Predators with Dr Paul Wilson

Child sexual murders always make headline news, but how did the killers become the predators they stalked and murdered young children? This book examines the how of child sexual predation.

Release date: July 2009

Sample Chapter:

Joseph Duncan

In the early hours of 3 July, 2005 Amber Deahn, a waitress at a Denny’s restaurant in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, spotted an eight-year-old sitting in one of the booths. The time was about 2am and the woman gave the little girl with the middle-aged scruffy man a second look. The waitress was sure she recognised her and thought she was a missing girl named Shasta Groene, who been missing since May 16 together with her nine-year-old brother Dylan.

Amber spoke to her manager about the little girl sitting with the middle-aged man in the diner. The manager decided to call police, who arrived quickly on the scene and confirmed their suspicions that the young child in the restaurant was indeed the missing girl. With the officers keen to talk to Shasta’s male companion, Amber stayed with the young girl. Kneeling down in front of her, she asked the girl her name. With tears in her eyes, the child replied that her name was ‘Shasta’, so the waitress held the girl tightly as Shasta poured out her story, a story that she had been forced to bottle up for almost two months. Her ordeal at the hands of the sexual predator and serial killer was finally over as police led the man away in handcuffs.[i] Yet the real account of what had occurred over the previous weeks was only beginning to unravel.

On Friday, 13 May, 2005, almost two months before his arrest, Joseph Edward Duncan III posted a final entry on his blog. The entry, entitled ‘Still Confused’ talked about not being a bad person, just someone with a ‘disease contracted from society and it hurts a lot.’[ii] He talked about the demons that prevented him from being honest on his website but spoke of an encrypted journal that he hoped he would be able to complete before he died or turned himself in.[iii] He was already on bail for the sexual molestation of a six-year-old boy in Minnesota so the man felt he had nothing left to lose. The blog, though sickening, gave only subtle hints as to what he had planned for that weekend. The convicted sexual predator had already staked out the house he had chosen as the first scene of his rampage. He knew who lived there and even the names of the two young children he planned to kidnap and rape.

In the small hours of Monday, 16August, 2005, eight-year-old Shasta woke to a strange sound coming from her home in Coeur d’Alene in Idaho. The family had been to a barbecue the evening before that had ended a few hours earlier. Walking out of her bedroom, rubbing her eyes, the young girl was rounded up by her mother along with the rest of the family and taken to the living room where 40-year-old Brenda Groene, her boyfriend, 37-year-old Mark Mckenzie and 13-year-old Slade were being held by intruder Joseph Duncan. Then, Shasta and her nine-year-old brother, Dylan, were taken from the home and placed in the man’s pick-up truck that he had parked outside.

According to Duncan, he was on a rampage when he entered the Coeur d’Alene home. His intention was to ‘kidnap and rape and kill until [he] was killed.’[iv] With his victims under his control and waving a shotgun around, Duncan began the assault on his victims using a hammer. He savagely bludgeoned Brenda, Slade and Mark, while in the pick-up truck Shasta and Dylan could hear the screams and commotion coming from inside the house. At one point their brother Slade tried to escape from the home. The two young children watched as he stumbled from the house bleeding profusely from a head wound. The boy was dragged back inside where he and the others were tied with gaffer tape and garbage ties. The killer then proceeded to smash their skulls with such force that the victims no longer resembled human beings.[v] The bloody scene that Duncan left behind was akin to a horror splatter film, with the walls and floor covered in the three victims’ blood. Slade had been killed by at least fourteen blows to the head, his mother Brenda had suffered at least three blows. Mark McKenzie had been killed by seven hits with the hammer.[vi] With the only threats he saw to his plan of rape and torture now out of the way, Duncan spirited Shasta and Dylan Groene away under the cover of darkness in the pick-up truck before putting them into another car in order to fool possible pursuers.

Later in the evening following the murders, a neighbour arrived at the front gates of the secluded tree-lined home to pay Slade Groene for a lawn mowing job he had done the day before. Expecting to see the younger children come bounding out of the home, the neighbour found it strange to find the house in silence and a smear of blood on the front door.[vii] Believing that something was the wrong, the neighbour returned home to call the police. Investigators arrived on the scene and quickly discovered the carnage inside. An all-points bulletin was raised for the missing children, though from the beginning, police held little hope of finding the two children alive. The killer had struck with such anger inside the Coeur d'Alene home that there was a very real possibility he would murder the children just as brutally as well.

Photographs of eight-year-old Shasta and nine-year-old Dylan led every news bulletin across the United States as police forces across the country searched for the youngsters. Yet their captor had hidden the pair away. He had taken the two children to a secluded hut in West Montana where there was little chance of the trio being found. He then sexually abused and tortured the Groene children while capturing many hours of it on film.

In one horrible video, Dylan screamed in pain as Duncan beat him with a wire loop while the boy was hanging by his neck in a wire noose. Dylan had suffered hours, days and weeks of sexual abuse and torture. Dylan was seen in one of the videos screaming for mercy as Duncan shouted back at him in a high-pitched voice, ‘The devil is here, boy, the devil himself …the devil likes to watch children suffer and cry!’[viii] as he danced naked in front of the frightened and injured youngster.

In the final video, Duncan looked to the heavens and said, ‘God, this child, this boy, does not deserve to die’,[ix] as he again hangs Dylan from the wire hung over a beam in the ramshackle cabin. The man left the boy hanging from the wire for several minutes while he sexually abused him before shooting him in the stomach while Shasta watched on. He then took the boy down as the lad gasped for breath, dying and in pain. The predator made the boy pray for his saviour and again looked to the heavens and pleaded, saying ‘God, what am I doing here? I don’t understand, I’m getting sick of your games,’[x] words that were reminiscent of his rambling weblog entries. Duncan then aimed a gun at the boy and fired a shot making the child scream out in pain.

Turning to his female captive, the killer tried to explain to Shasta that he had accidentally shot Dylan, lying to the little girl as her brother lay dead beside her. Duncan told her that the only thing he could do was to shoot Dylan in the head to stop him being in pain. Duncan placed the gun to the boy’s skull and fired a second shot at point blank range, killing him instantly. Little Dylan’s torture had finally come to an end. Duncan built a fire around the remains of the child and set the funerary pyre alight, burning the evidence of abuse that he had inflicted on the boy and reducing his remains to ash. But it was not over yet. For several more weeks, Duncan continued to abuse Shasta but had decided not to kill her. Duncan would later testify in court that he considered returning her to her home and, according to Shasta, he told her she was going home as she had ‘taught him how to love.’[xi]

Two days after Shasta was found in Duncan’s company, the killer led police to the burnt remains of her brother Dylan in Lolo National Park in Montana. By that time, he had confessed to the murders as well as others—investigators realised that they had a vicious child serial killer on their hands. In seeking the death penalty, the prosecution introduced a written confession by the killer in which Duncan confessed to three more child murders.[xii]

Eleven-year-old Sammiejo White and her half sister, nine-year-old Carmen Cubias, left the motel room a local church had rented for them to beg for change at a local taco restaurant in Seattle, Washington. The young girls said farewell to their older brother at 8.30pm on 6 July, 1996 and headed down the street. When their mother returned home two hours later, she and their brother went out in search of the two little girls. When no trace of them was found, they reported the missing girls to police. As the pair was known to be extremely streetwise due to the hardships they had suffered in their short lives, the police put their disappearance down as a possible runaway case. But it was not to be because in February 1998, eighteen months after their disappearance, a homeless man found several bones at a construction site in Bothell, a suburb near Seattle. Dental records from the two girls were used to positively identify the remains. Though police vigorously investigated the double murder without success, the case remained unsolved until Duncan confessed during the interrogation in the Groene murder case.

Duncan also confessed[xiii] to the unsolved murder of 10-year-old Anthony Martinez in Beaumont, California on 4 April, 1997. Anthony had been playing with a group of boys when Duncan approached them trying to entice the boys to enter his car to examine a photograph of his missing pet cat, promising them all a dollar if they helped him look for the animal. The children, knowing better than to accompany the man, ignored him and moved away. Failing in his attempt to entice the boys Duncan became angry and swooped on Anthony, grabbing him and holding a hunting knife to the boy’s throat. Anthony’s friends all recoiled, fearing that the man would murder their friend in front of their eyes. Instead, Duncan dragged the frightened boy into his car and drove away. The boy’s disappearance made national news as a search began for the brazen abductor and his victim. A little over two weeks later, Anthony’s body was found more than 200 kilometres (124 miles) away near Indio, California. All police had to investigate was a description given to them by Anthony’s friends and a single thumbprint found at the scene. The thumbprint remained unmatched until Duncan’s arrest in the Groene case.

Joseph Duncan’s sexual predatory history dates back to the age of eight when he began abusing other young children. As a twelve year old, he sexually assaulted a five-year-old boy. According to authorities who incarcerated the teenager, he was diagnosed as a sexual psychopath not amendable to treatment and was declared ‘not safe to be at large.’[xiv] This declaration followed a number of incidents where he forced children to perform oral sex on him before he sodomised them. Indeed, Duncan had attacked more than a dozen children before being sent to prison for the rape and torture of a fourteen-year-old boy when he was sixteen.

As Duncan said at his own trial for the murders of four of his victims, ‘You people really don't have any clue yet of the true heinousness of what I've done.’.”[xv] Described by many who interviewed and studied the child and the man he became as a ‘predatory psychopath’, the disturbed man was unable to respond to any known treatment. Duncan was the worst possible sort of serial offender.

Duncan pleaded guilty to the Groene murders as well as the rape and torture of Shasta and Dylan Groene. He was sentenced to death for the crimes.