Girl in good condition; brother is still missing

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho -- A day after successfully recovering 8- year-old Shasta Groene from her six-week ordeal with a registered sex offender, investigators said Sunday they had not found her 9- year-old brother Dylan.

The Groene children disappeared from a rural Coeur d'Alene house where the bodies of their mother, brother and the mother's boyfriend were found May 16. Shasta was spotted by workers and customers early Saturday in a Denny's restaurant about 10 miles from the home.

She was in the company of Joseph Edward Duncan III of Fargo, N.D., who was arrested. Duncan has requested a lawyer and is refusing to talk to authorities, and Kootenai County Sheriff's Capt. Ben Wolfinger says the boy is feared dead.

"Dylan is our number one priority at this point," Wolfinger said. "Our goal is to find Dylan one way or another."

Duncan had been charged in March with molesting a 6-year-old boy at a middle-school playground in Minnesota. He was released on $15,000 bail in April but then failed to check in with a probation agent.

In Minnesota, the judge who set bail at $15,000 for Duncan said he would have set it substantially higher to prevent Duncan's release had he known fully about his criminal history.

Duncan spent more than a decade in prison for sexually assaulting a Tacoma, Wash., boy at gunpoint in 1980, when he was 16. He has a Web site that calls for lighter sentencing of sex offenders.

"I am scared, alone and confused, and my reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society," said a May 11 blog entry. "My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die."

Becker County District Judge Thomas Schroeder told Minnesota's KSTP-TV that the details of Duncan's bail hearing were just coming back to him.

"Usually on a bail hearing you have limited information, and so you set it in an amount that you think is appropriate," the judge said.

Schroeder told the station he was unclear on whether he knew that Duncan was a Level 3 sex offender when he set his bail. The county attorney's office contends that information was presented to the judge, the station said.

But Schroeder said if he had known about Duncan's record, he would have set bail high enough so he would not have gone free.

"It would have been substantially higher," the judge said. "I mean, looking back, it probably would have been quite a bit higher."

In Idaho, Wolfinger said Shasta Groene is reported in good condition in Kootenai Medical Center, where she has been reunited with her father and an older brother.

The arrest of Duncan, 42, has raised many questions and provided few answers.

"Where have Duncan and Shasta and Dylan been the last six weeks?" Wolfinger said. Authorities believe Duncan, who was raised in Tacoma, Wash., remained in the Pacific Northwest with the children, he said.

"Was Duncan involved in the triple homicide? Were other people involved? If so, who, and where are they?

"Why did this crime occur?" Wolfinger said. "I think 'why' is probably the biggest question we have."

Duncan was charged with kidnapping and is being held without bond. His first court appearance was scheduled for Tuesday, when an attorney would be appointed.

The search for the children began May 16 when authorities found three people dead at the family home: their mother, Brenda Groene, 40; their brother, Slade Groene, 13; and Mark McKenzie, 37, the mother's boyfriend. The victims were bound and then bludgeoned to death.

Shasta spoke at length with investigators on Saturday, but authorities are treating her gently, Wolfinger said.

"She's a little girl who's been through who knows what in the past six weeks," he said.

A search of the stolen vehicle Duncan was driving has been completed, and the evidence forwarded to the FBI, Wolfinger said. He declined to describe that evidence.

Forty investigators are working the case, he said, with the FBI and Idaho State Patrol backing up city and county police.

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