Into the Woods: The Nightmare at Kootenai County

There was a moment, just before midnight on July 2nd, 2005, when a waitress named Amber Deahn looked across the dining room of a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and felt something shift inside her. She couldn't have explained it precisely, not right away. It was the way the little girl sitting in that booth seemed somehow both present and absent at the same time — the way she carried herself with the particular stillness of a child who has learned that stillness is safer than movement. Amber Deahn had seen the flyers. She had seen the news. And so she looked a second time, and then she was certain, and she picked up the phone and called 911, and in that single act of attention — that refusal to look away — she changed everything.

The little girl's name was Shasta Groene. She was eight years old. And she had been missing for forty-three days.

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Before that night at the Denny's, before the horror that preceded it, there was a family living an ordinary life in a rural corner of northern Idaho, in the kind of place where people choose to settle precisely because the world feels a little quieter there. The Groene family had put down roots near Coeur d'Alene, in Kootenai County, surrounded by the dense forests and cold clear lakes that define that corner of the Pacific Northwest. Brenda Groene, who was forty years old, was raising her children in that house — her daughter Shasta, who was seven at the time, and her son Dylan, who was nine. Brenda's boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, forty-three, was also part of the household. And Brenda's older son, Slade, thirteen years old, was there too, a teenager on the cusp of the life ahead of him.

By all accounts from people who knew them, this was a family bound by the ordinary adhesions of daily life — school mornings, weekend plans, the particular texture of growing up in a small community where everyone eventually knows your name. Shasta, by the accounts that would emerge later, was a bright and vivid child, the kind of kid whose personality filled a room. Dylan was quiet and thoughtful. Slade was, as his mother had reportedly said, her firstborn, her eldest, the one who'd been with her the longest. They were, in every meaningful sense, a family.

What happened to them in the predawn hours of May 16th, 2005, was an act of calculated, deliberate violence that prosecutors would later describe in court records as premeditated and without mercy.

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The discovery came the following morning, when a neighbor noticed something wrong — wrong in the way that silence can be wrong, in the way an absence announces itself. Authorities were called, and when Kootenai County sheriff's deputies arrived at the rural home on North Idaho's Wolf Lodge Road area, they found evidence of a devastating crime. Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie, and thirteen-year-old Slade Groene were found dead inside the residence. They had been bound and beaten — the medical examiner's findings, entered into the public record, established blunt force trauma as the cause of death. The violence was methodical. Deliberate.

And two children — Shasta and Dylan — were gone.

An AMBER Alert went out immediately. The search that followed was enormous in scope: law enforcement from multiple agencies, search teams moving through the surrounding wilderness, tips pouring in from across the region. But the woods of northern Idaho are vast and deep, and whoever had taken these children had vanished into them completely. Days passed. Then a week. Then two. The posters bearing Shasta and Dylan's faces appeared in windows across Coeur d'Alene and beyond. Parents held their own children a little tighter. And investigators worked the evidence they had — which, at first, was frustratingly thin.

What they did have was physical evidence from the crime scene: zip ties, which had been used to bind the victims, and footwear impressions. They had the knowledge that the perpetrator had entered the home and spent time there before the children disappeared. And they had the understanding, drawn from the nature of the crime itself, that this was not random. This was someone who had watched, who had planned, who had chosen.

The investigation, led by the FBI in coordination with local and state law enforcement, cast a wide net. Hundreds of leads were pursued. Sex offender registries were cross-referenced. But for forty-three days, Shasta and Dylan Groene remained missing, and the case remained, agonizingly, unsolved.

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Joseph Edward Duncan III was not unknown to law enforcement. Born in 1963, he had a criminal history that stretched back decades — a history that, in retrospect, formed a clear and documented pattern of escalating danger. He had been convicted of rape in Washington State in 1980, as a teenager, and had served time in prison. After his release, he had continued to come to the attention of authorities in various jurisdictions. In April 2005 — just weeks before the Groene family murders — Duncan had been charged in Minnesota with felony indecent contact with a child and had been released on bail, a bail decision that would later become the subject of significant scrutiny and public debate. He posted bail of fifteen thousand dollars and walked out of custody. Within weeks, according to the subsequent federal indictment and the evidence presented at trial, he drove west, and he found the Groene family's home, and he watched it.

The federal indictment, and the evidence prosecutors presented, described a man who had spent time in the woods near the property, who had done what the legal record called surveillance. Who had equipped himself deliberately. When he entered that home in the early morning hours of May 16th, 2005, he did so with specific intent, and the result was three people dead and two children taken into the wilderness.

The evidence established that Duncan took Shasta and Dylan to remote campsites in Montana and Idaho — the Lolo National Forest, the St. Joe National Forest — places where the trees close in around you and the nearest paved road is a memory. He had a vehicle. He had supplies. He had what prosecutors described as a documented history of predatory behavior and a stated fixation — found in journals and blog posts that investigators would later recover and analyze — on children. The details that emerged in court about what those children endured during those forty-three days are part of the public record of federal court proceedings, and they speak to suffering that no child should ever know. The story of their captivity is one that asks nothing more of us as listeners than simple acknowledgment: two children were taken, and they were harmed, and one of them came home.

Dylan Groene did not survive. According to the evidence presented at trial, he was killed in the weeks after the abduction, in a remote Montana location. The prosecution established this through physical evidence recovered from a campsite. Dylan was nine years old.

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And then came that night at the Denny's.

Amber Deahn saw a little girl who looked like someone she'd seen on a flyer. She saw the man the little girl was with. She made the call. Within minutes, law enforcement was at the restaurant. Shasta Groene, eight years old, was recovered alive. Joseph Edward Duncan III was taken into custody without incident, right there, in the parking lot of that restaurant, at approximately twelve-thirty in the morning on July 2nd, 2005.

Investigators later reflected on what Amber Deahn's decision meant — one ordinary person, paying attention, changing the course of events. Shasta had been gone long enough that hope, for many, had dimmed. Her return was greeted with an outpouring of relief from the community that is difficult to overstate.

In the aftermath of the arrest, the investigation moved quickly into its evidentiary phase. Duncan's vehicle and his campsites were searched. Physical evidence was recovered that connected him to the murders at the Groene home and to the abduction. Journal entries and recorded materials found in his possession were catalogued and would later be presented in court. The zip ties recovered from the crime scene were consistent with materials found in Duncan's possession. DNA evidence, as established in court records, connected him directly to the crimes.

Investigators also discovered, in those journals and in other recorded material, evidence of what prosecutors characterized as a prolonged, documented predatory mindset — writings that described his intentions and his worldview in his own words. These materials became central to both the prosecution's case and the subsequent legal proceedings about his mental competency.

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The legal proceedings in State of Idaho v. Joseph Edward Duncan III, and in the parallel federal case, were lengthy and complex, touching on questions of mental competency, the death penalty, and the admissibility of various forms of evidence.

Duncan was charged in federal court with kidnapping resulting in death, which carries the death penalty under federal law. He was also charged in Idaho state court with the murders of Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie, and Slade Groene.

In the federal case, Duncan initially entered a plea of not guilty and raised the question of his mental competency. Competency evaluations were conducted. The court found him competent to stand trial. Then, in a development that surprised many court observers, Duncan changed course. In February 2006, he pleaded guilty in federal court to all charges against him, including the first-degree murder of Dylan Groene. The guilty plea was entered in the United States District Court for the District of Idaho, and it was an extraordinary legal moment — a man pleading guilty to charges that made him eligible for federal execution.

What followed was a penalty phase, during which the jury was asked to determine whether Duncan should be sentenced to death. Prosecutors presented evidence of the crimes and of Duncan's history. The defense sought to introduce mitigating factors, including claims about his childhood and his mental state. The jury — after considering the evidence — returned a sentence of death on multiple counts. He was sentenced to die by lethal injection for the kidnapping and murder of Dylan Groene and the kidnapping and sexual exploitation of Shasta Groene. The federal death sentence was formally imposed in August 2008 by U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge.

The Idaho state case proceeded on a separate track. Duncan faced charges for the three murders committed at the Groene home. In that proceeding, Duncan again ultimately pleaded guilty. He received additional life sentences from the state of Idaho — sentences that, under the circumstances of the federal death penalty, were largely symbolic in terms of their practical effect, but that were legally significant in establishing the full record of his criminal accountability.

Duncan's attorneys pursued appeals in the years that followed, challenging aspects of the proceedings, including the competency determinations and the conduct of the penalty phase. Those appeals made their way through the federal court system. None succeeded in overturning the convictions or the sentences. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed his case and affirmed the convictions and the death sentence.

Joseph Edward Duncan III died on federal death row at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on July 26th, 2021. The cause of death was reported as brain cancer. He was fifty-eight years old. He never faced execution by the state — death came for him by other means, before the sentence could be carried out — but the full weight of what the legal system had determined was reflected in the record he left behind: guilty, on every count that mattered, in the eyes of two courts.

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The aftermath of a case like this one radiates outward in ways that are difficult to measure. The bail decision in Minnesota — the one that allowed Duncan to walk free in April 2005 — became the subject of significant public and legislative scrutiny. How had a man with his documented history been allowed to post bail on a felony charge involving a child and simply leave? The judge who set that bail later resigned amid the controversy, and the case prompted renewed conversations in multiple states about how the criminal justice system handles defendants with histories of sexual violence, and about whether existing mechanisms were sufficient to protect the public. Some advocates pointed to the case as evidence of critical gaps in how sex offender risk is assessed at bail hearings.

Shasta Groene's story, after her rescue, became one of survival in the most profound sense. She was eight years old when she was found in that Denny's. She was a child who had seen and endured things no child should ever know. The details of her recovery, her ongoing life, belong to her — she has spoken publicly at certain moments over the years, including in interviews as she grew older, sharing what she chose to share on her own terms, in her own voice. What is clear from the public record is that she survived. What is also clear is that survival, in cases like this one, is not a single moment but an ongoing act — something that has to be chosen again and again, over years, in the presence of memory that does not simply fade.

Dylan Groene was nine years old. Slade Groene was thirteen. Brenda Groene was forty. Mark McKenzie was forty-three. They are remembered here not as victims in the abstract, not as data points in a criminal case, but as people who were alive and then were not, because someone chose to take them from the world. The violence done to them was premeditated and deliberate, and the record of what followed — the investigation, the trial, the sentence — represents society's formal answer to that violence.

The forests of northern Idaho are still beautiful. The lake still catches the light on summer mornings in that particular way that makes you understand why people choose to live there, why families put down roots in the quiet of that landscape and build their lives in the shadow of those trees. The beauty of a place does not protect the people in it. It never has. What protects people, when protection comes, is attention — the attention of investigators who work through the night, of communities that don't stop looking, and sometimes, at midnight in a diner on the edge of a long and terrible summer, of one person who looks across a room, and looks again, and picks up the phone.