The crimes themselves seemed abnormal to the people who discovered them and to those who investigated them, but the modus operandi was sane enough; carefully organized and focused. Someone --possibly two or three someones, but more likely a single person--was breaking into the crypts and mausoleums of small-town cemeteries with the efficiency of a good burglar breaking into a house or store. He was apparently arriving at these jobs equipped with drills, a bolt-cutter, heavy-duty hacksaws, and probably a winch--Brandon says a lot of four-wheel-drive vehicles come equipped with them these days.
The breaks were always aimed at the crypts and mausoleums, never at individual graves, and almost all of them came in winter, when the ground is too hard to dig in and the bodies have to be stored until the deep frost lets go. Once the perpetrator gained entry, he used the bolt-cutter and power drill to open the coffins. He systematically stripped the corpses of any jewelry they might have been wearing when they were interred; he used pliers to pull gold teeth and teeth with gold fillings.
Those acts are despicable, but at least they're understandable. Robbery was only where this guy got started, though. He gouged out eyes, tore off ears, cut dead throats. In February of 1989, two corpses in the Chilton Remembrance Cemetery were found without noses--he apparently knocked them off with a hammer and a chisel. The officer who caught that one told Brandon, "It would have been easy--it was like a deep-freeze in there, and they probably broke off like Popsicles. The real question is what does a guy do with two frozen noses once he has them? Does he put 'em on his keychain? Maybe sprinkle 'em with nacho cheese and then zap 'em in the microwave? What?"
Almost all the desecrated corpses were found minus feet and hands, sometimes also arms and legs, and in several cases the man doing this also took heads and sex-organs. Forensic evidence suggests he used an axe and a butcher-knife for the gross work and a variety of scalpels for the finer stuff. He wasn't bad, either. "A talented amateur," one of the Chamberlain County deputies told Brandon. "I wouldn't want him working on my gall-bladder, but I guess I'd trust him to take a mole off my arm ... if he was full of Halcion or Prozac, that is."
In a few cases he opened up the bodies and/or skull cases and filled them with animal excrement. What the police saw more frequently were cases of sexual desecration. He was an equal-opportunity kind of guy when it came to stealing gold teeth, jewelry, and limbs, but when it came to taking sexual equipment--and having sex with the dead--he stuck strictly to the gentlemen.
This may have been extremely lucky for me.
I learned a lot about the way rural police departments work during the month or so following my escape from our house by the lake, but that's nothing compared with what I've learned in the last week or so. One of the most surprising things is how discreet and tactful small-town cops can be. I guess when you know everybody in the area you patrol by their first names, and are related to a good many of them, discretion becomes almost as natural as breathing.
The way they handled my case is one example of this strange, sophisticated discretion; the way they handled Joubert's is another. The investigation went on for seven years, remember, and a lot of people were in on it before it ended--two State Police departments, four county sheriffs, thirty-one deputies, and God knows how many local cops and constables. It was right there at the front of their open files, and by 1989 they even had a name for him--Rudolph, as in Valentino. They talked about Rudolph when they were in District Court, waiting to testify on their other cases, they compared notes on Rudolph at law-enforcement seminars in Augusta and Derry and Waterville, they discussed him on their coffee-breaks. "And we took him home," one of the cops told Brandon--the same guy who told him about the noses, as a matter of fact. "You bet we did. Guys like us always take guys like Rudolph home. You catch up on the latest details at backyard barbecues, maybe kick it around with a buddy from another department while you're watching your kids play Little League ball. Because you never know when you're going to put something together in a new way and hit the jackpot."
But here's the really amazing part (and you're probably way ahead of me ... if you're not in the bathroom tossing your cookies, that is): for all those years all those cops knew they had a real live monster--a ghoul, in fact--running around the western part of the state, and the story never surfaced in the press until Joubert was caught! In a way find that weird and a little spooky, but in a much larger way I find it wondertul. I guess the law-enforcement battle isn't going so well in a lot of the big cities, but out here in East Overshoe, whatever they're doing still seems to work just fine.
Of course you could argue that there's plenty of room for improvement when it takes seven years to catch a nut like Joubert, but Brandon clarified that for me in a hurry. He explained that the perp (they really do use that word) was operating exclusively in one-horse towns where budget shortfalls have forced the cops to deal only with the most serious and immediate problems ... which means crimes against the living rather than against the dead. The cops say there are at least two hot-car rings and four chop-shops operating in the western half of the state, and those are only the ones they know about. Then there are the murderers, the wife-beaters, the robbers, the speeders, and the drunks. Above all, there's the old dope-ola. It gets bought, it gets sold, it gets grown, and people keep hurting or killing each other over it. According to Brandon, the Police Chief over in Norway won't even use the word cocaine anymore--he calls it Powdered Shithead, and in his written reports he calls it Powdered S******d. I got the point he was trying to make. When you're a small-town cop trying to ride herd on the whole freakshow in a four-year-old Plymouth cruiser that feels like it's going to fall apart every time you push it over seventy, your job gets prioritized in a hurry, and a guy who likes to play with dead people is a long way from the top of the list.
I listened to all this carefully, and I agreed, but not all the way. "Some of it feels true, but some of it feels a little self-serving," I said. "I mean, the stuff Joubert was doing . . . well, it went a little further than just 'playing with dead people,' didn't it? Or am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong at all," he said.
What neither of us wanted to come right out and say was that for seven years this aberrant soul had gone flitting from town to town getting blowjobs from the dead, and to me putting a stop to that seemed quite a bit more important than nabbing teenage girls who've been shoplifting cosmetics at the local drugstore or finding out who's been growing goofy-weed in the woodlot behind the Baptist church.
But the important thing is that no one forgot him, and everyone kept comparing notes. A perp like Rudolph makes cops uneasy for all kinds of reasons, but the major one is that a guy crazy enough to do things like that to dead people might be crazy enough to try doing them to ones that are still alive ... not that you'd live very long after Rudolph decided to split your head open with his trusty axe. The police were also troubled by the missing limbs--what were those for? Brandon says an uncredited memo saying "Maybe Rudolph the Lover is really Hannibal the Cannibal" circulated briefly in the Oxford County Sheriff's Office. It was destroyed not because the idea was regarded as a sick joke-- it wasn't--but because the Sheriff was afraid it might leak to the press.
Whenever one of the local law-enforcement agencies could afford the men and the time, they'd stake out some boneyard or other. There are a lot of them in western Maine, and I guess it had almost become a kind of hobby to some of these guys by the time the case finally broke. The theory was just that if you keep shooting the dice long enough, you're bound to roll your point sooner or later. And that, essentially, is what finally happened.
Early last week--actuaDy about ten days ago now --Castle County Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and one of his deputies were parked in the doorway of an abandoned barn close to Homeland Cemetery. This is on a secondary road that runs by the back gate. It was two o'clock in the morning and they were just getting ready to pack it in for the night when the deputy, John LaPointe, heard a motor. They never saw the van until it was a
ctually pulling up to the gate because it was a snowy night and the guy's headlights weren't on. Deputy LaPointe wanted to take the guy as soon as they saw him get out of the van and go to work on the wrought-iron cemetery gate with a spreader, but the Sheriff restrained him. "Ridgewick's a funny-looking duck," Brandon said, "but he knows the value of a good bust. He never loses sight of the courtroom in the heat of the moment. He learned from Alan Pang-born, the guy who had the job before him, and that means he learned from the best."
Ten minutes after the van went in through the gate, Ridgewick and LaPointe followed with their own headlights out and their unit just barely creeping along through the snow. They followed the van's tracks until they were pretty sure where the guy was going--the town crypt set into the side of the hill. Both of them were thinking Rudolph, but neither one of them said so out loud. LaPointe said it would have been like jinxing a guy who's throwing a no-hitter.
Ridgewick told his deputy to stop the cruiser just around the side of the hill from the crypt--said he wanted to give the guy all the rope he needed to hang himself. As it turned out, Rudolph ended up with enough to hang himself from the moon. When Ridgewick and LaPointe finally moved in with their guns drawn and their flashlights on, they caught Raymond Andrew Joubert half in and half out of an opened coffin. He had his axe in one hand, his cock in the other, and LaPointe said he looked ready to do business with either one.
I guess Joubert scared the hell out of them both when they first saw him in their lights, and I'm not a bit surprised--although I flatter myself that I can imagine better than most what it must have been like, coming on a creature like him in a cemetery crypt at two in the morning. All other circumstances aside, Joubert suffers from acromegaly, a progressive enlargement of the hands, feet, and face that happens when the pituitary gland goes into warp-drive. It's what caused his forehead to bulge the way it does, and his lips to pooch out. He also has abnormally long arms; they dangle all the way down to his knees.
There was a big fire in Castle Rock about a year ago--it burned most of the downtown--and these days the Sheriff jugs most serious offenders in Chamberlain or Norway, but neither Sheriff Ridgewick nor Deputy LaPointe wanted to make the trip over snowy roads at three in the morning, so they took him back to the renovated shed they're using as a cop-shop these days.
"They claimed it was the late hour and the snowy roads," Brandon said, "but I have an idea there was a little more to it than that. I don't think Sheriff Ridgewick wanted to turn over the pinata to anyone else until he'd taken at least one good crack at it himself. Anyway, Joubert was no trouble--he sat in the back of the cruiser, chipper as a chickadee, looking like something that had escaped from an episode of Tales from the Crypt and--both of them swear this is true--singing 'Happy Together,' that old Turtles tune.
"Ridgewick radioed ahead for a couple of temp deputies to meet them. He made sure Joubert was locked up tight and the deputies were armed with shotguns and plenty of fresh coffee before he and LaPointe left again. They drove back to Homeland for the van. Ridgewick put on gloves, sat on one of those green plastic Hefty bags the cops like to call 'evidence blankets' when they use them on a case, and ran the vehicle back to town. He drove with all the windows open and said the van still stank like a butcher's shop after a six-day power failure."
Ridgewick got his first good look into the back of the van when he got it under the arc-lights of the town garage. There were several rotting limbs in the storage compartments running along the sides. There was also a wicker box, much smaller than the one I saw, and a Craftsman tool-case full of burglar's tools. When Ridgewick opened the wicker box, he found six penises strung on a length of jute twine. He said he knew it for what it was at once: a necklace. Joubert later admitted that he often wore it when he went out on his graveyard expeditions, and stated his belief that if he'd been wearing it on his last trip, he never would have been caught. "It brung me a power of good luck," he said, and considering how long it took to catch him, Ruth, I think you'd have to say he had a point.
The worst thing, however, was the sandwich lying on the passenger seat. The thing poking out from between the two slices of Wonder Bread was pretty clearly a human tongue. It had been slathered with that bright yellow mustard kids like.
"Ridgewick managed to get out of the van before he threw up," Brandon said. "Good thing--the State Police would have torn him a new asshole if he'd puked on the evidence. On the other hand, I'd have wanted him removed from his job for psychological reasons if he hadn't thrown up."
They moved Joubert over to Chamberlain shortly after sunrise. While Ridgewick was turned around in the front seat of the cruiser, reading Joubert his rights through the mesh (it was the second or third time he'd done it--Ridgewick is apparently nothing if not methodical), Joubert interrupted to say he "might have done somefing bad to Daddy-Mummy, awful sorry." They had by that time established from documents in Joubert's wallet that he was living in Motton, a farming town just across the river from Chamberlain, and as soon as Joubert was safely locked up in his new quarters, Ridgewick informed officers from both Chamberlain and Motton what Joubert had told them.
On the way back to Castle Rock, LaPointe asked Ridgewick what he thought the cops headed for Joubert's house might find. Ridgewick said, "I don't know, but I hope they remembered to take their gas masks."
A version of what they found and the conclusions they drew came out in the papers over the following days, growing as it did, of course, but the State Police and the Maine Attorney General's Office had a pretty good picture of what had been going on in the farm-house on Kingston Road by the time the sun went down on Joubert's first day behind bars. The couple Joubert called his "Daddy-Mummy"--actuary his stepmother and her commonlaw husband--were dead, all right. They'd been dead for months, although Joubert continued to speak as if the "somefing bad" had happened only days or hours ago. He had scalped them both, and eaten most of "Daddy."
There were body-parts strewn all over the house, some rotting and maggoty in spite of the cold weather, others carefully cured and preserved. Most of the cured parts were male sex-organs. On a shelf by the cellar stairs, the police found about fifty Ball jars containing eyes, lips, fingers, toes, and testicles. Joubert was quite the home canner. The house was also filled--and I do mean fitted--with stolen goods, mostly from summer camps and cottages. Joubert calls them "my things"--appliances, tools, gardening equipment, and enough lingerie to stock a Victoria's Secret boutique. He apparently liked to wear it.
The police are still trying to sort out the body-parts that came from Joubert's grave-robbing expeditions from those that came from his other activities. They believe he may have killed as many as a dozen people over the last five years, all hitchhiking drifters he picked up in his van. The total may go higher, Brandon says, but the forensic work is very slow. Joubert himself is no help, not because he won't talk but because he talks too much. According to Brandon, he's confessed to over three hundred crimes already, including the assassination of George Bush. He seems to believe Bush is actually Dana Carvey, the guy who plays The Church Lady on Saturday Night Live.
He's been in and out of various mental institutions since the age of fifteen, when he was arrested for engaging in unlawful sexual congress with his cousin. The cousin in question was two at the time. He was a victim of sex abuse himself, of course--his father, his stepfather, and his stepmother all apparently had a go at him. What is it they used to say? The family that plays together stays together?
He was sent to Gage Point--a sort of combination detox, halfway house, and mental institution for adolescents in Hancock County--on a charge of gross sexual abuse, and released as cured four years later, at the age of nineteen. This was in 1973. He spent the second half of 1975 and most of 1976 at AMHI, in Augusta. This was as a result of Joubert's Fun with Animals Period. I know I probably shouldn't be joking about these things, Ruth--you'll think I'm horrible--but in truth, I don't know what else to do. I sometimes feel that if I don't joke, I'll start
to cry, and that if I start to cry I won't be able to stop. He was sticking cats in trash barrels and then blowing them to pieces with the big firecrackers they call "can-crushers," that's what he was doing ... and every now and then, presumably when he needed a break in the old routine, he would nail a small dog to a tree.
In '79 he was sent away to Juniper Hill for raping and blinding a six-year-old boy. This time it was supposed to be for good, but when it comes to politics and state-run institutions--especiatty state-run mental institutions--I think it's fair to say that nothing is forever. He was released from Juniper Hill in 1984, once more adjudged "cured." Brandon feels--and so do I--that this second cure had more to do with cuts in the state's mental health budget than with any miracle of modern science or psychiatry. At any rate, Joubert returned to Motton to live with his stepmother and her commonlaw, and the state forgot about him ... except to issue him a driver's license, that is. He took a road-test and got a perfectly legal one--in some ways I find this the most amazing fact of all--and at some point in late 1984 or early 1985, he started using it to tour the local cemeteries.
He was a busy boy. In the wintertime he had his crypts and mausoleums; in the fall and the spring he broke into seasonal camps and homes all over western Maine, taking anything that struck his fancy--"my things," you know. He apparently had a great fondness for framed photographs. They found four trunks of them in the attic of the house on Kingston Road. Brandon says they are still counting, but that the total number will probably be over seven hundred.