homicidal rage toward victims who in his mind mirrored the boy he had been at their age. In his everyday life, this killer didn’t have a lot to say about his existence, about what happened to him and when it happened and how it happened. He might or might not be physically weak, but he was beyond doubt emotionally weak.
That was why I concluded that this second killing had been a different event from his first one; the first time, it had been an experiment; the second time, the killer had demonstrated his fascination with the taking of a human life, and had tested and proved to himself his power and control over the victim. For example, the cutting in the second murder had been more extensive than in the first.
The postmortem cutting indicated to me a growing morbid interest in sadistic activity that I thought might come to dominate the killer’s behavior in his future murders.
In between the first and second murders, one clue was actually discovered not to be a clue. The pebble in the mouth, which at first had seemed evidence that the body had been moved from elsewhere, turned out to be a mistake. The medical examiner had originally stated that a pebble had been found in Eberle’s mouth. Later, the ME retracted this statement and explained that the pebble was from another case and had nothing to do with the Eberle murder. The absence of the pebble allowed us to speculate that the first murder had taken place closer to the time that the body was found.
I revised my earlier profile. There was only one young male killer, I now wrote, a single killer with no accomplices. Thinking of his ability to carry the body, I wrote that he would not be much larger than his victims, and that he had killed on-site in order to avoid lugging the body any distance. I thought it certain that the killer lived in Bellevue, or on the air base. He was just too familiar with the area to be from anywhere else. In fact, I was leaning heavily toward believing that the killer had to be on the base. Staking a position quite far out on a limb, but commensurate with my earlier guesses about his intelligence and education, I said that the killer would most likely be a low-ranking airman, E-4 or lower. He would not be highly skilled, not someone who worked with computers, but a man who worked in administration or light maintenance, probably some sort of a mechanic. Leaning on the evidence of the wounds, which showed attempts to conceal signs of bite marks, I wrote that I felt the killer would be a reader of detective or police magazines, where the ability to identify someone through bite marks is routinely discussed. The pattern of the wounds and the ease with which the killer had abducted both victims were the items that concerned me when I stated that I felt it likely that the killer would be involved with young boys in some way—Boy Scouts, Little League, or some other kind of coaching.
I was entirely convinced that the killer would strike again, and soon, because school holidays were coming up; so was Johnny Evans. We talked over the details. Now the children would be out in their yards or on the streets and in the open playgrounds at all daylight hours, and the killer could approach one at any time. I recommended an all-out media blitz, utilizing the newspapers, television, and radio to caution children to play in groups, not alone, and to advise parents and guardians to look for suspicious cars and persons, and, when they saw anything suspicious, to write down license plates and descriptions and such, and to phone them in to the number of the task-force headquarters, which would be heavily advertised. The task force also put together what they called a Code 17; in the event of another abduction being reported, the entire Sarpy County area could be seal
ed off within eleven minutes. It was hoped that this way, if there was another child snatched off the streets, the abductor could be apprehended before he took the victim into the woods to be killed. The media blitz was tremendous, and so was the cooperation from the public. Perhaps as a consequence, there were no killings for the remainder of the year. At home again for the holidays, I rested a bit easier.
During this period, the local authorities picked up many known sexual deviates and interrogated them quite thoroughly. One was a prime suspect in the murders; he even flunked a lie-detector test, and rope and surgical tape found in his residence seemed quite suspicious. He fit the profile in many regards, though he was openly and overtly homosexual. He passed the second lie-detector test and in other ways proved not to be the murderer, however. The community was surprised by the number of people whose deviant behavior was so noticeable that it had become of interest to the police, and a half-dozen of the worst offenders—such as a pedophile who used to pull young boys into his Cadillac—were arrested and convicted on various charges during the manhunt for the killer of Eberle and Walden.
In addition, a witness who had seen Walden and a young male walking together just prior to the abduction was hypnotized, and under hypnosis managed to recall that the two walkers seemed about the same size. She even came up with the first several digits on the license plate of the car toward which they had been walking. Because of the high degree of coordination among the law-enforcement authorities, this number was quickly given to the state’s department of motor vehicles and a computer run made; there were nearly a thousand cars in the state that had those first several digits on the plates, but many fewer than that in the Sarpy County area. The police were about to start checking every single car on the list when, early on the morning of January 11, 1985, they got a break.
A female teacher at a church day-care center noticed a man in a car who seemed to be hanging around the center, a slight young man who matched the partial description that had been given out through the media. The car didn’t match, but the driver did.
The young man saw her writing something, parked the car, and knocked on the door of the center, then pushed his way in and asked to use the telephone. She refused to let him do that. He threatened to kill her, and told her to give him a slip of paper on which she had written down the license number of his car. She managed to run past him into another church building, and to call the police. The man fled in the car. It was eight-thirty in the morning.
With the license plate number in hand, the police were quickly able to find the owner of the vehicle, a nearby Chevrolet dealership. Rushing there, they learned that the car the teacher had seen was on loan to an airman at Offutt whose own car was being repaired. The airman’s own car, in the dealer’s garage, matched the description provided by several witnesses, and its license plate had the same first digits as those recalled by the woman who had undergone hypnosis. Peeking in, police saw some rope and a knife. Proceeding with extreme caution, the police obtained a search warrant before entering the car. Later, it was learned that this car was the fourth one on the list of a thousand that had been spewed out by the DMV’s computer, and it would most likely have been investigated anyhow within the next few days by a planned search for those vehicles.
Even before thoroughly searching the car, the police alerted the air base and, in the company of an FBI agent, a Sarpy County lieutenant, and several agents of the air force’s OSI (Office of Special Investigations), went immediately to the quarters of A 1 C (E-3) John Joseph Joubert IV, a radar technician involved in maintenance work. Joubert agreed to a search of his quarters. The investigators found more rope inside a duffel bag. Also there were a hunting knife and two dozen detective magazines; one of those magazines appeared to be particularly dog-eared and well thumbed, and it contained a story about the killing of a newsboy. Baby-faced, twenty-one years old and slight—five-six and 164 pounds—Joubert fit the profile to a T, down to the fact that he was an assistant scoutmaster of a local troop.
Joubert was interrogated for many hours by several teams of officers; he denied the offenses at first, and said all the evidence was circumstantial and would never convict him. When confronted with the fact that the rope in his duffel and car appeared to match that taken from the first victim, and told that it was a very rare rope that the head scoutmaster of the troop had brought back with him from Korea, Joubert asked to talk to the scoutmaster and to one fourteen-year-old scout to whom he had been quite close. Those people did talk to him, and shortly before midnight on January 11, Joubert confessed to killing the two boys, citing details that only the true killer could have known.
I was at home, stoking a fire in my fireplace, when the phone rang. My wife answered it and told me Johnny Evans was on the line. My heart sank, thinking that his call must mean there had been another murder of a young boy in Omaha; I was glad beyond words that the killer had been caught, that Johnny Evans’s own crusade to bring him in had paid off at last, and that I had been able to contribute something valuable to the stopping of this one-man murder wave. Evans was particularly amazed that I had been able to predict that police or detective magazines would be found in the killer’s residence; in his confession, Joubert said that he had used the detective magazines as part of his masturbatory rituals.
Some of the unusual details Joubert revealed in this confession were that after the first murder, he had gone to a McDonald’s to wash off the blood, and then had eaten breakfast there; later in the day, he had gone to a scout meeting where the abduction had been discussed, but he had not taken part in the conversation. He denied any sexual involvement with the boys, and even more vehemently denied that he had known them, stressing that he would not have done that sort of thing to any boy he knew, for instance those in the scout troop. After both murders, however, he had gone back to his quarters and relived the details and masturbated. During this initial confession, Joubert also said that he had been certain after the incident at the day-care center that he would be picked up that day, and was glad that he had been apprehended, for he was sure that he would have killed again.
* * *
The amount of interagency cooperation in this case was spectacular, and a model for the way things ought to be done in any major case involving an abduction and murder. Commendations for all the agencies involved were read into the Congressional Record, and congratulations were showered on the state, local, federal, and Air Force law-enforcement entities who had contributed to catching this killer. I was proud to receive, from FBI Director William Webster, a letter of commendation about the profile I had drawn of the probable killer, which, the Director wrote, “pointed toward the apprehension of an individual fitting the physical and mental characteristics you described. Your assumptions of the subject were very accurate and displayed great skill.… You have my profound thanks for a job well done.”
Of course I wanted to learn more about Joubert, and so I followed the progress of his case through the courts. He initially pleaded not guilty, despite having given a confession, then revised that plea and pleaded guilty; a three-judge panel gathered psychiatric and other reports, judged that he had been well aware of the nature of right and wrong at the time of the murders, and sentenced him to die in the electric chair. Various appeals resulted in a prolonged stay on death row.
Joubert’s background was traced quite carefully, and while most of it seemed quite ordinary on the surface, a buildup toward murder that had begun when Joubert was extremely young was evident. He was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Portland, Maine. One of the first fantasies he remembered was at age six or seven, of coming up behind his baby-sitter, strangling her, and then eating her until she disappeared. Such a strange and violent fantasy at that age was unusual, and provocative. Joubert had remembered and improved on it from then on, all during his childhood and adolescence, and up to and through the time of his murders. His mother had been a hospital worker and his father a counterman and waiter in a restaurant. They had separat
ed because of marital difficulties at almost the same time as this first violent fantasy occurred to Joubert. They divorced when he was ten, and Joubert and his mother moved to Maine. He later told one psychiatrist, whose report was submitted to the court, that his mother had a short temper and would blow up and break things; he’d retreat to his room until the tantrum stopped and she came in and apologized, as she usually did. He also reported that his mother had belittled him and made him feel as if he was not a worthwhile person. She continued to spank him until he was twelve, and had frequently disapproved of his open masturbation. His fantasies began with young women as their object, and then switched to young boys, adolescents in undershorts. Joubert did not know any longer whether the thoughts of strangling and stabbing these boys brought on the masturbation or whether the masturbation brought on the thoughts.
During his preteen years, Joubert became a pawn in the battle between his mother and father, as the latter tried to obtain custody of him but failed. To see his father during the summers, Joubert sometimes bicycled more than a hundred miles on his own, and had also made a similar trip to see an uncle. To avoid going to a public high school that he thought too dangerous, Joubert took on a newspaper delivery route and used his earnings from it to pay the tuition at a Catholic high school, for which his mother would not or could not pay. He was tormented at the Catholic high school, he reported, because people thought he might be a homosexual. He took a girl to the senior prom—his only date during those years—to avoid being labeled as gay. He was on the track and cross-country teams. He was an avid Boy Scout, even delayed getting his final Eagle Scout badge for some time in order to continue on in the program as long as possible. In his yearbook, he wrote, “Life is a highway with many roads branching off—don’t get lost.”
Whoever Fights Monsters Page 14