Joel Patrick Courtney - Essay Example

One of four children of working class parents, Courtney grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, near Portland. According to his older sister Dina McBride, he had an “idyllic” childhood (Tilkin 2009). By the time Courtney was eleven years old, he became involved with drugs and was sent to juvenile detention at 15. His sister also testified, during his trial for the Wilberger murder, that he had sexually assaulted her at least once. A cousin told investigators of four occasions when Courtney had attempted to sexually assault her when they were both teenagers.

(He was between fourteen and nineteen years old, and she was twelve to seventeen years old.) The cousin never reported the attacks because she was afraid of him (Gazette Times, 2009). When Courtney was 19, he was convicted of sex abuse and attempted rape for attacking a teenager female friend while under the influence of alcohol and drugs. His sister reported that on the encouragement of his parents, he “settled down” (Tilkin, 2009) to the point that he was able to receive counseling. He got married in the early 1990s and had three children.

He lived with his family near Albuquerque, New Mexico until April 2004, when they moved in with his brother- and sister-in-law in Portland. Courtney’s brother-in-law got him a job with his employer, a maintenance company. Courtney used a van owned by his employer to abduct Wilberger in Corvallis, Oregon, 85 miles south of Portland, at the end of May. In June, Courtney’s wife left him and returned to New Mexico; he followed her and he was arrested for a domestic disturbance. He was never charged, so after his release, he reconciled with his wife and moved in with his family in Rio Rancho, New Mexico (Gazette Times, 2009).

In November, he kidnapped and raped a 22-year old University of New Mexico student, but she escaped and was able to identify Courtney as her attacker. He pleaded guilty and in 2007, was sentenced to 18 years of prison. Eventually, police was able to link Courtney to the Wilberger case and in spite of the lack of the body of the alleged victim, charged him with 19 counts of aggregated murder, kidnapping, sexual abuse, rape, and sodomy. In exchange for providing information about the location of Wilberger’s body, a plea bargain was made, and Courtney was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, sparing him from the death penalty.

The deal also provided for Courtney to serve his sentence in his home state of New Mexico (Scrabner & Netter, 2009). Wilberger’s disappearance in 2004 was covered in the national media and was one of the most highly publicized murder trials in Oregon history (Moran, 2009). Wilberger, a devout Mormon whose boyfriend was serving as a missionary in Venezuela at the time, had completed her first year at Brigham Young University She was visiting and working for her sister in Corvallis at the time of her abduction.

On the morning of May 24, 2004, she was last seen cleaning lamp posts in the parking lot of the apartment building her sister and brother-in-law managed, located on the edge of Oregon State University campus. Earlier that same day, Courtney had attempted to abduct two other young college students, but failed because they were able to get away (Schrabner & Netter, 2009). According to a reporter from a local television station in Corvallis, Courtney’