In the early hours of July 2, 2005, a waitress at a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, recognized the little girl sitting with a stranger. Shasta Groene, eight, had been missing for forty-seven days, since May 16, when her mother, Brenda Groene, forty, her mother's fiancé, Mark McKenzie, thirty-seven, and her brother Slade, thirteen, were found bound and beaten to death in their home by Lake Coeur d'Alene. The waitress, a manager and two customers quietly called the police and placed themselves so that the man could not leave. Officers arrested him without a struggle. He was Joseph Edward Duncan III, forty-two, a registered sex offender on the run from a child molestation charge in Minnesota.
Shasta told investigators what had happened. Her mother had woken the children, saying someone was in the house, and led them into the living room, where a man in black gloves stood holding a gun. He bound the three others with zip ties, took Shasta and her brother Dylan, nine, outside onto the lawn, and went back in. Shasta heard thumping. She saw Slade, injured, stagger from the door. Duncan drove the two children away in a stolen Jeep and for six weeks held them at campsites, raping and torturing both. He told Shasta he had beaten her family to death with a hammer. At a camp in the Lolo National Forest near St. Regis, Montana, he shot Dylan. He claimed a shotgun had gone off by accident; Shasta saw him put the gun to her brother's head, pull the trigger when it failed to fire, reload and fire again while Dylan begged. Dylan's remains were found at the camp on July 4. Days later Duncan put a rope around Shasta's neck and stopped when she begged him, and then drove her back toward Coeur d'Alene.
Duncan was born on February 25, 1963, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the fourth of five children of a career Army man, and grew up moving from post to post until the family settled in Tacoma. At fifteen he raped a nine-year-old boy at gunpoint. At sixteen, in a boys' ranch, he told a therapist he had raped thirteen younger boys. In 1980 he stole guns from a neighbor and raped a fourteen-year-old boy at gunpoint, and was sentenced to twenty years. He was paroled in 1994 after fourteen, sent back in 1997 for a parole violation, and released in July 2000. In March 2005 he was charged with molesting two boys at a playground in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota; a judge set bail at fifteen thousand dollars, an acquaintance in Fargo helped him post it, and he disappeared.
His arrest reopened old cases from his years on parole. On April 4, 1997, ten-year-old Anthony Michael Martinez had been snatched at knifepoint from outside his home in Beaumont, California, by a man who asked for help finding a lost cat; his body was found in Indio on April 19. A fingerprint on the duct tape matched Duncan's, and in a July 19, 2005, interview he confessed, calling the killing revenge on society for sending him back to jail. He also told Shasta, and later investigators, that he had beaten to death Sammiejo White, eleven, and her half-sister Carmen Cubias, nine, who vanished after leaving the Crest Motel in Seattle on July 6, 1996. Their remains had been found in Bothell, Washington, on February 10, 1998. He was never charged with their deaths.
On October 16, 2006, as jury selection began, he pleaded guilty in Kootenai County to all the Idaho charges and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole. In federal court he was convicted of kidnapping Shasta and Dylan and murdering Dylan and was sentenced to death. A California court convicted him of the kidnapping and murder of Anthony Martinez. He was still on federal death row when he died of a brain tumor on March 28, 2021, at fifty-eight. Shasta Groene survived and, as an adult, has spoken publicly about what happened.