In 1999, a year before Joseph Edward Duncan III was to finish a 20-year prison sentence for the rape and torture of a Tacoma teenager, a risk assessment performed by a state psychologist found that nine of 10 offenders like Duncan would reoffend within six years.

It was a prediction that took on a grim new meaning yesterday. Court documents filed in Idaho accused the 42-year-old Duncan of stalking a Coeur d'Alene family for days this spring before breaking into the home, bludgeoning a mother, her boyfriend and teenage son to death and taking her two young children for sex.

Duncan was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of first-degree kidnapping, which could carry the death penalty if he is convicted.

Reached at her home in Tacoma yesterday, Duncan's mother, Lillian, said she had spoken briefly with her son after his arrest. She said that he told her he loved her and that he showed remorse.

"I don't know what he has done or what he hasn't done," Mrs. Duncan said. "I still love him, he's my son."

As a sex offender convicted in Washington, Duncan fell under a law that allows for offenders found to be "sexually violent predators" to be held indefinitely at a facility on McNeil Island for treatment. However, documents released yesterday by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) show Duncan was twice rejected for consideration for that program.

The documents refer to a 1999 psychological evaluation that said Duncan did not suffer from any major mental illness or have a history of convictions which "support [a] pattern of predatory sexual deviance" that would have justified his involuntary commitment as a sex predator.

Duncan, after he was arrested for rape in 1980, told doctors that he had raped as many as 13 boys before he was 17. He later recanted that story, saying he made it up so he could stay out of prison and get into a sex-offender program at Western State Hospital. He was imprisoned anyway.

The state said it could not consider those admissions, because they could not be verified, when considering Duncan for sex-predator commitment.

The 1999 psychological examination itself, as well as another conducted in 2000, were not released by the DOC, which claimed medical confidentiality and privacy exemptions to the state Public Disclosure Act in withholding them.

"It's a difficult case," said Victoria Roberts, head of the DOC panel that reviews sex offenders for possible sex-predator commitment. "Anytime you look at them in retrospect, you ask what could I have seen differently. I've looked at [Duncan's case] inside out now. Based on the facts we knew then, the same decision would be reached today."

However, John Phillips, a Seattle attorney who has led a 10-year federal court battle to improve conditions and treatment options for sex offenders at the Special Commitment Center, said there are "any number of offenders out there who have criminal histories that are far less scary than his.

"You might not want any of them on the streets," Phillips said. "But this raises questions about why [Duncan] was."

The psychological report, performed by DOC psychologist Savio Chan, uses actuarial tables to predict a sex offender's future risk. That assessment found that 87 percent of people with scores similar to Duncan's committed another crime within six years, according to records from the state parole board.

A second assessment, the Rapid Risk Assessment for Sexual Offense Recidivism, found sex offenders similar to Duncan would reoffend within 10 years.

Chan found Duncan posed a medium risk for reoffending, according to the parole board's records. Chan did not respond to a telephone message left at his office yesterday.

Duncan refused to cooperate with the 1999 risk assessment as well as another one in 2000 because he was worried they might be used to send him to the sex-predator program, according to DOC records.

Richard Packard, a Bainbridge Island psychologist who has performed dozens of evaluations on sexually violent predators, said offenders with medium-risk scores are the most troublesome for evaluators.

"When you get in the middle scores, it's very difficult to tell," he said. "You're going to have a substantial number of people we cannot make a definitive call on."

The records showed that Duncan, while in prison and on parole, was a bright, arrogant and sexually confused offender who refused to come to grips with his deviancy.

After spending nearly half his life in prison — he was 17 when he was arrested in 1980 and subsequently convicted — Duncan was released on parole in 1994. The documents detail a slow spiral out of control over the three years he was out of prison.

He went from being called a "very pleasant, bright, verbal, open young man" who had "done a lot of work on himself" to being described by his community corrections officer as a liar given to rationalizations and "distorted thinking" that made it impossible for him to accept treatment, according to the documents.

During that time, he smoked marijuana, handled a gun in violation of his parole, became sexually involved with his male community sponsor and had a relationship with a married woman who was "helping him explore his feminine side by helping him with transsexual fantasies." That woman had two young children with whom Duncan apparently was left alone, in violation of the conditions of his parole, according to the documents.

But it wasn't until Duncan absconded in 1997 while facing allegations of drug use and the incidents with the children that he was sent back to prison to serve the remaining three years of his sentence. While in prison, he repeatedly refused to participate in sex-offender treatment. In 2000, the DOC was forced to let him go and he moved to North Dakota.

The murder and kidnapping charges filed yesterday in Idaho alleged that Duncan was prowling neighborhoods when he happened upon 8-year-old Shasta Groene and her brother, Dylan, 9, playing in their bathing suits outside their home. After that, he stalked their home for days, using night-vision goggles to learn its layout before bursting in, subduing their family with a shotgun and a hammer, and abducting the siblings.

The new details of the gruesome attack were in the minutes and a recording of a closed-door probable-cause hearing before First District Magistrate Judge Scott Wayman. The girl told detectives her ordeal began when she heard her mother call her into the living room early on the morning of May 16. There, she said, she saw Duncan wearing dark gloves and holding a shotgun. Her 13-year-old brother, Slade; her mother, Brenda Groene; and her mother's boyfriend, Mark McKenzie were bound with zip-ties and duct tape.

Duncan then bound her and Dylan and laid them on the ground outside, near a swing set. Shasta said she heard McKenzie yell out several times, and at one point they saw Slade stagger, bloody and incoherent, out of the home.

Few other details about Duncan's weeks on the run with Shasta were released. Authorities have previously said Shasta was repeatedly molested.

Duncan was arrested July 2 having an early morning meal in a Coeur d'Alene restaurant with Shasta Groene. The body of Dylan Groene was later found at a western Montana campground.

Duncan is expected to face federal charges in Dylan's death because the boy's remains were found across state lines in Montana. In addition to the crimes in Idaho, Duncan is also charged in Becker County, Minn., with molesting two boys on a school playground.

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com.

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com.

Information from The Associated Press

is included in this report.