Missing Girl Found With Sex Offender

Shasta Groene, an 8-year-old girl missing for more than six weeks from the home where her mother, brother and a third person were found bludgeoned to death, was rescued Saturday at a nearby Denny’s after a waitress working the overnight shift recognized her. The girl was in the company of a 43-year-old man registered as a sex offender in another state.

Her brother, Dylan, 9, who was reported missing at the same time as Shasta, is feared dead, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department said.

Joseph Edward Duncan III was arrested and charged with kidnapping after the waitress and her shift supervisor called the police.

Duncan, who had been released on bail in Minnesota weeks before the children were reported missing, has a record as a sex offender dating to 1980. He had most recently been living in Fargo, N.D., where he was a computer science major on the dean’s list at North Dakota State University.

Waitress Amber Deahn said she saw the child and the man sitting at one of her tables, became concerned that something might not be right -- and tried to find one of the fliers that had been circulated about Shasta’s disappearance.

To stall their departure, she offered the girl crayons and a play mask. And she urged them to follow their dinner -- the appetizer plate of chicken strips, onion rings and cheese sticks -- with dessert.

She offered a full range of options and when the girl said she wanted a milkshake, Deahn again took time to explain all the possibilities -- chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, blueberry and Oreo cookie. The girl said vanilla, and Deahn took her time preparing it. In thinking of every way she could to buy more time for police to arrive, she made a large shake instead of a child’s size, knowing it would last longer.

Police arrested Duncan inside the restaurant just after he nervously asked for his bill. When police briefly left the girl with Deahn, the waitress knelt down and asked her name. The child answered “Shasta Groene,” then burst into tears.

Deahn, who is six months’ pregnant, said she “picked her up and hugged her. I felt a rush of pure relief as if she were my own daughter.” Deahn has a 15-month-old daughter, Maria, at home.

Shasta was taken to a hospital, where she was reunited with her father, Steve Groene, and her oldest brother, Vance. Other family members expressed elation that she was found -- and their gratitude to those who helped free her from her alleged captor.

Police, the FBI and the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department began tracking down leads from the arrest -- looking for Shasta’s brother and connections between the abduction of the children and the slayings in their home, Sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger said.

Duncan was convicted of raping a 14-year-old boy twice at gunpoint in Washington state in 1980. He served 14 years in prison and was returned there after violating his parole in 1997.

Released in 2000, he moved to Fargo, where about 300 people turned out at a community notification meeting when he was registered as a Level III sex offender.

In the 3 1/2 years he lived in Fargo, Duncan had met the legal requirements to register as a sex offender, police said.

“Until his disappearance, we had no reason to believe he would be trouble,” Fargo Police Capt. Jeff Williams said.

In April, Duncan was charged with molesting a 6-year-old boy on a school playground in Becker County, Minn., the previous July. He was released on $15,000 bond and his whereabouts were unknown until Saturday morning.

Shasta and her brother had been missing since at least May 16, when sheriff’s deputies came to her rural home on a neighbor’s tip and made a gruesome discovery.

Shasta’s mother, Brenda Groene, 40; her brother, Slade Groene, 13; and the mother’s boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, 37, had been bound and bludgeoned in their home in an unincorporated area of Coeur d’Alene.

In a resume posted on a North Dakota State University website, Duncan describes himself as a “go-getter” who believes “in the power of computers to help mankind achieve its potential, tinkering in amateur philosophy as I may.”

According to his resume, Duncan expected to graduate in May with a bachelor’s degree in computer science at North Dakota State.

He had a 3.3 grade-point average, was a member of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society and made the dean’s list.

“He did not graduate,” Williams of the Fargo police said. “He disappeared before the semester was over.”

Duncan’s resume said he had worked for Invie Consulting in Moorhead, Minn., developing intranet-based industrial control software. And he listed his interests as karate, snow skiing and scuba diving.

“Upon graduation, I will seek a position that will take advantage of my skills, experience and education while enhancing my already considerable repertoire,” Duncan wrote in his resume. “I hope to relocate to a more southern state, possibly the Kansas City region.”

After being released on bond in the Minnesota case, he failed to stay in touch with his probation agent. Becker County, Minn., officials issued a warrant for his arrest in May.

The sex offender registries maintained by individual states and the District of Columbia rely on convicted rapists, child molesters and other sex offenders to obey the law and tell authorities every time they change their residence, said Jenni Thompson, an independent consultant with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Here’s the thing about sex offender registries: they are only as good as we can expect criminals to make them,” said Thompson, a former affiliate of the Polly Klaas Foundation, a California-based organization that tries to prevent child abduction and help find missing children.

Another national organization, Parents for Megan’s Law, estimated this year that of the nation’s 551,987 sex offenders who are required to register their whereabouts, 24% fail to comply.

“The truth is, we’re asking criminals to follow the law when they get out of prison,” Thompson said. “Obviously, not all are going to do it. There are thousands and thousands and thousands on the registries, and that’s very valuable, but some are not going to register, and some are not going to stay at the address they’ve registered at.”

In 1994, Congress passed a law requiring states to create registers of sex offenders and track their whereabouts.

Two years later, Congress added an amendment to force states to notify local communities when sex offenders moved in. Most states now make those registries public over the Internet.

Since each state and the District of Columbia has its own rules for the sex offender registries, some contain more information and cover more offenses than others.

Nancy McBride, national safety director for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said a national registry would help states share information and open a specialized communications channel to help track missing offenders more swiftly.

“The fact that the states can’t communicate with each other, that’s a terrible hindrance for us,” McBride said. Referring to news reports of Duncan’s travels, she said he appeared to have moved from state to state “under the radar screen.”

“We’ve got to do a better job in tracking them,” McBride said. This year, Florida legislators mandated life sentences or lifetime tracking by satellite system or radio monitor for people convicted of certain sexual crimes against children 11 years of age and younger.

McBride said such tracking methods, as well as implanting computer chips under an offender’s skin, should be considered by public officials as possible ways of ensuring they know an offender’s whereabouts.

“All of the technology that’s out there, the cutting-edge technology, we should look at,” McBride said. “Because a convicted sex offender is four times more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime than a non-sex-offender.”

*

Times staff writers John Dahlburg and Jenny Jarvie contributed to this report.