Joseph Edward Duncan

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Edward Duncan III was recognized by strangers in a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in the early morning of the 2nd of July 2005. A waitress, a manager and two customers noticed a girl sitting with a man none of them knew. They had seen her face in news reports about a missing child. Quietly, they called the police and arranged themselves so the man could not leave. Officers arrived and arrested him without incident. The girl told the waitress and the officers who she was. She was Shasta Groene, and she had been missing for weeks. The calm of that arrest hid a darker record. It reached back to 1978, ran through killings that went unsolved for years, and ended in a lakeside house where a family had been destroyed. How was a man with that history free to move across state lines? What did Shasta tell investigators about the weeks she was gone? And why did a single arrest lead to three courts, a prison blog, and a long fight over his right to waive an appeal?

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• 2. A Long Record

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  Joseph Edward Duncan III was born at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on the 25th of February 1963. He was the fourth of five children, with three older sisters and one younger brother. His father, Joseph Edward Duncan Jr, served in the United States Army, so the family moved every year or two, within the country and abroad. The elder Duncan finally retired to Tacoma, Washington, when his son was around 12. The boy's mother was described as domineering. After his arrest in 1980, Duncan claimed he had been abused as a child, but his younger brother disputed that account. His parents separated in 1979 and divorced in 1983. His sisters left home all at once, and his brother eventually went to live with their father. Duncan stayed with his mother and attended Lakes High School, though he never graduated.

  The first recorded sex crime came in 1978, when Duncan was 15. He sexually assaulted a 9-year-old boy at gunpoint. A year later he was arrested for driving a stolen car and sentenced as a juvenile. He was sent to the Jessie Dyslin Boys Ranch in Tacoma. There, according to an Associated Press report, he told a therapist that he had bound and sexually assaulted six boys. He also estimated that he had raped 13 younger boys by the age of 16.

  In 1980 he stole several guns from a neighbor, then abducted a 14-year-old boy and assaulted him at gunpoint. The sentence was 20 years in prison. Duncan served 14 of them and was released on parole in 1994. He lived in several places around Seattle. In 1996 he was arrested for marijuana use, then released several weeks later under new restrictions. A parole violation sent him back to prison in 1997, after an arrest in Missouri. He walked out again on the 14th of July 2000, with time off for good behavior, and moved to Fargo, North Dakota.

  In March 2005 Duncan was charged over an incident at a playground in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where two boys had been molested on the 3rd of July 2004. On the 5th of April 2005 a Becker County judge set his bail at US$15,000. A Fargo businessman who had come to know him helped pay it. Duncan skipped bail and vanished. On the 1st of June, a federal warrant charged him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Within weeks, a house on Lake Coeur d'Alene would be silent.

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• 3. The Lakeside House

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  On the 16th of May 2005, authorities entered a home along Lake Coeur d'Alene, outside the city of Coeur d'Alene. They found three bodies. Brenda Groene was 40. Her boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, was 37. Her son Slade was 13. Autopsies found that all three had died of blunt trauma to the head, and that each had been bound. Two of Brenda's children were not in the house. Dylan was 9 and Shasta was 8. An Amber alert went out, and searchers combed the surrounding area while detectives treated the deaths as homicides.

  Much of what is known about that night comes from Shasta herself. She told police that her mother woke her and Dylan and whispered a warning, "Someone is in the house." Her mother led them into the living room. There Shasta saw a man in black gloves holding a gun. He used nylon zip ties on her mother, her mother's fiancé and Slade. Then he took Shasta and Dylan outside and left them on the lawn.

  While she waited beside her brother, Shasta heard repeated thumping sounds from inside the home. She also saw Slade, injured, stagger away from the entrance. When the man had finished, he put the two children in his car. It was a stolen Jeep Cherokee, and it carried them away from the lake.

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• 4. Weeks of Captivity

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  Forty-seven days passed between the discovery of the bodies and the arrest at the restaurant. For about six weeks of that time, Shasta said, Duncan held her and Dylan at remote locations and repeatedly raped and tortured them. They drove a long distance and stayed at two different campsites. During that time Duncan told Shasta that he had killed her family with a hammer.

  Her account of Dylan's death differs from Duncan's. He claimed the boy was shot by accident, when a shotgun stored in a clear plastic box went off while he was digging for beer. Shasta said she heard a loud boom from the far side of the Jeep and found Dylan on the ground, screaming. Duncan put the shotgun to the boy's head, but it failed to fire. Dylan begged him to stop. Duncan reloaded and fired, and Dylan died instantly. According to Shasta, Duncan then cried and said he had acted to end the boy's suffering. At trial it emerged that the weapon was a sawn-off 12-gauge shotgun.

  Days later, Duncan nearly killed Shasta as well. He told her she could choose between strangulation and a gun. She chose strangulation, and he wrapped a rope tightly around her neck. Gasping, she managed to beg him to stop, using his nickname, "Jet." He stopped at once. He asked whether she wanted to meet his mother, she said yes, and they drove back toward Coeur d'Alene.

  Meanwhile the search had narrowed around a red Jeep Cherokee with Missouri license plates. Duncan had rented it in Minnesota and never returned it. At a gas station in Kellogg, Idaho, about 40 miles east of Coeur d'Alene, an employee noticed the vehicle and a girl wandering the lot. Nothing seemed wrong, so she did not intervene. After the arrest, she and her manager reviewed surveillance footage and identified Duncan and Shasta.

  With Shasta safe, hope for Dylan faded. On the 4th of July 2005, investigators found human remains at a remote, makeshift campsite in the Lolo National Forest near St. Regis, Montana. The FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, confirmed through DNA testing that they were Dylan's. A public memorial service followed on the 16th of July, which would have been his tenth birthday, at Real Life Ministries.

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• 5. Cold Cases Reopened

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  The arrest in Coeur d'Alene prompted the FBI to launch a nationwide review of unsolved missing child cases. Duncan became a possible suspect in several crimes. They fell in two windows, one between 1994 and 1997 while he was on parole, and another between 2000 and 2005. He was cleared in some cases. Authorities in California and Washington, however, held enough evidence to link him to unsolved murders in their jurisdictions.

  On the 4th of April 1997, Anthony Michael Martinez, 10, was playing with friends in the front yard of his home in Beaumont, California. A stranger walked up and asked the boys to help him find a missing cat. They searched an alleyway and found nothing. When they reported back, the man grabbed Anthony at knifepoint and threw him into his vehicle. After a two-week search, Anthony's body was found on the 19th of April in Indio, California. He had been sexually assaulted and bound with duct tape. A composite sketch circulated and a partial fingerprint was lifted from the tape, but the case went cold.

  In July 2005, bloggers noticed that Duncan resembled the sketch and that his vehicle resembled the one the attacker had used. The FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children got involved and contacted Riverside County authorities. They matched the fingerprint to Duncan. FBI agents said he confessed in an interview on the 19th of July 2005, calling the crime "revenge against society again for sending him back to jail for a probation violation." On the 3rd of August, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department announced the connection.

  Shasta supplied another thread. She told investigators that Duncan had described earlier crimes to her, including the Martinez killing and the 1996 deaths of two girls in Seattle. Sammiejo White was 11 and her half-sister Carmen Cubias was 9. They vanished on the 6th of July 1996 after leaving the Crest Motel. Their skeletal remains were found on the 10th of February 1998 in Bothell, Washington. Duncan confessed to beating both girls to death, though he was never charged in their case.

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• 6. Three Courts

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  Duncan first appeared in a Kootenai County court on the 13th of July 2005. He faced three counts of first-degree murder and three of first-degree kidnapping for the deaths of Brenda and Slade Groene and Mark McKenzie. County prosecutors had planned to charge him with kidnapping Shasta and Dylan as well. They handed those charges to federal courts instead, because taking children across state lines for sexual exploitation is a federal offense.

  The trial was set for the 17th of January 2006, then pushed to the 4th of April when the defense asked for more time. It slipped again to the 26th of October. The judge remarked, "No one wants to try this case twice, including me." Duncan's lawyers blamed the delays on the prosecution's pursuit of the death penalty. On the 16th of October 2006, just after jury selection began, Duncan pleaded guilty under a plea bargain. He received three consecutive life sentences without parole for the kidnappings. Sentencing on the murders waited for the federal outcome. He also agreed to cooperate with detectives and to provide passwords to encrypted files on his computer. After the federal death sentence, Kootenai County added three more life sentences.

  On the 18th of January 2007, a federal grand jury in Coeur d'Alene indicted Duncan on ten counts, including kidnapping resulting in death and sexual exploitation of a child resulting in death. The trial date moved to the 22nd of January 2008. On the 3rd of December 2007, Duncan pleaded guilty to all ten. In exchange, Shasta would not have to testify in the penalty phase. A gag order kept the other terms private.

  The penalty phase began with jury selection on the 14th of April 2008. During it, Duncan dismissed his attorneys and chose to represent himself. His lawyers objected that he was not competent, but the court ordered an evaluation and accepted its finding that he was. On the 27th of August 2008, after three hours of deliberation, the jury recommended death. The judge imposed three death sentences, all tied to Dylan's killing. On the 3rd of November 2008, three consecutive life terms followed for kidnapping Shasta and abusing both children.

  Standby counsel filed an appeal, but Duncan wrote to the court that it went "against his wishes." In July 2011 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the district court should have held a hearing on his competence to represent himself, and sent the question back. In September 2012 he was moved to the United States Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana. On the 6th of December 2013, a federal judge ruled that he was competent when he waived his right to appeal. Prosecution psychiatrists diagnosed pedophilia, sexual sadism disorder and antisocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits, yet held that he was legally sane. A Ninth Circuit panel agreed on the 27th of March 2015, and the Supreme Court declined his petition on the 28th of February 2016. A habeas corpus petition followed in February 2017.

  California had its own case. Riverside County charged Duncan with Martinez's murder on the 18th of January 2007, the day of his federal indictment. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appealed for his extradition, but the federal trial went first. Duncan reached California on the 24th of January 2009, five months after his death sentence. On the 15th of March 2011 he pleaded guilty, and on the 5th of April he received two life terms with no parole and no right to appeal. District Attorney Paul Zellerbach said the Martinez family wanted closure and that "the federal system will kill him long before the state of California would have seriously considered it."

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• 7. The Fifth Nail

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  Before his arrest for murder, Duncan ran a personal website called "The Fifth Nail." The name came from a legend. Besides the four nails that pierced the body of Jesus Christ in the crucifixion, a fifth was said to have been taken and hidden by the Romans. The site described his daily life as a convicted sex offender. On it he denied being a pedophile and claimed he had been sexually abused as a child.

  From prison, a Blogspot site appeared under a long title promising to expose the meaning of the Fifth Nail from federal death row. Everything on it was posted by someone using the pseudonym Silenced, who presumably received Duncan's letters. His Kootenai County public defender, John Adams, and prosecutor Bill Douglas both declined to comment on whether he was the author. Inmates have no internet access. Outgoing mail is scanned for requests for contraband or help with escape, but it is not read word for word.

  Through that blog, Duncan described life on federal death row at Terre Haute. He said he rarely interacted with other condemned prisoners and spoke to them only when required. He claimed other inmates never gave him trouble, while a handful of correctional officers occasionally harassed him.

  In July 2019 the federal government announced it would resume executions after a pause of nearly two decades. Duncan wrote that he was "relieved." In his view, lethal injection was a "better" and "cleaner" death than dying of natural causes in prison, which he feared most. He worried the government would never reach him. Of the five prisoners then scheduled, Lezmond Mitchell, Wesley Ira Purkey, Daniel Lewis Lee, Alfred Bourgeois and Dustin Lee Honken, he said he knew four but called none a friend.

  The execution never came. In October 2020, Duncan underwent brain surgery after a diagnosis of glioblastoma. He refused chemotherapy and radiation. Federal Bureau of Prisons medical staff estimated he had six to twelve months left. He died on the 28th of March 2021, at the age of 58, and his body was cremated.

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• 8. Aftermath

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  The jurors who recommended death were offered counseling afterward. The evidence they had to examine was severe. It included a 33-minute video in which Duncan abused a restrained Dylan Groene inside what looked like a dilapidated wooden shed or small cabin. There were also other recordings of Dylan's torture, human remains and a wire noose from the cabin. None of it had been needed for a confession, because Duncan had already pleaded guilty.

  In 2016, Shasta Groene was 19 years old. She started a petition called Slade and Dylan's Law, in honor of the two brothers Duncan had murdered. Her petition argued that convicted sex offenders should not be released from jail. In practice, that would shrink the three-strike rule for violent sex offenders to a single strike. By the time the petition closed, 51,820 people had signed on in support.

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