Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer. Gary Ridgway. Dennis Rader. Richard Speck.
This pitiless club has a new member: Joseph Edward Duncan III.
As a teenager in Tacoma, Wash., Duncan raped and tortured a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint. Convicted as an adult, he spent 18 years in prison and was afforded many opportunities to overcome—or perhaps constrain—his psychopathic sexual urges.
Ultimately, all efforts failed.
After prison, Duncan enrolled in college in Fargo, N.D., registered as a sex offender and spent several years without any reported lapses.
But early last spring, he was accused of molesting a boy on a playground in Minnesota. Facing charges that almost certainly would have led him back to prison, Duncan vanished from Fargo in a stolen Jeep, just weeks before he was to graduate from North Dakota State University.
Three days later, authorities allege, Duncan turned up with a shotgun and carpenter's hammer at the home of Brenda Groene and her children near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He bludgeoned to death Groene, her son Slade, 13, and Brenda's boyfriend, Mark McKenzie.
He bound the woman's two youngest children, Dylan, 9, and Shasta, 8, and carried them away in his Jeep. He took them to a hideout in the Montana woods and used the children as sexual playthings for seven weeks before finally killing Dylan, officials allege.
He was arrested July 2 at a Coeur d'Alene restaurant while having breakfast with Shasta.
Following Duncan's arrest, it was discovered that he had been keeping an Internet diary of sorts, a web log, commonly referred to as a blog, in which he disturbingly implied that he had left a string of bodies following his release from prison.
"I got out and I got even," wrote Duncan in his blog. "But I did not get caught. So I got even again, and again did not get caught. I got even twice (actually more)."
Duncan also wrote of keeping a second diary, a secret diary written in code that provided more details of his horrible crimes.
"...the world will know who I really was, and what I really did..." he wrote. "...I am scared, alone, and confused, and my reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society. My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die."
Duncan's writings were voluminous, and could easily fill a book. He also had an affinity for dressing in drag, and at one point in his life he posted as series of such photos of himself on the Internet and labeled them, "Jazzi Jet," and is an example of how he apparently views himself.
At the time of this writing, the FBI as well as investigators in at least five states are continuing in their efforts to determine where Duncan might have been at any given time where any unsolved murders or rapes of children were committed. The investigation, while no longer in its infancy, is still continuing and new details will likely emerge as Duncan's case moves toward trial.
Duncan's trial date was originally slated to begin on January 17, 2006. However, according to the November 23, 2005 edition of The Seattle Times, First District Judge Fred Gibler vacated the January date and pushed his trial date back to April 4, 2006, in response to defense attorneys' requests for more time to prepare for trial.
I wonder how many of our pedo-freak comments are from future Duncans?
Update: COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho -- Federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty against the registered sex offender accused of abducting two children last year and killing one of them, the U.S. attorney's office said Tuesday.
Too late IMO, I think life in prison for the diddler would be a better punishment.
Inmates love the shorteye’s….
