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Missing Girl Shasta Groene Is Found Alive at an Idaho Denny's, and Sex Offender Joseph Duncan Is Arrested

Shasta, 8, had been missing since her mother, brother and her mother's boyfriend were found beaten to death in May. Diners recognized her from missing-child posters.

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Illustration of police cars and officers outside a lit roadside diner among pine-covered hills before dawn. Not an actual scene from the case.

For six weeks, eight-year-old Shasta Groene had been missing from her family's home near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Early on July 2, 2005, people at a Denny's recognized her, and police arrested the man with her.

Shasta and her brother Dylan, 9, had been missing since May 16, when their mother, Brenda Groene, their brother Slade Groene and their mother's boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, were found beaten to death at the family's home near Wolf Lodge Bay. Shortly after 1:30 a.m., two young men smoking outside the all-night restaurant saw a man and a girl get out of a red Jeep. One of them had seen the children's faces on a billboard hours earlier. Inside, staff and customers compared the girl with posters of the missing children, and within four minutes two calls reached the police emergency line, the first from the restaurant's manager at 1:51 a.m.

Officers confirmed Shasta's identity and took Joseph Edward Duncan III, 42, into custody on kidnapping charges and a fugitive warrant. Duncan was a Level 3 registered sex offender from Fargo, North Dakota, considered at high risk of reoffending. He had served 14 years in Washington for raping a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint, and he had disappeared after an April 2005 court hearing in Becker County, Minnesota, where he was accused of molesting a boy. After the arrest, investigators said they did not expect to find Dylan alive.

Duncan later pleaded guilty to the three murders at the Groene home and to federal charges including the kidnapping and murder of Dylan, whom a federal appeals court found he had shot at a campsite in Montana's Lolo National Forest on or about June 22, 2005. He was sentenced to death in the federal case.

The Spokesman-Review reported that the first call to police came from the restaurant's manager, while a federal appeals court said a waitress and a customer each recognized Shasta and called the police.

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