After graduating from high school, he had gone to a military college in Vermont, and the freedom he found there because of the lower drinking age in that state resulted in his not showing up for classes or in his sleeping through them, so his grade average was poor. When not drinking or sleeping, he played a great deal of the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons. After a school year at this college, he returned home for a summer and then joined the Air Force. At his training school in Texas, he had made friends with one young man and they had taken assignments together and roomed together at Offutt, beginning in the summer of 1983. It was then that Joubert had begun collecting his detective magazines. After a few weeks at Offutt, the roommate told Joubert that others on the base were referring to himself and Joubert as “the girls.” The allegation of homosexuality disturbed the roommate, and he abruptly moved out. This action provided a key precrime stress to Joubert. Less than a week after his friend moved out, Joubert abducted and murdered Danny Joe Eberle.
He told his psychiatric interviewers that he had not really found out what it felt like to kill, and that while he was doing the killing, he was acting as if by rote, simply acting out the fantasy he had been perfecting since the age of six and feeling very little. Back in his room, he masturbated, then fell deeply asleep and had not been troubled in his sleep. When in the grip of the fantasy, he could not restrain his impulses. He admitted to one person that he had felt very good when he first realized that his initial victim was indeed under his control. Several different mental-health professionals who interviewed him all agreed that he was intelligent (IQ 125), alert, and more than a little pleased at all the attention he was receiving. They categorized him as a 301.20 in the numbering scheme of the standard manual of psychiatric disorders; that is, suffering from a schizoid personality disorder with compulsive features.
Among the several psychiatrists who evaluated Joubert during this period was Dr. Herbert C. Modlin of the Menninger Clinic, who made the following observations about Joubert, and reported to the court:
This man seems not to know what love and affection are, as though he has never experienced such feelings. In describing his relationship with his sister, the best he could do was say, “We didn’t hate each other.” It is striking that this intelligent man could not describe either parent. He seems so separated from emotional experiences as to suggest some sort of chronic dissociative process. I suspect that he is dimly aware of this defect or lack in himself, and, in part, the homicides were an attempt to experience strong emotions.
Dr. Modlin reported that he had many unanswered questions about Joubert and his crimes. Why had the victims been thirteen-year-olds? Why had they been strangers to him? Why had they been stabbed, and why had Joubert made multiple cuts? Why had he partially removed their clothes? Why had the abductions taken place in the early morning?
Many of these questions continued to bother me, although I believed I had some insight into the answers to a couple of them. There was more to be found out, however, and a tremendous leap forward in our understanding of Joubert and his crimes came through another chance happening. In the fall of 1984, I had brought back to Quantico with me slides and other documentary aids about the slayings and the killer, and was using the case as an example in an FBINA class. As I presented it, one of my students raised his hand and asked to see me during the next break. Lieutenant Dan Ross of the Portland, Maine, police force, said that the Omaha murders reminded him of an unsolved case in Portland.
I was excited because when Joubert had been arrested in Omaha, I had suggested that the authorities there check back to his previous Maine address and look for earlier crimes that might have similar characteristics. Although I had initially believed the Eberle killing to have been the suspect’s first homicide, after learning more about him, I had come around to the suspicion that there could well have been earlier, preparatory crimes; his fantasy was just too strong not to have erupted in antisocial behavior at some earlier point in his life. Also, his relatively abrupt enlisting in the Air Force could have been a way to get himself out of town cleanly and without being noticed after the commission of an early crime. Omaha had been too busy with other aspects of the case, however, and an initial call to Portland by the Sarpy County authorities had drawn a blank.
The lieutenant went home to Portland for the weekend and returned with the files on the unsolved murder case. One of the other students in my class that quarter was a police officer from Sarpy County with whom I’d worked in the Joubert investigation, and the three of us sat down to go over the files.
The circumstances were very much the same—just before dawn, a lone boy as the victim, an attacker who had also been described by witnesses as young, and who clearly knew the area; a slashing death, bite marks on the victim. This terrible event had occurred in August 1982, a bit more than a year prior to the Eberle abduction, and just before John Joseph Joubert IV entered the Air Force. Ricky Stetson, eleven years old, blond and blue-eyed, had been out jogging over a regular route that took him near a highway viaduct. On a hillside close by the viaduct, he had been stabbed to death and his body mutilated, though not so severely as the later victims. The murder had occured just at daylight. The killer had attempted to pull off the victim’s clothes but had been only partially successful. Examining the crime-scene photos, I learned that photographic evidence had been taken of the bite marks on the victim, and that the photos had been preserved.
We checked back through Joubert’s records and learned that years prior to the time of that murder Joubert had been a paper boy with a route that was contiguous to the hillside where Stetson had been stabbed and bitten. More recently, Joubert had worked at a company whose plant was close to the site. Witnesses recalled seeing the jogging boy followed by a young man on a ten-speed bike; most of those witnesses, shown photos of Joubert, thought that the assailant had been Joubert, but, after several years of intervening time, couldn’t be 100 percent sure.
With some difficulty, Dan Ross went to the Nebraska state prison and obtained bite impressions from Joubert, which were then shown to experienced forensic odontologist Dr. Lowell Levine, Director of the Forensic Sciences Unit of the New York State police. Dr. Levine was convinced that Joubert’s bites closely matched those taken from the victim.
As the Portland case developed, the trail of crimes committed by Joubert eventually led back even further, as I had suspected it might. In 1980, there had been several unexplained slashings, one of a nine-year-old boy, and another of a female teacher in her mid-twenties. Both victims had been cut rather badly, and were lucky to be alive. Back before that, in 1979, a nine-year-old girl had been stabbed in the back with a pencil by a boy on a bicycle who had sped past. There was not much use to indicting Joubert on those charges, but the Stetson murder demanded an answer. Joubert was eventually indicted and convicted for that murder in Maine. Should his sentence in Nebraska ever be commuted, he would have to be transported to Maine and imprisoned for the remainder of his life. In essence, the solving of the Stetson case in Maine was an early and informal triumph for what would become the VICAP system; in this instance, it was the fortuitous circumstance of having a man in my class who could connect two murders in different states with the same MO. Once VICAP was up and running, that sort of comparative analysis would be available to the authorities whenever a serious crime was committed.
My own interview with Joubert had to wait until the court processes in both Maine and Nebraska had been exhausted, years later. I took along Special Agent Ken Lanning, our BSU expert on child abuse, and an agent from the Omaha office. Joubert had put on some weight in prison and finally looked like a young man rather than an overage boy. I had learned from the prison authorities that he had been drawing on tissue paper in his cell on death row, and these drawings had been seized and taken from him. They were quite good, well drawn, but what they showed was chilling. One depicted a boy by the side of a road, hog-tied, and the second was of a boy on his knees as a man slid a knife into him.
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br /> Every ounce of information we can extract from a killer about his mind and methods gives us more ammunition to track the next one. Joubert didn’t want to talk to us at first, but eventually my long interest in his case and the techniques I’d learned to apply in my interviews of more than a hundred murderers got him to loosen up a bit.
I asked about stresses in his past, and it was then that he recalled that before he had started to hurt anyone, he had lost a friend. This was when Joubert’s mother refused to help him find the boy, and Joubert was bereft. Shortly afterward, his descent toward murder began. In our interview in prison, he rather plaintively asked me whether the FBI could help him find this lost friend. I said I’d try.
He admitted the murders, and we started talking about the details. Among the many subjects I wanted to explore, I was particularly interested in three matters—the unexplained bite marks, the detective magazines, and the way he had chosen his victims. They were all related.
He told us about the fantasy of cannibalism that had been with him since the time he was six or seven years of age. The working out of that fantasy had been the engine of his murders, and it had encompassed biting the bodies, including that of the first victim, back in Portland. Presumably, the slash marks on Eberle’s leg, that ticktacktoe pattern that had puzzled us, had been his attempt to obliterate the bites he had made in that area. I asked him whether he had learned from detective magazines that the police could identify a killer through forensic odontology on such bite marks, and he agreed that he had; one of the reasons that he read such magazines was to get information on how to avoid detection. The main reason was stimulation; for him—as for many killers—detective magazines were pornography, even though they showed no depictions of nude bodies, only suggestions of dominance, torture, and the like.
I asked him when he had first started reading those magazines, and he said that it had been at about age eleven or twelve, when, in the company of his mother, he had seen them on a rack in a grocery store. He had been excited by the depictions of people being frightened and threatened, and had gotten his hands on one of the magazines and used it as a prop for masturbation and his fantasy of strangulation and stabbing. So the magazines had been associated in his mind with both sexual excitement and killing for nearly a decade prior to his murderous actions. And at the time of first equating those magazines, his fantasy, and sexual self-stimulation, Joubert had been a prepubescent boy, fair-haired and slim, with a bike and a predawn paper route.
After six or seven hours of talking, Joubert asked me a question. “I’ve been fair to you, Mr. Ressler, so can you do me a favor? Get me a set of the crime-scene photos. There’s something that I have to work out in my mind.”
This young man, then twenty-eight years old, was on death row for these crimes, and he still wanted depictions of them, probably for the purposes of masturbation. I told him I was unable to comply with his request, and left the interview having gained the sad understanding that John Joubert’s terrible fantasy would most likely not die until he did. In 1992, he remains on death row.
6
ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED CRIMES
To most people, when confronted by evidence of violent criminality, the behavior may seem an enigma, even a unique occurrence. Very few of us are used to grisly murders, mutilations, bodies thrown into ravines—and the majority who are ignorant of such matters includes most local police, who seldom encounter crimes of this sort. Even outrageous, unspeakable criminal behavior is not unique and not incomprehensible, however. These sort of murders have occurred before, and, when properly analyzed, can be understood well enough so that we can even break them down into somewhat predictable patterns. By the late 1970s, the Behavioral Sciences Unit had accumulated a large amount of experience in assessing these sort of crimes. The usual police officer might never have seen an act of disembowelment or cannibalism during his career, but because so many police departments sent us their unusual cases for analysis, we were used to looking at such crime scenes and could get past the average person’s disgust at them and discern what the evidence revealed about the probable perpetrator.
Amassing this knowledge was one thing. Communicating it to our audience—those police officers who sought our help in tracking down violent criminals—was another. To characterize the types of offenders for police and other local law-enforcement people, we needed to have a terminology that was not based in psychiatric jargon. It wouldn’t do much good to say to a police officer that he was looking for a psychotic personality if that police officer had no training in psychology; we needed to speak to the police in terms that they could understand and that would assist them in their searches for killers, rapists, and other violent criminals. Instead of saying that a crime scene showed evidence of a psychopathic personality, we began to tell the police officer that such a particular crime scene was “organized,” and so was the likely offender, while another and its perpetrator might be “disorganized,” when mental disorder was present.
The organized versus disorganized distinction became the great divide, a fundamental way of separating two quite different types of personalities who commit multiple murders. As with most distinctions, this one is almost too simple and too perfect a dichotomy to describe every single case. Some crime scenes, and some murderers, display organized as well as disorganized characteristics, and we call those “mixed.” For instance, Ed Kemper was a highly organized killer, but his mutilation of bodies after death was more typical of a disorganized one. In the following pages, I’ll paint the principal characteristics of both classic organized and classic disorganized offenders. Please remember that if I say that a particular attribute is characteristic of an organized offender, it is not so 100 percent of the time, but is something that is generally applicable. For instance, I say that the organized offender hides the bodies of his victims; in our research interviews, and in analysis of crime scenes, we found this to be true more than three-quarters of the time. That’s enough to make the generalization hold up pretty well, but not enough to make it an absolute condition for our characterization. All of the “rules” of profiling are like that. Though the distinction between organized and disorganized itself is very apparent once recognized, the list of attributes that go along with each of the categories has grown, over the years, as we have learned more details about these murderers, and it continues to be enlarged.
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When trying to figure out whether the crime has been perpetrated by an organized or disorganized offender, we look at crime-scene photographs, and, if possible, we examine information from or about the victim. For instance, we try to assess whether or not this particular victim meant a low risk for the criminal. It would be a low risk if the victim was frail or weak. Where did the victim become a victim? When Monte Rissell abducted a prostitute from a deserted parking lot in the early-morning hours, he chose a victim who might not be missed for some time. Knowledge that the perpetrator would deliberately choose such a victim can be important in trying to apprehend him.
We ordinarily divide the crime into four phases. The first is the precrime stage, which takes into account the “antecedent behavior” of the offender. Often, this is the last stage about which we finally obtain knowledge, though it is the first in temporal sequence. The second phase is the actual commission of the crime; in this stage, we place victim selection as well as the criminal acts themselves, which may include far more than murder—abduction, torture, rape, as well as the killing. The third phase is the disposal of the body; whereas some murderers do not display any concern about having the victim found, others go to great lengths to avoid its discovery. The fourth and final phase is postcrime behavior, which in some cases can be quite important, as some offenders attempt to inject themselves into the investigation of the murder, or otherwise keep in touch with the crime in order to continue the fantasy that started it.
The major attribute of the organized offender is his planning of the crime. Organized crimes are premeditated, not sp
ur of the moment. The planning derives from the offender’s fantasies, which, as I’ve shown in earlier chapters, have usually been growing in strength for years before he erupts into overt antisocial behavior. John Joubert had his crimes in mind for years before the opportunity for a slashing murder presented itself and he crossed the line into action. Rissell, too, had had violent fantasies for years before a likely victim showed up in that parking lot after the night when, in his mind, he had been spurned by his former girlfriend.
Most victims of organized offenders are targeted strangers; that is, the offender stakes out or patrols an area, hunting someone who fits a certain type of victim that he has in mind. Age, appearance, occupation, hairstyle, and lifestyle may be elements in the choice; David Berkowitz looked for women who were alone or sitting with men in parked cars.
The organized offender often uses a ruse or con to gain control over his victim. This is a man who has good verbal skills and a high degree of intelligence, enough to lure the victim into a vulnerable area. Control is of the essence for the organized offender, and law-enforcement personnel learn to look for control as an element in every facet of the crime. An organized offender might offer a prostitute a fifty-dollar bill, give a hitchhiker a ride, assist a disabled motorist, tell a child that he’s taking him to his mother. Since the crime has been planned, the offender has devoted time to figuring out how to obtain victims, and may have perfected the ruse. John Gacy promised money to young men in a homosexual transient district in Chicago if they would come home and perform sex acts with him. Ted Bundy used his charm, but also the aura of authority that some police paraphernalia gave him, to lure young women into his car. With the organized killer, the victims are personalized; the offender has enough verbal and other interchange with the victims to recognize them as individuals prior to killing them.
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