Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (19 page)

Meanwhile the authorities were finding that the marks on Hansen’s aviation map identified the known grave sites of Joanne Messina, Eklutna Annie, Sherry Morrow and Paula Goulding. The extractor marks on the bullets used to kill Paula and Sherry matched those produced by Hansen’s Ruger – and a witness identified Hansen as the man she’d seen with Sherry on the day she went missing after meeting someone at a café, and a necklace found in his attic was identified as belonging to the murdered Andrea Altiery.

Seventeen of the marks indicated further potential graves

– but the harshness of the winter made digging impossible till the following spring.

Confession

As the weeks passed, the prosecution built their case against Hansen, locating further witnesses who’d seen him with the dancers just before they disappeared and finding more of the victim’s possessions hidden in his attic. He recognised that he was going to be found guilty and sent to the notorious maximum security prison at Marion, Illinois, so did a deal with the District Attorney – he’d confess if he could be sent to a less violent prison.

On 23 February 1984, he admitted killing Sherry Morrow, Paula Goulding, Eklutna Annie, Joanne Messina and a woman who the DA suspected was Andrea Altiery. He’d kept her fish necklace in his extensive trophy collection, a one-off design which her friends immediately recognised. He also recognised a photograph of Sue Luna, and one of Tami Pederson and pointed out the latter’s grave site. And he told them about a black woman he’d murdered at Summit Lake in 1978. Shown his aviation map, he identified a total of 11 grave sites, admitting 157

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that the passage of time had dimmed his memory of which victims inhabited the other graves.

Taken out in a police helicopter, Hansen identified some of the burial sites from the air. When the helicopter landed, the handcuffed man took them to the sites where he actually tore at the snow with his hands in an effort to unearth the bodies.

He was flushed and smiling, and it was clear to the troopers that he was aroused. He also admitted to more than 30 rapes spanning 12 years.

Trial

Brought before Superior Court Judge Ralph E. Moody, Hansen pleaded guilty to four homicides – Goulding, Morrow, Annie and Messina – and acknowledged his commission of 13 other homicides. (It’s common for serial killers to only be charged with a few of their murders; the ones which are simplest for the prosecution to prove.) The Assistant District Attorney told the court that Robert Hansen had enjoyed terrorising and repeatedly raping the women then setting them free naked in the woods and hunting them down as if they were deer. The authorities also suspected that he’d shot some of them from his plane as they ran through the Alaskan wilderness in a desperate search for sanctuary. The defence didn’t give a statement, as Hansen wished them to remain silent and when asked if he wanted to make a statement he replied that he did not. As a result, the entire trial lasted a mere two and a half hours.

The judge noted, ‘This gentleman has been known to us for several years, yet we’ve turned him loose several times knowing that he had the potential to kill.’ He sentenced the serial killer to 460 years plus life without the possibility of parole, whereupon Hansen was transferred to the maximum security prison at Lewisburn, Pennsylvania.

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Body search

That spring, Alaskan State Troopers began the search for the remaining bodies. On the first day they found the remains of Sue Luna and Malai Larsen beside Knik River. On the second day they found a Jane Doe by Horseshoe Lake. Day three yielded the jawbone of Angela Feddern by Figure Eight Lake: animals had eaten the rest of her corpse. Day six resulted in the recovery of Tami Pederson’s body on an island in the middle of Knik River, and a week later Lisa Furrell’s remains were found in a shallow grave south of Knik Bridge. A week after that, the body of Tereasa Watson was recovered at South Lake, partially eaten by animals. Added to the four bodies that had previously been located before Hansen was sentenced, this brought the total to 11.

In 1985 a pilot landed on a sandbar on Knik River and found the body of DeLynn Frey, the last of Hansen’s victims to be reported missing. But detectives believed he’d bound and killed at least 18 girls, one more than he admitted to. That estimate was later revised to more than 30 sexually motivated kills. John Douglas of the FBI commented that Hansen might have started killing in his twenties and that ‘there were probably victims he wasn’t proud of… ones who weren’t prostitutes or perhaps very young’. The other bodies had doubtless been eaten by animals and the bones scattered far and wide.

Divorce

Robert Hansen’s wife now divorced him. Hansen himself had urged her to do this, afraid that some of the murder victims’

boyfriends would seek vengeance on his family. He told detectives that his wife didn’t deserve to have any problems, but seemed to repress the fact that the victims and their families had also done nothing wrong yet received a wealth of pain.

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The great escape

Robert Hansen served the first two years of his life sentence at Lewisburn, Pennsylvania but he was threatened numerous times by other prisoners so in 1986 was moved to Oak Park Heights prison in Minnesota where he could spend less time with the rest of the prison populace. When that prison became overcrowded in 1988 he was transferred to Lemon Creek prison at Juneau, spending the first year under special protective custody. Thereafter he was given work as a prison clerk.

The prison perceived him as a model prisoner until they found his escape plan, consisting of aeronautical charts, letters to a boat salesman and features about plastic explosives and airline safety. The authorities feared that he intended to escape by private plane then transfer to a boat. They also wondered if he meant to blow up a commercial aircraft as a way of getting back at the world, a common sadistic fantasy.

Hansen was immediately moved to Cook Inlet prison in Anchorage then transferred to Seward’s new maximum security prison, the Spring Creek Correctional Center, where he was initially only let out of his cell for three hours a day.

In July 2003, a Las Vegas video company told a local TV station that they were organising hunts where paying customers could stalk and shoot paintballs at naked women.

Perhaps remembering Hansen’s homicidal hunting, numerous members of the public phoned in to complain. But the company had apparently invented the hunts in order to play a prank on the TV station – only to find themselves inundated with calls from men, and a few women, eager to pay up to $10,000 to hunt naked female prey.

That same year, Alaskan State Troopers appealed to the public to help them find the identity of Hansen’s Jane Doe, the victim given the moniker Eklutna Annie. They described her as a white brunette in her twenties dressed in jeans, a brown 160

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leather jacket, a sleeveless knitted top and reddish-brown high-heeled boots.

Now in his late sixties, Robert Christian Hansen is still incarcerated at Spring Creek which is heavily guarded, the 500

inmates watched over by more than 200 corrections officers.

He writes humorous short stories and it’s rumoured that he’s also written his autobiography. He will eventually die in jail.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

JOHN JOSEPH JOUBERT

John Joubert was only 20 when he killed three
boys and tried to abduct a woman. The young
scoutmaster’s boyish face hid his cruel sexual
fantasies.

Formative experiences

John was born on 2 July 1963 to Beverly and Jack Joubert, who went on three years later to have a daughter. The family lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and ran a diner there for many years. When it failed, Jack found other work in the catering world and Beverly became a bookkeeper. The children were often left with a pretty young babysitter whose mother was Beverly’s friend.

The three women would constantly criticise Jack Joubert in his absence, as they saw him as a weak man and a low achiever.

And when they were together, the couple argued all the time.

John would become very upset at witnessing these shouting matches and begged his parents to be nice to one another. But the discord escalated and by the time he was six years old, his mother had demoted his father to sleeping on the settee.

John began to fantasise about finding the babysitter dead and cannibalising her body because he thought that if she disappeared his parents would stop their endless arguing. Later these fantasies crystallised so that he was the one killing her.

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Though he had an IQ of 123, which is university entrance level, he didn’t do particularly well at school because he was so unhappy. He didn’t go to any of the extracurricular activities, keeping more and more to himself.

Divorce

When John was eight his mother left his father and moved him and his sister into a dilapidated apartment. She forbade him to see his father, whom he loved and who lived just across the street. It was one of many rules in the Joubert house – John wasn’t allowed to watch the same television programmes as his fellow pupils and this, coupled with his shyness, ensured that he quickly became an outsider figure at school.

In 1974, his mother moved the family to Portland, Maine.

He begged to live with his father, who’d now remarried, but his deeply religious mother declined: she eventually wanted him to go to an exclusive boy’s Catholic secondary school in the area so that he’d have an even stronger grounding in her beliefs.

At 11 he saw detective magazines in the local grocers which showed frightened women in bondage and he began to fantasise about tying women up and hurting them. Later John began to feel attracted to other boys, but his upbringing forbade this so he quickly repressed his desires. Many of society’s most vicious sadists are in conflict over their sexuality.

One day a schoolmate asked John if he was gay, and thinking that this meant happy, he answered yes. He consequently became the laughing stock of the playground. It also made it harder for him to approach the one girl he would later claim that he was attracted to.

Realising that he’d never fit in at school, John joined the Boy Scouts and began to earn merit badges. Outwardly he looked like a pleasant – if unhealthily conservative – youth, but inwardly he fantasised about tying people up and torturing 163

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them. He masturbated several times a day to these fantasies, eventually working up the nerve to act them out.

Teenage cruelty

On a cold afternoon in October 1979, the 16-year-old grabbed hold of an eight-year-old boy in nearby Oakdale and attempted to strangle him. Thankfully the child struggled so hard that he managed to break free.

The following month Joubert approached a girl of a similar age. She was friendly and her lack of apprehension disturbed him. After all, he wanted victims who were visibly in awe of him and whom he could immediately dominate. Shaken, he failed to carry out his planned attack, instead returning to the comfort of his sadistic fantasies.

In December he struck again, cycling past a ten-year-old girl and stabbing her in the back with a pencil, breaking the lead and leaving some of it embedded in her flesh. He cycled home and masturbated compulsively to the memory of her screams.

But it was in the following January that he upped the ante, stabbing a young student on her way to an evening class.

Though seriously injured, she survived.

Later that week Joubert was briefly questioned by officers who were talking to everyone in the vicinity, but his innocent expression and slender build doubtless helped them decide that he wasn’t a sadistic fiend.

Two months later he stabbed a nine-year-old boy in the throat, leaving him with a wound which required 12 stitches.

By now police had stepped up the hunt for the Oakdale Slasher and Joubert decided to keep a low profile for a while.

College

He started college and for the first time in his life had a little fun, tasting his first alcoholic drink and sampling marijuana.

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He also began to play Dungeons and Dragons (a role-playing game where players become powerful characters) and became very good at it. Unfortunately he failed to devote a similar number of hours to his studies and dropped out at the end of his first year, soon spending hours hanging about the house and becoming increasingly melancholy.

His mother understandably wasn’t prepared to support him forever and demanded that he find work. Such altercations are often pivotal in a sadist’s life: unable to cope and angry at key authority figures, he decides to make someone else feel even worse…

The rst murder

Determined to hurt and demean another human being, he cycled along a path called Back Cove, near central Portland, an area of the city he often frequented. It was early in the evening of 22 August 1982. Espying 11-year-old Ricky Stetson out jogging, he began to follow him. Several people saw the teenager cycling behind the 11-year-old boy, but they thought nothing of it. They had no way of knowing that Joubert was a 19-year-old sadist with repressed homosexual desires.

His excitement mounting, Joubert overpowered the child in a quiet area of the cove and strangled him manually and with a ligature before stabbing him several times in the chest. He also bit the boy on his calf, probably chewing and swallowing the flesh just as he’d done in his fantasies when cannibalising his babysitter. Finally, he interfered with Ricky’s clothing so that his underpants were visible. Then, remembering that the bite-marks on the child’s flesh could be traced back to him, he gouged the marks out with his knife. But some traces of his toothmarks remained, which would later link him to the child’s torture-death.