BOISE, Idaho – A man convicted in the 2005 slayings of three members of an Idaho family was charged Thursday in U.S. District Court with kidnapping the family’s two youngest children and killing one of them.
U.S. Attorney Tom Moss said the indictment against Joseph Edward Duncan III, issued by a federal grand jury in Coeur d’Alene, will allow the government to seek the death penalty.
The indictment accuses Duncan of kidnapping Dylan Groene, 9, and his sister Shasta, then 8 years old, sexually abusing them both and later killing Dylan in Montana.
Shasta was rescued as she and Duncan ate at a Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, restaurant about seven weeks later, in July 2005.
The 43-year-old Duncan is charged specifically with kidnapping resulting in death as well as sexual abuse of both children and firearms counts.
The grand jury alleged that Duncan killed Dylan in an “especially heinous, cruel and depraved manner,” according to federal prosecutors. “The grand jury also found that the child’s killing involved torture and serious physical abuse.”
Also on Thursday, Duncan was charged in a California state court with the decade-old kidnap and slaying of a 10-year-old boy in the Riverside County desert town of Indio, Calif. Prosecutors in that case say they intend to seek the death penalty against Duncan in the 1997 killing of Anthony Martinez of Beaumont that they say involved kidnapping, torture and child molestation.
Roger Peven, Duncan’s Idaho defense attorney, told The Associated Press late Thursday that the federal case will be resolved before any additional cases are tried in state court. He said his client would plead not guilty on Friday in Boise.
“This will get the process going,” Peven said. “We’ve been anticipating it for quite some time.”
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Idaho filed their first charge against Duncan, accusing him of illegally driving a stolen Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo across state lines when he left Idaho for Montana following his ambush of the Groene family. The charge was a placeholder, to make sure that other states where Duncan is being investigated for crimes cannot extradite him before the federal case is completed.
Duncan already pleaded guilty last October to first-degree murder and kidnapping in Idaho’s 1st District Court for the May 16, 2005, hammer slayings of the children’s mother, Brenda Groene; her fiance, Mark McKenzie; and Groene’s 13-year-old son, Slade.
A judge sentenced Duncan to life in prison without parole for the kidnappings, but sentencing on the murder counts was deferred so that federal prosecutors could try him and seek the death penalty.
“Sadly, an entire family was brutalized by this crime,” said Kelvin Crenshaw, a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent, in a news release Thursday accompanying the federal indictment.
Duncan stalked the Groene family for several days and then entered the home and bound and fatally bludgeoned the two adults and the teen.
Court documents allege Duncan kidnapped the two youngest children and went into the mountains near St. Regis, Mont., where he sexually abused them for weeks before killing Dylan. The boy’s body was found in a remote campsite.
Shasta, the sole survivor of the carnage, was rescued when she and Duncan walked into a restaurant in Coeur d’Alene early on the morning of July 2, 2005. Duncan has been quoted in court documents as saying he was trying to return the girl to her father.
In the California case, a ranger found Anthony’s nude, bound body under a pile of rocks north of Indio, about 70 miles from his home. His head had been bashed in with a rock.
Duncan is also considered the prime suspect in the slayings of two children near Seattle.
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