Shasta Groene – Survival Story

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.

So shout out to Tracy Ferguson, Kim Rosencranz, Cat Cox, Jamie mcgar, Melissa M. Marshmallow, Stephanie Lynz seventy nine, Crystal Centrin, 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, Pam Armstrong, Brianna aupencru Elizabeth hann Becks, Whittacombe, and Autumn Banks.

Thank you so much, you amazing, amazing people.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 like a hunter stalking his prey.

was already dark. No one knows exactly when Joseph slipped 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, 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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 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, 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.

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 and snooping in things.

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.

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, 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. 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 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 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

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

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.

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 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 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 the sexual assault, but just know it occurred and it.

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, 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.

At first, she heard a loud boom and she ran around the jeep and saw Dylan lying on the ground bleeding.

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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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, 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.

our life. But thank you for being here. We appreciate every single one of you, and until next time, stay wicked.