Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Inside Edition
Topics: Crime, US News, True crime, Idaho
Dan Seddon
Serial killer survivor Shasta Groene has recounted the horrific moments leading up to her kidnapping in 2005.
Just eight years old at the time, Shasta and her older brother Dylan were taken from their home in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho by child molester Joseph Edward Duncan III, who took a hammer to the rest of their loved ones in a devastating massacre two decades ago.
This included mother Brenda Groene, stepfather Mark McKenzie and brother Slade Groene.
The youngsters were driven away from the remote property by Joseph in a stolen Jeep Cherokee, while it took until early July that summer for him to be apprehended by the authorities.
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Tragically, Dylan died by shotgun wound before police could catch up with the trio.
Shasta spoke to Inside Edition Digital over the weekend to promote her new book Out of the Woods - recalling that terrible time as she did so.
Before Joseph made his move on the family, he'd apparently scouted them out from afar in the days leading up to the murders.
Shasta said her mum and stepdad were having a domestic when they first spotted their eventual killer in the distance.
"I remember looking out of my bedroom window and they just stopped fighting and she was pointing at something up on the hill.
"When I looked over it looked like there was a person with binoculars up there, and so my stepdad - he didn't have very good eyesight - went inside to grab his binoculars, but by the time he came out, he had left and moved.
"You couldn't see him and so they kind of just wrote it off as like a paranoia thing, but I saw it too."
When Joseph had secured his victims though, he admitted to the daughter that her mum wasn't seeing things at all - he'd just hidden behind a tree stump when the binoculars came out.
The Groene house was easily accessible for the criminal, as they would always leave their backdoor open overnight so that the dogs could go in and out at their leisure.
"We lived in the middle of nowhere and we just didn't think that was an issue really," noted Shasta. "He had said the night prior to that he was also in the house learning where we slept and stuff."
When he was skulking around in the dark of the night, Joseph actually awoke the eight-year-old.
"I thought I saw a face in my closet, like a face of a person," she remembered.
"I woke my brother Dylan up and was like, 'Can you come sleep in my bed because there's somebody in the closet?' I remember telling my brother that."
In Idaho's federal court, Joseph was convicted of kidnapping and murdering the Coeur d'Alene four, resulting in six life sentences and three death sentences, but over in California he was given another two life sentences.
He died in March 2021 at the age of 58 from a brain tumour.