Idaho authorities release missing girl 911 tapes

Shasta Groene reunited with her father

Shasta Groene was found Saturday but her brother is still missing.

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Waitress recognizes missing child at restaurant.(6:29)

Witnesses describe recognizing missing girl (3:54)

Groene was found with registered sex offender.(2:06)

Officer discusses man suspected of kidnapping girl.(8:14)

• Waitress: 'I picked her up and held her'

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COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho (CNN) -- Authorities Sunday released tapes of two 911 calls reporting a possible sighting of a missing 8-year-old girl, calls that led to the girl's safe return and the arrest of a registered sex offender now charged with her kidnapping.

Shasta Groene and her 9-year-old brother Dylan had been missing since May 16, in the aftermath of a triple homicide at their mother's home in Coeur d'Alene.

Shasta was reunited with her father, Steve Groene, Saturday afternoon, but Kootenai County Sheriff's Department spokesman Capt. Ben Wolfinger said "preliminary information" indicated that Dylan was dead.

"It's been very bittersweet in the last 24 hours," he said.

Shasta was found at 2 a.m. Saturday at a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene when employees and a customer recognized her.

The customer and the store manager phoned police.

"I just have something to tell you," the male customer said. "I'm sitting down here at Denny's, and there is a little girl that just walked in that looks exactly like that Shasta girl."

The 911 operator asked if the girl was still inside, and the customer answered, "Yes, she is, and she's with an older man."

In the second tape, Denny's manager Linda Olson said, "I have got a little girl here with a tall gentleman, and she looks so much like that, ah, Shasta?"

She described the man -- later identified as 42-year-old Joseph E. Duncan III -- as 6'3" with dark curly hair and "really slim."

Wolfinger said all 40 investigators who worked the case in May have been brought back to follow up on "all those leads that we've established in the last 24 hours." He expected an 18- to 36-hour effort to try to wrap up the case.

But, he said, investigators still did not know if Duncan had any connection to the murders of the Groene children's mother and brother and the mother's boyfriend. They were killed just a few miles from the Denny's where Shasta was found.

"We don't know at this point," Wolfinger said. "That's some of the questions we have to answer today."

He said Steve Groene was out of town when his daughter was found and returned when authorities contacted him. He was reunited with Shasta at the Kootenai Medical Center, where she was taken "as a precautionary measure," Wolfinger said.

Duncan is scheduled to appear in court in connection with kidnapping charges Tuesday at 2 p.m.

Authorities said they were searching the red 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo that Duncan was driving for possible evidence.

The vehicle was reported stolen in early May in St. Paul, Minnesota The license plates on the vehicle were stolen in Newton County, Missouri, a few days before.

Duncan's criminal background

Duncan was convicted of raping a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint in 1980 in Washington and was charged in March with molesting a 7-year old almost a year ago in Minnesota.

He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the rape conviction, but began his sentence in a treatment program. After he was terminated from the program, he served his sentence in prison until he was released on parole in 1994.

But Duncan returned to prison three years later for a parole violation. He served the remainder of his term and was released on July 14, 2000. A week later, he was in Fargo, North Dakota, preparing to enter North Dakota State University.

Duncan was an honor student at North Dakota State University, studying computer science, according to his resume, posted on his personal Web site at the school. He was expected to graduate in May, but NDSU spokesman David Wahlberg said that didn't happen. (Full story)

A second arrest, on May 5, 2005, may have had something to do with that. The Detroit Lakes (Minnesota) Police Department charged him with molesting a 7-year-old boy near a middle school in Becker County, Minnesota, in July 2004. The department issued a warrant for his arrest when he violated the terms of release from an April 5 court appearance.

Duncan was listed as delinquent on both the North Dakota and Washington state registries of sex offenders.

Duncan ran a Web site called "Fifthnail.com," which was aimed at helping "in the fight against official propaganda that supports discrimination against classes of people defined by mistakes they made in the past, or might make in the future," according to the mission statement.

"It is our position that State Sanctioned Discrimination serves no public interest and in fact creates an even more dangerous class of criminals by denying x-convicts a place in our society, forcing them to feel like outcasts with little to loose (sic)," the statement said.

Fifthnail.com was no longer operational; CNN located archived copies of some pages.