Missing Baby Found ALIVE in a Mall After Outsmarting the Serial Killer Who KILLED Her Entire Family

Missing Baby Found ALIVE in a Mall After Outsmarting the Serial Killer Who KILLED Her Entire Family

“A girl who looks exactly the same just walked in. Okay, is she still inside? Yes, she is there. She is with an older man. With an older man? Yes, and what struck me most was that I saw a photo of her, and I recognized her in that picture. I showed it to one of the waitresses, and she said, ‘Oh my God, she’s here.’ I don’t know if you want to send a deputy sheriff to check the windows or something. I don’t know what you want to do, but it seems very strange to me. The girl looks exactly like that kid from the office. She looks very, very much like that girl in the photo.”

At 2 a.m. on July 2, 2005, a little girl walked into a Denny’s restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She was dirty. Her hair was disheveled. She was wearing light clothing, inappropriate for such a time of year. She came in with a man, and something about the way she moved, the way she held herself, the way she didn’t look at anyone the way children usually do, made the woman behind the counter stop and take another look.

The man put her in a booth. He placed an order. The girl sat opposite him and said almost nothing. The waitress, Amber Dean, approached the table. She brought the girl a coloring book. She spoke to her. She suggested a milkshake. The girl said she wasn’t very hungry. The waitress talked her into it anyway, and then went to cook it very, very slowly.

On the other side of the restaurant, manager Linda Olson was already talking to the police on 911. She recognized the child from the ad. The ad was hanging on the front door of this particular restaurant. The man had passed it as he entered. The staff quietly headed for the exits. A customer on the other side of the room looked at the girl. She looked back at him, and in the way only someone who had spent weeks learning to communicate without words could, she told him everything he needed to know without making a sound. She nodded. He nodded in response. He went to the waitress. By the time the police arrived, all the exits were blocked, and the man had no idea anything was happening.

His name was Joseph Edward Duncan III. He was a convicted sex offender who had been on the run from justice for 7 weeks. The little girl opposite him was 8 years old. Her name was Shasta Groene. And the reason she ended up in that booth at two in the morning with a strange man, dressed inappropriately, and why she was there at all, is one of the most amazing and incredible survival stories this channel has ever covered.

She was not lost. She didn’t get lost. She spent 47 days in the Montana wilderness trying to survive, comforting that man and making him believe that she trusted him. All this was calculated. This was all intentional. All this continued until the right moment came. “Denny’s” became that moment. But to understand what it cost, you need to go back to the beginning.

To a farmhouse off Interstate 90. To the three people who didn’t survive that night. And to an 8-year-old girl who, in the midst of the most terrifying event that has ever happened to anyone, decided she would find her way home. Stay with me until the end, because the moment Shasta Groene looked up in that booth, met the stranger’s gaze across the restaurant, and conveyed everything she needed without making a sound is one of the most amazing displays of resilience and fortitude this channel has ever covered.

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The Groene family home was located in the Wolf Lodge area, a rural area in northern Idaho, about 8 miles east of Coeur d’Alene, along the south shore of Coeur d’Alene Lake. It wasn’t an isolated hut in the middle of nowhere. Families lived along that stretch. In the summer, children played outside, and life in the area was ordinary and leisurely for a rural community, where people went about their business and assumed their neighbors were doing the same.

Brenda Groene was 40 years old. She was the mother of five children from two marriages. The older children were from her ex-husband Steve Groene, and the younger ones grew up in the house in Wolf Lodge. Her boyfriend, 37-year-old Mark McKenzie, had become part of the family. Those who knew this family described him as a person who sincerely joined their lives, working and living next to Brenda the way a person does when they find a place they plan to stay.

Slade Groene was 13, the same age as Jesse, the older brother who was staying overnight elsewhere that night. Slade was the oldest child in the house, the one left. Investigators and people who knew the family have noted over the years that Jesse’s absence from the house that night was the only reason he was not among the dead. He returned home the next morning and found his entire life over or gone. Dylan Groene was 9. Shasta was 8.

A few days before the attack, the two younger children were living the life that children in rural Idaho do in May. On the street, in plain sight, playing in the yard of their family home along the nearby road. Living the ordinary life of a family who had no reason to think that anyone was paying special attention to them.

Someone was paying very special attention to them. Investigators later tracked the movements of the man who entered that house. He was driving east on Interstate 90 in a rented Jeep, passing through the Wolf Lodge area, when he saw Shasta and Dylan playing outside. He stopped. He was watching. He came back.

In the days before the attack, according to investigators’ reconstruction of his movements, he bought night-vision goggles and a video camera at Walmart. He stole license plates from another car in Missouri to make his Jeep harder to track. He filed a false report that the Jeep had been stolen—a deliberate layer of misinformation designed to create distance between himself and the car, should it ever be linked to any case. He was patient. He acted thoughtfully. He had done this before.

On the night of May 15 or early morning of May 16, he entered the Groene house. To understand how Joseph Edward Duncan III ended up in Brenda Groene’s house with a nail gun in the spring of 2005, you have to go back to the beginning. Because the tragedy of what happened to the Groene family is inseparable from the question of how a person with Duncan’s past could even freely walk through someone’s door.

Duncan was born on February 25, 1963, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the fourth of five children in a military family. Due to his father’s military career, the family moved frequently, and as a result, Duncan grew up in Tacoma, Washington. According to his own later confessions, he gave extremely candid descriptions of his psychology to therapists, and later in his own writings, violence manifested itself in him early.

He claimed that he first committed a crime against a child when he was only 12 years old. He told the therapist that by the age of 16, he estimated he had committed crimes against 13 boys. He was arrested for the first time at the age of 15. At 16, he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy in Tacoma, and also stole firearms from neighboring homes.

This conviction resulted in a 20-year prison sentence. First, alternatives to incarceration were tested—a treatment program at a facility in Washington state. After 22 months, he was expelled from the program for violating rules, escaping from the facility, and due to the nature of the fantasies he described during treatment. The 20-year sentence was renewed. He served 14 years and was released in 1994.

He would have to be closely watched for the rest of his life. This did not happen. While on parole between 1994 and 1997, when supervision conditions were supposed to keep him under close watch, investigators would later conclude that he had murdered three children. In July 1996, according to his own later confession, he kidnapped and murdered two half-sisters in Seattle, Washington: Sammy Jo White, 11, and her sister Carmen Cubias, 9.

These murders remained unsolved. They were not linked to Duncan until his arrest in Idaho in 2005. In April 1997, a 10-year-old boy named Anthony Martinez was playing behind his home in Beaumont, California, when Duncan approached a group of children he was with, offered them a dollar each to help find his cat, and led Anthony away from the yard. He killed the boy in the wilderness.

Anthony’s body was found by a ranger, bound with duct tape. The fingerprint on this tape could not be linked to Duncan for years. His brother Marcos, who was with Anthony the day he was taken, carried the memory of watching the man take his brother away for the rest of his life. When his parole was revoked in 1997 for other violations, Duncan returned to prison.

In 2000, he was released again, this time thanks to a reduced sentence for good behavior, and he moved to Fargo, North Dakota. He enrolled in computer science courses at North Dakota State University and, according to those around him, was considered a capable student who gave no outward signs of what was going on beneath the surface.

He also started a blog. He called it the “Fifth Nail Blog,” a name taken from the legend of the five nails of the crucifixion, the fifth of which was to pierce the heart of Christ and end his suffering. It all began in January 2004 as a diary—a record of the life of a man trying to stay afloat after being released from prison. In posts published in the middle of the night, he wrote about frustration, about the stigma of being on the sex offender registry, about the gap between who the world thought he was and who he saw himself as.

He described the inner image he tried to maintain: a happy Joe, an ordinary person with friends, hobbies, and a future. In some of the recordings, he also allowed something else to break through: anger at the world, a sense of resentment, the destruction of everything that held him back from carrying out his intentions. His last post, dated May 13, 2005, stated: “I intend to cause as much harm to society as possible, and then die.” Two days later, he found himself at the Groene family home.

Between his last blog post and the night he broke into Brenda Groene’s home, there was another decision by another agency that had the opportunity to stop him but didn’t. In July 2004, 10 months before the murders, Duncan went to a playground in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and approached two boys. His actions there led to criminal charges in March 2005.

On April 5, 2005, he appeared in Becker County Circuit Court before Judge Thomas Schroeder. He was a registered level three sex offender—the highest category reserved for those considered most likely to reoffend. A man who had already served 14 years for a sexual offense against a child, who was on parole at the time when three children were later found murdered, and who was now accused of a new offense against children at the playground, appeared in court.

Judge Schroeder set bail at $15,000. A businessman from Fargo who met Duncan wrote a check. Duncan was released. He checked in with his probation officer twice. Then he stopped. A federal warrant was issued for his arrest for failure to appear in court by June 1. And on May 15, before the federal warrant went into effect, he had already driven through Wolf Lodge, spotted Brenda Groene’s children playing in the yard, and started planning.

The Idaho crimes occurred on the very day Duncan was scheduled to appear again in Becker County Court. When the story gained national attention and reporters began asking how Duncan ended up at large, Judge Schroeder gave an answer that remained on the record. Looking back, bail probably should have been much higher. This is the full report that the system provided about what made its decisions possible.

Shasta Groene later provided investigators, and later the public, with an account of what she saw that night. In a book published with author Gregg Olsen, she described her childhood as one that already required a certain amount of resilience. Family circumstances were not always easy, and Shasta, in her own words, learned early to understand situations and adapt to them. This instinct for adaptation was what helped her survive.

Duncan watched the house for several days. Before arriving in the area, he purchased night-vision goggles and a video camera. He stole license plates from another car in Missouri and then filed reports of the rental car being stolen, creating enough confusion to make it difficult to track his movements. He acted deliberately and was patient.

He broke into the house at night when Slade, Brenda, and Mark, as well as the two younger children, were there. First, he tied up the adults and Slade. Then he tied up Shasta and Dylan. He put the two younger children in his Jeep. Shasta said she heard her mother call her into the living room. That was the last time she heard her mother’s voice.

The three people left in the house—Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie, and Slade Groene—were beaten to death with a nail-driving hammer that Duncan had brought with him. The next day, Shasta’s older brother, Jesse, returned home. Duncan went east. He took Route 90 through Idaho into Montana, heading to a remote area in the Lolo National Forest near the town of St. Regis, where there are mountains, forests, and logging roads that most people never use. It was an area large enough to swallow a man and two children without leaving a trace on the highway or hiking trails.

Meanwhile, in Kootenai County, the investigation was consuming all available resources. More than a hundred FBI agents and 80 additional investigators from various agencies in the region processed tips coming in from across the country. They were looking for physical evidence in the Wolf Lodge area. They followed tracks that led nowhere. An Amber Alert was broadcast everywhere. Shasta and Dylan’s faces appeared on posters in restaurants and gas stations throughout Idaho, Washington, and Montana. The case was covered on national television for days, then weeks.

The whole country was watching this. Duncan was watching too. He followed the news from remote camping sites to stay ahead of what investigators were announcing publicly. When initial reports of a red Jeep linked to the suspect emerged, he changed vehicles. He moved between locations in the Lolo National Forest, choosing terrain that is difficult to survey from the air and nearly impossible to explore on foot without intimate knowledge of the area.

He thought through the logistics as he did everything else—prudently, methodically, with a patience that shocked investigators when they later put it all together. He ordered Shasta and Dylan to call him Jet, short for his initials, Joseph Edward. He constantly changed moods, which Shasta later described with astonishing accuracy.

He would speak with feigned remorse about what he had done to her family, then make threats that seemed real and imminent. He was talking about religion. He was talking about God. He told them about his own difficult childhood. He was, as is often the case with deeply disoriented people, desperately yearning to be understood by at least someone. And the only person nearby was an 8-year-old girl whose family he had just destroyed.

During the weeks spent in those mountains, Shasta made a decision. Years later, she described it in interviews and in her book. Not in those exact words. Not in that analytical context. After all, she was only 8 years old, and what she was doing was survival, not strategic planning in the adult sense. But what Gregg Olsen, the author of her book, described, and what Shasta herself was able to articulate, was this: From an early age, she learned to “read” the people around her and tell them what they wanted to hear in order to keep herself safe.

This skill, formed long before Duncan appeared in her life, became a tool of her salvation. She listened to him. She gave him her attention. She did not offer him open resistance, which could have ended in tragedy before there was a chance for salvation. She made him feel—as much as he was capable of feeling it—that she was not just a captive, but a person he valued. She also remembered everything. Every detail that fell from his lips, every route he took, every place he mentioned, every bit of information she felt might be useful later.

She carefully put all this down in her memory and waited. During those weeks, Duncan told her things that she later relayed to investigators with an accuracy that became the foundation of the case against him; he described how he was looking for children to kidnap when he spotted her and Dylan in the yard at Wolf Lodge. He described how he carried out the attack. He told her details that only a criminal could know.

Shasta remembered all this. Every word, every boast, every detail he blurted out in front of the child because he was sure she had no one to tell it to. A few weeks after their arrival in the mountains, Dylan Groene was murdered. He was 9 years old. What happened in that clearing, Shasta described carefully and briefly—enough for investigators to understand the facts, but no more than she was willing to tell the public, which was her right.

Duncan later told Shasta that he did it to save Dylan from further suffering. Did she accept it, or just absorb it like everything else? She continued to live. She carried within her grief the loss of her brother in that wilderness, the last member of her family, and she did not stop. According to Shasta herself, in the days after Dylan’s death, she herself was on the verge of death.

In no account that I have read does she describe exactly how she experienced that period. She was just saying that she had gotten through it, that her thoughts about how to survive, how to remain useful to him, how to make him see her as a person and not a problem, had worked long enough for something to change, and eventually it did.

In the days leading up to July 2, Duncan began talking about taking Shasta to North Dakota. He remembered meeting his mother and family. He spoke about the future in a completely different way than he had spoken before. Shasta, who had been weighing every word for 7 weeks to survive, heard this and made a choice. She told him that she didn’t want to leave him even a step away. She spoke to him as someone who trusted him. Later in an interview about this period, she said: “At that point, I was trying to earn his trust and convince him that I didn’t want to leave him.”

On the night of July 1 and early morning of July 2, Duncan was driving from Montana to Idaho. Around the evening of July 1, he stopped at a store in Kellogg, Idaho. A gas station employee noticed a girl who looked like Shasta, but didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Surveillance footage from that stop later confirmed that they were there.

Duncan pulled up to the Denny’s restaurant on the main street of Coeur d’Alene at approximately 2 a.m. on July 2. He walked through the front door of the restaurant, which had a poster about missing children with pictures of Shasta and Dylan hanging on it, without even looking at what he had passed. Linda Olson was the manager on duty that night. Her waitress was Amber Dean. There were only a few customers in the restaurant at the time. As it always happens at Denny’s restaurants at two in the morning. People who stay up when others rest.

Shasta entered with Duncan. She was dirty. Her hair was disheveled. She was wearing light clothing, inappropriate for the time of day and for a man who was supposedly going to take the child to visit relatives in North Dakota. Linda Olson glanced at it and remembered the poster she had passed every time she entered the restaurant for seven weeks. She and Amber Dean recognized her almost simultaneously.

What the women did next is what separates a happy ending from a disastrous one. None of them panicked. None of them came close enough to Shasta to alarm Duncan. They didn’t shout across the room or do anything that would let the man with the kidnapped child know that everyone around him knew what was happening. Amber Dean calmly approached the table. She brought Shasta a coloring book. She spoke to her, distracted her hands, held her attention.

She suggested a milkshake. Shasta said she wasn’t very hungry. Amber talked her into ordering it anyway. Then she went to make a cocktail—very, very slowly. At the same time, Linda Olson was calling 911. She quietly positioned staff near the exits—not ostentatiously, but so that Duncan couldn’t get out without encountering anyone on his way. Two restaurant patrons also independently called 911. The calls to the dispatch center began coming in just minutes after Shasta walked in the door.

Shasta, sitting at the table, looked up. On the other side of the hall, a visitor named Nick Chapman was looking at her. She met his gaze. From the look in his eyes, she knew he knew. She nodded slightly. He nodded in response. He approached the waitress. “I tried to tell him with my eyes that it was me,” she said later.

The police arrived at the restaurant and arrested Duncan right at his table. He offered no resistance. He was taken into custody on charges of kidnapping and an active federal warrant out of Minnesota. A warrant that had been in effect since June 1, a warrant issued because he failed to appear in court, a warrant that had been circulating for a whole month while he was in the mountains with his two children and no one knew where they were.

Kootenai County Police Officer Shane Averitt spoke with Shasta on the street in his patrol car. His dashcam recorded this conversation. Three years later, a recording of this audio was presented to a jury who were deciding whether to execute Duncan or keep him in prison for life. On the recording, Averitt asked Shasta what made Duncan decide to bring her back. She said he was going to take her home. He asked what made him change his mind.

Through tears, audible on the recording from nearly two decades away, Shasta said through a moan that Duncan had told her something. He told her that she taught him how to love. That she was the only one who understood him. And that thanks to her he realized what he was doing wrong. She was 8 years old. She spent 47 days making the man who destroyed her family feel understood. And it helped her survive long enough for Amber Dean to bring her a coloring book at two in the morning.

Linda Olson and Amber Dean received awards from the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office in late July. Funded by public donations. The amount was a little over $4,000 each. The true value of their action cannot be expressed in this way.

Duncan was held without bail on charges of kidnapping and, soon after, murder. In Kootenai County, he was charged with three counts of first-degree murder: Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie, and Slade Groene. And three counts of first-degree kidnapping. Federal charges were subsequently filed for the murder of Dylan Groene, for crimes against both children during their weeks in captivity, and for other federal offenses.

The crucial information that allowed investigators to find Dylan came from Shasta herself. A few days after her rescue, she provided investigators with details about the places Duncan had taken them. Details she had been quietly storing in her memory for 7 weeks. On July 4, 2005, two days after her rescue, on Independence Day, investigators discovered human remains in a remote makeshift camp in the Lolo National Forest near St. Regis, Montana.

The remains were sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, for DNA analysis. It was confirmed that these were the remains of Dylan Groene. He would have turned 10 on July 16. A public memorial service was held that day at the Real Life Ministries church in Coeur d’Alene. The community, which had been searching for six weeks, gathered to say goodbye to the boy they hoped to find alive.

The ensuing trial was long and complicated, in part because Duncan chose at various points to represent himself. A decision that gave him the opportunity to speak out, drag out the case, and behave in a way that only prolonged the process and caused additional pain to the affected families. He underwent numerous psychiatric examinations. He repeatedly changed his legal position.

In October 2005, he pleaded guilty in Idaho state court to the murders of Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie, and Slade Groene, as well as three counts of kidnapping. He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences for kidnapping alone. The murder convictions remained pending federal prosecution. Federal hearings dragged on for years.

In 2008, Duncan was convicted of federal charges, including the murder of Dylan Groene, and sentenced to death. He received three separate federal death sentences, one of the rarest cases in the American legal system. The matter dragged on even longer. After his arrest, a blogger in Georgia noticed similarities between Duncan and a photoshopped image circulated years earlier in connection with the kidnapping and murder of 10-year-old Anthony Martinez in Beaumont, California, in 1997.

Investigators checked this connection. A fingerprint found on the duct tape that bound Anthony’s body was compared to Duncan’s known fingerprints. They coincided. Duncan was extradited to California, where he pleaded guilty to Anthony’s murder and received 11 more consecutive life sentences. While in prison, he also confessed to the murders of Sammy Jo White and Carmen Cubias in Seattle in 1996. Two half-sisters whose murder cases remained unsolved for almost a decade. No charges were filed for these deaths.

In total, Joseph Edward Duncan III was found guilty of at least seven murders: three adults and two children connected to the Groene case, as well as Anthony Martinez in California. Plus a federal indictment. He was reasonably linked to the murder of two more children. He received three federal death sentences and 11 consecutive life sentences without parole. He died in federal prison on March 28, 2021. He was 58 years old. Before his death, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The planned execution never took place.

When news of his death broke, Shasta Groene, who was 28 years old at the time, issued a statement: “For so long I struggled with hatred for this person. Today I woke up feeling like my soul was finally free.” Anthony Martinez’s father, Ernesto, said: “Although I would have liked to have witnessed his execution, knowing that he now stands before God and answers for what he did is true justice.”

The question that arises after any such case is the most important from a practical point of view. How did it happen? And how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again? Joseph Duncan’s dossier was not hidden. It has been documented, archived, accessible, and repeatedly verified by various institutions over the decades. He was a registered sex offender. He was regularly checked in by supervisory officers.

It existed on paper within the framework of an official control mechanism created by society to oversee those who had already proven themselves dangerous. And every time this mechanism had a chance to see what the full history of his crimes described—not just a man with a problem that could be solved by treatment, but a man whose documented biography pointed to one unchanging path—it found a reason to release him back into the world.

His release in 1994 was accompanied by conditions for parole. He violated them, and it is now known that three children were killed during this period. He was returned to custody for unrelated violations, not for the murders that were not yet linked to him. He served additional time and was released in 2000 with credit for good behavior. He moved to North Dakota, went to university, and lived among ordinary people who had no idea who he was.

In 2004, he attacked children on a playground. In 2005, he was charged and appeared before a judge who set bail at $15,000—an amount that a Fargo businessman helped him pay within hours of the hearing. He checked in with his supervising officer twice. Then he stopped appearing. By June 1, federal authorities had issued a warrant for his arrest. The crimes at Wolf Lodge had already been committed.

The day of the murders coincided with the day Duncan was scheduled to appear again in Becker County Court. Steve Groene, Shasta’s father, after her rescue publicly expressed undisguised anger at the system that allowed this to happen. He directed his anger at the courts, oversight structures, and bail decisions in Minnesota. He called for significant reforms in how the most dangerous criminals are assessed and monitored. He was not alone.

In subsequent years, several states tightened bail rules in cases involving high-risk registered sex offenders. Federal lawmakers debated demands for enhanced oversight, but the fundamental problem—a system built on evaluating each offense individually, rather than reading the entire biography as a holistic picture—was never fully addressed. Duncan provided every institution he contacted with all the information they needed to understand who he was. His first conviction at age 16, 20-year sentence, 14 years in prison, parole period and events during it, return to prison in 2000, playground crime in 2005.

This is not a complicated picture. This is a very obvious picture. And a 10-year-old boy in California, two girls in Seattle, and three members of the Groene family paid for the institution’s failure to read it clearly.

In the 20 years since July 2, 2005, Shasta Groene’s life has not been easy. She was open about it because honesty is part of what she hopes for when sharing her story with other survivors. The trauma of the experience didn’t end when the police arrived at Denny’s. People who love survivors of such events sometimes expect the worst to end at the moment of rescue. That once a person is physically safe, recovery should occur naturally and in a straightforward manner towards a normal life.

The reality of complex trauma, as has been extensively documented by researchers and clinicians, is that it doesn’t work that way. This especially doesn’t work when the affected child, whose brain and nervous system are still forming, doesn’t yet have the tools to integrate events into an understanding of the world that would allow them to function.

Shasta spoke openly about the following years. Depression, post-traumatic stress, addiction that began at age 12 and intensified in adolescence. “When I was 14, I tried meth for the first time,” she said in a 2015 interview. “For four years after that, there was meth. I used almost everything that came to hand and allowed me to feel like a different person.” She described the appeal of this numbness with a clarity that anyone who has worked with trauma survivors will instantly recognize.

This is not a character flaw, but a completely human attempt to cope with pain that has been present for years without proper support. She went through therapy. She worked with great difficulty and for a long time to build a life.

Over the years, she lost loved ones. Her father, Steve, died after the case was closed. She herself became a mother. She had her own legal problems that became public. She endured it all just as she endured 47 days in the mountains of Montana. Not gracefully, not without loss, not as a story with a happy ending sometimes suggests, but continuously, which is the only thing that really matters.

In 2025, the 20th anniversary of these crimes, she published the full story in the book Out of the Woods: A Girl, a Killer, and a Lifelong Struggle to Find the Way Home, co-written with New York Times bestselling author Gregg Olsen. The name matters. The book is not about kidnapping. It’s about what happened after. Two decades of trying to heal, understand what happened, and build something on the ruins of a childhood destroyed by a man with a sledgehammer and a $15,000 bail.

Gregg Olsen, who has dedicated his career to true-crime stories and called the project the most challenging work of his life, said: “I think Shasta Groene, like no other person on the planet, was uniquely equipped to survive this.” He wrote that what Shasta had learned before Duncan approached her—how to recognize danger, how to adapt, how to tell people what they wanted to hear in order to stay safe—had taken shape in her life by May 2005, and that it was this innate talent that stood in the way of the criminal.

The book’s afterword, written by a psychologist who is a nationally recognized expert on abductions and complex trauma, directly refutes the “Stockholm Syndrome” label for what Shasta felt towards Duncan during her captivity. The psychologist claims that this label nullifies and distorts the complex calculations of a child’s survival in an impossible situation. Shasta did not bond with her captor out of confusion. She acted using the tools she had to survive.

Linda Olson, the Denny’s manager who called 911 in the early morning hours of July 2, 2005, contributed to the book. She described seeing Shasta walk through the door that night—dirty, disheveled, and wearing light clothing at two in the morning—and the years that had passed since the rescue she had helped to effect.

“I was incredibly happy when Shasta was rescued. It was a miracle, a happy ending. I thought this brave eight-year-old girl would get help, love, and everything else she needed to be okay. I was so wrong. Recovery for people who have experienced trauma is a long, difficult process, and the goal is often unattainable. She kept telling me that no one wanted to listen to her because it was too painful for them to accept. Let Shasta and others like her tell their story the way they need to. This is not about us.”

Amber Dean, the waitress who entertained Shasta at the table, passing the time with a milkshake until the police arrived, received a commendation and cash reward from the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office in July 2005, along with Linda Olson. The reward for information that helped save Shasta was raised through donations from across the region. Both women accepted the award without much fanfare.

In August 2025, Gregg Olsen and Shasta held an autograph session at the Well-Read Moose bookstore in Coeur d’Alene. She was back. She stood before the people who grew up hearing her name, who remembered the Amber Alert, who remembered that Denny’s, who remembered the day the story ended and the day they learned it wasn’t the end, and she told them what the years after were really like. The parts that were too painful for anyone around to hear. Those parts that were not covered in the primary news.

The Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office marked the 20th anniversary with an official statement: “In May 2005, the Groene family of Kootenai County became the brutal victims of a serial killer who was driving through our community. The family was tracked down, attacked, and tortured.” They thanked every investigator and local resident who helped. It was a statement that commemorated the case. It did not address the circumstances that made this case possible.

There is a detail in this story that I keep coming back to. When Amber Dean came to Shasta’s table at two in the morning at Denny’s in Coeur d’Alene, she brought her a coloring book. She kept the conversation going. She was distracting her. She bided her time with a milkshake until the police arrived. She did all this while sitting across from a man who had already killed four people, making sure he had no reason to panic or run away.

And opposite, at the same table, was an 8-year-old girl who had been doing exactly these calculations for 47 days. Keep him calm. Make him talk. Don’t give him reasons to act. She did it one more time. Together, the waitress and the child outsmarted the man, who didn’t even suspect that his time was up.

This is exactly what the script in Shasta Groene cannot fully convey. Author Gregg Olsen tried to do just that. A psychologist who later wrote books about it tried. Shasta herself, in an interview and in her own words, tried to describe what those 47 days demanded of her. But the essence of this is something that cannot be simplified. An 8-year-old child, alone with the man who killed her mother and brother, was deciding every minute how to stay alive, and she did it.

Dylan Groene, born July 16, 1995, was killed in the mountains of Montana at the age of nine. He was remembered on the day he would have turned 10, by people who had been looking for him for weeks. His sister provided the location of his remains. She also carried this burden.

Brenda Groene, Mark McKenzie, and Slade Groene were murdered in their own home on the night of May 15, 2005. They deserved a long life. But they didn’t survive.

Anthony Martinez was 10 years old when he was kidnapped from behind his home in California in 1997, and his brother saw the man take him away. The murderer was at large because the system released him, monitored his parole violation, and released him back into the world.

Sammy Jo White and Carmen Cubias, sisters, ages 11 and 9, Seattle, 1996, still await charges that were never filed.

Shasta Groene was 8 years old when her world fell apart, and she decided she would deal with it on her own, without anyone’s advice. She was 28 when she learned that the man who had taken everything from her had finally passed away. She was 42 when she stood in a bookstore in Coeur d’Alene and told her story in her own voice for the first time. She handled it. She continues to cope with this even now. This is what survival really looks like.