Duncan responsible for 3 deaths at Idaho home, authorities say

Authorities believe the man accused of kidnapping 8-year-old Shasta Groene and her brother is also responsible for killing three people at the family home, a sheriff's spokesman said this morning.

"We believe Joseph Duncan is the only one responsible for these crimes," Kootenai County Sheriff's Capt. Ben Wolfinger told a news conference.

Joseph Edward Duncan III, 42, a convicted sex offender on the run from an earlier child molestation count, was arrested Saturday at a local Denny's restaurant with Shasta, believed to be the sole survivor of the attack in which the girl's mother, older brother and mother's boyfriend were killed. The bodies were found, bound and bludgeoned, on May 16 at the home outside Coeur d'Alene.

Duncan has been charged with two counts of kidnapping in the abduction of Shasta and her 9-year-old brother, Dylan. Wolfinger said officials likely would not be able to conclusively identify human remains found in western Montana, believed to be the boy, until next week.

Duncan was never a suspect in the attacks on the family and his name never came up until his arrest, Wolfinger said. He could not explain why Duncan's fingerprints were not found at the scene.

Wolfinger declined to say whether Duncan had a gun or to speculate on how he might have overpowered the five people at the house.

Officials still have no motive for the crimes, nor have they found a connection between Duncan and the family, Wolfinger said, raising the possibility the attack and kidnapping were random.

"When we get the pieces together, we'll find out what the motive is," he said, adding, "A sense that we got the right guy permeates through the investigators as they work diligently."

Duncan had spent more than a decade in prison for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint in Tacoma, Wash., and was a fugitive at the time of his arrest after he was charged with molesting a 6-year-old boy in Minnesota.

He was released on $15,000 bail earlier this year after being charged with molesting the boy. Police in Fargo, N.D., had been looking for Duncan since May, when he failed to check in with a probation agent.

By the time he was 16, Duncan estimated he had raped 13 younger boys, some at gunpoint, according to Pierce County court records.

At 17, after he was arrested for the rape and torture of a 14-year-old Pierce County boy in 1980, Duncan was deemed to be a sexual psychopath and as an alternative to prison was admitted for treatment to the Sex Offender Program at Western State Hospital. However, he was booted from the program after 22 months when officials learned he was sneaking off the Western campus and having "violent rape fantasies," said Pierce County Prosecutor Gerry Horne. A judge then reinstated his 20-year prison sentence.

"He was a very dangerous young man," Horne said yesterday.

In a handwritten affidavit released yesterday, Kootenai County Sheriff's Sgt. Brad Maskell revealed that Shasta told authorities that she and Dylan had been repeatedly molested by Duncan.

The two-page document also contained new details from the abduction.

The girl recalled being awakened by her mother and watching Duncan tie up her family before she and her brother were placed in a pickup. The children were later transferred to a Jeep and taken to the first of three campsites.

"She knew how she left home," the affidavit said. "Her mother woke her up, went to living room. Man forced family in ligatures."

The affidavit makes no mention of the beating deaths of the girl's family or whether she witnessed the killings.

Darlene Torres, Shasta's grandmother, said Duncan has no known connection to the family.

"Nobody in the family has ever seen this man before. Ever," Torres told CBS' "The Early Show" Wednesday.

Misty Cooper, Shasta's aunt, said Shasta "seems to be doing really good right now," but that the family had not spoken to the girl about her ordeal.

"We just go on with every day, normal things," Cooper said.

During a brief court appearance yesterday in Coeur d'Alene, a shackled, unshaven Duncan, wearing a yellow jumpsuit, looked intently at First District Magistrate Judge Scott Wayman and said little, other than to acknowledge that he understood the charges against him.

The pair of first-degree-kidnapping charges do not say who the victims are, but identify them as 8-year-old "S.G." and 9-year-old "D.G" because they are minors. The abductions, charging papers said, occurred during the period of May 15 to July 2, and added that the children were held both in and out of the state of Idaho.

The intent of the crimes, the documents said, was to rape, seriously injure or commit a lewd and lascivious act on a child under 16 years old. Convictions can carry the death penalty or life in prison.

There was a warrant for Duncan for failing to register as a high-risk sex offender and he was facing charges of molesting a 6-year-old boy in Minnesota, where he was released on bail in April, just weeks before the children disappeared. His last-known address was in Fargo, N.D.

A judge who had set Duncan's bail at $15,000, despite prosecutors' request that it be higher, said if he had known Duncan's record, he would have set it high enough that he would not have gone free.

According to Pierce County court records, Duncan, the fourth of five children in a military family, was born in Fort Bragg, N.C. His family moved frequently when he was a youth, and they were living in the Tacoma area when he was a teenager.

When he was admitted to Western State Hospital for the rape of the 14-year-old in 1980, he spoke with therapists about earlier assaults against other children, court records say.

Duncan told therapists that he sexually assaulted a 5-year-old boy when he was 12 years old. When Duncan was 15, he did the same thing to a 9-year-old boy at gunpoint. When he was 16, Duncan told his therapists, he tied up six younger boys and sexually assaulted them.

Duncan, who dropped out of Lakes High School in Lakewood, Pierce County, in 10th grade, estimated that he'd committed about 13 rapes on younger boys by the time he was 16.

Duncan's first recorded brush with the law occurred in 1979 when he was arrested by police after a high-speed chase in a stolen car. He was sent to Dyslin's Boys Ranch for several months. The next year, according to court documents filed in Pierce County Superior Court, Duncan was charged with first-degree rape, first-degree burglary and third-degree statutory rape for the assault on the 14-year-old boy. Police and prosecutors said Duncan broke into a neighbor's house in January 1980 and stole a gun.

He pulled the gun on a boy who was walking to school and forced him into a wooded area, papers say. Duncan made the boy undress and perform a sex act, court documents say. Duncan then walked the boy farther into the woods, sexually assaulted him a second time, and then beat the boy's buttocks with a stick and burned him with a cigarette.

He led the boy back to his clothes and told him to run away.

That night, court records show, Duncan was arrested.

Duncan pleaded guilty to first-degree rape and was ordered to undergo psychological testing at Western State. Mental-health evaluators there said he did not appear to suffer from any clinical mental illnesses, but he was diagnosed with an anti-social personality and as a sexual deviant.

A presentence report on Duncan indicated he had serious sexual-psychopathy issues and would have to be in a controlled environment but also mentioned that his age and appearance could make him a victim were he to be incarcerated in an adult prison.

Reports to the court from his treatment providers at the Sex Offender Program show that at the end of 1980, Duncan's progress was considered good, his therapists wrote. "The amount of change that has occurred in Mr. Duncan has been encouraging. The large amount of self-disclosure is a very positive sign for future success," they wrote.

Duncan admitted to having rape fantasies that he couldn't control and he acknowledged a lonely and solitary childhood. Court documents say Duncan felt isolated and bullied by peers because of his family's constant moves. In addition, he didn't feel wanted at home, he said.

His parents fought constantly until their divorce in 1979, he told his therapists. After that, he felt somewhat displaced by his mother's string of boyfriends and his father rebuffed him when he asked if he could live him.

The victimization of others, he said, was a way of acting out the anger and hostility he felt toward his family.

"It was an outlet for my feelings [of]rejections. One from my mother and one from my father," Duncan wrote in a personal history. By March of 1982, however, his therapists concluded that, after 22 months in the Sex Offender Program, Duncan was no longer trying. "He has chosen not to commit himself to our program techniques," therapists wrote.

The report details two times that Duncan sneaked out of a special facility for extended visits with family, while his parents were sleeping, and prowled the neighborhood. His treatment providers saw the incidents as proof that Duncan was choosing not to control himself.

Duncan was then sent to the state Department of Corrections to serve out his prison term.

Meanwhile, authorities in Idaho yesterday were reviewing video of Shasta and Duncan at a gas and convenience store in Kellogg hours before she was rescued. Kootenai County Sheriff's Capt. Ben Wolfinger said it appeared Shasta was "wanting to be recognized by the patrons there in the store."

"In the small takes I saw out of that surveillance video, she's walking around, stopping, looking right at the faces of the different patrons there," Wolfinger said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Early Saturday, employees and customers spotted the girl eating breakfast with Duncan in a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene and summoned police.

Seattle Times staff reporter Mike Carter and Associated Press writers Nicholas K. Geranios and Sarah Cooke contributed to this report.