By Steve Huff
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| Coeur D'Alene, Idaho map |
COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho (Crime Library) — Newly-released court documents indicate Groene killer and kidnapper Joseph Edward Duncan made records of his crimes.
On a May morning in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 2005, someone noticed something strange at the rural home of Brenda Groene and Mark McKenzie.
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| Brenda Kay Groene |
It was too quiet. Closer inspection revealed there was blood, everywhere, and three murdered people inside the small block house near Interstate 90. Brenda Groene, her 13-year-old son Slade, and the 6'5" Mark McKenzie were dead. They'd been bound with duct tape, zip-ties, and beaten to death.
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| Slade Groene |
The ominous scene was made more haunting by the absence of Brenda's two youngest children by her former husband Steve, Dylan, age 9, and Shasta, age 8.
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| Mark McKenzie |
The murders stunned Coeur d'Alene, and the nation. After drugs were found in the bloodstreams of Brenda Groene and Mark McKenzie, some speculated the murders were related to a drug deal gone bad... but that didn't really answer the question: where were Dylan and Shasta?
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| Shasta Groene |
On July 2, 2005, around 2 in the morning, a level III sex offender from Fargo, North Dakota, Joseph Edward Duncan III, age 42, was arrested in a Denny's Restaurant in Coeur d'Alene. With Duncan was Shasta Groene. A sharp-eyed customer and waitress recognized the little girl and worked to detain her and Duncan until police arrived.
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| Joseph Edward Duncan, III arrest photo |
Dylan Groene was not with them.
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| Dylan Groene |
Joseph Edward Duncan III is perhaps the first alleged mass killer known to have kept a weblog. Duncan began his blog, Blogging the Fifth Nail, in January of 2004.
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| Shasta and Duncan shown entering a convenience store |
In his penultimate weblog entry, written May 11, 2005, Duncan perhaps unwittingly echoed writings of killers in the past like David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam," or the Zodiac Killer. He titled it, "The Demons Have Taken Over." From that post:
I have been asking God to help defeat the demons (...) He didn't answer, again(...) 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. As for the "Happy Joe" (Jet), well he was just a dream. The bogeyman (sic) was alive and happy long before Happy Joe(...)
After Duncan's arrest, Dylan Groene's bones were found in a culvert near a remote campsite in Northern Montana. For most of their captivity, Dylan and Shasta Groene had been held at that site and others in the area and repeatedly abused. In the end, Dylan was murdered, his remains burned, and dismembered.
Shortly after the boy's remains were found, rumors began to circulate on the internet that the story of what happened to the Groene children while they were with Duncan was worse than anyone had imagined. He had not allegedly kidnapped the children and killed a family just to use the brother and sister sexually: he had recorded, even scripted the acts.
Many making comments on various messageboards discounted this news as simply too horrible — an attempt to further sensationalize an already nightmarish story.
After Duncan's July arrest, a weblog titled "The Cellar" was created at jetd63.blogspot.com to track the crimes and trials of Joseph Duncan. The blog's original creator, working under the pseudonym "Mickey Rat," based the URL on one of Duncan's many online nicknames, one that stood for Duncan's initials and the year of his birth. In an entry made September 26, 2005, the weblogger who took over blogging duties from "Mickey," a female computer expert from New England going by the nick "Captain Fantastic," posted descriptions of the acts Duncan allegedly recorded. The account had been given to her by an anonymous source. At the time, authorities would only admit there were recordings.
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| Shasta and Duncan walk to his Jeep after getting gas |
On Friday, October 21, 2005, new court documents in the Groene case were unsealed, showing that Joseph Edward Duncan III had indeed made photographs and videos of Dylan and Shasta Groene.
The court documents released on October 21 confirmed the outline of what had been reported nearly a month earlier at jetd63.blogspot.com. KXLY TV out of Spokane, WA gave a concise rundown:
-During Dylan and Shasta's weeks in the mountains with Duncan, he took pictures of her and Dylan with his digital camera.
-That he took Dylan away from the campsite for a period of time and committed some type of acts, about which Dylan later told her.
Records also reveal that investigators believe 9-year-old Dylan was shot. They say Duncan showed Shasta where they were on a map; told her how he killed her family; and told her he made some drawings on the walls of his Fargo, North Dakota apartment before skipping town.
The same day the court documents in question were unsealed, the FBI asked for assistance from the public in identifying and locating three young boys from the South Bay area of San Francisco. According to a brief article posted at the website of San Francisco TV station KRON, the boys had been photographed some time in 1997. The FBI would only say the photos had been obtained during an ongoing investigation, and that the boys might have been the victims of a crime.
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| Anthony Martinez |
After allegedly kidnapping and murdering 10-year-old Anthony Martinez from Beaumont, California, in April, 1997, Joseph Edward Duncan III proceeded to spend several months in the San Francisco area before he was re-arrested and sent back to prison for the final 3 years of his sentence. Newswatchers familiar with the Duncan case had to wonder, upon seeing the vague request from the FBI, if yet another layer of the history of the man who thought of himself as "The Boogeyman" was about to be revealed.
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