Focus on Suspect in Idaho Slayings Widens

“I got out and I got even, but did not get caught,” the blogger wrote earlier this year, describing his losing battle with the “demons” that he said had driven him to rape and murder children.

“I got even twice,” he added, “actually more.”

How many times more?

Authorities in California and at least four other states are asking that question about Joseph Edward Duncan III.

A convicted child-rapist from Washington state who was released from prison in 2000, Duncan, 42, became a dean’s list computer science student in North Dakota. Then, last spring, he jumped bail and disappeared after being accused of molesting a 6-year-old boy in Minnesota.

He surfaced last month at a Denny’s restaurant in the Idaho panhandle city of Coeur d’Alene, where an alert waitress on the overnight shift recognized the girl with him, Shasta Groene, 8, as a kidnap victim whose face was on “Missing” posters around town. Duncan was arrested July 2 and has been charged with kidnapping the child and her 9-year-old brother, Dylan. Authorities expect to charge him with the killing of Dylan, whose body was found in Montana.

He has been charged with murdering Shasta Groene’s mother, Brenda, her 13-year-old brother, Slade, and Brenda Groene’s boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, who were bound inside their rural Idaho home and apparently killed with a claw hammer.

Wednesday, authorities in Riverside County announced that Duncan had become the prime suspect in the 1997 molestation and killing of 10-year-old Anthony Martinez, whose disappearance from outside his home in Beaumont coincided with a period when Duncan was out of prison. The case generated widespread attention at the time and had remained unsolved.

Now, authorities in several states, reacting to the news of Duncan’s alleged role in the Martinez killing, say they are combing credit-card records and other evidence of his whereabouts to look for links to unsolved crimes. In addition to the investigations in California, Idaho and Minnesota, officials in Washington are examining the possibility that Duncan may have committed additional crimes there. He is also being investigated by authorities from Montana, where Dylan Groene’s body was found July 4.

Even before the announcement Wednesday of his alleged link to the killing in California, Duncan’s case had stirred widespread anger in the states where he was already a suspect. The anger became especially fierce after the Minnesota judge who allowed him out of jail last spring on a $15,000 bond conceded that he was not fully aware of Duncan’s criminal history in Washington, where he was convicted in the 1980 gunpoint rape of a 14-year-old boy.

No one in any state has yet pieced together all of Duncan’s moves, but authorities have identified him as the blog author who alternately boasted of and bewailed his violent propensities as he eluded arrest this year.

Duncan’s criminal career apparently began with the 1980 rape. He was arrested near Tacoma, accused of stealing guns from a neighbor’s house and twice raping the 14-year-old. He told psychiatrists at Washington’s Western State Hospital that he was a high school dropout who had moved frequently in his youth as the fourth of five children in a military family.

In court records, he also was quoted as telling doctors he had raped 13 younger boys, first doing so, he said, at the age of 12.

In 1982, the Washington state Board of Prison Terms and Paroles classified him as “a sexual psychopath, not safe to be at large and not amenable to treatment.” The report also called him an “extremely dangerous” deviant.

But by 1994, having served 14 1/2 years of his 20-year term, Duncan was released under parole conditions that included abstinence from alcohol and drugs, periodic mental-health evaluations, and “no contact with minor children without the prior approval of his community corrections officer.”

He was re-incarcerated twice for failing drug tests; during one of his periods out of prison, authorities said, he went to California to visit his father, Joseph Jr., in the San Bernardino County town of Highland, 22 miles northwest of Beaumont.

Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle said the killing of Anthony appeared to coincide with that visit.

Authorities said they became aware of Duncan’s possible link to the killing July 14 when he was asked by FBI agents in Idaho if he had been involved in any other crimes. Duncan told the agents that he had a connection to the Martinez case, they said.

He declined to be interviewed when Riverside County sheriff’s detectives rushed to Coeur d’Alene to interview him. But Wednesday, authorities announced that they had matched Duncan’s thumbprint to one found on the duct tape used to bind Anthony’s mouth, legs and hands before his body was buried in a shallow grave in a remote canyon near Indio.

Authorities believe Anthony’s abductor set his bound body along rocky ground, then lifted a heavy boulder and used it to fatally “cave in” the boy’s head, Doyle said. Pathologists who examined the boy’s body, found 15 days after he was snatched, reported that the abductor probably allowed the child to live for a few days after the kidnapping, then killed him.

DNA, probably from the abductor, was found at the scene, but authorities have yet to compare it with Duncan’s DNA, Doyle said.

Jack Levin, an expert on criminal disorders who is director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston, said at least one aspect of Duncan’s apparent method in the killings to which he is linked was not uncommon for child predators.

“The sexual predator abducts a child and keeps him with him for a period of time,” said Levin, “then decides to eliminate the only witness to his sex crimes.”

But the Idaho killings of Shasta and Dylan Groene’s mother, older brother and the mother’s boyfriend were unusual for a child predator, he added.

“It’s almost unheard of for someone to kill three people in order to kidnap their children,” Levin said.

Doyle said there are obvious similarities in Duncan’s alleged Idaho crimes and the Martinez abduction and slaying.

Idaho authorities say Duncan used night goggles to “scout” the Groene home in the days before his alleged violent rampage May 16. Shasta Groene has told authorities in Idaho that Duncan repeatedly molested her and her brother before killing Dylan and leaving his body at a remote Montana campsite.

Beaumont police Lt. Mitch White, the lead investigator in Anthony’s abduction, said he believes that whoever kidnapped the boy also scouted Beaumont neighborhoods. Like the Groenes and McKenzie, Anthony Martinez was bound and then killed. Like Dylan Groene, he was found to have been sexually assaulted and killed and dumped at a remote area far removed from the site of his abduction.

As investigators continue to examine Duncan’s past, one unsolved case that has drawn particular interest in the Seattle area is the abduction and killing of two girls, Sammie Jo White, 11, and her sister, Carmen Cubias, 9, who disappeared in 1996 not far from where Duncan was living at the time. Their bodies were discovered several months later.

A spokesman for the King County sheriff’s office in Seattle said Thursday that there were “some similarities” between those crimes and the way in which the Idaho victims were killed after some period of brutalization. An investigation so far has failed to either “eliminate or include him” as a suspect, the spokesman added.

An FBI spokesman declined Thursday to say whether Duncan had elaborated on a role in any other sexual assaults or killings.

Doyle, the Riverside County sheriff, said Duncan had done “some rambling” about other cases, including possible Washington state crimes, when he spoke to investigators about the Anthony Martinez killing.

“The fact is, he may be responsible for some other cases, but you still need the evidence,” Doyle said. “We have ours.”

“Had they not found him at Denny’s,” Doyle added, “I fully believe [Duncan] would have killed Shasta, moved on to his next targets, and we’d still be struggling with our unsolved killing of Anthony.”

The blog that authorities attribute to Duncan appears to support that view. In postings in 2004 and 2005, the author veered between prayers for help, self-pity and a vow to wreak vengeance on society for its mistreatment of him.

“Yes, I am still alive. I honestly wish not,” the blogger wrote April 24. “If you are reading this, and you believe in God, please pray for God to help me defeat my demons.” But, he added, he worried that his demons were stronger than he thought.

“I’m afraid, very afraid,” he wrote. “If they win, then a lot of people will be badly hurt, and they’ve had their way before, so I know what they can do.”

*

Pugmire reported from Riverside and Verhovek from Seattle. Times staff writer Susannah Rosenblatt in Riverside contributed to this report.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Trail of crime

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department suspects that Joseph Edward Duncan III kidnapped and killed Anthony Martinez, 10, of Beaumont in 1997. Duncan was arrested in Idaho and was with a girl who was kidnapped after her mother, a brother and her mother’s boyfriend were killed. His known and alleged criminal history:

1980: Joseph Edward Duncan III is arrested near Tacoma, Wash., for the rape of a 14-year-old boy. He is convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

1994: After serving 14-1/2 years, he is released and moves to Seattle.

August to October 1996: He tests positive for marijuana use and is jailed for that and for firearm violations. He is released in October.

March 1997: In Roslyn, Wash., he again tests positive for marijuana use and violates firearm restrictions. A warrant is issued for his arrest.

April 4: Anthony Martinez, 10, is abducted in Beaumont in Riverside County. Duncan’s father lives in Highland in San Bernardino County.

April 19: Anthony’s body is found near Indio. He had been sexually assaulted and his head crushed by a boulder.

August: Duncan returns to prison in Washington after being arrested in Kansas City for violating parole.

July 2000: After his release from prison, Duncan moves to Fargo, N.D. He registers as a sex offender.

July/August 2004: A 6-year-old boy is molested in Detroit Lakes, Minn. Police search Duncan’s residence.

March/April 2005: Duncan is formally charged in the molestation. Duncan posts the $15,000 bail and flees Minnesota.

May 16: Three members of a family are found slain in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Two of the family’s children, Dylan Groene, 9, and Shasta Groene, 8, are missing.

July 2: Shasta Groene and Duncan are spotted at a Denny’s in Coeur d’Alene. Duncan is arrested.

July 10: A body found July 4 in Montana is identified as Dylan’s.

July 14: Duncan tells of his link to the 1997 slaying, according to FBI agents.

Aug. 2: Police match Duncan’s thumbprint to one found on tape that bound Anthony’s body.

*

Sources: Riverside County Sheriff ‘ s Department. Graphics reporting by Lance Pugmire