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S-R reporter Rich Roesler found few of Joseph Duncan’s relatives willing to comment yesterday as a federal jury in Idaho sentenced him to death, but a woman in Tacoma who was involved with Duncan’s father – the two share a son – and first met Duncan as a troubled teen said the jury made the right call. Here is Roesler’s report:
“One of my sons asked `what if it was me that had done that?’ and I said `Honey, if you had done that, I would be the one to push the trigger,” said Pat Rybiski, 61. “I don’t care how abused or mistreated, there’s no excuse for what that man’s done.”“The Lord is the one that gets vengeance, the eye for the eye, not we people,” she said. “He guided the jury to that decision.”
Rybiski dated Duncan’s father for three years around 1980. Their son, now 27, is Duncan’s half-brother.
She said that an investigator for Duncan’s lawyers had repeatedly asked her to testify on his behalf during the sentencing. Rybiski refused. She monitored the trial from afar and was revolted by what she learned about the case.
“I was really kind of sick to my stomach thinking that the man had been in my house, close to all three of my children,” she said.
Duncan, then 17, was already in serious trouble when Rybiski met him for the first time. He was committed to a state mental hospital for an evaluation pending his trial for molesting a younger Pierce County boy at gunpoint.
“At the time, I thought `He’s a game-player, he tells you what you want to hear. And smart,’” she said.
Later, she said, Duncan visited the family, trying to get to know his half-brother. And as the two boys were talking in the living room, Rybiski said, Duncan said something that startled her.
“He said `People are going to tell you I am a very black soul, and you need to believe that,’” she said. “I remember that very clearly.”
She said she last spoke with Duncan shortly before he went to North Dakota.
Rybiski said she feels sorry for Duncan’s family. His brother Bruce died of a sudden heart problem two years ago. His mother lives in Tacoma, where she declined comment Wednesday. His father lived in Las Vegas recently, but has apparently moved.
“It would be hard for a mom and a dad to know that your kid was a demented…I don’t know the word. Psychopath,” she said.
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