Kidnap Probe Focuses on Web Diary

“Yes, I am still alive. I honestly wish not,” the blogger, then an apparent fugitive, wrote April 24 on a website called the Fifth Nail. “If you are reading this, and you believe in God, please pray for God to help me defeat my demons.”

Authorities here and in North Dakota said Sunday that the words were apparently written by Joseph Edward Duncan III, a registered sex offender in Fargo, N.D.

On May 13, a posting on the online diary said: “I hope to complete this journal before I die ... or turn myself in.” It added: “Right now the only thing I’m sure about is that I’m sure about nothing.”

That was just days before three people here in northern Idaho were found slain in a home and two children went missing.

Early Saturday, police found one of the children, 8-year-old Shasta Groene, at a Denny’s restaurant with Duncan, who was arrested and charged with her kidnapping.

Sheriff’s officials said Sunday that Shasta’s brother, Dylan, 9, was feared dead.

“Our goal is to find Dylan one way or another,” Kootenai County Sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger said in Coeur d’Alene.

Wolfinger said Shasta was in the hospital and was speaking with investigators.

Duncan will not be appointed a public defender until he appears in court Tuesday.

Duncan’s apparent weblog was first reported Sunday in the Forum, the daily newspaper in Fargo, N.D., where Duncan moved in 2000 and where he had registered as a Level III sex offender after serving more than 15 years in a Washington state prison for raping a 14-year-old boy, twice, at gunpoint.

Duncan also was arrested and charged with molesting a 6-year-old boy last July at a middle school playground in Detroit Lakes, Minn.

Shortly after he posted a $15,000 bond and met with a probation officer in early April, he disappeared -- until Amber Deahn, a waitress working the graveyard shift at a Denny’s here, thought she recognized Shasta as the missing girl pictured on a flier and called police.

As authorities here searched for Shasta’s brother and sought to determine whether Duncan was responsible for the bludgeoning deaths of the three people -- the children’s mother, Brenda Groene, 40; another brother, Slade Groene, 13; and the mother’s boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, 37 -- officials in Minnesota appeared to concede that Duncan had not seemed a threat when he was arrested there.

“You hear so many of these, and apparently I did set the bail in this matter,” Becker County District Judge Thomas Schroeder told KSTP-TV of the Twin Cities. He said that details of Duncan’s bail hearing were just coming back to him.

The district attorney in Becker County, Joe Evans, told the Fargo newspaper that an arrest warrant was issued for Duncan after he disappeared. He added that Duncan had apparently lived in North Dakota for years without legal troubles -- he was a dean’s-list student at North Dakota State University -- after his release from prison in Washington.

Authorities “do their best with the information they’ve got,” Evans said. “There will always be people that second-guess, but we can’t always predict human behavior.”

Evans’ son, John, said by telephone Sunday that the district attorney was out of town and could not be reached.

When Duncan arrived at the Denny’s in Coeur D’Alene shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday, he drove a red Jeep that had been reported stolen May 4 in Minnesota and that had Missouri license plates on it, said Wolfinger, the sheriff’s spokesman.

Wolfinger said at a news conference Sunday that many other aspects of the case remained a mystery to authorities.

More than 40 investigators were working on the case, including state police and the FBI, he said.

Among the questions unanswered were these, he said: “Where have Duncan and Shasta and Dylan been the last six weeks? Was Duncan involved in the triple homicide? Were other people involved? If so, who and where are they?”

Wolfinger said he could not elaborate on why authorities thought Dylan was dead, but said they were still investigating.

“I’d be more than happy to stand up here and tell you [that our assumption] was the biggest mistake that we’ve ever made, but, unfortunately, we don’t think it’s going to be there,” he said.

In January 1980, Duncan, then 16, was charged with breaking into a neighbor’s home in Tacoma, Wash., and stealing four handguns and ammunition. Later the same day, he abducted a 14-year-old boy and raped him twice at gunpoint, according to Pierce County court records.

After pleading guilty to first-degree rape, Duncan served 14 years in prison; he was released in September 1994 but was returned to prison in Washington for parole violations.

In July 2000, Duncan was released from prison and moved to Fargo, where he followed legal requirements to register as a Level III sex offender, considered to be the most dangerous and at-risk of repeat offenses.

He appeared to have had no run-ins with the law, Capt. Jeff Williams of the Fargo Police Department said in a telephone interview.

Duncan enrolled at North Dakota State University in fall 2000.

Duncan’s resume, posted on the university’s computer science website, said he had worked as a computer programmer in Spokane, Wash., in 1999 -- when he was in prison -- and that he was later a software developer in Moorhead, Minn.

On the resume, he described himself as a “go getter” who believed “in the power of computers to help mankind achieve its potential, tinkering in amateur philosophy as I may.”

On the Fifth Nail blog, Duncan apparently wrote that public knowledge of his offender status was “a daily torment for me.”

“I like traveling because I feel more ‘normal’ because of the anonymity of being a traveler,” a March 1, 2004, entry said.

He also complained of society’s antipathy toward convicts.

In late April, after Duncan was released from jail in Minnesota, the Fifth Nail blogger wrote that his “demons” were stronger than he thought.

“I’m afraid, very afraid,” the writer said. “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.”

On May 11, the blogger wrote of being on his knees, crying to God for help.

Five days later, the three people were found slain, and Shasta and Dylan were missing.

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Times researcher Lynn Marshall in Seattle contributed to this report.