Murderer's sister blogs about his early life
PORTLAND, Ore. – For the first time insights into the childhood of the man who killed Brooke Wilberger have been revealed through his sister’s blog.
Dina McBride is the sister of Joel Courtney. Courtney pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and concealing the commission of kidnapping of 19-year-old Wilberger. He agreed to a plea bargain that put him in prison for the rest of his life in New Mexico.
Now his sister has typed out her family’s story in her blog. In it she details their idyllic early childhood in Beaverton: four children raised by working-class parents.
But she said “there was a very long season where my brother Joel embraced drugs, began dabbling in Satanism, and was arrested for a variety of different offenses. To say that my parents were heartbroken would be the worst possible understatement.”
She said her parents tried everything including “family counseling.”
With the counseling Joel managed to settle down and have a family, but in May of 2004 shortly after Brooke Wilberger disappeared from an apartment complex near Oregon State University, Dina said she remembers when Joel came to her house and said, “You’ll never believe where I’ve been for the last three days!”
That’s when he told her: “'I was kidnapped. There were guys with knives, and guns. I had to hide – there was a blonde girl with me, she and I had to hide out in the bushes to get away from the guys. There was blood, too. It rained, it was cold. I haven’t eaten in days!' He finally sat down at the dining room table and I could see that he was perhaps coming down off of some drug …”
Dina wrote that Joel was acting nervous: “He looked up quickly out the front bay window of the house and said, ‘Dina! There’s someone in your car! He’s got a gun!’”
That was the last time she saw Joel as a free man.
Dina wrote that Joel wasn’t always so volatile. She said they were “born to two of the most loving, amazing parents.”
She remembers “Kool-Aid stands”, a “parade in Beaverton” and trips to the “Oregon Surf.”
In the five years that Wilberger’s disappearance was a mystery, Dina doesn’t say whether she ever went to police.
But of her brother’s confession she writes: “I was in shock. Mostly over the fact that Joel agreed to cooperate and provide the truth he’s been asked for so many, many times. My mother actually asked him at one point in time – and he’d responded with a certain amount of disdain that he’d never be held accountable for that, that no one could prove anything.”
In closing Dina said: “I was so thankful that the Wilberger’s could now have Brooke’s remains to lay to rest. I was thankful that some closure could come for us as well. Yes, there were tears of joy – but some of sorrow as well. Oh, the horrible, horrible loss.”
