Joseph Edward Duncan III Bio – Joseph Edward Duncan III Wiki
Joseph Edward Duncan III was an American convicted pedophilic and ephebophilic serial rapist, abductor, arsonist. He is infamous for the 2005 murders of several members of the Groene family and abductions of the two youngest children, one of whom he later killed.
AGE:
Joseph Edward Duncan III 58 years old.
DETAIL OF INCIDENCE:
On May 15, 2005, Shasta, then 8, thought she saw someone in her bedroom closet. Frightened, she summoned her 9-year-old brother, Dylan, and he crawled into bed with her so she could fall asleep.
But hours later her mother shook her awake. “My mother was crying,” Shasta remembers. “She’s like, ‘Sissy, you need to wake up. Someone’s in the house.'”
She and Dylan went to the family room, where her stepfather Mark and her brother Slade were facedown on the floor with zip ties around their wrists and ankles and duct tape across their mouths. A man dressed in black who was holding a shotgun told Shasta’s mother, Brenda, to get on the ground too.
The man, who would later be identified as 42-year-old Joseph Duncan III, bound Shasta’s hands and feet and carried her and Dylan outside before returning to the house. “I heard thumping and a grunt in pain,” Shasta says through tears. “I didn’t know what was going on.”
The reality inside the Groene home in rural Wolf Lodge, Idaho, was unimaginable. Duncan killed Shasta’s entire family — her mother Brenda Groene; her stepfather Mark McKenzie; her brother Slade, 13 — and then held Shasta and Dylan captive for seven weeks while sexually and physically abusing them. (Duncan would later fatally shoot Dylan.) Eventually, he’d be connected to three previous murders of children.
The terrifying case that rocked the small, idyllic town is featured on tonight’s two-hour, premiere episode of the sixth season of People Magazine Investigates, airing tonight on Investigation Discovery and discovery+. (An exclusive clip is shown below.)
“This case profoundly affected this community,” says retired Det. Sgt. Brad Maskell, the former lead investigator for the Kootenai County sheriff’s department. “To this day, everybody still talks about it.”