Shasta Groene – Survival Story - Wicked and Grim: A True Crime Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
On a quiet Idaho night in May of two thousand
and five, an innocent family was attacked and slaughtered inside
their own home. Then their two youngest children were taken
and vanished without a trace. What began as a routine
welfare check would unravel into one of the most disturbing
child abduction cases in modern American history, a hunt that

(00:30):
crossed state lines, exposed years of hidden crimes, and also
shocked even seasoned FBI agents. And at the center of
it all was an eight year old girl forced to
survive the unthinkable. This is the survival story of Shasta Grony.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
My name's Ben, I'm Nicole, and you're listening to Wicked
and Grim.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
A true crime podcasting. The following podcast content. I have
material intended audience listener.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
That felt kind of lonely.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Our intro it felt lonely.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Without Jacko getting used to that.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
I see what you're saying. Halloween weeks over and done
with and onto a new season, specifically Mariah Carey season.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Oh gosh, tell me I'm wrong, I think. Well I'm
not quite there yet.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Well I'm not either, but the memes and stuff were
certainly there, and the stores you go to, Oh, man
man full swing Christmas.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
We took our Halloween decorations down. I guess I should
have been the grallowing decorations down, but I'm not ready
to put Christmas up yet. No, it would be a
little while. I think it's nice when I don't know,
when you have the house, it just looks so empty
and clean, almost after you on decrave right, holiday, less.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Clutter, it's more organized. It's a breath of fresh air.
Getting that space again.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, so I'm going to enjoy that for a little bit,
I think and.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
Totally understand that. So we have a whack ton of
people to thank over on Patreon. We didn't think during
Halloween week. We were a little bit preoccupied with everything
going on. So it's back into the regular scheduled things
today and this is going to be I think officially
our longest list of patrons ever.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah. Well, I mean, gosh, yeah, we get quite a
few people sign up, but I didn't realize it was
that many in that week. So that's fricking awesome.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
It is, so bear with me. I'm going to go
through a long list of some amazing people, and I'm
going to do my best on all of your names.
So shout out to Tracy Ferguson, Kim Rosencranz, Cat Cox,
Jamie mcgar, Melissa M. Marshmallow, Stephanie Lynz seventy nine, Crystal Centrin,

(03:09):
Ca Von, Sherry Harmison, Dimitri Miltrin, Jamie Hill, Deborah rob
Cindy Brunson, Laurie Diltz, Lyssa Sirah Vultanan, Sarah Hill, Melissa Bowling, Medley,
Natasha Hankem, Kathy, Emily Hendrix, Stephanie Schneider, Kelly Powers, Dave Langford,

(03:31):
Pam Armstrong, Brianna aupencru Elizabeth hann Becks, Whittacombe, and Autumn Banks.
Thank you so much, you amazing, amazing people.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Dan Dang, that's a good list of humans right there.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
It is a good list of humans, and they got
some pretty cool stuff going through October. Though we've been
silent the last couple days recouping from everything.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Wow. I mean, there's a lot for people to catch
up onto, so I think that's understandable.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
That's definitely true. But we got some cool stuff lined
up both in the podcast here and over on Patreon,
So be sure to stay tuned into the podcast and
check out Patreon if you're interested. Yeah, but I think
we should mosey on over to our case for the day.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
What do you think, back to normal schedule and scheduled programming.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Normally scheduled programming. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, for sure,
let's do it. So this is a survival story, and
I thought it'd be good to come back into everything
with a survival story.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
That's a good idea.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
But it comes with a warning. This does discuss the
abuse and sexual abuse of children. Oh gosh, So I
keep details very limited in that aspect. Okay, okay, you
ready for this? Yep? Now. Before the world knew her name,
before the headlines and Amber alerts, before the word survivor
was ever even attached to an eight year old girl,

(04:50):
Shasta Gronie was just a kid growing up in a
small house tucked into the trees along Wolf Lodge Bay
Road in northern Idaho. Her mother, Brenda Groenei, was forty.
She was a barefoot in the summer natural living, make
anything work kind of mom, always planting her feet in
the dirt like she needed the earth to really steady
and ground her. It was said she could take a

(05:11):
rundown house, a thrift store couch, and a handful of
wildflowers and somehow make it feel warm and inviting, like
a home, like someplace to live.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
I love that. I want to be like that when
I grow up.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
That's something to strive for. Honestly, Yeah, she was part hippie,
part force of nature, and she didn't fuss over appearances.
She made things work. Her fiance, Mark Kenzie, wasn't loud
or dramatic. He was a kind of man who fixed
what he broke, helped who needed helping, and kept the
house running with quiet reliability. He loved her kids like

(05:45):
they were his own, and they trusted him the way
children do when a man has proven himself to be safe.
Three of Brenda's five children still lived at home, thirteen
year old Slade the oldest, who was already doing yardwork
for neighbors and teasing his siblings in the way that
only big brothers really can. Then there was nine year
old Dylan, who was gentle, sensitive and openly attached to

(06:07):
his mom, a kid who cried, easily, hugged off, and
defended his little sister when she needed him. And then
there was Shasta, the youngest, eight years old and small
for her age, but already sharper and stronger than anyone
really realized. Their two oldest brothers had already moved out,
so the house most days was just the five of them.
There were school, movies, chores, and of course the kids

(06:30):
playing outside barefoot like their mother often did, and nobody
thought twice about it. They lived near the woods, surrounded
by tall pines, and the kind of trust in the
surroundings that comes from believing danger is something that happened
somewhere else. The back door to their home, in fact,
stayed unlocked, so that the dogs could go in and
out at night freely. It was the kind of household

(06:52):
you don't really worry about danger with, because danger, as
I mentioned, was far away, not here, happened to other
people somewhere else, on another street and another neighborhood and
another home. Except little did they know danger was actually here,
and it was already here. One afternoon, Brenda looked out
the window and she froze in place. There was a

(07:13):
man on the hill behind the house. He wasn't walking
or exploring, but he was watching. She pointed him out
to Mark, who ran inside to grab binoculars, but by
the time he got back, the man was gone, swallowed
by trees and who knows where. They tried to laugh
it off. Maybe it was a hunter passing through, or
a hiker who had wandered a little bit too far

(07:34):
off the trail. Maybe she'd even imagined it. Who knows.
Maybe it was just nothing. But it wasn't nothing. The
man on the hill was someone by the name of
Joseph Edward Duncan, a convicted child predator out on bail.
He was driving a stolen jeep with fake license plates
and wearing night vision goggles and already studying their family

(07:56):
like a hunter stalking his prey.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Oh man, I hate this.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
He watched them play in the yard, he learned where
each child slept, and he returned night after night, staying
long enough to memorize the rhythms of their life. He
didn't want money or material things. He wanted children, and
in the Grony family he found exactly what he was
looking for.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
That's some creepy shit right there.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
This man is scum of scum.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
I will say that now well, and honestly, if you
just see him once like that, you would, you know,
just push it aside like oh, or just make excuses.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
Right for sure, because it could be I mean, you're
out in the bush, people walk around, hiking, they hunt.
Who knows, right, Maybe it's a neighbor surveying his property
lines and gets up to yours and he's trying to
figure out where it is. Whatever acred you have, who's
to say? Now, it's when patterns start to emerge that
you start to think twice about things. But unfortunately they

(08:53):
didn't have that insight. They only saw him the once so.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
One time, so it's yeah, it's easy to just be like, oh,
that was nothing. It was just kind of creepy, but nothing, yeap.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
Now, as I mentioned, the back door even stayed un lock,
so the dogs would come and go, and no one
thought twice about it. But Joseph, well, he saw an opportunity.
May fifteenth, two thousand and five, was supposed to end
like any other night at the Grony home. The family
had spent the evening at a neighbor's barbecue, having fun,
and when they finally drove back to Wolf Lodge, it
was already dark. No one knows exactly when Joseph slipped

(09:28):
into that house, only that he had already been inside
before learning where each person slept and mapping out the
rooms exactly, regardless of how long. Once inside he waited,
he brought with them zip ties, gloves, a hammer, and
a sawn off shotgun. Somewhere between midnight and morning, Brenda
woke up first. She must have sent something was wrong,

(09:49):
a sound, a shadow, or the unmistakable feeling that they
weren't alone, just something. She went straight for her children's
room and shook Shasta and Dylan awake, whispering the kind
of no child should ever have to hear that someone
is in the house. The three of them walked into
the living room, where Joseph was already waiting, with gloved

(10:10):
hands and a gun in his grip. They were now
confronted with an armed intruder, and they were powerless. Now
things are a little bit vague here on how this
exactly played out, but we are following the events as
eight year old Shasta recalls it. And once the family
was all gathered, he then zip tied Branda first, then Mark,

(10:30):
then Slade. The two youngest children were then sent outside,
barefoot into the night, told to sit in the yard
while the rest of the family was dealt with. They
heard what happened next, but they didn't see it. The
thuds the screams and the sickening, dull rhythm of a
hammer striking flesh again and again coming from inside the house.

(10:52):
Now at one point during the attack, thirteen year old
Slade somehow made it outside, injured, staggering in a daze
and covered in blood, before Joseph drug him back inside
and finished what he started. Oh No, By the time
the house went quiet, three members of the family were dead,

(11:14):
and the two youngest children were alive, sitting outside in
the dark. But Joseph wasn't done. He then put both
Shasta and Dylan into the back of his jeep and
drove away from Wolf Lodge, past the darkened houses, pasted
the neighbors who'd soon be waking to sirens the past
life they had known hours earlier. While the siblings sat

(11:36):
frozen in the back seat, the dogs they barked in
the otherwise silent house, and early the next morning, the
neighbor who owed sleigh money came to the door. He
was ready to hand him a few dollars for mowing
his lawn as he was doing yardwork for neighbors. Right. Yeah,
he came, and he knocked, but there was no answer
in the home. Now on the driveway. The cars were

(11:56):
all still there, but there was no answer. In fact,
there there's even some doors in the vehicles that were
left to jar, a little bit left open. Something didn't
seem right, something was wrong, so he called the police.
When officers arrived and entered the home on the morning
of May sixteenth, two thousand and five, for that welfare check,

(12:17):
they found what they later described as a scene quote
beyond brutal. Brenda and slade laid in the kitchen, mark
in the living room, and there was blood everywhere, bloody footprints,
handprints splattered all over. It was an absolute massacre in
that home. But there was no sign of Shasta or Dylan.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
It would be a complete nightmare in there.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yes, that's exactly what it was. It was clear this
wasn't a burglary gone wrong or a fight that spiraled
out of control. It was a targeted, violent event in
a way that didn't match anything local law enforcement had
ever seen before. Three people brutally bludgeoned and murdered and
two young children missing, no signs of forced entry, no

(13:03):
obvious motive, nothing, and the killer hadn't even tried to
cover up or hide what he'd done. Zip Ties were
still left on the bodies, binding them together. Blood was
still fresh, like I said, footprints, handprints. The back door
was unlocked. The family car sat in the driveway, each
door left slightly open, like the killer walked away, not
in a hurry, but with a purpose, after looking around

(13:24):
and snooping in things.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
Well, I have to say too, the one son that
he murdered was a child. Yes, I think you had
said he was like thirteen. That's a kid, Yes, definitely,
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
But he had taken the two youngest, is what he Yeah? Yeah, Now,
the crime scene didn't just tell investigators what had happened,
It told them someone had taken time to do it.
Shasta and Dylan, of course, quickly became the priority right
out of the gate. They were assumed alive until proven otherwise,
and within hours an Amber alert went out statewide and

(13:57):
then nationally. Their faces were on TV, on highway billboards,
and inconvenience store windows and posters. Everyone was looking for
a little girl with wide brown eyes and a boy
with a shy smile. While detectives tried to figure out
who would want to murder a family and take these
two children. But the first forty eight hours went nowhere.

(14:19):
There was no forced entry, no obvious enemies, no ransom call,
no fingerprints that matched anyone in the system, no vehicle
spotted leaving the scene, nothing, No neighbors heard anything unusual
except the family dogs beginning to bark in the early
morning darkness. The killer walked out of that house like
a ghost, and investigators worked their way outwards in circles
trying to find something, starting with people closest to the family,

(14:42):
you know, friends or ex's, coworkers, neighbors, that sort of thing.
They questioned everyone in the area, including one man named
Concrete Bob Lutner, who was a rough edged local with
a criminal record and a rumored debt to Brendan Mark.
He had apparently visited the family the same day that
they were murdered, and he owed them approximately two thousand dollars.

(15:03):
He owned tools, he had a temper, and he knew
the house, so police announced him as a person of interest.
Within hours of that being announced, Concrete Bob himself walked
into the police station on his own accord and demanded
to be interviewed, and he wanted to prove he wasn't
anywhere near the house when the murders happened now as

(15:23):
alibi checked out and there was no physical evidence that
tied him to the scene. So just like that, the
only lead they had, well it disappeared. By day three,
national media had arrived, Satellite trucks lined the rural roads.
Reporters described the scene as if it were straight out
of a horror movie, and the FBI joined the case.
A one hundred thousand dollars reward was posted. Search teams

(15:45):
combed the mountains, riverbanks, and logging roads around Wolf Lodge,
trying to find any clue or even potentially bodies, but
there was nothing. Not a footprint or sightings, no vehicle trace.
The two children were just gone. Now. While Idaho detectives
were busy trying to find anything they could, the man

(16:06):
that they were after, Joseph Edward Duncan, was calm. He
was driving and eating at gas stations, and in the
back of his seat of that stolen red jeep, two
children were being taken deeper into a nightmare. Now. At
the time the murders took place, Joseph was already a
fugitive from another state, a registered Level three sex offender

(16:27):
who'd been released on bail just weeks earlier after being
charged with molesting two boys in Minnesota.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Oh, man, there's no reason that man should be released then.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Just you wait, he should be behind bars, like you said,
awaiting trial. But a judge allowed him out on a
fifteen thousand dollars bail, and a local businessman, convinced Joseph
had turned his life around, paid it and set him free. Wow,
fifteen thousand dollars bail for a level three registered sex offender,

(17:00):
the highest level.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
I mean, gosh, it's like, you don't want to blame anyone,
but you kind of have to blame those two, the
judge and that business man, because they like, they enabled
him to be out of jail.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
They one percent? Did I agree wholeheartedly?

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Holy shit? So like blood is on their hands now.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Joseph's criminal record didn't look like the profile of someone
who might reoffend, which is kind of like, you know
the question, oh, would Joseph reoffend if we let him
out on a fifteen thousand dollars bail? Well, his criminal
record actually looked more like the portfolio of someone who
never stopped offending. By age sixteen, he'd already raped more
than a dozen boys.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
What the shit.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
At seventeen, he abducted and raped another child at gunpoint
and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, where he
served only fourteen. Each time he got out, he escalated,
gun stolen children, assaulted probation, violated state lines, crossed, re arrested, released, repeat, Oh.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
My gosh, this is not okay. I feel like anyone
just that has even once heard a child should just
like never again. You just don't ever get an opportunity again.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
I agree. No amount of supervision, no amount of therapy
or anything could change an individual like this. The system
kept sending him back out. The system was failing repeatedly,
and he kept doing exactly what everyone feared he would do,
which is reoffend. In the spring of two thousand and five,
when the Minnesota judge freed him, he didn't go home.

(18:30):
He didn't wait to face a new trial. I want
to know what he did. He rented a jeep, stole
license plates, bought night vision goggles, a camcorder, restraints, weapons,
and camping supplies, and started driving west. This was immediate
upon his release. This is what he did.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Oh my gosh, this makes me sick. Yeah, like this, Oh,
it's just the fact that this could have been really
quite easily prevented.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
I yeah, but this is the problem. It's these these
reoffenders that are being released back into the world consistently,
the system not doing their job, the system failing and
allowing them to do these things to human beings who
are out there in the world and innocent.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yeah. See, I honestly don't get mad like with I
mean the system, I guess I get mad at But
like judges and stuff, for example, I don't generally like
get mad their job is hard, but in this instance,
like I'm like pissed about this, Like that is just
not okay.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, I agree, I generally don't judge a judge.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, the different they have a hard job, but this
is just this is wrong.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
Now, this judge fucking failed hard.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
So, after driving with the stolen jeep and all this
new supplies, when he reached Idaho, he didn't choose a
target with a history behind it. He just kept his
eyes open. There was no grudge or debt or any
connection of any kind. He simply passed a small house
on a quiet rural road and saw two children, a
girl and a boy, playing outside in the sun, and
decided those were the ones, really, and it's that randomness

(20:03):
that haunted a lot of people later. The Grony family
didn't know him, deadn't crossed him. They never even saw
him before, or he even realized he was coming. When
Joseph took Shasta and her brother Dylan, he told them
they would die too if they fought him, and so
they sat there, silent and shaking as they drove for
hours into the mountains and into the forest. Their world

(20:26):
became trees, dirt, and a tent and cold air with
the man who stole them. The first campsite was deep
in the wilderness outside Saint Regis, Montana, isolated enough that
no one would hear a scream or stumble upon them
by accident. Joseph immediately gave them rules, things like when
they could eat or sleep, or go walk, or even
when they could talk. Everything was a test, and every

(20:47):
failure had an extreme punishment and beating and abuse. He
alternated between moments of kindness, letting them have marshmallow roasts
and giving him soda, and then bursts of violence. But
most horrific of all was the sexual assault that both
children were subjected to. Now, as I mentioned at the
very beginning. I'm not going to go into detail of

(21:09):
the sexual assault, but just know it occurred and it.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Was violent, which I mean, given what this piece of
shit is, it's not surprising, I guess.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah. Now, Shasta noticed something early on. The more Joseph
focused on Dylan, the more danger her brother was in,
and so she did something no child should ever have
to do. She began to make herself useful to the
man who killed her family.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Dang.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
She seemed to step up in situations, put herself in
the line of fire. She laughed when he wanted her to.
She asked him questions about his life. She pretended to
trust him, she called him by his nickname, all to
try and protect her brother. But Dylan was breaking. The abuse,
the starvation, and the constant fear it began to hallow

(22:01):
him out from the inside. Shasta could see it in
his eyes, the way he stopped reacting, stopped hoping, trying to,
you know, come up with an escape plan with a sister.
She promised him over and over that she would get
them both home, and then came a squirrel. Now Joseph
told them that the squirrel, if they caught it, well,

(22:23):
they could go home. Because the squirrel was ransacking their
camp and bothering them, getting into food and all this
sort of stuff lots. So if these two caught this
squirrel and got rid of it, they were good to
go home. That was the deal. And it was of
course a lie.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, lies for sure.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
And it was one of many lies. But to two
starving children, terrified captured out being subject to all this
in the bush, it was their saving grace. So they
built a trap out of sticks and whatever they could,
and after days of trying, they caught the squirrel.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
They're smart kids, say they are.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
Now. When this happened, they were elated. They thought they'd won.
Dylan even hugged Shasta and saying like, we're going home,
and in that moment the mood shifted. Joseph walked back
to the jeep, where he kept a plastic storage box
filled with various things, beer tools, rope, and the sawn
off shotgun that he always traveled with At the jeep.

(23:20):
The first blast shattered the illusion Dylan was over there
with him, and Shasta didn't even understand what had happened.
At first, she heard a loud boom and she ran
around the jeep and saw Dylan lying on the ground bleeding.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Oh my gosh. No.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
When she looked down there at Dylan, he was on
the ground, shot in the stomach, bleeding fast, but still alive,
still talking and begging for his life, saying please, don't please,
I don't want to die, like literally begging for his life.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
After they just did they were successful at what he
asked them to do. Correct, he just shoots them? Okay,
holy shit, this is just so messed up.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, but Joseph wasn't listening to his please. He walked over,
reloaded the gun and with no hesitation, he lifted it,
pressed it against the side of Dylan's head no, and
pulled the trigger.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
Oh my gosh, she.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Has to watch this happen. And she didn't scream, not
because she didn't want to, but she couldn't. It was
as if her body just shut down, like her brain
refused to process one more impossible reality. Now. Joseph cried
after doing this, and he claimed it was mercy, saying
that the first shot was an accident and the second

(24:36):
one was to end his pain. And it is believed
that the shot in the stomach was not intentional, whether
he had intended to still kill Dylan is unknown, but
is believed that there was a gem in the gun
of sorts, and the shot to the stomach was not
an intentional shot. Okay, but it is believed he was

(24:57):
most likely still going to kill Dylan. Why was going
for the gun all that sort of stuff. Yeah, shot
to the stomach is believed to not have been intentional.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
So this poor little girl just has now lost every
single family member.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Correct, and the one who was standing by her side,
her brother, Dylan, was gone.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
I don't even know. Yeah, how could you even just
like move forward with that?

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Knowing that well, in that moment, like she knew there
was no escape coming. She understood the gravity of the situation,
even at being eight years old. Yes, she knew there
was no getting away. If she wanted to live. She
knew this that she would have to make Joseph think
he needed her. She's smart enough to figure this out.
She needed to be his company, not a victim or
a hostage. She needs to befriend him.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Oh, the fact that a little eight year old has
to figure this out just, oh, it's too much.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
So even after he killed her entire family, shooting her
brother out there in the woods, and she's now alone
with him, she stayed calm, She continued to hold conversations.
She even smiled when he wanted her to smile, She listened.
She made herself whatever he needed, whatever kind of human

(26:13):
he needed her to be.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
How would she even know how to do that?

Speaker 1 (26:16):
I don't know. It was the only thing that she
had left in her though, the only fight she had,
and it worked. Just days after killing Dylan, Joseph asked
her a question. He asked her, do you want to
meet my mother? It was the crack she was waiting for,
and she said yes. And so, after more than a

(26:36):
month in the woods with a monster, she found herself
headed back to Idaho. In the early hours of July second,
two thousand and five, the door of a Denny's in
Cordelaine's swung open, and a little girl in pajama style
kind of close walked in beside a man everyone initially
assumed was her father. Now Shastagrony had been missing for

(26:57):
forty seven days. At this point, her face was everywhere billboards,
gas stations, nightly news broadcasts, you name it. There's flyers
taped up in convenience stores. Most people had stopped believing
that she was even alive at this point, and yet
here she was this thin, quiet, pale little girl with
her arms crossed in front of her, like she was

(27:19):
trying to make herself smaller. Inside that Denny, she ordered
herself a milkshake, and the waitress who was serving them
Amber Denon. She couldn't stop staring. Something felt off. The
girl didn't really look up, she didn't talk unless the
man gave her permission to, and she sat stiff with
eyes down on her shoulders, tight, not at all like

(27:39):
a child going out on an outing with her dad.
Getting a milkshake at Denny's. Yeah yeah, So Amber excused
herself and went to the manager, and she told the
manager that she believes that this girl looks a lot
like that missing grony girl, and the manager agreed.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
Oh my gosh, she's angels.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Hey wait, because the staff did some amazing stuff here.
They didn't panic, but what they did was stall the
food order to the table, and they called police quietly.
So stalling gives the police more time to arrive and
hold them there for longer. Not only that, but the
staff positioned themselves near the exit so no one could

(28:20):
slip out unnoticed, so they literally guarded the doors of
this place. These Dennis employees.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Wow, okay, because it would have been so easy for
them just head down to their job kind of thing,
and not really the observant of the situation. So this
is unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Well, and not only that, they didn't have to put
their bodies in the line. Yeah, what if he had
a gun and ran for the door they're standing there?

Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, wow, okay, this is good.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Eventually, the door to the restaurant opened and a Quardelaine
police officer walked in. He walked straight to the table
where they were sitting, crouched beside Shasta, and asked, what's
your name? She looked at Joseph first, as if checking
whether she was allowed to answer or not, and he nodded. Shasta.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
She said, oh my gosh, this could make me just
sob rain.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Now that single word broke six weeks of silence, and
the spell Joseph had been holding over her was gone.
Just like that, it was over. He went outside without
a fight. Police cuffed him beside his stolen jeep. A
search of that vehicle found restraints, weapons, night vision goggles,
and of course, the sawn off shotgun. Meanwhile, inside the

(29:29):
Denny's amber sat with Shasta at the booth and asked
her if her brother was in the car, to which
Shasta told her, no, he's in heaven.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Oh gosh, okay.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
By sunrise, Shasta was in a hospital, in a clean bed,
clean clothes, with warm food. Her father, Steve Groeney, arrived
and wrapped his arms around his little girl.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Oh right, yes, okay. I was like, what the shit
he died? But okay that was his stepfather, Yes.

Speaker 1 (29:59):
Her step So you did say that she lost her
entire family. I did say, yes, she did earlier because
I didn't want to give away the mouth that her
father was in fact still here.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
Holy heck. Okay.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
The world celebrated her safe return when news broke, but
for law enforcement, the case was still only half over.
There was still one question hanging in the air, heavier
than anything else where. Was Dylan. Now. Shasta had already
told investigators what had happened to him, that her brother
had been shot, killed and quote buried in the woods
by the place with the trees and the dirt road.

(30:34):
But remember she's eight years old. She didn't know state lines,
or couldn't coordinates or how far they'd driven or directions,
but still her description gave detectives enough to start Montana
a dirt road and a makeshift camp, homemade fire pit
even and of course the grave. Search teams were sent

(30:54):
to the Lolo National Forest, which is an enormous stretch
of wilderness spanning thousands of eight acres. They used helicopters,
cadaver dogs, grid searches, but the area was just too vast,
so they tried something else. What had turned the search
around was in fact the jeep that he drove see
After his arrest, Joseph's vehicle was impounded, but inside was

(31:17):
a GPS unit still mounted to the dashboard holding breadcrumb
data of everywhere that he had driven. The coordinates led
investigators straight into the forest where that campsite was. On
July fourth, two thousand and five, two days after Shasta's rescue,
investigators reached a clearing miles off the main road. There
were rope marks on trees, melted candle wax, and burned

(31:40):
scraps of a tarp, and then behind the campsite a
mound of disturbed soil. The remains recovered from that shallow
grave were confirmed by DNA. It was the body of
nine year old Dylan Grony. The autopsy left no room
for confusion. He had suffered one gunshot wound through the
abdomen and another one through the head. A public memorial

(32:03):
for Dylan was held twelve days later on what would
have been his tenth birthday. Oh gosh, no, his little
league teammates wore uniforms and his school friends released balloons. Now,
with Shasta rescued and Dylan's remains identified, investigators believe they
had reached the end of the nightmare, but it quickly

(32:24):
became clear there were only well, they were only just
at the tip of the iceberg on this story. You see,
Joseph Edward Duncan had a criminal record, but he wasn't
just a fugitive who happened to target one family. The
more investigators Doug, the more they realized his name had
a different kind of trail behind it, not one that
was bound up in legal terms or anything, one that

(32:47):
was actually scattered across states with parole logs, juvenile files,
old court records, and police databases, yes, but also with
open cold cases. The moment his mugshot hit the news,
phone started ringing in police departments, detectives who worked cold cases,
some over a decade old, in fact, were now suddenly

(33:08):
asking the same question, is this our guy? The first
confirmed link came from California. A Riverside County investigator recognized
Joseph instantly via a sketch, and in nineteen ninety seven,
it was a case with a ten year old Anthony Martinez,
who had been abducted at knife point while playing with

(33:28):
his friends. A partial fingerprint had been taken from duct
tape used to buying the boy, and a print well
that was never matched to anyone until now. When that
fingerprint was reanalyzed against Joseph, it came back as a match.
The case had haunted detectives for eight years, and now
they had their man. Then came Washington State. During her interviews,

(33:53):
Shasta told investigators that Joseph had talked casually, almost in fact,
like bragging about two girls in Seattle. He said that
he'd beaten them and left their bodies in the woods.
Now she didn't know their names, but detectives, well, they did.
There was Sammy Joe White, who was eleven, and Carmen Cubias,
who was nine. They both vanished in nineteen ninety six

(34:17):
and were found murdered two years later. The more they uncovered,
the clearer it became. This wasn't a man who snapped
in two thousand and five, or not even a man
who simply re offended. This was a predator who had
been serial attacking, abducting, raping, and murdering children for a

(34:37):
long time and never stopped. By his own admission, he
had assaulted more than a dozen boys before the age
of sixteen. He had been in and out of prison,
treatment programs and parole systems for nearly thirty years, and
every time he was released, children disappeared, parents had buried
their kids, and no one knew they were all connected.

(35:00):
Until that is, Shasta lived long enough to speak about it.
Not even live long enough to speak about it, But
Shasta befriended him, got the information needed, and managed to
get herself to safety to be able to speak about it.
For investigators, this was no longer just about the Grony family.

(35:21):
This was about how Joseph kept getting out, how he
was granted bail, how a registered Level three sex offender,
the highest risk category, could go missing for months and
no one was even looking for him. As one FBI
agent later put it, quote, we didn't just arrest a killer.
We exposed every failure that kept letting him kill. When

(35:44):
Joseph Duncan was finally in custody, there was no question
whether he would be prosecuted. That was obvious. It was
only a matter of where, how, and for what crime first.
His crimes they stretched across multiple states, to multiple courts
and multiple victims. Prosecutors from Idaho, Washington, California, and the

(36:05):
federal government government all had a legitimate claim to put
them on trial, but the one priority took precedence over everything,
and that was a justice for the Grony family and
the prosecution for Shasta. Idaho charged Joseph first filing three
counts of first degree murder for Brenda, Slade, and Mark,
and three counts of kidnapping as well. But even the

(36:26):
prosecutors knew that the state case was only part of
the story because once Joseph drove Shasta and Dylan out
of Idaho, he crossed state lines and that made it
a federal crime. Transporting children for sexual exploitation meant the
federal government had the right to seek the ultimate penalty,
which is death. The decision was made quickly. The federal

(36:51):
trial would come first and Idaho would wait. But Joseph
surprised everyone. Instead of fighting the charges, delaying the process,
or denying what he had done, he pled guilty. It
seems he didn't want a long trial or especially want
Shasta to take the stand, so he admitted everything, the kidnappings,

(37:12):
the torture, and the murders. That left only one question
for the jury, does this man live or does this
man die? The penalty phase was brutal for everyone involved
in this story. Juror saw graphic photographs, heard the recordings
Joseph made of himself abusing Dylan, and watched a thirty

(37:34):
three minute long video he filmed inside a shed abusing Yeah,
what the shit? It was all proof of what he
was capable of when no one was watching. One juror
later said, quote, it wasn't a question of whether he
deserved death, It was whether we could sleep again after
seeing what he did.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
On August twenty seventh, two thousand and eight, after just
three hours of deliberation, the jury returned its decision for
the murder of Dylan. He was sentenced to death for
the sexual exploitation resulting in death. He got death for
using a firearm in a violent crime resulting in death.
He was sentenced again to death three separate federal death sentences,

(38:20):
plus three additional life sentences on top. With the federal
case settled, Idaho moved forward instead of dragging the family
through the trial. Joseph again pled guilty, this time to
the murder of Brenda, Slade and Mark. He received three
more life sentences, each without the possibility of parole, and

(38:41):
the judge in this case made it clear too, if
for any reason, the federal death sentences were overturned, Idaho
would seek the death penalty all over again.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, I mean, well, it's about down time, really.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
The trials were still not over. California extradited Joseph next,
charging him with the nineteen ninety seven abduction and murder
of ten year old Anthony Martinez. Once again, he confessed.
Once again, he was sentenced two more life terms stacked
on top of the rest. By the end, Joseph had
three death sentences federally, eight life sentences without parole, and

(39:18):
zero chance of ever breathing free air.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Again because he is a complete monster.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
Absolute. For the first time in decades, he wasn't walking
out of prison for shasta life after her rescue wasn't well.
It wasn't a return to normal. It was the beginning
of a very long, complicated, and often painful fight to
figure out who she was beyond the worst thing that
ever happened to her. She was only eight years old

(39:45):
when she walked out of that Denny's with police. The
world called her the miracle child, the survivor, the brave one,
but she still was just a kid who watched her
entire family die. She lived through weeks of torture and
abuse and walk walked away from it all. The grief
came first, then the questions, then the pressure, interviews, media

(40:05):
and strangers calling her strong while she was still learning
how to sleep without just nightmares. Her father tried his
best to rebuild their life, but the relationship was extremely
strained due to all of this was unpredictable and marked
by a lot of trauma. As a result of it all,
Shasta was placed in and out of foster care. She

(40:25):
bounced between homes, rules, therapists, court dates, and expectations no
child should ever carry. Healing wasn't linear, and life wasn't either.
As she grew older, the weight of everything she survived
didn't fade, and like many survivors, especially those who experienced
trauma before they even understand the world, Shasta eventually turned

(40:46):
to substances to numb what therapy couldn't reach, and she
fell into addiction. But she didn't stay there. Recovery, real recovery,
came slowly, the way it often does, one hard at
a time. She also found love, and she became a
mother to five boys, each one proof that her life

(41:06):
did not end. In two thousand and five, she named
one of them Silent, a combination of her brother's names,
Slade and Dylan. Her youngest son also carries Dylan's middle name.
She built a home for her family, becoming a homeowner
at twenty years old. She created something that she never had, stability,
a place no one could take from her, and then

(41:28):
it all burned down. Everything she had built was gone
in a house fire that forced her and her kids
to start over yet again.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Okay, that is just not okay that someone who goes
through something like this also has that happened, Like holy shit.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah yeah, I was speechless when I learned.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
Well, yeah, like that is just some serious bullshit right there.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Yeah, to quote her, life is hard, right, now, but
I'll get through it. I always get through everything. Dawn
end quote, damn now. For more than fifteen years, Joseph
Edward Duncan sat in federal prison on death row, and
for just as long Shasta Groni was waiting. She wasn't
waiting for closure. She was waiting for justice, the kind

(42:16):
the system promised her when she was still small enough
to swing her legs off of a courtroom chair. She
wanted to watch him die, not out of revenge, because
it was supposed to be the ending, the ending that
she was owed, the ending she was promised. He took everything,
her family, her brother, her childhood, and the deal was simple.

(42:37):
He was sentenced to die for it all, and she
would get to witness it. But in March of twenty
twenty one, that ending was stolen. Instead of being executed,
Joseph died quietly in a prison hospital bed at the
age of fifty eight from brain cancer. When the news broke,
the world cheered and called it closure, but Shasta called
it a robbery. Quote. They told me I could watch

(43:00):
when they executed him. I wanted to look him in
the eye and show him that he didn't destroy me.
And I was robbed of that end quote. She said
his death triggered a full relapse of her addiction because
she would never get the chance to face him, to
tell him that she grew up, that she had children,
to tell him that she lived, and that he didn't

(43:22):
get to win. She also felt the system protected him
until the very end. He got a warm bed, he
got medical care, surgery, three meals a day, things her
family never got because they were no longer alive. Things
her brothers never lived long enough to even have. And
every time he appeared in court, she couldn't shake one

(43:42):
thing that she always saw. They had a bulletproof vest
on him when he was escorted in the buildings. The
man who beat her family to death with a hammer
filmed himself torturing her brother was being protected until nature
killed him instead. That's not closure, that's a loophole. Shasta
never set out to become an activist, but something shifted

(44:04):
when she got older, when she fully understood not just
what had happened, but why it was allowed to happen
at all. Her family wasn't murdered by a stranger who
appeared out of nowhere. They were murdered by a known
violent sex offender, a man with decades of Red flags,
violations and convictions. He was allowed to walk free on
bail again and again and again. The system didn't fail accidentally,

(44:29):
it failed by design. So at nineteen years old, Shasta
did something that took a different kind of courage than
just surviving. She spoke up. She started a justice campaign
called Slade and Dylan's Law, named after her two brothers.
The petition demanded that violent sexual predators, especially those who
target children, should never be released back into society. No

(44:52):
early release, no parole, no bail bonds that treat a
repeat offender like a minor threat. One conviction for a
sexual crime against a child would mean life behind bars.
By the time the petition closed, more than fifty thousand
people had signed it, and even though it did not
become law, it forced something important into national conversation, the

(45:14):
fact that the justice system already knew what Joseph Duncan
was and still gave him another chance to destroy a family. Honestly,
the fact that that was not turned into law, I'm
kind of disgusted with.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah, I'm surprised.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
The fact that someone out there said, na, we should
give a violent sexual predator against children less than life
behind bars is disgusting to me. They should be behind
That should be the minimum. Life behind bars in.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
My opinion, Yeah, pretty messed up now.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
In the end, Shasta found love with her five sons.
She found love with a partner who supports her, and
a home that she's trying to rebuild. She still struggles, Yes,
she still gets overwhelmed, but she keeps going. Shasta doesn't
dress her story up as triumph. She tells it the
way it is. Survival is messy, healing is layered, and
you don't magically become a whole just because you didn't die.

(46:09):
But every day she wakes up, parents are children and
refuses to let Joseph Duncan own another second of her life.
That is survival, and that is victory. It may not
be the outcome that she imagined. Where she is sitting
across from him in prison to take every ounce back
of power that he had. Right, she wanted to look

(46:30):
him in the eye and say the word she rehearsed
in her head for years. You didn't destroy me. You
don't own me. I lived, I had children, I loved,
I built a life you never get to control. But
even without that final conversation, she still managed to make peace. See,
in the end, she realized she had a choice, a

(46:51):
choice to forgive, not to free him, but to free herself.
She also chose motherhood over bitterness, life over tragedy, and
she chose to speak up against repeat predators who are
being released quote by mistake. She still plans to tell
him what she lived through, not by his face, obviously,

(47:12):
because he's gone, but by telling the world with every interview,
every page of her book, every time she says her
brother's name out loud. It's the conversation that never happened. Quote.
I don't hate him because if I hate him, he
still owns a part of me, and he doesn't get
that anymore. End quote. It's not a fairy tale ending,

(47:35):
but it's real. And Shasta in the end, got her
justice by living the life he tried to steal. And
that's the survival story of Shasta.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Groney, hmmm, damn, damn, damn, damn.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
And if it's not obvious, Shasta is one hundred percent
our badass of the day.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Gosh, well, yeah, just incredible, especially at eight years old,
what she did, no kidding, it's yeah, it's hard to
even comprehend. I don't even feel like I could do that,
and I'm, like, you know, in my late thirties.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
So yeah, I feel how to have the power to
go through that coverage, not also the wits to do it.
To understand, I need to befriend him and then to
go on through all these things in life and keep
your chin up, and then to say I don't hate him,
because if I hate him, he still owns a part
of me and he doesn't get that anymore. Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
You know. It is slightly sad because I wish afterwards
that her life would have been a bit easier, but
she went through like Helen back, so of course it
would be a journey. Yeah, the house fire thing is
so unnecessary.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
But that's just life beating you down, honestly, like what
the hell?

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah, And it's just honestly so fucked up to imagine
there are people like that guy in this world, Like.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
That's scary individuals capable of something like that. Yeah, he
never stopped. The second he was out, he was right
back to it. He never intended to stop, no, he.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
And yeah, he just didn't give a shit.

Speaker 1 (49:14):
And yet a judge put him on a fifteen thousand
dollars bail, and a business man.

Speaker 2 (49:17):
Was like, no, I know you. I still have trouble
with processing that. Did they not realize who he or
all his crimes or his full history?

Speaker 1 (49:26):
Because it doesn't make sense, it doesn't, it's absurd, But
that's what happened.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Oh my gosh. Well and then also I was realizing
too that she would have had some other or siblings too, right.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
She does have two older SIPs.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
There was two that weren't in the home, correct, So
her whole entire family wasn't taken away, but you know
pretty pretty much. So yeah, so damn, damn. That is
like that ah, that one is going to halt me
for a while.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
Rightfully, so I can understand. It's heavy, it's scary, and
it's so necessary because the system just failed. And we're honestly,
like people talk about to this day, like things are
getting worse, like this world's falling apart. I honestly feel
like the world's falling apart because of things like this
systems failing people. They're letting repeat offenders walk and walk

(50:19):
and walk, and they're they're almost protecting these perpetrators instead
of the victims.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Yeah. Well yeah, like her. Her life was probably almost
harder after she didn't have like, you know, any resources,
most likely or not the resources that he would have had.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Right, No, I guarantee you if she had brain cancer,
she would have had to provide her own medical for
that surgery. Yet he was in jail and that was
covered by taxpayers.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
Okay. That is messed up, isn't it. Oh? Okay, I
don't like that. I don't like that at all.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
That's the problem with this world.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Yeah, when you put it that way and think about
it like that, that's fucked.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
Yeah. So with that, thank you guys for being here.
A bit of a heavy story. Like I said, I
kind of grade out some of the more graphic stuff, yeah,
is good. Yeah, but thank you for being here. If
you want to check out the description of this podcast,
we are an independently produced and owned show or an
indie podcast. It's us in our tiny home, researching, writing, producing, recording,

(51:28):
you name it. We got our dogs and our chickens too,
but they don't really do much for the show, just
our life. But thank you for being here. We appreciate
every single one of you, and until next time, stay wicked.

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Shasta Groene – Survival Story

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Shasta Groene – Survival Story