The HORRIFYING story of Shasta Groene: An 8-yr-old's brutal ordeal with 'Night Vision Killer'
Shasta Groene, who was eight years old in 2005, made headlines when she was rescued from infamous serial killer Joseph Duncan III, also known as Joseph Edward Duncan. With the rescue, she became the only survivor of the gut-wrenching Idaho murder and kidnapping case. Duncan, who was 42 at the time of the incident, broke into her house and brutally murdered her mother, Brenda Groene, 40, her stepfather, Mark McKenzie, 37, and her brother, Slade Groene, 13. Duncan, known as the 'night-vision' serial killer, then held her captive, tortured and abused her for seven long weeks.
Groene disappeared from the public eye in the 17 years following the tragedy. She has now spoken up about the ordeal which still haunts her, as the focus of the first episode of this season’s 'People Magazine Investigates'. The episode aired on Investigation Discovery on Monday, June 6, and is streaming on Discovery+ .
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Groene, now 25, recalled how Duncan slaughtered her family and then kidnapped her and her then-nine-year-old brother, Dylan. He held them captive for nearly two months, and sexually and physically assaulted them. He ultimately shot Dylan dead in front of her. The sole survivor of the attack, Groene was rescued after the serial killer took her to a restaurant and was spotted by customers and employees, who called the police.
The home invasion
On May 15, 2005, Groene thought she saw someone hiding in her bedroom closet in her Wolf Lodge, Idaho, home. It was nighttime and she fell asleep after being comforted by her brother. She assumed she had imagined it.
She later woke up and heard her mother crying. "My mother was crying. She's like, "[Shasta], you need to wake up. Someone's in the house"," she said. She then found her stepfather and her brother laying face down on the floor of the family living room. There were zip ties around their wrists and ankles, and duct tape covered their mouths. A man stood there armed with a shotgun, wearing all black and night-vision goggles.
Duncan took Groene and her brother Dylan outside to his car. He then used a hammer to murder her mother, stepfather, and other brother. "I heard thumping and a grunt in pain. I didn't know what was going on," Goene recalled. He then came and and took Groene and Dylan to a campsite in Lolo National Forest near St. Regis, Montana, where kept them for two weeks before shooting Dylan dead.
"I honestly have no idea what gave me strength or hope," Groene said. "But there was something inside of me that was pushing me to say or do certain things to be on [Duncan's] good side and earn his trust. I believe that was my mom’s spirit guiding me. She wanted me to get out safe and alive. I felt like I was getting help from her spiritually. But there were times when I really thought, "How long am I going to be alive?""
The rescue
"One day, he asked me, "How do you want to die? You have two choices, I can shoot you or you can be strangled to death,"" Groene recalled on the show. "I felt like there was always something guiding me, like a voice in my head telling me what I needed to do and how it needed to go. So I told him, "I want you to strangle me, I guess." I couldn't picture what happened to my brother happening to me, it scared me." She explained that if Duncan tried to strangle her, she would have more time to "talk him out of it." Shooting her, on the other hand, would mean he could "just pull the trigger and it would all be over."
"So that's what I chose. He had me lay down on the ground and he put a rope around my neck,' Groene continued. What miraculously saved the eight-year-old's life was when she called Duncan by his nick name, Jett. "He squeezed it, everything started turning white and I said, "Please don't Jett." When I said that he loosened his grip on the rope and he started crying," Groene said. "He was like, "I don't know why, when you call me that, I can tell you really care about me." At that point, I knew that I had gained a lot of trust with him. I was pretty much going to do whatever it took to survive."
Groene recalled how Duncan once took her to a restaurant after she manupulated him into thinking she did not want to leave his side. "I would tell him that I wanted to show him all the places I grew up in, where I went to school because I loved school, where I used to hang out, basically show him my life because I had no family," Groene told Fox News Digital. "That made him feel good because he felt that I trusted him. He felt that he was learning about my life and getting to know a vulnerable part of me. I was just trying to manipulate him. [When we got to the Denny's] I looked up and saw this guy. He looked at me, and I nodded my head. He nodded back. I can tell from his eyes that he knew who I was. I was trying to tell him through my eyes, that it was me."
Groene was eventually rescued on July 2, 2005. The man alerted a waitress and the police were finally called. "I remember feeling safe, but at the same time, I was sad about my family, and so focused on, "Where is my oldest brother, where's my dad?" Stuff like that," Groene had previously told KTVB in an interview. "I was happy to be in a safe place, but there was still that part of me that was like, "What if that happens again?""
Groene was later sent to live with her biological father. She continued to be haunted by the past and took a year off of school. She went to therapy but suffered from an eating disorder. She also indulged in self harm.
"I had my brothers with me all the time," Groene said, recalling the times she spent with them. "And that’s exactly how I wanted it to be. I always wanted to be with them. I was the youngest and the only girl. 'I was the little sister my brothers protected. And my mom made sure that the family was always together. It felt weird being in a house with my dad and his girlfriend with none of my brothers."
"I was just so alone. He was a truck driver, so it was very seldom that we saw him. But that’s how he paid the bills," she continued. "I also became really sensitive about my weight and the things that I ate. I think it was a way to punish myself. I developed an eating disorder at a very young age. If I ate, I made myself throw up. I then started self-harming. I was hiding a lot from my dad. And then he got throat cancer. He almost died from it. So much has happened that I never fully got to heal."
Groene explained that she felt guilty because she had promised Dylan they would get out of captivity alive. "I had promised my brother [Dylan] that I would make sure that we got out alive. I carried so much guilt because he didn’t live, and I did," she said. "I felt like it should have been the other way around. I handled all of that in very unhealthy ways. I started drinking at age 13, smoking marijuana and hanging out with older people. I was trying to numb everything. And there was a possibility that my dad might die. I didn’t know what to do."
Duncan was convicted and sentenced to death in 2008. After his arrest, he was linked him to the April 1997 slaying of ten-year-old Anthony Martinez from Beaumont, California, with the help of DNA evidence. He later admitted to the killing. He was also linked to the murders of two young girls in Seattle in the 1990s. She was accused of molesting a young boy on a playground in Minnesota in 2005.
A registered sex offender, Duncan later admitted to a therapist that he believed he had raped 13 younger boys by the time he was 16. In March 2021, he died from terminal brain cancer at a hospital in Terra Haute, Idaho.
"One thing is for sure, he does not exist anymore. Now, we can live our lives knowing that," Groene had said at the time. For so long I have been struggling with hate towards that man. Today, I woke up feeling like my soul was finally free. I hope other people affected by Joseph Duncan were able to wake up feeling the same way."
Groene's legal troubles
In April 2018, Groene pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of injury to a child. She was ordered to serve unsupervised probation through October 2019. According to court records, Groene left methamphetamine where a one-year-old child in her custody could ingest it. She also reportedly left the drug in close proximity to a month-old baby.
Just a month later, Groene was accused of violating the terms of her probation. A Canyon County judge later declined to sentence her to jail time, but instead instituting 18 months of supervised probation.
Groene now lives in the Boise area with her husband, Michael, and four children. She is expecting to give birth to a fifth child in August.