Groene case prompted attacks

OLYMPIA – Nearly a year after he was arrested, Michael Anthony Mullen says it was an infamous North Idaho case – Joseph Edward Duncan’s alleged kidnapping, sexually abusing and killing of Groene family members in May 2005 – that drove him to murder two Bellingham sex offenders.

“Duncan is the straw that broke my back and forced me to go public with my fight,” he said in prison correspondence with a Spokesman-Review reporter. Mullen is serving a 44-year sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. In a letter responding to questions for this story, Mullen also made two startling claims:

“The two men he was convicted of killing weren’t the first sex offenders he’d killed.

“He videotaped the slain men’s last words and “execution,” and the video “will be released soon on the Internet” as a warning to sex predators.

Bellingham police are skeptical.

“That would be news to me,” police Lt. Craig Ambrose said about the claim of other killings. “He had talked about continuing and identifying others, but not that he’d actually followed through.”

Ambrose also said that police have no indication that a video was made.

Shortly after the Aug. 26, 2005, killings, Mullen wrote to local newspapers, promising more deaths. He signed the letters “Agent Life.” On Sept. 5, after telling two relatives what he’d done, they insisted he turn himself in to police. He called a police dispatcher in Bellingham, set up a meeting with detectives and confessed. He said he wanted the death penalty.

Police in Bellingham and throughout the country worried about copycat killings of other sex offenders, which didn’t happen. But Ambrose said the department has stopped posting addresses of offenders on its Web site.

At Mullen’s sentencing, Victor Vasquez’s daughter wept and said that her father – who’d gone to prison for molesting her – was a human being and hadn’t deserved to die. The public is too quick to judge all sex offenders equally, she said, when their circumstances are often wildly different.

“If we went back hundreds of years, we could be stoning them and hanging them in the streets,” she said. But some sex offenders, she said, are legitimately trying to start their lives over and make amends.

“My way of making peace with it was to get to know the person he became,” she said of her father. “When I met him, it was definitely a reminder that people change and that things can turn out positively.”

By all accounts, the two slain Bellingham men were living quiet lives after serving their sentences. Neighbors told police that they kept to themselves and maintained a tidy yard. They had no known involvement with either Duncan or the Groenes.

But by killing Vasquez, 68, and Hank Eisses, 49, Mullen said he felt he was sending a warning to other sex offenders.

“I feel that it needed to be done. I should have held public executions of pedophiles long ago,” he wrote.

He said he was aghast at the North Idaho abductions of Dylan and Shasta Groene and the killing of their brother Slade. Mullen said he often thinks of the days Dylan spent in captivity before Duncan allegedly killed him.

“In my mind, I can see and feel the horror this boy endured before his death,” he said. “… We as a Nation failed to protect these three beautiful children!” Mullen wrote. “… Yeah, Duncan had a huge effect on me! I hope he suffers a brutal and slow death. Duncan is everything I hate in mankind. I wish they’d lock him in a prison cage with me!!”

Mullen said he, too, was sexually molested.

“I was first befriended, manipulated, exploited, then sexually abused at the age of five,” he wrote. Later, he said, he grew strong enough to fight back and “became the hunter instead of the hunted.”

In prison, he said, he’s working on an autobiography. He’s also “personally writing to welcome all child sex offenders sentenced to a Washington state prison.”

He concluded with two Latin sayings: “Virginibus Puerisque” (“For girls and boys”), and Julius Caesar’s famous “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”).