Joseph Edward Duncan III was a registered sex offender from Fargo, North Dakota, who in May 2005 broke into a house near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, killed three members of the family inside, and took away the two youngest children. He held them for almost seven weeks and killed the boy, Dylan Groene, who was nine. The case ended on July 2, 2005, when a waitress at a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene recognized the boy's eight-year-old sister, and the manager called police.
He had served a 20-year Washington sentence for a crime he committed at 16, had been released in July 2000, and was on the run from a Minnesota charge at the time of the killings. After his arrest he was linked by a fingerprint to the 1997 abduction and murder of a 10-year-old boy in Beaumont, California, and federal prosecutors said he had confessed to killing two young sisters in Seattle in 1996. He pleaded guilty in Idaho state court, in federal court and in California. A federal jury in Boise sentenced him to death three times in 2008. After years of litigation over whether he had been mentally competent to give up his appeal, he died of brain cancer on federal death row in March 2021.
Duncan was born on February 25, 1963, the fourth of five children, according to a profile by the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. His father had a career in the Army, and the family moved about every two years, with postings that included Germany and California, before settling near Tacoma, Washington. His mother handled most of the discipline at home. His parents separated in July 1979. Prison records released by the Washington Department of Corrections in 2005 described a troubled family life.
He left high school in his sophomore year. At 15 he was involved in a car theft and a high-speed police chase, and he was sent for four months to a boys' ranch near Tacoma, followed by a year of probation, the Forum reported.
In January 1980, when he was 16, Duncan broke into a neighbor's home in Tacoma and stole handguns and ammunition. Later the same day he abducted a boy. He pleaded guilty to first-degree rape, which the Forum described as first-degree rape with a firearm, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. A court also ordered a 90-day evaluation at Western State Hospital. The reports do not name the court that sentenced him. The boy survived.
At Western State Hospital after his arrest, according to the prison file reported by The Spokesman-Review, Duncan gave shifting accounts of his past, and he later said he had been trying to get into the hospital's program rather than go to prison. He earned a high school diploma in prison in 1982. He served his sentence in several Washington prisons.
The file showed that in 1993 prison officials found he had altered a corrections document so that his conviction read "assault" instead of "rape." He said he had done it to protect himself from other inmates, and he was found in violation.
Duncan was paroled in 1994. The Forum's timeline puts his parole in September 1994, after 14 years; the Washington prison file, as reported by The Spokesman-Review, says he was first released in late December 1994. He found work in telemarketing in Seattle and saw a community therapist. About a year and a half after his release his parole officer raised concerns about his conduct and his therapist's approach.
Accounts of how the parole ended differ in detail. The Forum says his parole was revoked in October 1996 for marijuana use and possession of a firearm, that he absconded in March 1997, and that he was arrested in Kansas City, Missouri, in August 1997. The Spokesman-Review, from the prison file, says he failed a drug test and broke other parole rules, left the state in the spring of 1997 and was arrested months later in Kansas City; it gives December 12, 1997, as the date his parole was revoked. The Forum's timeline says simply that he was returned to prison for violating parole in April 1997. All agree that he went back to prison and that his parole was not reinstated.
Before an offender like Duncan was released, a Washington body called the End of Sentence Review Committee decided whether the state should try to have him civilly committed as a sexually violent predator. In March 2000 a psychologist, Carla van Dam, evaluated him. She found the evidence was not enough to seek commitment, but she called him "an untreated sex offender" and "a skilled liar," cited a score suggesting a 61 percent chance of reoffending, and wrote that the case "generates more questions than it answers." She considered his single conviction insufficient for commitment.
The committee agreed. Its chair, Victoria Roberts, told The Spokesman-Review in 2005 that "there just wasn't the evidence" that he had a mental abnormality and was likely to reoffend. The offense was about two decades old and had been committed when he was a juvenile; other allegations he had made about himself he later recanted, and nothing substantiated them; and he had no known offense during about three years of freedom in Seattle. Washington had required lifetime supervision for sex offenders since 2001, but that rule did not reach his earlier conviction. "I think the right decision was made," Roberts said, given what the committee knew.
He was released on July 14, 2000, having served the rest of his sentence, with no probation conditions. He was classified as a Level 3 sex offender, the highest-risk category, and local police were notified.
Duncan moved to Fargo in 2000 and registered there as a sex offender that July. North Dakota also assessed him as a high risk to reoffend. He studied computer science at North Dakota State University and made the dean's list, the Forum reported, and a professor hired him in 2001 for a research project. He later took a job with a consulting firm in Moorhead, Minnesota, that required frequent travel, and he cut back his course load. He held steady jobs, made friends and kept a low profile. He kept an online journal in the months before the killings.
In July 2004 a man approached two boys at a playground in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and the boys gave police a description of the man and his car. On March 4, 2005, Duncan was charged in Becker County District Court with second-degree criminal sexual conduct and second-degree attempted criminal sexual conduct over that incident.
At a hearing on April 5, 2005, Assistant Prosecutor Michael Fritz asked for 25,000 dollars bail. Judge Thomas Schroeder set it at 15,000 dollars. Prosecutors had noted that his last known offense was 25 years old and committed as a juvenile, and that he had a steady job in Fargo and was close to finishing a college degree. The county attorney, Joe Evans, later said the charges would probably have brought about 13 months in prison under Minnesota's guidelines. Duncan paid the bail with a personal check and then called a Fargo businessman for a loan to cover it; the businessman wrote him a 15,000-dollar check the same day, the Associated Press reported. The businessman said Duncan had assured him he was innocent of the Becker County charges. A physician who had lived in Fargo told police he had given Duncan 6,500 dollars toward lawyers' fees.
Duncan promised to stay in touch with a probation agent. He checked in, and about a week later the contacts stopped. On April 15 a red 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee was rented in his name from an agency in St. Paul; it was not returned on its April 20 due date. In May park rangers in the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area in Wyoming found the Jeep's key tag while cleaning up garbage that bears had pulled from a dumpster. Police searched his Fargo apartment, and Fargo police issued a warrant for him on May 6. When he missed a Becker County hearing on May 16, a bench warrant was issued and his bail was forfeited.
After the Idaho killings, the Becker County bail decision came under sharp criticism. "In retrospect, there's no way to defend it," Evans said in July 2005. A court spokesman said Judge Schroeder regretted it. Lawyers for the estates of two of the Idaho victims sued Becker County and Duncan in federal court in Idaho; the Associated Press reported in March 2006 that the suit had been filed on December 5. It claimed the bail had been set too low and that the county had failed to supervise him; the county's lawyer said it would ask to be dismissed, citing the immunity of judges and prosecutors. The outcome of that suit was not reported, and neither was how the Minnesota charge was finally resolved.
Brenda Groene, 40, lived with her children in a house in the Wolf Lodge Bay area east of Coeur d'Alene, beside Interstate 90. Her live-in partner, Mark McKenzie, 37, was a father figure to the children, The Spokesman-Review reported. Slade Groene was 13. Dylan Groene was nine; he had been born on July 16, 1995. The youngest, a girl, was eight.
Mark McKenzie's brother remembered a house where children played outdoors and caught snakes and frogs. An older son of Brenda Groene said strangers often stopped there, especially after car trouble on the freeway, because it was the first house they came to. He remembered his mother as "a really nice lady."
Dylan loved sports, cars and music. He was adventurous, had a wide smile and hugged his teachers even when he was trying to look cool. He liked to tell his music teacher that his father played in a band, played with toy cars with school staff, and asked the school librarian for books on motorcycles, trucks and cars. As a little boy he was called "Dilly Bar," and later "D.J."
Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie and the three children were last seen alive at a barbecue at the house on May 15, 2005. According to the testimony of a Kootenai County sheriff's sergeant, Brad Maskell, at a hearing that July, Duncan had chosen the family after driving past on Interstate 90 and seeing the youngest child playing outside, and he had watched the house for two or three days, using night-vision goggles from a distance. Sheriff Rocky Watson said the crime was planned but that he believed the family had been selected at random. "It was not a spontaneous act," he said.
The federal courts later summarized what happened. On May 16, 2005, Duncan, armed and masked, entered the house. He bound the family members and killed Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie and Slade with a hammer. He took Dylan and his sister away. The bodies of the three were found in the house on May 16. An Amber Alert was issued on May 17. An initial search found nothing, and for weeks investigators considered theories that ranged from drug gangs to motorcycle gangs, The Spokesman-Review reported.
On June 1, 2005, a federal arrest warrant was issued for Duncan in Minneapolis, in connection with his flight from Minnesota.
Duncan took the two children to campsites in the Lolo National Forest in Montana and held them for almost seven weeks, the Ninth Circuit said. He killed Dylan there on or about June 22, 2005. The federal charges to which he later pleaded guilty describe what he did to both children in legal terms: kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, and the sexual exploitation of a child resulting in death. Investigators later recovered photographs and video recordings he had made, and they were used as evidence at his federal sentencing.
The children had been moved first in a pickup, then in the Jeep, which was later found to be carrying stolen Missouri license plates, and the Jeep had been kept at a neighbor's secluded barn, Sergeant Maskell testified.
On July 2, 2005, Duncan brought the girl into the Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene. A waitress, Amber Deahn, recognized her. Her manager, Linda Olson, called 911 and told the dispatcher that a customer looked a lot like the missing Coeur d'Alene girl. A 21-year-old customer, Nick Chapman, who had seen the pair walk in, called 911 about four minutes later. Other employees reportedly helped make sure the man did not leave. Duncan was arrested, and the girl was taken to the hospital and then released to her father.
At the end of July the Kootenai County Sheriff's Department gave reward money from private donations to Deahn and Olson, basing its decision on who had made the first 911 call; Olson chose to split her share with Deahn. The girl's father disagreed and said he might give Chapman his motorcycle. The U.S. Department of Justice's 2021 release dates the rescue to July 3, but the Ninth Circuit and contemporary reports give July 2.
The girl's account led investigators to a campsite in the Lolo National Forest west of St. Regis, Montana. Human remains were found there on July 4, 2005. The FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, identified them through DNA as Dylan's, and the Kootenai County Sheriff's Department announced the identification, The Spokesman-Review reported on July 11. "Every parent wants to be able to put their child to rest," an aunt said.
A public memorial service was held on July 16, 2005, the day Dylan would have turned 10, at Real Life Ministries in Post Falls. Nearly 800 people came, among them teachers from his school, local police officers and FBI agents. Mourners released red and blue balloons outside.
At first Duncan was held without bail in the Kootenai County Jail on two counts of first-degree kidnapping. "It's probably the most complex case I've ever seen," Captain Ben Wolfinger of the sheriff's department said. On July 12, 2005, the Kootenai County prosecutor, Bill Douglas, filed three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of first-degree kidnapping in state court, and planned to drop the original kidnapping charges so that federal prosecutors could bring their own. Douglas described the investigation as "seamless" across agencies. The Ninth Circuit's opinion gives August 2005 as the month the state charged him.
On April 4, 1997, Anthony Martinez, 10, was abducted in Beaumont, California. Accounts written at the time of the sentencing said Duncan had approached a group of children, offering each a dollar to help find a lost cat, and that Anthony was taken at knifepoint; another account says he was taken while playing with his brother behind the family home, and a 2021 report says his brother escaped with Anthony's help. Friends saw him forced into a white car. His family remembered him as a joyful boy who loved playing with his brothers and sisters. A ranger found his body about two weeks later in Berdoo Canyon, a desert area near Joshua Tree National Park, some 70 miles east of Beaumont.
The case stayed unsolved for eight years, during which Riverside County investigators followed up some 15,000 leads, Sheriff Bob Doyle said. After the Idaho arrest, Duncan mentioned the name Martinez and the general area to the FBI, which contacted Riverside authorities on July 14, 2005. Investigators flew to Idaho and fingerprinted him; he refused to be interviewed. A match was confirmed between his print and a partial thumbprint recovered in the case, and Doyle announced it at a press conference reported by the Associated Press on August 3, 2005. "We're pretty confident that he's our suspect," he said. Beaumont police said they believed the abductor had scouted neighborhoods in the town.
On July 6, 1996, Sammiejo White, 11, and her sister Carmen Cubias, 9, left the motel in north Seattle where their family had recently moved, and did not come back. Their mother described Carmen as independent and said both girls knew how to use the buses. Until their remains were found, police treated the case as a missing persons inquiry. On February 10, 1998, a man living in an abandoned barn found remains in the North Creek area of Bothell, and on February 18 the King County Medical Examiner's Office identified them as the two girls. Its chief investigator said they had most likely died very soon after they disappeared.
In August 2005 King County investigators began reviewing the case, because Duncan was believed to have been living near the girls when they disappeared. "We don't have any evidence that links him to our double homicide," the sheriff's spokesman, Sergeant John Urquhart, said then. A King County spokesman later said Duncan had given the FBI details about the killings that August but had not formally confessed.
In January 2007, when federal prosecutors filed notice that they would seek the death penalty, they said Duncan had confessed to killing the two girls and Anthony Martinez. Urquhart said his office had not heard of any confession: the FBI called the 2005 interview a confession, but King County did not believe the transcript supported that, and the details Duncan gave could have come from a cellmate. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office said the offices had since "straightened it out" and maintained that he had confessed to all three. In 2008 Seattle authorities said further charges were unlikely. The Justice Department said in 2021 that he had described the crimes to federal investigators but was not prosecuted for them because of the sentences he already faced, and the Associated Press reported that he had admitted killing seven people, five of them children.
In November 2006 the FBI said it was reviewing whether Duncan might be connected to the 2002 death of a 19-year-old Montana man whose body was found in North Dakota. An FBI supervisor said there was no direct evidence tying Duncan to it and that "we're a long way from saying he's a suspect." No charge is known to have followed.
Duncan and the state reached a binding ten-point agreement before trial. On October 16, 2006, before First District Judge Fred Gibler, he pleaded guilty to all six counts: three of first-degree murder and three of first-degree kidnapping. He was represented by the Kootenai County public defender, John Adams; the federal defender Roger Peven, who would represent him in the federal case, was also involved. Asked whether he wished to make a statement, Duncan said he had thought about it but had "nothing to say."
Judge Gibler imposed three consecutive life terms without parole on the kidnapping counts. Sentencing on the murders was put off until the federal case was finished. If the federal case did not end in a death sentence, Duncan would return to Kootenai County for a death penalty hearing on the murders, at which no witnesses would be required. Douglas said the death penalty had never been negotiable. The agreement spared the surviving girl from testifying in the state case; recorded police interviews would be used instead. Duncan also had to cooperate truthfully with sheriff's detectives and give his public defender the passwords to encrypted files on a laptop found in the Jeep, which FBI experts had not been able to open. Peven had already received the password and used it to examine the files in part, The Spokesman-Review reported.
Relatives spoke afterward. One victim's mother said she felt relief and that closure was "the beginning." Another mother said her family would never fully recover. The children's father, who had lost his voice to cancer, wrote that the family considered it the best possible outcome.
On January 18, 2007, a federal grand jury in Coeur d'Alene returned a ten-count indictment. The counts covered the kidnapping of both children, aggravated sexual abuse of both, sexual exploitation of a child resulting in death, being a felon in possession of a firearm, using a firearm in a crime of violence resulting in death, transporting a stolen firearm, possessing an unregistered firearm, and transporting a stolen vehicle. On January 23 the government gave notice that it would seek death on three counts, citing as aggravating factors his alleged confessions to earlier killings and his prior convictions.
California was also seeking him. Riverside County had filed murder charges with special circumstances, and its district attorney, Rod Pacheco, said that "after 10 years it's time to finally get justice for the family of Anthony Martinez." Douglas argued that Duncan should stay in Idaho until all the Idaho charges were resolved, and he did.
In September 2007 Judy Clarke took over as head of the federal defense team. A former federal defender for Eastern Washington and Idaho, she had represented Ted Kaczynski, Susan Smith and Eric Rudolph. On December 3, 2007, with counsel and without any plea agreement, Duncan pleaded guilty to all ten counts before U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge in Boise. He said he accepted responsibility for his crimes and would "continue to accept that responsibility to the death, if necessary."
Jury selection for the penalty phase began on April 14, 2008. On the second day Duncan told the judge he wanted to represent himself. Judge Lodge questioned him and referred him to a court-appointed psychologist, who found him competent. On May 2 his lawyers moved for a finding that he was incompetent, or at least for a hearing. Three defense experts who had examined him concluded that delusions and impaired judgment left him unable to represent himself, and the defense pointed to brain imaging and to his own writings.
The court-appointed psychologist interviewed him three times and found his thinking unusual but not delusional. On its own motion the court then ordered a six-week evaluation by the Bureau of Prisons at the federal detention center in SeaTac, Washington, beginning May 23, 2008. Duncan largely refused to take part, but the forensic psychologist there found no psychosis and concluded he could represent himself. On July 24, 2008, Judge Lodge denied the motion for a competency hearing. He found the court's experts more credible and noted Duncan's rational conduct in court, his statements at the plea hearing, and that no one had questioned his competence before. Duncan was allowed to proceed on his own, with his three lawyers on standby.
The penalty hearing opened on August 13, 2008. The government presented evidence for ten days. Duncan called one witness, himself, offered no evidence in his own defense, and rested. "I have no argument," he told the court at the close. After about three hours, the jury of nine men and three women unanimously recommended death on all three capital counts, kidnapping resulting in death, sexual exploitation of a child resulting in death, and use of a firearm during a crime of violence resulting in death, and on August 27, 2008, Judge Lodge imposed three death sentences. Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan gave the government's closing argument.
"My family thanks you from the bottom of our hearts," the children's father told the jurors through the electronic voice box he had used since losing his vocal cords to cancer. Brenda Groene's mother said justice had been served.
On November 3, 2008, according to The Spokesman-Review, the remaining sentences were imposed (a 2013 Justice Department release gives November 13 for the federal non-capital sentences). By video link from Kootenai County, Judge Gibler gave Duncan three consecutive life terms for the murders of Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie and Slade, on top of the three life terms already imposed for the kidnappings. Judge Lodge then sentenced him on the seven non-capital federal counts to three life terms for the kidnapping and abuse counts and four ten-year terms for the firearms and stolen-vehicle counts, with fines and restitution. Lodge said there were no redeeming qualities that would lessen the risk to society and that Duncan "will always be a danger to society." Duncan quoted the Bible, compared himself to St. Paul, and said that his conscience was clear but that this did not make him innocent; "the truth is my only judge," he said. The children's father said he wanted Duncan put to death. A University of Idaho law professor told The Spokesman-Review that the number of death and life sentences might be a record.
In November 2008 Duncan's standby lawyers filed a notice of appeal. In a letter to Judge Lodge dated November 15, Duncan wrote that any appeal was "done contrary to my wishes," and at a hearing on November 24 he said he understood his right to appeal and did not want to use it. Lodge found the waiver knowing, intelligent and competent and struck the notice. Duncan was held on federal death row at Terre Haute, Indiana, as reports from 2011 and 2013 describe. In 2010, according to later reports, he wrote to the court that he had changed his mind because of his mother's wishes and now wanted to pursue his appeals.
The Ninth Circuit agreed to hear a limited appeal. On July 11, 2011, a panel of Judges Susan P. Graber, Raymond C. Fisher and Milan D. Smith Jr., in an opinion by Judge Graber, held first that standby counsel had standing to appeal, because a lawyer may challenge a competency finding where lawyer and client actively dispute the client's competence. It then held that the defense experts' opinions, the brain imaging and Duncan's writings raised a reasonable doubt about whether he could understand the proceedings and make a rational choice, so federal law required a full competency hearing. The court expressed no view on which experts were more persuasive. It sent the case back for a retrospective hearing: if Lodge found that Duncan had competently waived his appeal, he was to reinstate his earlier order; if not, he was to decide whether Duncan had competently waived counsel, and if he had not, the death sentences would be vacated and a new penalty hearing held with counsel.
While the federal appeal was pending, Duncan was taken to California. A jury in Indio found him competent to stand trial in August 2009, after a four-week competency trial at which six psychologists and psychiatrists testified. He then acted as his own lawyer. In October 2010, after about a year representing himself, he asked for a public defender, and Judge David Downing appointed Gail O'Rane of the county's capital defense unit.
The newly elected district attorney, Paul Zellerbach, then accepted an offer from the defense: a guilty plea in exchange for life without parole. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty but agreed to the deal after consulting Anthony's relatives, who wanted to be spared a trial. Zellerbach said the state would guarantee Duncan was never released, and that the settlement would likely speed his execution on federal death row. On March 15, 2011, before Judge Downing in Riverside County Superior Court, Duncan pleaded guilty to the murder of Anthony Martinez, admitted six special-circumstance allegations, among them kidnapping, and waived his right to appeal. "Yes I do," he said when asked whether he intended to plead guilty.
He was sentenced in Indio on April 5, 2011. He did not speak. Judge Downing said he had never met a more evil person in 31 years in the justice system. Anthony's father said he would love nothing more than to carry out the execution himself; his mother said she would have been satisfied simply to see Duncan die. The supervising deputy district attorney, Otis Sterling, called it one of the most frightening cases he had handled. Reports differ on the form of the sentence: The Spokesman-Review and WABC-TV reported two life terms, the Associated Press reported the agreed sentence as life without parole, and the Justice Department later counted one California life sentence. Duncan was returned to federal death row.
Judge Lodge held the retrospective hearing in open court in Boise from January 8 to February 15, 2013. Nine experts testified: four appointed by the court, one hired by the prosecution and four by the defense. The defense experts said Duncan was psychotic and delusional. The others found he was not, and reported diagnoses of personality disorders and other conditions that, in their view, did not affect his competence. Prosecutors argued that from the planning of the crimes through his conduct at sentencing and his interviews with FBI agents afterward, he had shown "the capacity to appreciate his position and to make a rational decision to abandon further litigation."
On December 6, 2013, in a 66-page order, Lodge found that Duncan had been competent when he waived his appeal in November 2008, that he had "clearly and unequivocally waived his right to file an appeal," and that this was "a rational choice based on his acknowledgment of his guilt." He reinstated his earlier order.
The Ninth Circuit heard argument on March 17, 2015, in San Francisco, where Wendy Olson, the U.S. Attorney for Idaho, who argued the case herself, told the panel that "competent defendants can waive their right to appeal, even in a capital case." On March 27, 2015, the court affirmed Lodge's finding and dismissed the appeal. Duncan's attempt to withdraw his waiver, made more than two years later, "came too late," the panel wrote. The U.S. Supreme Court then declined to hear the case, as the U.S. Attorney's Office announced on March 2, 2016. No execution date was set.
His lawyers then moved on to collateral review. In 2017, the Justice Department said, they moved to set aside his conviction and sentence. Their 231-page motion, described by The Spokesman-Review in November 2017, challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty and argued, among other claims, that Roger Peven's early withdrawal from the case had damaged the defense. Prosecutors replied that none of the claims had merit. In March 2019 Judge Lodge denied the motion as to two of the death sentences, for kidnapping resulting in death and sexual exploitation of a child resulting in death, finding that Duncan had competently and voluntarily waived his appeal and that the videos and photographs he made had "clear and overwhelming" value for jurors weighing the death penalty. He put off ruling on the firearm death sentence until higher courts decided cases on whether that statute was unconstitutionally vague. When Duncan died, his lawyers were seeking to appeal Lodge's 2019 order.
Duncan was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He had surgery and declined chemotherapy and radiation; a doctor had estimated his life expectancy at six months to a year, according to a court filing made in January 2021. He died on March 28, 2021, at 58, at a hospital near the federal prison at Terre Haute, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Idaho and The Spokesman-Review reported. The Justice Department's announcement described him as having stage IV brain cancer. At his death his sentences, as the U.S. Attorney's Office counted them in 2016, were three federal death sentences, six Idaho state life sentences, three federal life sentences and one California life sentence.
Anthony Martinez's mother said in a statement that the world was a more beautiful place without him. His father said that he would have wanted to see Duncan executed but considered Duncan's accountability before God to be the real justice, and his younger brother said Duncan could no longer harm anyone.
The case set off a debate across the region about sex offender laws. In Washington, lawmakers proposed mandatory life sentences for first-degree rape and electronic monitoring of released offenders in the summer of 2005, and in 2006 the state set 25-year mandatory minimums for many sex offenses, allowed electronic monitoring and created a crime of criminal trespass against children. In Idaho in 2006 the legislature passed a "two strikes" law imposing life on designated violent sexual predators who reoffend, barred sex offenders from coming within 500 feet of schools when children are present, tightened registration rules, and, in a measure inspired by the case, raised the cap on crime victim counseling payments from 2,500 to 25,000 dollars in certain circumstances.
The house at Wolf Lodge Bay was later torn down, The Spokesman-Review reported in 2011.
Proven by final judgment on guilty pleas: the 1980 Washington first-degree rape; the three Idaho murders and three kidnappings; the ten federal counts covering the kidnapping of both children and the death of Dylan Groene; and the California murder of Anthony Martinez.
Attributed but never charged: the deaths of Sammiejo White and Carmen Cubias. Federal prosecutors said he confessed; the King County Sheriff's Office said in 2007 that the interview transcript did not support a confession. He was never charged, and no court has ruled on his responsibility.
Reviewed and not charged: the 2002 death in North Dakota, where the FBI said he was not a suspect.
Details that vary between sources: the date of the federal non-capital sentencing (November 3, 2008, in The Spokesman-Review; November 13 in a 2013 Justice Department release); the date of the rescue (July 2, 2005, in the Ninth Circuit and contemporary reports; July 3 in the 2021 Justice Department release); the date of his 1994 parole (September or late December); the dates of the parole revocation and his return to prison (October 1996, April 1997 or December 12, 1997); Anthony Martinez's age (10 in court and news reports; 11 in the 2016 Justice Department release); the form of the California sentence (two life terms, or life without parole); and when the Minnesota charge was filed (March 4, 2005, in the Forum's timeline; April 2004 in another Forum article).
February 25, 1963: Joseph Edward Duncan III is born.
July 1979: his parents separate; the family has settled near Tacoma, Washington.
January 1980: at 16, he steals guns from a neighbor's home in Tacoma and abducts a boy; he pleads guilty to first-degree rape and is sentenced to 20 years.
1982: earns a high school diploma in prison.
1994: paroled (September, or late December, by different accounts).
1996 to 1997: parole violations; he leaves Washington and is arrested in Kansas City; parole revoked.
July 6, 1996: Sammiejo White and Carmen Cubias disappear in Seattle.
April 4, 1997: Anthony Martinez is abducted in Beaumont, California; his body is found about two weeks later near Joshua Tree National Park.
February 10, 1998: the Seattle girls' remains are found in Bothell; identified February 18.
March 2000: a state evaluator finds too little evidence to seek civil commitment.
July 14, 2000: released; moves to Fargo and registers as a Level 3 sex offender.
July 2004: the Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, playground incident.
March 4, 2005: charged in Becker County, Minnesota.
April 5, 2005: bail set at 15,000 dollars; he posts it.
April 15, 2005: rents a Jeep in St. Paul that is never returned.
May 6, 2005: Fargo police issue a warrant.
May 16, 2005: Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie and Slade Groene are killed near Coeur d'Alene; Dylan and his sister are taken; a Minnesota bench warrant issues.
June 1, 2005: federal warrant issued in Minneapolis.
On or about June 22, 2005: Dylan Groene is killed in the Lolo National Forest, Montana.
July 2, 2005: arrested at a Denny's in Coeur d'Alene; the girl is rescued.
July 4, 2005: Dylan's remains are found; their identification is reported July 11.
July 12, 2005: Idaho murder and kidnapping charges filed.
August 2005: a fingerprint links him to the Martinez case.
October 16, 2006: pleads guilty in Kootenai County to three murders and three kidnappings; three life terms on the kidnappings.
January 18, 2007: federal ten-count indictment; death notice filed January 23.
December 3, 2007: pleads guilty to all ten federal counts.
April 2008: on the second day of jury selection, asks to represent himself.
July 24, 2008: Judge Lodge finds him competent and lets him proceed alone.
August 27, 2008: three federal death sentences.
November 3, 2008: state life terms for the murders and federal non-capital sentences.
November 2008: standby counsel appeal; Duncan waives his appeal.
August 2009: a California jury finds him competent to stand trial.
March 15, 2011: pleads guilty to the murder of Anthony Martinez; sentenced April 5, 2011.
July 11, 2011: the Ninth Circuit orders a competency hearing.
January 8 to February 15, 2013: retrospective competency hearing in Boise.
December 6, 2013: Lodge finds he competently waived his appeal.
March 27, 2015: the Ninth Circuit affirms.
March 2, 2016: the U.S. Attorney's Office announces that the Supreme Court has denied review.
March 2019: Lodge upholds two death sentences on collateral review and defers the third.
March 28, 2021: dies of brain cancer, aged 58, near the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana.