The quiet streets of Bellevue, Nebraska, where children once rode bikes without fear, are now the hunting ground of a predator whose calm exterior masked a cold and methodical brutality. John Joseph Joubert IV, a 20-year-old Air Force radar technician and former Boy Scout, has been arrested and charged with the murders of two young boys, and authorities now believe his killing spree stretches back to his native Maine, where the body of an 11-year-old boy was found with bite marks that match Joubert’s dental records. The arrest, which came after a sharp-eyed preschool teacher jotted down a license plate number, has unraveled a chilling pattern of violence that began in Joubert’s own troubled childhood and escalated into a series of attacks that left three boys dead and a community shattered.
The investigation into Joubert began to unravel on January 11, 1984, when a teacher at a Bellevue preschool noticed a man sitting in a tan car near the school, watching the children with an unsettling intensity. She walked over to record his license plate, and when he jumped out and threatened to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her, she broke free and called police. Officers traced the rental car to Joubert, a quiet airman stationed at Offutt Air Force Base.
When they searched his on-base room, they found a length of rope that matched the unusual bindings used on 13-year-old Danny Eberly, whose body had been discovered in a field three months earlier. The rope was a type manufactured exclusively for the U. S.
military, a detail that immediately linked Joubert to the crime.
Danny Eberly vanished on the morning of September 18, 1983, while delivering newspapers on his bike, a job he took pride in. His father, Leonard, found the bike propped against a fence, the newspapers still stacked in the basket, and knew something was terribly wrong. Three days later, searchers found Danny’s body in tall grass along a gravel road, stripped of his clothes, his hands and feet bound with that distinctive rope, and surgical tape covering his mouth.
He had been stabbed nine times, some wounds shallow and measured, as if the killer had taken his time. The medical examiner determined Danny was conscious for three to four agonizing minutes before he died. Bite marks on his body provided a key piece of evidence that would later seal Joubert’s fate.
Just months later, on December 2, 1983, 12-year-old Christopher Walden left his home in Papillion, Nebraska, a town just three miles from where Danny’s body was found, and began walking to school. He never arrived. Hunters discovered his body two days later in a wooded area, his throat cut so deeply that he was nearly decapitated.
He had been stabbed seven times, and like Danny, he had been stripped of his clothing. The similarities between the two murders were undeniable, and the FBI, led by profiler Robert Ressler, was brought in to build a profile of the killer. Ressler described a young white male, intelligent but socially isolated, someone who would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 again.
He was right on every point.
Joubert’s confession to the Nebraska murders was calm and almost clinical. He told investigators that he had been setting his alarm for 6:30 a. m.
for weeks, waking up each morning to decide whether he would go out looking for someone to hurt. On September 18, he chose to act. He spotted Danny at the start of his paper route, pulled a knife, and clamped a hand over the boy’s mouth.
He drove Danny to a remote road, where the boy begged for his life, promising not to tell anyone. Joubert later said he paused and considered taking Danny to the hospital, but then convinced himself the boy would identify him. He kept stabbing until Danny stopped moving.
For Christopher Walden, the murder was quicker, but no less brutal. Joubert pulled up beside the boy, showed him the sheath of his knife, and ordered him into the car. When Christopher refused to lie down in the snow, Joubert strangled him and then used his knife to finish the job.
The trail of violence did not begin in Nebraska. In Portland, Maine, where Joubert grew up, a series of attacks had terrorized the Oakdale neighborhood in the early 1980s. In December 1979, a 6-year-old girl named Sarah Canty was playing outside when a teenager on a green 10-speed bike jabbed a pencil into her back and rode away.
In January 1980, a college student named Vicky Goff was stabbed in the side while walking to class, spending a week in the hospital. In March 1980, 9-year-old Michael Whitham was slashed across the throat with an X-Acto knife after being lured by a teenager asking harmless questions. Michael survived, but the attacks stopped as suddenly as they began, and the boy on the bike vanished.
Then, on August 22, 1982, 11-year-old Ricky Stenson went for a jog around Back Cove in Portland and never came home. His body was found the next morning under a bridge, strangled, stabbed once in the chest, with bite marks on his leg. Police initially arrested a 24-year-old man, but dental impressions did not match, and he was released.
The case went cold. It was only after Joubert’s arrest in Nebraska that the FBI compared the bite marks on Ricky’s leg to Joubert’s dental records and found a perfect match. By January 1986, Joubert was indicted for Ricky’s murder, and investigators tied him to the earlier attacks on Sarah Canty, Michael Whitham, and Vicky Goff.
Joubert’s childhood offers a grim window into the making of a killer. Born on July 2, 1963, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he was raised in a Catholic household marked by turmoil. When he was four years old, he witnessed his father choking his mother until she lost consciousness, a moment he later told therapists had carved itself into his memory as a permanent wound.
His parents divorced when he was six, and his mother took him and his younger sister to Portland, Maine, where they lived in a cramped, run-down apartment. His mother was controlling and impossible to please, and his father was barred from contact. At school, Joubert was small and painfully shy, the kind of kid bullies naturally targeted.
They called him Jujubee, shoved him in hallways, and teased him during recess. He never fought back. One teacher noted that he seemed to absorb the 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 as if he believed he deserved it.
By age 11 or 12, Joubert’s fantasies had turned violent and methodical. He imagined tying people up, gagging them, and watching them struggle. In later psychiatric reports, he admitted that it was not the violence that excited him, but the fear and the moment someone realized they were not getting away.
Despite these dark thoughts, he maintained a normal facade. He joined the Boy Scouts, played clarinet in the school marching band, and delivered newspapers for five years. He used the money to help pay tuition at an all-boys Catholic school, where he earned solid grades in honors classes.
To most people, he was a quiet, bookish kid who kept to himself, spending afternoons building model airplanes and listening to music. He had no real friends, and those dark thoughts continued to swirl.
When Joubert graduated high school in 1981, he enrolled at Norwich University in Vermont to study engineering, but college gave him a freedom he could not handle. He turned to alcohol and marijuana, earned only 10 credits, and dropped out. By the summer of 1982, he was back in Maine, unemployed and directionless.
He enlisted in the Air Force, training as a radar technician, a move that FBI profiler Robert Ressler later said was an attempt to get as far away from Maine as possible, knowing that someone might eventually connect him to Ricky Stenson’s murder. He was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska, where the distance seemed to offer safety. But the urge to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 did not fade.
In Nebraska, Joubert’s crimes escalated with a chilling precision. He told investigators that he was glad he had been caught because he did not think he could stop himself. A panel of psychiatrists diagnosed him with obsessive-compulsive disorder, sadistic tendencies, and schizoid personality disorder, but every expert agreed he was fully aware of his actions when he killed.
A three-judge panel sentenced him to death for the Nebraska murders. In Maine, where the death penalty does not exist, he received life in prison for Ricky Stenson’s murder. He spent more than a decade on death row at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, filling his time reading Freud and Hemingway, lifting weights, and teaching himself to draw.
Those drawings, obtained by journalist Mark Pettit, depicted violent scenes involving young boys, and criminal profilers said his fantasies had not faded with time but had sharpened and deepened.
Before his execution, Joubert insisted he had changed. He said he had finally asked his mother and sister whether anything traumatic had happened to him as a child, and only then did his mother admit that his father had once choked her unconscious in front of him. He claimed that moment had shaped everything and that now that he understood it, he would never 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 again.
Almost no one believed him. On July 17, 1996, at 12:01 a. m.
, John Joseph Joubert IV was led into the execution chamber in Nebraska. He was 33 years old. At 12:29 a.
m. , he was pronounced dead. Years earlier, he had told a reporter that what thrilled him most was not the violence itself, but the power and control, the look in a child’s eyes when they realized they were not going to get away.
That is what he lived for. In the end, the only reason he did not keep going was because a preschool teacher refused to ignore the feeling in her gut that something was wrong. She wrote down a license plate number, and that simple act brought a killer’s world crashing down.
