Town note
The town motto is "founded by a jackass and inhabited by his descendants".
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His father was a career soldier and the family moved every year or two, including postings in Europe. By then he was using marijuana daily, along with acid, amphetamines, barbiturates, Valium and PCP.
In 1980, aged seventeen, he broke into a neighbour's house and stole four pistols, a thousand rounds of ammunition and pornographic magazines. He said later that he had meant to go home and look at the magazines, but instead took a gun and went cruising for a victim. He found a fourteen-year-old boy outside a school, forced him into the woods at gunpoint, made him perform oral sex twice, beat him with a stick and burned his buttocks with a cigarette.
The court imposed twenty years and suspended all of it, sending him instead to a sex offender treatment programme at Western State Hospital. A psychological evaluation found him preoccupied with deviant sexual fantasies and described him as meeting the definition of a sexual psychopath. He told doctors that his sexual history began at eight, that he had forced a five-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him by the age of twelve, that he had abused a nine-year-old at gunpoint at fifteen and that by sixteen he had committed thirteen rapes of young boys.
On Valentine's Day 1982 his mother stayed with him at a hospital cottage used for family visits. After she went to bed he took a coat, gloves and an extension cord, climbed the hospital wall and crept up to a nearby house, where a dog barked and he was spotted. He climbed back and woke his mother, and according to the report she then taught him to disco dance. After twenty-two months the programme gave up on him, and he was returned to custody.
He worked in telemarketing for Time Life books, moved into the Tuscany apartments in Seattle in April 1995, and in January 1996 began dating a married Seattle mother of two while working at a software company in Bothell.
He later told the FBI that they were his first revenge against society, and that he killed them with a crowbar. Their skeletal remains were found a year and a half later.
In April 1997 he abducted ten-year-old Anthony Martinez from an alley in Riverside, California, after luring three boys with a photograph of a cat and a dollar each.
He moved to Fargo, North Dakota, enrolled at North Dakota State University to study computer science, made the dean's list twice, and registered as a Level Three sex offender. On 3 July 2004, at Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, he was seen filming children near playground equipment with a video camera. He called over a six-year-old boy and his eight-year-old friend, pulled down the younger boy's shorts and touched him.
No warrant was issued; a summons was mailed to his Fargo home. He appeared in Becker County court on 5 April 2005, where bail was set at $15,000. Police searched his apartment on 5 May 2005 and found him gone, along with a rented Jeep.
On 11 May 2005 he posted on his blog, The Fifth Nail, that he was scared, alone and confused and that his intent was to harm society as much as he could and then die. He had stalked the Groene family for two days after seeing eight-year-old Shasta playing outside in her bathing suit. On 17 May 2005 deputies on a welfare check entered the family home on Frontage Road near Wolf Lodge, Idaho, and found Brenda Groene, forty, her thirteen-year-old son Slade and her fiancé Edward McKenzie, thirty-seven, face down and dead. All three had been bound with zip ties and duct tape and killed with a claw hammer: Slade was struck fourteen times, McKenzie seven and Brenda three. Shasta and her nine-year-old brother Dylan were gone.
At about 1.30am on 2 July 2005 Shasta was recognised by a customer and an employee at a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene. Two days later investigators found human remains at a campsite near St Regis. Dylan had been shot in the head with a sawn-off shotgun after, by Shasta's account, a first accidental discharge hit him in the stomach.
Fingerprints tied him to the Martinez scene, and on 3 August 2005 the Riverside County sheriff announced the link. The deal spared Shasta from testifying.
He was held at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. In early 2021 he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given six to twelve months. He died on 28 March 2021, less than three months later. Shasta Groene survived, gave evidence, graduated from a treatment programme, and in 2015 spoke of wanting to become a counsellor; in 2024 a fire destroyed her trailer.