Amber Deahn deliberately took too long over the little girl’s vanilla milkshake. It was around 2 a.m. on July 2, 2005, at a Denny’s in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and she thought the child at her table might be eight-year-old Shasta Groene, missing for almost seven weeks.
The restaurant usually displayed a missing-person poster, but when Deahn checked, it wasn’t there. The girl barely responded to the crayons and coloring materials the waitress brought her. Before saying thank you, she looked to the man beside her for permission.
Deahn and her manager, Linda Olson, agreed to call the police. While Olson made the call, Deahn offered dessert, then made the shake larger than a child’s serving.
When officers arrived, the man abruptly asked for the check. They followed him back to the table. An officer told Deahn to stay with the girl, so she knelt beside her and asked her name. The child said, “Shasta Groene,” and began to cry. Deahn picked her up and held her.
The man was Joseph Edward Duncan III. Police knew that Shasta’s mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her brother Slade had been beaten to death at their home. They were still looking for nine-year-old Dylan, who disappeared with her.
In a patrol car, Officer Shane Avriett asked where her brother was.
“He’s in heaven,” Shasta answered.
Avriett knew about thirteen-year-old Slade. He asked about the other brother. Shasta explained that Dylan was dead, too, and directed the officer toward Montana’s Lolo National Forest. She also knew where to find the gun. It was in Duncan’s red Jeep.
Before the killings, Shasta lived with Dylan, Slade, their mother, Brenda, and Brenda’s boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, near Wolf Lodge Bay, east of Coeur d’Alene. Their father, Steve Groene, lived separately. Shasta was the youngest of five children, and the only daughter, and she loved Britney Spears, dolls, and doing her hair. Her older brother Jesse thought she particularly enjoyed not having to share her possessions with another girl.
Dylan copied Jesse’s blond crew cut and was learning guitar from him. Slade played guitar, violin, and drums and made the honor roll. Brenda gardened and took in strays. Shortly before her death, she told Jesse about a dog she brought home because it was cold and hungry. Money was tight, but Jesse remembered her feeding a houseful of people when the cupboards looked almost empty. McKenzie was teaching Slade to hunt and intended to take Dylan when he was older.
Duncan reached their home after fleeing another prosecution. He was forty-two and had spent much of his adult life imprisoned for raping a fourteen-year-old boy in Washington. After his release in 2000, he moved to Fargo and studied computer science at North Dakota State University, twice making the dean’s list.
In April 2005, he appeared in a Minnesota courtroom on new child-sexual-assault charges. His lawyer pointed to his studies, his jobs and his compliance with registration requirements, describing a man “taking his obligations as a citizen very seriously.” The judge set bail at $15,000. Duncan paid it and later disappeared. His next court appearance was scheduled for May 16.
Before that date arrived, he drove past the Groene house on Interstate 90 and spotted Shasta outside. He spent two or three days studying the family’s movements, watching with night-vision equipment and looking through their windows.
In the early hours of May 16, he entered through an unlocked back door with a shotgun, a hammer, duct tape, and plastic ties. He woke Brenda at gunpoint and made her lead him to the bedrooms, then gathered everyone in the living room and bound them.
Duncan took Shasta and Dylan outside and left them on the grass. He killed Slade with the hammer in the backyard, then killed Brenda, forty, and McKenzie, thirty-seven, inside. He put the two younger children in his vehicle and drove into Montana, where he established a camp in a remote part of Lolo National Forest. He repeatedly sexually assaulted them and threatened to shoot them if they tried to escape.
The children knew him as Jet, though he demanded that they call him Daddy. He showed them the hammer he used against their family and beat Dylan with a stick until it broke. When he mocked Dylan for being afraid of the dark, he called him a coward. Shasta later corrected that description for investigators.
Both children wrote letters to their father. They told him they were alive and knew what had happened to their mother. Shasta had news she wanted him to hear.
“Dear Dad, I have some very good news, and it is that we are coming home soon!”
The letters never reached Steve. Police found them in Duncan’s Jeep.
At home, Steve offered his Harley-Davidson and $10,000 for information that would bring both children back. He stopped working at the recycling center and performing with his blues band, Blue Tattoo. By Father’s Day in June, he was spending most of his time at home, sleeping when he could and waiting for news. Investigators had conducted hundreds of interviews, but no break in the case had been announced.
“That’s pretty much all I do is sit and wait for that phone call.”
Duncan repeatedly promised the children he would take them home, then changed his mind. In videos he made at the campsite, they played and ate watermelon, and once discussed their wishes while a marked log burned in the fire. Duncan wanted forgiveness.
“Going home!” Dylan called out.
Shasta had a longer list. “I want a purse and makeup, and I want to go home, and I want one thousand million dollars.”
Duncan told them his own wish had a better chance of coming true. The videos survived alongside recordings of his sexual abuse of the children.
On or about June 22, he killed Dylan. Shasta heard a shot from the other side of the Jeep and found her brother wounded. Duncan claimed it was an accident. She then saw him put the shotgun to Dylan’s head and try to fire. When it failed, he reloaded and shot the boy. Afterward, he burned the body.
When he eventually drove Shasta back to Idaho, she was alone with him. Avriett later asked why Duncan had brought her home, and she repeated his explanation. He claimed she had taught him how to love.
At the hospital after her rescue, she answered questions wrapped in a quilt decorated with teddy bears, clutching a stuffed animal. Her descriptions helped investigators locate the campsite. Four weeks later, she returned with them and placed labeled rocks on the ground to show where she, Dylan and Duncan stood when her brother died.
By the time a federal jury assembled to decide Duncan’s punishment in 2008, he had pleaded guilty to the Idaho murders and the federal charges involving the children. Shasta was eleven. Her father, who supplied the children’s toothbrushes for DNA testing during the search, identified their handwriting in the letters from the camp.
Duncan chose to represent himself during the federal sentencing proceedings, raising the possibility that he might question Shasta. She made her wishes clear in a statement included in court documents.
“I don’t want to be in the same room as him.”
An agreement allowed recorded interviews to replace live testimony, so she never had to appear.
She and Steve also found a way to remember Dylan where he died. They left Matchbox cars and other small items where Duncan burned his body, making a memorial for him. Prosecutors wanted to show the jury a photograph, but the judge excluded it. He also restricted testimony from Shasta’s teacher about how she had changed, concerned about the limits on evidence in the capital proceedings.
In August 2008, the jury returned three death verdicts. By that November, Duncan had also received nine life sentences. Steve wanted an execution.
“I just want to see him put to death,” he said.
Shasta still had to grow up in a place where strangers knew her name.
People recognized her wherever she went, and she resented being treated as a public figure because of what she had done. She blamed herself for failing to prevent the killings and felt ashamed of the abuse. As she grew older, she drank and used drugs with teenagers who knew her as someone to party with rather than the girl from the news.
“I wanted to be everyone else but myself,” she told KHQ in 2015.
By thirteen, she was having nightmares and hallucinations. A court-appointed psychologist described a child struggling to function. In August 2010, adults gathered at her therapist’s office for an intervention that led to court-ordered residential treatment in Utah. In writer Gregg Olsen’s later account, based on interviews with Shasta, she experienced the meeting as another loss of control over what would happen to her.
In February 2014, a drug-related offense sent her into juvenile detention. She later credited the year-long program with saving her life. Afterward, she stayed in southern Idaho rather than returning to Coeur d’Alene, hoping to live somewhere people did not already know her story. At eighteen, she was expecting a son.
Duncan remained on federal death row until March 28, 2021, when he died of brain cancer. He was never executed. His criminal cases and admissions eventually implicated him in the murders of three other children in California and Washington, in addition to Dylan and the three people he killed at the Groene house.
Shasta’s recovery continued through addictions, arrests, and attempts to get better that did not always last. She later described feeling that people were disappointed in her, as though she had failed to make proper use of being spared. Even adults who cared sometimes found the details of her experience too painful to hear. Telling only fragments left her feeling that she had never really been heard.
When Olsen approached her about a book, he offered to stay in touch while she considered it. She did not have to answer immediately. That helped her decide he was the person she wanted to work with.
Their conversations, with Olsen’s assistant Robbin Lassen, included three meetings that stretched from noon until two in the morning. They talked about her life before Duncan and everything that followed, and Shasta remembered laughter during those long sessions, too. By the end, she considered Olsen and Lassen family. The book, Out of the Woods, appeared in 2025, twenty years after her rescue. She arranged to return to Coeur d’Alene for a signing, hoping to thank the community that helped her.
That year, writing under her married name, Shasta Groene McClain, she described the life Dylan never got to have. He remained her best friend, the brother who never grew up, married or had children.
“I want people to know that being rescued didn’t end the trauma of what happened to my brother and me,” she wrote in an essay about her life afterward.
By then, she had five sons, and they were beginning to ask questions. She knew they might eventually find the news stories or read the book, and she did not intend to lie to them. She wanted them to understand her strictness and her worry, and why she would not let them walk to the park alone.
