Serial Killer’s Death Brings Pause from Idaho to California

She detected something off in her mom’s voice.

She couldn’t quite tell what it was from her room to the living room. It was higher pitched than usual — agitated but trying to control her mood.

What’s going on?

Shasta walked out of her room towards the living room when she heard an unfamiliar gruff male voice grunt at her — more like a bull than a human. She can’t quite make out the words — her ears ring as adrenaline pumps full blast through her 8-year-old body.

All that she could think of was the most primal of reactions as her mother’s shouts echoed in her head, “Run, Shasta! RUN!”

The Beast Joseph Duncan slaughtered the matriarch of the Groene home, Brenda (age 40), her boyfriend Mark McKenzie (age 37), and Slade Groene (age 13), at their home in Coeur D’Alene Idaho that day in 2005.

This was just the start of a fevered nightmare no one should have to see, let alone two children from an insular part of an insular state. The Beast held a knife to Shasta’s throat as he took her and her 9-year-old big brother Dylan out the door.

Shasta and Dylan were petrified by fear: frozen like the white tail deer that make their home in the woods here and accidentally run in front of the headlights of her mother’s vehicle. That had a strange terror percolate down their spines and over their skin like a multitude of invisible spiders – the invader was strangely calm.

There was an almost religious sense in how he treated his crimes – a sense of the sacred to the mind of a psychopath. He had rehearsed-rehearsed-REHEARSED time and again for years in his fantasies. Of course he had a ritualized component – killing was his communion; torture his penance.

He had already tortured and murdered 10-year-old Anthony Martinez in 1997 when he was on probation. The Beast violently abducted the 10-year-old at knifepoint while he was playing in an alley only 20 feet from his home in Beaumont, CA. His body was found bound and under rocks in a sun-parched desert canyon. Circling vultures lead investigators to him.

Duncan was unidentified so far aside from the trail of dead in his wake… including three other young women whom he beat to a pulp on a Seattle street corner in 1996.

The Beast brutally tortured and maimed Shasta and Dylan over their weeks after capture. Shasta would survive the homicidal rage of Joseph Duncan. Her big brother would not be so lucky. The beast dumped Dylan’s body just outside Joshua Tree National Park after savaging both children in the wild backcountry of western Montana.

Duncan made his fatal error (as this class of offenders tend to do) when he took Shasta to a Denny’s some six weeks after she was abducted. He was recognized there and taken into custody without incident.

Skip ahead 16 years. Nothing can give the families of the victims back the people who were so savagely taken from them.

Still, the beast Joseph Duncan died recently of a brain tumor at a hospital in Indiana. Is dying in a hospital more than the beast deserves? Absolutely. Did it bring some solace from Idaho to California? Yes.

Anthony Martinez’s mother had this to say about the extinction of Duncan: “The world is a more beautiful place without the evil that is Joseph Duncan. God chose to make his end a long-suffering and I believe that is fitting. The horror of his thoughts consumed him.”

The now-in-her-twenties Shasta deserves the last word on this:

“He does not exist anymore. Now, we can live our lives knowing that. For so long I have been struggling with hate towards that man. Today, I woke up feeling like my soul was finally free.”