By Alice Fiecchi
Joseph Edward Duncan III wasn’t a good guy, and it wasn’t a secret. Joseph Edward Duncan III wasn't a good guy, and it wasn't a secret. He and his brother were normal teenagers of an Army family in Tacoma, but sometimes a good childhood isn't enough to make you a successful member of our society. Some people need more help, some people need fewer problems. Unfortunately, Joseph didn't find a way to fit into the world. Instead, he decided to follow his darkest desires since the very young age of 15.
He became a violent sexual predator, and soon after a ruthless serial killer. During his first years in prison, he's been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. He's been charged with five counts of murder, one count of auto theft, four counts of kidnapping, one count of sodomy, one count of drug possession, and one count of parole violation. He was on the run from a child molestation charge in Minnesota when he saw two kids playing outside. They were Shasta Groene (8 years old) and his little brother, Dylan Groene (9 years old): his last two victims. Not even his family suspected about the terrible tortures he repetitively did to the kids for six weeks, until he got arrested.
After killing all the members of their families, he kidnapped them. He told them how he brutally murdered their older brother, their mother, and her fiancé, and told them he would have killed them too. Shasta, that found the strength to talk about her experience, was terrified by the man. She tried to be kind to him, and sometimes he was nice to her too. She used to ask him questions about him and call him "Jet", which seems to have been an effective method to keep the killer calm and survive his madness.
But Dylan hasn't been that lucky.
Shasta was in Duncan's car, a stolen red Jeep Cherokee, when she heard the first shot. She ran to see what was happening and found his brother screaming on the ground. Duncan wasn't lying when he said it was accidental: a shotgun went off while he was searching for a beer in a box, hitting Dylan in the stomach; but he was lying when he started crying after killing Dylan with a second shot to the head, ignoring Shasta begging him to spare her brother's life. He justified himself saying he wanted to put the boy out of his misery. Shasta was frozen and didn't speak to him for days.
Why didn't he kill Shasta? What stopped him? What made him want to keep her captive, and to keep her with him?
Let's take a step back.
The problems Duncan had and caused started before any bad event in his life we know of, like the divorce of his parents that happened when he was sixteen. Soon after that, he was convicted of raping a 14-year-old boy. Evidently, the cause of his crimes wasn't about his family. His brother, Bruce Duncan, spoke about it: "I grew up in that household," he said. "I was not abused and I never saw any abuse going on." Yet he adds that his brother changed during the years he spent in prison as a teenager. He believes he became a victim of the murderers and rapists looking for sex.
He wanted to be an innocent kid again. That's why he saw himself in the little girl he wanted to kill. "...The world will know who I really was, and what I really did... I am scared, alone, and confused, and my reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society. My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die," Duncan explains. He wanted revenge against society and the government for stealing his innocence, he wanted to go back and he couldn't. Once, he even sustained that God was the one that pushed him to commit his crimes, and with God, he may have referred to the government that had complete power over him and was evil to his eyes.
His aspiration of revenge against society seems to have mixed with his need of feeling the innocent kid he was, and this stopped him from killing Shasta.
To give a more clear explanation about the reason he held his victim captive, it's necessary to conclude with the reason he kept Shasta alive - or maybe we should say the reason he resisted killing her multiple times -, that he explained to her.
Duncan had an epiphany. Just when he felt ready to kill the little girl, he understood what he was doing was wrong, so he drove to Coeur d'Alene, saying he wanted to take the girl home and turn himself in. Soon after, he has been arrested, and Shasta rescued.
Did a side of Duncan wanted to have this epiphany? Did he know he would see himself in the little girl he decided to spend his days with? Did he kidnap her to stop his madness?
The human mind is complicated, and the reasons for the cruelties that serial killers commit are many and different. Some of them kidnap their victims to torture them, some do it because they want to give themselves a chance to stop their madness or to the victim to escape. Many of them want to keep their victims with them because of a special relationship they create with them while committing their crimes. It's a complex bond not many talks about, but most of them have with the people they hurt. Most of them say each one of their victims is important to them.
"A person of this type chooses his victim for a reason. Possession. Control. Violence." Bundy talks about himself in third person, attempting to explain why he stalked and meticulously chose his victims, and even used their bodies and kept their decomposing heads. "...murder is not just a crime of lust or violence. It becomes possession. They are part of you… (the victim) becomes a part of you, and you (two) are forever one… and the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them." Ted Bundy was a bright man with a promised successful future as a lawyer, a psychologist, or a politician. After his death sentence, the judge remarked how he would have been glad to work with him, if only he chose a different path. But Ted, despite his apparently good life, didn't resist the temptations. They weren't crushing them like the desires of Richard Ramirez, yet he didn't stop himself from killing over thirty young women for his pleasure born from hardcore pornography.
Ted Bundy often refers to his victims with the pronoun "it". The women were objects for him, that he used for his pleasure. Yet he wanted to keep them with him, he abducted them and killed them only after using his charisma on the girls. Psychologists weren't able to explain what he felt for the victims and Bundy couldn't talk about it, but his vision of the victims is very similar to the one of another killer that understood himself better: Jeffrey Dahmer.
Like Bundy, he needed to overpower and possess the victims that he considered objects for his pleasure too. He wanted complete control over them. Dahmer used to photograph the corpses he had sex with, because "It was my way of remembering their appearance, their physical beauty. I also wanted to keep something. If I couldn’t keep them there with me whole, at least I felt that I could keep their skeletons." He wanted love, he was afraid of being abandoned, but he only searched for the most handsome man he could find after becoming addicted to pornography and drinking often. He wanted to use him, it was the best he could have, at least that's what he thought since he struggled to accept his homosexuality.
He didn't care if the victims were alive, he wanted to keep them with him in any possible way until he felt ready to focus on the next target.
While Dahmer and Bundy seemed to have a bond similar to an obsession to their action more than feelings for the victims (they can't remember their names, but they remember the details of their gruesome crimes) that drove them wanting to keep them in their houses, other killers had a clear intention to bring pain to their victims or being emotionally attached to them.
While Jeffrey Dahmer wanted to build an altar made of skull and bones as a memorial to not end the relationship with his victims with their lives, Richard Ramirez wanted to create a torture room. This isn't something that may have been connected to his violent childhood, as opposed to Dahmer that loved taxidermy since he was a kid. A very curious detail is that Dahmer seems to care less about his victims, yet he says he wished he could have kept them with him without needing to hurt them, while Richard even kissed a woman and asked if she enjoyed the sex after brutally raping her. The level and type of caring that each serial killer has for his victims is very different and not always obvious, as the examples proved.
Most of Bundy's victims were similar to a woman that rejected him. He never got over that rejection. He also sustains his life was almost perfect, but he doesn't mention his fury about the lies his mother told him and his grandfather being violent with him and the other family members. The anger he had inside may have mixed with his sexuality when he got into hardcore pornography and started to desire to do what he was reading and seeing. He also started to drink, and the alcohol lowered his inhibition as he admits in his last interview, just a few hours from his execution. The relationship with his victims and their corpses was something he needed (for unclear reasons) linked to his past, something he couldn't have without using force. It was a relationship based on passion and sexual energy.
The fantasies of the killers are reinforced by the need of the relationship they want and they can't have. Their sick desires start very soon and they are usually linked to something normal and accepted by society, so that some of the killers feel less guilty committing their crimes.
Going back to the subjects I took as examples, I notice that Jeffrey Dahmer mixed his sexuality with violence at the age of fifteen, starting to have desires of controlling and having complete dominance over the men he liked, while Richard Ramirez became fascinated by death around the age of thirteen, after seeing his sadistic cousin shooting his wife.
The killers are driven by emotions and desires, especially sexual desires. Their sexual desires are what pushes them to kill, but the reasons behind the kidnapping of a person is more complex and obscure, and it's about the bond they create with the victim.
Some victims survive attacks by being nice to the killers. Can a bond stop a murder? Is understanding serial killers useful? It depends. Some serial killers want to be evil, others feel sick and seek help. They try to stop themselves.
Dahmer started having drinking problems at eighteen, when he lived alone after the divorce of his parents. He remembers that one day he couldn't stand their arguments anymore, so he walked into the woods to escape reality and isolate in the little fantasy world he created in his mind. Soon after that episode, he started killing.
His last victim remembers going to his house. Dahmer was "a wolf in sheep clothes", as Ramirez defines him. He seemed a nice guy you could trust. But in the apartment, the victim immediately finds himself handcuffed and threatened with a knife.
It was an uncontrollable compulsion to satisfy himself, that's how Dahmer describes his obsession and his addiction to killing. He didn't want to kill, but if it was needed to have complete control over his partners, he couldn't care less of their lives. He didn't like to have them dead, he wanted them alive, but none of them survived his experiments on their brains to make them living zombies. "I had this obsessive desires and thoughts wanting to control them, to possess them permanently. [...] Not because I was angry with them, not because I hated them, but because I wanted to keep them with me." He seems repentful, yet he wasn't a role model in prison and he has always been fascinated by dead animals and played with their bones. Are his crimes caused by his fascination mixed with his sexuality? He believes they are. His obsession was also fed by the fact he suffered from loneliness and he was afraid to be abandoned and left alone. He couldn't make his partners stay with him, he didn't have control and he wanted to, the desired mixed with his sexuality, and his partners became his toys. But Dahmer always knew something was wrong with him.
After handcuffing his last victim, he watched a movie with him. It was "The Exorcist". Later, he explained that he felt evil and he didn't like it. That movie was something symbolic for him. In the moment he was watching it with the victim, he was trying to take time to convince himself not to hurt the man and stop his madness. But he couldn't.
In the end, the most popular reason to kidnap a victim and keep them in a house of horror is to torture them… but only in movies. Serial killers aren’t villains and hurting people isn’t always the main reason for their actions, but it’s what they do. The reasons behind their gruesome crimes are complex and different; what we know for sure is that the reason behind every kidnapping is always connected to the torment born and grown inside the criminal, and that a reason is never missed when a serial killer decides to keep the victims with him instead of killing them.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. The figures check out against this archive with one clarification. Joseph Edward Duncan is recorded here at six convictions in Idaho together with a federal death sentence; the article's five counts of murder is the state charge sheet rather than the whole of it. He died in federal custody in March 2021, which the article, written earlier, does not reach. Ted Bundy is in this archive at thirty confessed, so the article's “over thirty” is at the top of what the record carries. Richard Ramirez is recorded at thirteen to sixteen and more. The quotations attributed to Duncan, Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer are their own statements about themselves, made to interviewers or in writing, and the explanations built on them are the author's reading, not findings. Shasta Groene survived and is named here as she named herself in public afterwards; her brother Dylan did not.