‘Dylan was a very brave boy’
As a child’s voice told of horrors suffered by herself and her 9-year-old brother, jurors listened intently, some clasping their hands over their mouths, other leaning forward or occasionally jotting a note on a clipboard. The victims’ father, Steve Groene, sat in the audience, where he clutched a tissue and left at the end of the day with reddened eyes. Duncan himself sat looking down, sometimes writing a note on a legal pad, but often closing his eyes.
Then-8-year-old Shasta told of a killer who plotted carefully, but then kept changing his mind. He selected the campsite because it was heavily treed, she said. “He was trying to find a camp with a lot of trees so no one would hear us scream or anything.” At one point, Duncan threw a large knife off into the woods, after telling the children that he wouldn’t hurt them any more, and that the knife was one he had bought “to scare children,” Shasta said. She said he did the same with an ax. “He said he was going to kill me and Dylan with the ax … but he was too afraid to, so he threw it in the woods.” Shasta said Duncan swung the ax near her head before that. “I thought that he was going to kill me,” she told officers. “But I knew that he couldn’t do it, because he tried to do it like 50 times before. … He tried to kill us with a whole bunch of other weapons.” After throwing away the ax, Duncan then bought another ax on one of his trips to town so he could chop fire wood, the child said.
At one point, Duncan, who had told Shasta that he himself was a coward, taunted Dylan for being afraid of the dark, Shasta recounted. “He also told Dylan that Dylan was a coward, which Dylan wasn’t – Dylan was a very brave boy,” she said. Shasta told the officers, “Every time that Jet said he was going to kill me or Dylan, Dylan would start crying and screaming, but I would only cry.”
When Duncan took Dylan from the campsite where he was holding the children captive to a nearby old cabin, Shasta said, “There was a hammer in the cabin, that he was going to hit Dylan in the head with it, but instead he wanted to choke Dylan and kill him that way … He told me that.”
When Capt. Dan Mattos asked Shasta why Duncan wanted to kill her, she said, “So he wouldn’t get caught – but I knew that he would get caught anyways.”
