“And I could see a trail of blood and it just gave me a sinking feeling. I knew right away that this was going to be a bad scene.”
“I’d seen suicides, I’d seen people disfigured in auto accidents; this was kind of the over the top.”
“I kind of went into right out of the grieving mode into the panic mode of, you know, where are my kids?”
“There was so much anger in it; I mean, he just hit like he couldn’t kill them enough.”
“He’s the boogeyman. He is a smart, intelligent, manipulative killer.”
“There’s blood all over the door, nobody comes through the door.”
“You know, I drive by, and Dylan and Shasta would come out to the car and I give them sheriff deputy stickers and they wanted to look in the patrol car and see the lights.”
“It was very calm and still and there was kind of an eerie stillness about the residence, and as I walked up to the front door I saw the blood on the front door. There was a smell and odor that if you’ve been in law enforcement long enough, it smells like death.”
“And as I walked around the back and saw a smear on the back door of blood and the door was ajar, and that initially just sent a chill down my spine. My senses kind of went up and I took a little more precautions.”
“You know, I called for another unit to come back me up. We walked up to the front door and I looked into the front door and I could see a trail of blood. It just gave me a sinking feeling. I knew right away that this was going to be a bad scene.”
“I turned the corner. There was what appeared to be a young male face down, uh, female face down. It appeared to be they were bound and their heads were mutilated, and then I saw the man. I saw the man laying on the floor; I could see that he too had been bludgeoned multiple times in the head and had suffered severe, severe head trauma.”
“Mark McKenzie, Brenda Gro, Slade Gro, all bludgeoned to death.”
“And I remember thinking to myself, ‘My God, this is a mother.’ You know, this is a mother who has been tied up and murdered right here along with her own child, and how horrific that was.”
“I’d seen suicides, I’d seen people disfigured in auto accidents; this was kind of the over the top. It really hit home. It hit my heart. It’s hard for me not to get emotional. You don’t prepare for that in law enforcement, but I still had to reach down and say, ‘You know what? I got to do my job.’ I’ve got kids in this house.”
“Oh no, oh no, not the little ones, not the little ones.”
“We began to wonder if possibly they had met the same fate as the others in the house; their bodies could have been disposed of in another way.”
“We wondered if possibly that they had fled out into the woods here.”
“Shasta! Dylan!”
“You get kind of a panicked feeling in your heart. You know, we have mountain lions and all kinds of different critters running around here. I wouldn’t want my little ones out there.”
“Our first motivation was we now had two missing children; that changes the game, and that’s when we really start activating resources, additional agents.”
“The first clue that jumped to mind were the kids staying with their father, and that was the first door we knocked on.”
“You know, that I obviously had one dead child, I knew that there were two missing, and that just changed the aspect of everything. I kind of went into right out of the grieving mode into the panic mode of, you know, where are my kids?”
“We checked with friends, relatives, any place where they could have been staying. After we exhausted all of those possibilities and they were nowhere to be found, we were very concerned that we had an abduction.”
“The community of Coeur d’Alene joined together and united in a way I’ve never seen before because they wanted to find Shasta and they wanted to find Dylan.”
“That if they’re not found within the first 24 to 48 hours, they generally are found dead.”
“I think actually the more time went by and they weren’t finding bodies, that I actually had more hope that they were alive somewhere.”
“We were organized around one common goal, and that was finding Dylan and Shasta.”
“There was a fear factor that permeated the community, disbelief that a crime of this horrific nature could have occurred in this community—this peaceful community, this idyllic community—and a lot of the members of the community were very adversely affected by all this.”
“In a murder case where you’ve got a fingerprint on the door, you’ve got a bloody shoe print, or you’ve got a witness, you’ve got something to work on. In this case, we didn’t have any of that; we didn’t have anything to work with. So the best thing we could do is learn as much as we could about our victims.”
“Brenda and Mark had been dating for about seven years and they had a great relationship. Mark commuted every day to a manufacturing job in Spokane, 40 miles away, and Brenda had recently given up her cleaning business to be a stay-at-home mom. They seemed to be a picture-perfect couple, but there was a wild side to them as well.”
“Brenda and Mark were known to be partiers; they wanted to have a good time. They had that side of them that enjoyed to, you know, have a beer or two or a few other things.”
“Mark was a great guy and he loved those kids. They weren’t his kids, but he loved them and he took very good care of them. And this is why we can’t understand why this happened.”
“And when you see multiple, multiple impact injuries like that—such violence committed upon a person—we’re taught that that’s a personal, that’s a personal killing. Oftentimes, that’s done by somebody who knows the family, somebody that is filled with a lot of anger towards those people.”
“Why would you take the kids out of the house, kill the parents to do so? Why wouldn’t you take them at a bus stop? Why wouldn’t you take them when they’re walking to school? So it appeared to be some kind of a revenge motive, someone that was close to the family, someone that wanted to get personal, up close and personal to the victims.”
“One of the first leads we looked at is that father and mother were divorced; father had a separate residence. We had received allegations that there was a volatile relationship that had existed between Steve and Brenda, and so we naturally would have to rule Steve out before, you know, we could move on to some other things.”
“Steve and Brenda have had a hard time having a workable relationship after the divorce. We were aware of some ill will that existed between them pertaining to child custody as well as some property issues.”
“Please release my children safely. They had nothing to do with any of this.”
“Everyone that was out there, part of the media and even law enforcement, were shocked because the statement, ‘They had nothing to do with this’—well, what is this?”
“And because of that, we did have to continue to look into his activities and basically to make sure that there wasn’t anything that we’d missed along the way.”
“Police were able to kind of look at the cell phone records and my computer records and know that I was actually at home on a computer or on my phone.”
“Steve and Brenda also have two adult sons, Jesse and Vance, and both have had their share of run-ins with the law.”
“My two oldest boys have, you know, been in quite a lot of troubles since they were in their early teenage years. A lot of people make reverence to their drug problems and stuff like that.”
“We began to get some tips about a barbecue that occurred the day prior to the killings. So the cops started looking at everyone that was at the barbecue. Did somebody get in a fight? Did somebody owe somebody money? Was there something else that happened that would have made someone at that barbecue turn around and say, ‘I’m going after these guys the next day?'”
“We found a fingerprint on the same door that was bloodstained there at the scene. That fingerprint returned to an individual who we were aware had attended the gathering the previous day. His name is Gary Youngwood.”
“There was the hope that this person would lead to the resolution of the crime, to find out what had happened to the kids. Either this person may have witnessed something that could help us solve the case, or maybe the person themselves were involved in some way in the crime.”
“He was difficult to find. We did serve some search warrants on his cell phone; we began to track him by cell phone. There was a considerable amount of resources that were spent in locating this person and discovering what it is that he knew.”
“One of the thoughts is that he’s avoiding contact with us because he knows something.”
“Well, you know, the police are looking to interview you about the murders.”
“I just… a friend of mine called.”
“He passed his polygraph, so it was apparent to us fairly quickly that although he was a person of interest at the time, we pretty much washed him out of any involvement and any knowledge of the crime.”
“One allegation was that this was a biker hit, and so we started looking at biker gangs, and maybe there was some sort of vendetta that existed. Maybe there was money owed, maybe you know somebody insulted someone else’s girlfriend, who knows.”
“The weapon used to bludgeon the victims appeared to be a hammer with a crosshatched face on it, and that is the sort of hammer that you would find as a framing hammer or as a drywall hammer.”
“Some gang expert threw out the fact, ‘Well, you know, if they were killed with a hammer, that sounds like outlaw bikers.’ Was this a biker gang that rolled through town? We just didn’t know.”
“Brenda Groen was into motorcycles, so when we started getting these allegations of a potential biker hit, you know, it made a little bit of sense to us.”
“I never gave up hope that we would get the children back. In this case, statistically, however, in child abduction cases it is very unusual; more often than not, these cases end up in a sad way.”
“When the lab results came back and we determined that the blood was Slade’s blood throughout the house, we were relieved to know that the kids might possibly still be alive somewhere.”
“I know that that was personally very traumatic for me to think that Slade was walking through the house injured and leaving a trail of blood throughout the entire house, through every room of the house, and then finally dying at his mother’s feet.”
“Now we knew that the children had somehow either left the house on their own or been removed from the house, and there was no evidence to suggest that they had been killed in the house. We believe that they were alive somewhere, and there was nothing that we would stop at doing in an effort to find them.”
“Are there any violent drug gangs who would do a crime like this if they were owed a debt that wasn’t being repaid? Could it be somebody that happened upon the house who was high on drugs, taking drugs, and unleashed a lot of violence on the family so quick that they couldn’t do anything about it at all?”
“Well, maybe this home invasion group broke into the house, bound the victims, and when they discovered there was no money and there was no drugs, decided to take it out on the victims.”
“But what we couldn’t explain was how did the children factor into this? Everything else looked good, but when we got back to the children, they were an anomaly that could not be explained.”
“We brought the FBI profilers in because we were at a loss. We have a situation where the children are gone and a family is murdered. Therefore, does this fit with any known profile of any criminal that you guys know out there?”
“But even the top behavior analysts in the country are stymied by the puzzle. Very quickly, they told us, ‘There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense. There’s a lot of here that isn’t typical of these type crimes,’ and that’s their expertise.”
“We could find similar crimes when it came to our bludgeoned murder victims, we could find similar crimes when it came to the abduction of our children, but when you put the two together, we couldn’t find anything.”
“Why would you just not murder the entire family? And so we kept coming up with all these theories as to why someone would take two children from the house. Was it to hold them for ransom? Was it to sell them into slavery? The one thing they left us with, though, is the key to solving this crime is answering the question: what happened to the children? If you can find out why the children were taken, then you will solve the crime.”
“I had high hopes still that they were alive. I just didn’t know whether I would ever see them again in my lifetime. My one thought was, ‘My God, I hope they’re alive.’ But as time went by it got worse and worse, where I was more and more sure that something had happened to him.”
“I was running on very little sleep, as was most all the investigators in the case. I don’t think many of us slept any more than a couple of hours a day for probably the first 10 days of the investigation.”
“She told us that she saw the vehicle, a dark-colored vehicle. She believed it was a Lincoln, pull off in the highway just to the east side of the crime scene. She believed she saw three male adults in that car.”
“She called that in because she thought possibly that car may have been involved in the crime.”
“Came forward anonymously and he felt that his associates had been involved in something very serious. He thought that he overheard them talking about possibly placing some bodies in some abandoned mine shafts over in the Silver Valley.”
“We found that they drove a car very similar in description to the one that the lady had called in previously. When we did some analysis of their cell phone activity, we noticed that there was indeed some cell phone activity in the area of the crime scene on or about the time of the crime.”
“When the phone rang at 2:00 in the morning, Saturday morning, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I was going to hear. I couldn’t believe it. I refused to believe it at first, and even said, ‘You have got to be kidding me.'”
“I had just come back from my break. I automatically checked my section and I had noticed two new people in my section. I get a clear view of the little girl. It was an instantaneous, ‘Oh my God, is that Shasta?’ She remained with her head down. Her hands were in a prayer position stuck between her legs. Her whole body language just screamed, ‘Help me.'”
“Hey, how are you guys doing tonight?”
“I saw the squad car pull up. I walked out and as soon as the officer stepped out of his vehicle, I told him he was going to need to call for backup. I was positive it was her, and he was going to need more help.”
“Stay with her.”
“Honey, what’s your name?”
“Shasta Groene.”
“When we first got the call that Shasta was found, I was elated. I was ecstatic, although we had so many questions: who was this person that Shasta was found with? Where has she been this entire time? Was this a person that just found her wandering on the street? Was she dropped off? It was unbelievable, and of course all of us wanted to know: where was Dylan?”
“Daddy.”
“I thoroughly expected to find that this was going to be one of the many, many names that we had dealt with in the investigation, and when they told me the name Joseph Edward Duncan III, I was perplexed. I had never heard that name.”
“Who?”
“I had a web page where I wrote extensively about society’s persecution of sex offenders. He knew he was going back to prison for the molestation in Minnesota, and he made a decision. He decided, ‘I can either stay here, try and fight the case and risk going to prison, or I can go on the run, take whatever money I have, and I can live out my ultimate fantasy.’ That was his goal.”
“I did make an attempt at interviewing Mr. Duncan; however, Mr. Duncan invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence.”
“A key piece of evidence was a small micro drive, a 4-gigabyte micro drive that contained a lot of still images and video images of the children while they were in captivity.”
“I still had hopes that they were going to find Dylan alive somewhere.”
“When I heard Shasta had been found, I just cried and I just thought, ‘Thank God, thank God.’ And then second later I thought, ‘Where’s Dylan?’ It was hard to be happy and elated about it because now I understand that they don’t know where Dylan is still.”
“She sees Joseph Duncan standing over Brenda, Slade, and Mark with a shotgun. He removed the two children, Shasta and Dylan, from the home and laid them in the grass out on the back of the house.”
“He did not want Shasta and Dylan to see what he intended to do to their family.”
“They’re in the middle of nowhere. They saw no other humans, no other vehicles; you don’t even hear the presence of man out here. So they literally must have thought they were at the ends of the earth.”
“My first thought was, ‘How can I kill this guy?’ I had a lot of spiritual thoughts of evil.”
“I thought to myself, it was shocking and I thought what a monster this guy was to know that there’s people out there that can inflict this type of pain on a child. It shakes your whole foundation of beliefs and it’s just it’s overwhelming.”
“Oh, I don’t believe for a minute that he was planning to let Shasta live, and she was lucky.”
“When they told me they had conclusive evidence that Dylan had been murdered, I pretty much lost it and I just broke my heart, you know? Dylan was such a loving, tender-hearted kid, and eventually find out all the things that he went through during that period of time, that that was our today.”
“He wanted society to know how bad he was. He wanted to make sure that society was harmed or injured by what he had done. He had two goals: his goal again was to live out what he thought his ultimate fantasy was, which apparently involved murdering and assaulting children, and to exact revenge on society—revenge against what he thought society had done to him as a registered sex offender.”
“He started assembling equipment and items that he would need.”
“Where’s the man?”
“I instructed Brenda to wake Mark up and I instructed Brenda to put the zip ties onto Mark. I wanted them to believe that this is just a burglary. I felt that was a better choice than to let them know that his intent was to truly take the young children. I thought if he told them that they would fight to the death.”
“Some people think that he took her there because he wanted to be captured. Some people believe that he took her there because he was out of money. My personal belief is that it was Shasta that brought Duncan back to us because Shasta was able to befriend Duncan, and that allowed her to survive the whole ordeal.”
“I was not surprised that Duncan pleaded guilty. I think he’s a coward. I don’t think he wanted to get up on the stand and have to testify, and I was so pleased that he had pleaded guilty so that we wouldn’t have to go through the hell of going to court every day and seeing this man.”
“I thought a lot about what I would say when I was…”
“I talked to Mark on the phone a couple of days before this terrible thing happened and thank God I had told Mark that I loved him, and he had told me he loved me back, and that’s the last time I spoke to him.”
“Jasmine is 12 years old now. It’s amazing that she acts just like any other kid her age.”
“My son Jazzy, he’s 22 now. He had his first kid back in February of ’07. They named him Dylan Slade Steven Groene, which I thought was pretty awesome.”
