Saturday, July 16, 2005

GROENE INVESTIGATION » ONGOING COVERAGE

Duncan a charmer, exploiter

Homicide suspect's past littered with champions for his cause

Joe Crary, left, and Dr. Richard Wacksman

Richard Roesler
Staff writer
July 15, 2005

© The Spokesman-Review 2005

OLYMPIA – Even while in prison, Joseph Duncan III attracted advocates who lobbied for his early release, paying for lawyers, complaining to state lawmakers and browbeating state correctional officials in letters and in person.

"He is open, honest and eager to move on with his life," one such supporter, named David Woelfert, wrote to parole officials in 1993. "He is no threat to society whatsoever."

Today, Duncan sits in the Kootenai County jail, accused of slaying an Idaho family with a claw hammer in May and kidnapping two children from the home. Authorities in at least two other states are considering additional charges.

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But a decade ago, Woelfert was so taken with the young inmate that he loaned him $3,000, paid his initial rent in a halfway house and reportedly became Duncan's lover, even as Duncan dated women and experimented with cross-dressing.

"It is my intention to back him, support him, and help him in any way possible upon his release," Woelfert had written in 1991, shortly after meeting Duncan. "I will 'be there' for him. I believe him. I believe IN him."

By 1997 – after Duncan had fled the state, violated his parole rules and landed back in prison – Woelfert felt very differently.

"He had been the source of my greatest pride and now (has) become the greatest source of shame and embarrassment," he wrote Duncan's parole officer in August 1997, two nights after Duncan was arrested on a fugitive warrant in Missouri.

But within a month, Duncan's parole officers were contacted by an attorney, hired by a North Dakota doctor whom Duncan had met while on the run in San Francisco.

"Sounds like (Duncan) perhaps made a friend in No. Dakota," a parole officer identified as S. Silver in a computer log, wrote on Sept. 23, 1997. "This appears to be a pattern for (Duncan) as according to Dave Woelfert, (Duncan)'s ex-lover, (Duncan) uses/financially abuses his lovers and moves on."

Duncan, raised in a military family that moved frequently, was arrested at his Tacoma home in 1980, one month shy of his 17th birthday. He'd raped – at gunpoint – a 14-year-old boy.

He was sentenced, under Washington's old flexible-sentence rules, to up to 20 years in prison. But the judge suspended the sentence, allowing Duncan to instead start sex offender treatment at Western State Hospital, a state-run mental facility near Tacoma.

By 1982, he'd washed out of the program, apparently embittered by an incident in which a state counselor allegedly visited his mother at her home and propositioned her for sex. She repeatedly complained to state officials about this, but the investigation was dropped when she failed to show up for a hearing. The allegation – and the note about the hearing – are among more than 400 pages of state documents released to The Spokesman-Review under state public records laws for this story.

Duncan – nicknamed "Jet," which a family friend said stands for Joseph Edward the Third – went to prison. Prison reports from the time paint him as a quiet loner who spent most of his time reading. Later he would take up meditation, volleyball, art and yoga.

"It was pretty obvious when you talked to him that he had troubles that were bothering him, but you just didn't know how deep they went" said Pat Rybiski, 58, a retired Tacoma school bus driver who dated Duncan's father after he divorced in the early 1980s.

"I think he was crying for help," she said. "But at this point, I don't think that anything's going to help him, unless he meets his maker."

After several years in prison, Duncan started writing to state parole officials, saying he'd changed and should be released.

"I was a confused and rebellious kid demanding denied attention and not understanding the consequences of my actions. Now I am a fully mature adult," he wrote in 1989. "I am a positive person. I like me. I trust me. ... I am already a new person."

His mother, Lillian Duncan, said her son had overcome tremendous hurdles, from para-typhoid to bedwetting to being badly spoiled by his father.

"I tried and tried to properly train him up in an authoritarian Christian manner, but his Dad had apparently been raised in a very liberal fashion," she wrote to the state Indeterminate Sentence Review Board (ISRB) in 1988.

She was proud that he'd gotten a high school diploma – with honors – while imprisoned in Shelton, "in spite of being beaten and sexually abused ... I understand that he was sexually used and mistreated many times at Shelton.

A prison report dated June 14, 1984, confirms that Duncan was placed into protective custody because other inmates were pressuring the slim 21-year-old for sex.

"I repeat, he has been punished enough," his mother wrote in her letter. "Please care enough to give him a chance to have a decent life."

By 1991, there was a growing chorus of voices urging Duncan's release.

He was a "fine man" and the "Apple 2 computer whiz" of McNeil Island prison, his electronics instructor said.

"He has found belief in himself and the Lord, conveying to all a positive image," wrote his sister Susan Eldridge, an Air Force noncommissioned officer.

"There is no punishment suitable for forcing evil into another person's life," Duncan wrote to the Indeterminate Sentence Review Board that same year. "But there is rehabilitation, and there is remorse, and there is the desire to do right."

On Jan. 2, 1991, Duncan started a pen-pal correspondence with David Woelfert, a King County revenue officer, volunteer hydroplane mechanic and coach of a men's slow-pitch softball team.

Such relationships are fairly common, correctional officials said. Prisoners advertise for pen pals, or meet people through prison church services, substance-abuse meetings or other activities. Volunteers in prisons are trained to beware of inmate manipulation or having personal or financial dealings with inmates. But the state doesn't have much control over the nature of outside friendships, state officials said.

"As long as the person doesn't have an official relationship with the institution, there's not much we can do," said Victoria Roberts, chairwoman of the state's End of Sentence Review Committee. "They were both adults – and consenting adults."

Woelfert did not return repeated calls – to both his work and his home – seeking comment for this story.

Throughout 1991, Duncan and Woelfert wrote and talked on the phone. Woelfert even made the 546-mile round trip from his Lynnwood home to visit Duncan in prison in Walla Walla.

"Mr. Duncan is filled with remorse for the act that he committed many years ago," Woelfert wrote to the review board in August 1991. "He has gone through the self-imposed hell of realizing the impact of what had happened."

The review board actually had found him parolable as early as 1987, but wanted him to first take more classes and come up with a place to live. In 1988, he wanted to move to his mother's home in Tacoma, but that was rejected. An alternative plan – to move in with his stepgrandmother, Lolita Erskine, was also rejected when a parole investigator discovered that Erskine's husband was Earl Erskine, who was sentenced in 1985 to 20 years in prison for sexually molesting children 50 times at a daycare facility in Tacoma.

Shortly after they met, Woelfert became Duncan's most vocal advocate, touting Duncan's achievements in letters to the review board and attending weekly meetings at a Seattle halfway house for ex-inmates for two years in preparation for Duncan's release. Months before Duncan was approved for release, Woelfert had already paid his first month's rent at the halfway house.

"Further incarceration of Mr. Duncan will serve no purpose whatsoever," he wrote in 1993.

When Duncan's enrollment in a Pine Lodge Pre-Release victim-awareness class – the final hurdle before his release – was delayed by a week, Duncan complained bitterly.

"He stated that his sponsor has money and he would be contacting his attorney," a correctional official named R. Cooper noted in a computer log on June 8, 1994. "...It would appear that (Duncan) uses the fact that his sponsor has money to try and manipulate staff or threaten them with legal actions."

Duncan was paroled in September 1994. He moved into a halfway house in Seattle. He spent a few hours at Seattle Center, strolling with his mother, according to computerized logs kept by parole officers. He and Woelfert took a car tour of Seattle's Capitol Hill and walked around Green Lake. They got together to watch Monday night football.

Duncan got a job as a phone solicitor for a publishing company. He went to counseling. He later got a second job with a small software company.

Within a year, he'd decided that he wanted to start relationships with women.

"Although (Duncan) is currently involved in a homosexual relationship, he believes he's still exploring his sexuality," a parole officer wrote in October 1995.

Sexual confusion had long been a problem for Duncan, who when first arrested at age 16 told investigators that he'd had his first sexual experiences at age 8.

"I recently (last year) made another important decision: to explore my feminine traits," he wrote to parole officials on Nov. 30, 1989.

By January 1996, he was dating a married mother of two in Tacoma. She "is helping him with his transsexual fantasies," a parole official named S. McNickle noted in a Jan. 16 report. "They are working on buy(ing) (Duncan) some women's clothing for this purpose." McNickle told him to see his counselor more often.

A few months later, his counselor, a Seattle therapist, took him to a gay retreat in Leavenworth to see how Duncan dealt socially with other gay men.

In June, Duncan came to his parole officer, confused by his relationship with the married woman.

"She is still married and living with her husband while telling (Duncan) that she is in love with him," McNickle wrote in a computer log. "Looks like (Duncan) has some terribly confused boundaries."

In September 1996, Duncan tested positive for marijuana during a routine urine test. He was arrested, then released on parole again. In November, his parole officer said that he told her he planned to "give up his homosexuality and attend to heterosexual experiences."

In March 1997, he again tested positive for marijuana use. He quit his telemarketing job, told Woelfert he wanted him to have his camcorder and kittens, and disappeared in his girlfriend's 11-year-old Chrysler New Yorker, according to parole reports.

He called Woelfert from Northern California. He apparently visited North Dakota. When an FBI fugitive task force checked at the Kansas City, Mo., home of Duncan's half sister, Duncan answered the knock at the door. He was arrested and sent back to prison.

In late September 1997, according to Duncan's Department of Corrections computer log, his parole officer got a call from Dr. Richard Wacksman, a North Dakota doctor who told her he'd met Duncan in a San Francisco coffeehouse.

Dr. Wacksman felt Duncan was honest and sincere, he told the parole officer, S. Silver. Duncan had visited the doctor before his arrest in Kansas City.

Review board chairwoman Kathryn "Kit" Bail, after meeting with Wacksman, wrote in a Feb. 2, 1998, memo that the doctor "feels that he can help Joe and his wife – Dr. Wacksman's – is in support of his efforts. He stated that he is bisexual. I told Dr. Wacksman that we are unconcerned about his relationship with Joe, except insofar as it bears on his case or a potential parole plan."

Wacksman asked that the state parole Duncan to his home in North Dakota, where he lived with his wife and two kids, ages 8 and 11. In a follow-up letter, Wacksman said he'd support Duncan as he started his new life.

No way, the state said.

Duncan's parole was revoked Dec. 12, 1997, during a hearing at the King County Jail.

"Under no circumstances whatsoever would the board allow Mr. Duncan to reside in a home where victim-age children reside, even if the state of North Dakota would agree to supervise him," the board wrote in its findings Dec. 23, 1997. "With all due respect to Dr. Wacksman, we are not willing to expose his children to that kind of risk. ... Mr. Duncan has a history of charming, exploiting and using others for his own purposes."

Wacksman – and his lawyer – didn't give up.

"Mr. Duncan is not much of a threat to society," Wacksman wrote to Kit Bail on July 14, 1998. "He was a screwed-up adolescent that grew up in prison."

He urged her to release Duncan. "My work as a physician executive and co-chair of our corporate ethics committee has taught me to take risks and to do what is right," Wacksman wrote.

Woelfert also contacted Bail, the review board's chairwoman. He said he was "shocked and completely flabbergasted" that the board wouldn't let Duncan live with Wacksman. He objected to Bail's reason: that the state must "protect society."

"My question to that statement is: protect society from what? From whom?" Woelfert wrote June 15, 1998. He said it would save the state money to send Duncan to North Dakota – and noted that he was sending a copy of his letter to three state lawmakers.

"Why, as a taxpayer of Washington State, must I be forced to pay for this shabby service?" he wrote. He called the board an outdated "money-sucking operation" solely interested in keeping a shrinking pool of flexible-sentence inmates incarcerated for the sake of the board's own jobs.

Like Woelfert, Dr. Wacksman did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment. Wacksman now lives and works in Florida.

Duncan's final stint in prison didn't go well, according to prison reports. He at first refused to sign up for classes, got in a fight with a cellmate, and refused psychological exams or sex-offender treatment. Shortly after he arrived, two inmates complained that he was threatening them and demanding sex.

"Saturday night, we took a shower together and afterward he was offering me a massage," one reported in a confidential note. "I made it very clear to him I was not interested and he started to get mad. He was offended by my rejection. He said that I had to sleep sometime."

In victim-awareness class, Duncan kept bringing up examples of victims purportedly bringing things on themselves.

"In his eyes ... some people are asking for it," a corrections official named M. McIntyre wrote in Duncan's log. An "example he brought up was Gandhi. He stated that Gandhi died quickly and forgave his offender, therefore did not consider himself a victim."

On July 14, 2000, Duncan was credited with serving his maximum sentence. He was released from prison in Airway Heights. In Spokane, he was put on a Greyhound bus headed for Tacoma.

He ended up moving to Fargo, N.D., and enrolled at North Dakota State University. He was arrested in July 2004 for allegedly molesting two young boys, then released on bail. Wacksman loaned him $6,500 for an attorney, according to the Fargo Forum newspaper. A local businessman, Joe Crary, wrote Duncan a check to cover the $15,000 bail, the newspaper reported.

"He was polite, soft-spoken and seemed sincere in turning his life around," Crary told the Forum.

In April 2005, Duncan rented a Jeep in Minnesota. In mid-May, reportedly after several days of surveillance, Duncan allegedly showed up with a shotgun and claw hammer at the home of the Groene family, east of Coeur d'Alene.

He allegedly bound Brenda Kay Groene, her son Slade Groene, and Brenda's boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, then killed each with hammer blows to the head. He allegedly took children Shasta and Dylan Groene, ages 8 and 9, with him, hiding in the Montana woods for weeks and allegedly molesting the children repeatedly before slaying Dylan.

Duncan was arrested when workers and customers at a Coeur d'Alene Denny's restaurant recognized Shasta Groene. He faces three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of first-degree kidnapping.

The last entry on the Department of Corrections log obtained by The Spokesman-Review is dated July 6, 2005. It was a record of a call from David Woelfert, the man who had helped Duncan win his first prison release.

"Dave feeling guilty and troubled that he could even know someone capable of current crimes," the log entry reads. "Dave has had a number of call(s) from (Duncan)'s friends in this area – all shocked about crime spree."