By Katherine Ramsland
According to former detective Vernon Geberth in Sex-related Homicide and Death Investigation, the abduction and murder of a child under eighteen by a stranger is rare. "Statistically, they comprise about .50 of 1% of all murders in the United States (between 100 and 200 cases annually.)" Yet these incidents affect communities far more traumatically than similar abduction/murders of adults, because it is among the worst scenarios any parent can imagine. When three members of the Groene-Mckenzie family were bludgeoned to death in their home in Idaho on May 15, 2005 and young Shasta and Dylan Groene were kidnapped, it became instant national news.
Thanks to the nationwide Amber Alert program, several people recognized Shasta in a restaurant, which probably saved her life. She told police that over the course of several days, she and her nine-year-old brother had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by their kidnapper. Then he'd taken Dylan away, tortured and shot him, burned his remains and fled with her. (Dylan's remains were found in Montana.) There's little doubt, if not for the intervention of concerned citizens, that she was next.
Their abductor was James Edward Duncan III, a convicted child molester. His criminal history includes a long string of assaults against children, as well as at least one other murder. He remains a suspect in several as-yet unsolved cases, and in his online blog, he alluded to having committed murder more than once. Duncan officially began his criminal career in 1978 when he was fifteen by forcibly raping a nine-year-old boy at gunpoint. Apparently he told a therapist that he'd already assaulted at least a dozen boys in a similar manner, six of whom he'd bound. Only two years later, he was in prison for raping a 14-year-old boy.
Duncan remained in prison for fourteen years, and his parole conditions stipulated that he stay away from children. He apparently managed to do that, at least according to official records, though several children disappeared in places where he lived and those cases are still under investigation. Reportedly, he admitted to FBI agents that he was involved in the abduction and murder of Anthony Martinez in Riverside, California in 1997. He'd attempted to grab Anthony's brother as well, but that boy escaped.
In April 2006, Duncan was charged in Minnesota with molesting a six-year-old boy and attempting to molest his friend. Bond was posted and Duncan then purchased a shotgun, a claw hammer, and ammunition. He stole a Jeep Grand Cherokee and fled the state, arriving in Idaho. He apparently spotted the Groene children in their yard, and staked out the home for a few days until he determined the right time to go grab the kids. Instead of taking them from the yard, he decided to kill three people inside the home. Even worse, rather than just shoot them, he chose instead to bind them and use the claw hammer to bludgeon them to death. Each person heard the others being killed, which bears witness to Duncan's need to inflict psychological as well as physical torture. He also described to Shasta and Dylan what he had done to their family and recorded his treatment of them for his later enjoyment.
Duncan, 42, had grown mean over the years, and viewed his treatment as unjust. He'd kept a Web diary labeled "Blogging the Fifth Nail," a reference to the nails used on Jesus Christ during his crucifixion. In some entries, Duncan discussed the idea of right and wrong and his awareness that he did not know the difference. "God has shown me the right choice," he wrote in April 2005, "but the demons have tied me to a spit and the fire has already been lit." Duncan also expressed a great deal of anger over his social isolation, the result of his Level III sex offender status, and he wanted to strike out at society. "My intent," he wrote, "is to harm society as much as I can, and die." Apparently his aim was to kill people and grab children for his own pleasure. In one entry, just four days before the Idaho murders and abductions, he wrote, "The demons have taken over." Yet writing from prison, he apparently takes credit for coming "into the light" by returning the girl to her home.
Duncan is among those offenders who established a pattern of child abuse when he was an adolescent and had become addicted to it. Sharon K. Araji, a professor of sociology at the University of Alaska, writes in her review of child sexual abusers for Serial Offenders: Current Thoughts, Recent Findings that little research has been done on this "hidden" group. Most of what we know refers to adult male offenders. Pedophilia is the result of an intensely arousing fantasy, triggered by the sight or smell of a child, and many adult child abusers got their start before the age of 18. In fact, juveniles commit anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of sexual acts against children (usually against someone they know). Araji states that the typical juvenile sexual offender is male, age fourteen, white, and living with both parents. He generally has numerous victims before being caught and may be a victim of abuse himself.
The average number of victims for these offenders is seven. Like Duncan, they're generally opportunistic, calculated, and interested in victims who appear to be vulnerable. They rely on bribes, threats, and coercion, and have often befriended young children because they're not comfortable with their own age group. They may then experiment with them sexually and even develop delusions that children desire them, when in fact it's more likely that children simply cannot physically resist them. "Most come from families with multiple problems," Araji indicates, "such as lack of sexual boundaries, frequent exposure to pornography, substance abuse, and abusive and conflicting family interactions."
They experience anxiety when not with their fantasy object and will attempt to alleviate it with child pornography or substances, but eventually they respond to the urge to go out and seek the real thing. In order to fully operate, they require anonymity, so if they get caught and placed on a sexual offender registry, they chafe at being thus restricted. It's not surprising, then, that they often move their residence to attempt to escape community awareness. Forced separation from children exacerbates their anxiety, which in turn heightens their tendency to violate. The recidivism rate for those who prefer male victims is about twice that of those who prefer females.
If abusers are psychopathic and experience no remorse over what they do to children, then they have no internal moral guard against their impulses. They will repeat their offenses, growing more secretive and escalating in intensity. Those who also need to violate with pain will often evolve toward torture and murder. If that excites them, then unless they're stopped, they will undoubtedly become serial killers.
One of the earliest such offenders in America was Jesse Pomeroy, who is similar to Duncan. At the age of 14 in 1874, Pomeroy was arrested for the sadistic murder of Horace Mullen, a four-year-old boy. The townspeople already knew him from his earlier offenses: at the age of ten and eleven, he'd sexually tortured other boys. Caught, he was sentenced to reform school, where he enjoyed watching the headmaster dispense physical discipline. After his release, Pomeroy mutilated and killed a 10-year-old girl who had entered his mother's store. A month later, he snatched Mullen, taking him to a swamp outside town and nearly decapitating him with a knife. After Mullen's body was discovered, Pomeroy was taken to see it. Asked if he'd done this vile deed, he reportedly admitted, "I suppose I did." When the girl was found buried in his mother's cellar, he confessed to that murder, too. He was convicted and given life in solitary confinement.
More recently, during the 1980s, twenty-year-old John Joubert was convicted of the murders of two boys in Nebraska. He'd gotten his start in Maine at the age of thirteen when he'd stab other children with pencils, razors, and other implements and found that he enjoyed hurting others. He tried strangling a boy and then when he was 18, he killed an eleven-year-old. Then he fled the town. From a broken home, Joubert had been an angry child, and he discovered both solace and power in striking out at others and getting away with it. In Nebraska, he looked for victims while volunteering in a Boy Scout troop. For him, the torture and murder of young boys was a way to relieve sexual tension. But as with all predators, the experience did not ultimately satisfy, so he would soon plan another.
Offenders like Pomeroy, Joubert and Duncan tend to become angrier as they grow older and more likely to become abusively violent. Their fantasies involve more than just sexual pleasure with children; they also envision hurting these vulnerable victims as a symbolic way of striking back at society, and possibly at people who have hurt them. They feel fully justified — even entitled - so they continue without remorse and each successive act is often worse than the one before it. Once they've become angry, enthralled with torture, and entertained only by the thrill of murder, there's little that can be done to stop them at this point, short of lifetime incarceration or execution.
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