John Joubert - Childhood

Childhood

Joubert was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on July 2, 1963. A bright child, Joubert began reading at age three and renting books from a public library at five. He was later found to have an IQ of 123, signifying above average intelligence. Joubert's parents divorced when he was six years old, and he stayed to live with his mother, whom he greatly resented throughout his life as being excessively controlling. His mother forbade him from seeing his father, and often stood in the way of him developing connections with his peers and spanked him up until he was twelve years old. He also had problems with his peers, who taunted him on the basis of his relatively small build from the time he was in grade school up until high school.

From a very young age, Joubert began having increasingly violent sadistic fantasies. According to three psychiatric reports prepared on Joubert in 1984, his earliest sadistic fantasies began at around the age of six. These fantasies revolved around murdering and cannibalizing a neighborhood girl who babysat him. To one psychiatrist, he described having nothing personal against the girl seeing her as "just someone to kill."

In 1971, Joubert's mother moved them out of their former house into a rundown apartment. At this time he was considered an outcast at school, and sought to reconcile for these feelings of isolation by joining cub-scouts. It was around this time that his sadistic and homicidal fantasies progressed to the point where he contemplated murdering strangers on the streets, tying and gagging those who resisted him. In one later psychiatric report, he was described as saying that he derived pleasure from the thought of his victims saying "if you are going to do it, get it over with."

In 1974 Joubert's mother moved his family to Portland, Maine and got a job as a bookkeeper. Here, his family settled in a two-story home in the middle-class Oakdale neighborhood. While attending school in Portland, his problems with his peers began to intensify. He confessed at the age of twelve to having homosexual tendencies, and was further teased and ostracized because of it.

When he was 13, he stabbed a young girl with a pencil and felt sexually stimulated when she cried in pain. The next day, he took a razor blade and slashed another girl as he biked past her. In another incident, he beat and nearly strangled another boy. He relished the power of bullying, and continued to brutally attack his peers and younger children. At around age 16, he nearly strangled to death an eight-year old boy named Chris Day. Each offense occurred with gradually higher intensity, and each time Joubert successfully evaded getting caught.