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 Off ice had a pretty good picture of what had been going on in the farmhouse on Kingston Road by the time the sun went down on Joubert’s first day behind bars. The couple Joubert called his “Daddy-Mummy'-actually 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 filled-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 halt 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, able to stop. He was sticking I’ll start to cry, and that it I start to cry I won’t be 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-especially 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.
It’s impossible to say to what extent” Daddy-Mummy” participated in what was going on before Joubert did away with them. It must have been a lot, because Joubert hadn’t made the slightest effort to hide what he was doing. As for the neighbors, their motto seems to be, “They paid their bills and kept to themselves. Wasn’t nothing to us.” It’s got a gruesome kind of perfection to it, wouldn’t you say? New England Gothic, by way of The Journal of Aberrant Psychiatry.
They found another, bigger, wicker box in the cellar. Brandon got Xeroxes of the police photos documenting this particular find, but he was hesitant about showing them to me at first. Well… that’s actually a little too mild. It was the one and only place where he gave into the temptation all men seem to feel you know the one I mean, to play John Wayne. “Come on, little lady, jest wait until we go by all them dead Injuns and keep lookin” off into the desert. I’ll tell you when we’re past.”