Thursday, August 4, 2005

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Duncan tied to boy's slaying

Police link him to 1997 killing in California

Related stories Groene

Bill Morlin
Staff writer
August 4, 2005

Joseph Edward Duncan III, the man at the center of a multiple murder and kidnapping spree in North Idaho, may be well on his way to being identified as a serial killer – one who targets children, investigators said.

The 42-year-old registered sex offender was identified Wednesday as a suspect in the 1997 abduction-murder of 10-year-old Anthony Martinez, whose nude body was found dumped in a remote canyon near Riverside, Calif.

A partial fingerprint, found on duct tape used to bind the boy, was positively identified as that of Duncan's, Riverside County investigators and FBI agents announced on Wednesday.

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The accused killer and convicted rapist now is being looked at for possible involvement in other unsolved child killings, including the July 1996 abduction-murders of two Seattle girls whose remains weren't found until February 1997, according to investigators familiar with the expanding national case.

Duncan is being held in the Kootenai County Jail on three counts of first-degree murder for the bludgeoning deaths of Brenda Groene, her son Slade Groene and her fiancé Mark McKenzie. He also is being held on three kidnapping charges related to those deaths.

Duncan initially was also held on state charges of kidnapping 9-year-old Dylan Groene and 8-year-old Shasta Groene. Those charges since have been withdrawn because Idaho officials expect federal prosecutors to take over that aspect of the case.

Duncan was arrested on July 2 after being spotted in a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene with Shasta Groene.

At the time of his arrest, Duncan was a fugitive charged with molesting a 6-year-old boy in Minnesota.

A few days after the arrest, FBI agents and Kootenai County sheriff's detectives investigated remote forest camps in Shoshone County where Duncan was believed to have been hiding. There, investigators discovered the dismembered, burned remains of Dylan Groene.

"At the end of this, I believe he will be classified as a serial killer," said one investigator involved in the case.

"Right now, we're looking at a bunch of unsolved murders of kids throughout the country, and trying to piece together a timeline of Duncan's whereabouts," the investigator said.

Kootenai County sheriff's officials declined comment Wednesday on the latest developments.

A murder charge in the Martinez case hasn't been filed, but will be sought once additional investigative work is completed, Riverside County authorities said.

The 10-year-old California boy was abducted on April 4, 1997, near his home in the city of Beaumont. He was forced at knifepoint into a car as several of his friends watched. The children were playing when a stranger offered them a dollar to help find his lost cat, investigators said.

The boy's body was found bound and naked 15 days later, dumped in a remote canyon north of Indio, Calif., in an area called Berdoo Canyon. Press reports at the time said the boy had been sexually assaulted and his hands were bound with duct tape.

It was the duct tape – carefully preserved as crime evidence – that yielded a partial fingerprint that has been positively linked to Duncan.

"We're pretty confident that he's our suspect. … This is huge," an elated Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle told a press conference on Wednesday in California, the Associated Press reported.

"We followed up 15,000 leads over eight years," the sheriff said. "You can imagine the elation that everybody has."

Duncan was linked to the unsolved murder after FBI agents in Coeur d'Alene – using data provided by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children – contacted detectives in Riverside County in mid-July.

Hopeful about the fresh lead, California detectives traveled to Coeur d'Alene July 20-22 and used a federal search warrant to get a set of Duncan's fingerprints, authorities said.

"After these fingerprints were obtained, they were forwarded to California Department of Justice and … compared to partial prints located at the Martinez crime scene," said Cpl. Dennis Gutierrez, a spokesman for the Riverside County Sheriff's Office.

"Credible evidence has been developed … that makes Joseph Edward Duncan the focus of our investigation," Gutierrez said.

Authorities did not disclose, however, if they also obtained a DNA match between Duncan and evidence on Martinez's body.

Investigations into Duncan's possible connection to murders of other children, such as the Seattle-area victims, intensified Wednesday after the announcement in California.

Duncan was living close to the Crest Motel on Aurora Avenue in Bothell, north of Seattle, when Sammiejo White, 11, and her sister Carmen Cubias, 9, disappeared on July 6, 1996.

The girls, staying with their mother, left the motel at 11 p.m. to buy a pack of cigarettes for an older brother, the Seattle Times reported in January 2000.

Records obtained by The Spokesman-Review show Duncan was living and working in Bothell at the time the two sisters disappeared. The records also show Duncan was experimenting with transsexual activities, smoking marijuana, occasionally dating a married woman, and had access to his brother's handgun during the same time frame.

The skeletal remains of the girls were found in February 1998 by a transient walking across a soggy field that was being cleared for a new development, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported in January 2000.

Duncan was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the 1980 sexual assault of a 14-year-old boy in Tacoma, but that term was suspended and he was put into sex offender treatment at a state hospital.

When that treatment failed, he was sent to prison in 1982 where he remained until 1994. He was returned to prison in December 1997 after twice breaking the conditions of his parole. He was ultimately released in July 2000. He moved to Fargo, N.D., and began studying computer science at North Dakota State University.

Less than a week before Martinez was kidnapped in April 1997, Duncan disappeared from Seattle, breaking the conditions of his parole, according to documents from Duncan's Dec. 12, 1997, parole revocation hearing.

Officials believed Duncan fled Washington and was in California or Nevada at the time, according to the parole revocation report. In a previous 1987 parole hearing, Duncan had asked to be paroled to his father, who lived in Vista, Calif., which is about 50 miles from Beaumont, where Martinez was kidnapped.

One of Duncan's friends said that Duncan called his former roommates in mid-May of that year from a phone in northern California.

And after Duncan's arrest in Kansas City, Mo., on Aug. 28, 1997, a North Dakota doctor hired Duncan a lawyer. That doctor said he'd met Duncan in a San Francisco coffeehouse.

Witnesses told California authorities that the man who kidnapped the Martinez boy was driving a white car. Reports from a parole officer state that Duncan was driving his girlfriend's white Chrysler New Yorker at the time.