SPOKANE – Registered sex offender Joseph Edward Duncan III said in a recent letter that God ordered him to return abduction victim Shasta Groene last summer.
Duncan is being held without bail in the Kootenai County Jail in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he faces a murder trial in the deaths of three people in a crime authorities contend was intended to allow him to kidnap Shasta, now 9, and her brother Dylan, 9, for sex. If convicted, Duncan could face the death penalty.
Shasta was rescued last summer after seven weeks; Dylan’s body was later found in Montana.
“God himself appeared between me and Shasta and commanded me to take her home immediately. So I did,” Duncan wrote. “I do not know why he did not appear to me sooner, you’ll have to take up that question with God.”
Kootenai County Jail records show that Duncan received a letter from Jean Reed of Vancouver, Wash., on Jan. 25, which condemned him for his life as a child molester. Reed is a Vancouver organizer for Washington’s Initiative 921, which seeks to lock up violent sex offenders for life after conviction on a first offense.
Duncan sent a letter back to her last Tuesday, jail records showed.
“We are floored by it,” said initiative sponsor Tracy Oetting of Skykomish. She rejected the notion that God told Duncan to return Shasta, noting he was captured after employees at a Coeur d’Alene restaurant delayed him and called police.
The group released the letter as a way to publicize the initiative, Oetting said.
Duncan’s public defender, John Adams, was not in his office late Monday and is not listed in the telephone book.
Shasta and Dylan disappeared from the home near Coeur d’Alene where their mother, older brother and their mother’s boyfriend were killed in May. In July, Duncan was arrested at a Denny’s restaurant as he ate with Shasta. Dylan’s body was found a few days later at a remote campsite in Montana where the children had apparently been held.
Duncan has offered no explanation for why he stopped to eat in a town where pictures of Shasta and Dylan had been plastered everywhere since their abduction.
In the letter, Duncan described himself as a remorseful man ready to trade places with his victims.
“If dying, even going to Hell, could erase what has happened I would volunteer in a moment,” Duncan wrote. “But it can’t even, though dying at this point in my life would be easier than facing what I have done.”
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