CHAINED to a tent by a dog collar and malnourished from lack of food, Shasta Groene, then eight, begged hopelessly for freedom.

The youngster’s terror had started 47 days earlier when she’d been woken at midnight by her weeping mum Brenda, 40, who instructed her in whispers to go to the living room.

Shasta, aged eight, pictured a few weeks after she escaped her captor

Missing posters lined the roads – Shasta and Dylan’s disappearance was international news as their family was discovered bludgeoned

There, Shasta and her brother Dylan, nine, encountered a horrific sight.

A masked man holding a sawn-off shotgun was looming over her mum’s fiancé Mark McKenzie, 37, and older brother Slade, 13, who had their hands cable-tied and were belly-down on the floor.

The man, who she later dsicovered was serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan III, then ordered Shasta, Dylan and Brenda to lie on the floor flat and tied them up.

“The ties were so tight they pinched,” Shasta, now 29, says.

“The carpet scratched my face.”

“He had his finger over his mouth, telling me to be quiet.

“He picked me up and carried me to the back garden. The ground was damp as I was made to lie on the grass on my stomach, facing away from the house.

“I lay perfectly still, frozen with fear.”

Moments later, he returned with Dylan. As they huddled together, they heard a series of thumping noises from the house, followed by silence.

She was petrified but tried desperately to convince herself her family was safe.

Until Slade staggered out.

“He’d managed to break free,” says Shasta.

“He was coming towards us, but the man was following. I watched in horror as he hit Slade over and over with a claw hammer.

“He stumbled to the picnic table. He looked straight at me then and I watched, terrified, as the light drained from my brother’s eyes.”

A tribute to Shasta’s big brother, Dylan, which took place in Idaho

A huge police hunt was launched for Shasta after she vanished

Having just seen her big brother beaten to death in front of her, the man hauled Shasta and Dylan into a car and drove for hours.

At daybreak they arrived in a rural location in Montana. The man set up a tent and said to call him “Jet” or “Daddy”; he then told them ‘‘If you try to run, I’ll shoot you.”

The siblings had dog collars with a long chain put around their necks and attached to the tent. They were made to write letters to their biological dad, Chris.

Shasta says: “It gave me hope he was just holding us to ransom. I wrote: ‘Dear Dad, I miss you very much’”

They’d clasp their little fingers together at night and swear they’d make it out alive. But Shasta soon began to think death would be preferable.

For weeks, the man sexually abused them both, sometimes multiple times a day and sometimes while filming them.

Shasta says: “I just squeezed my eyes closed and prayed for it to be over quickly.

“I was forced to watch as he tied Dylan to a big log and beat him on the back with a stick until the stick broke. It was horrible.”

As time progressed, her hopes of freedom shrank – so she started acting like she was interested in him.

“Sickeningly, it was like he viewed me as his girlfriend,” she says.

Over several days, Shasta managed to convince her captor to let her free.

And one day, they came to a deal – if they could capture a squirrel, they could be free.

Shasta and her brother worked tirelessly to build a cage, and after five weeks, she and her brother caught the animal.

But Jet then shot and killed Dylan anyway.

“He’d given us both a beer to celebrate taking us home,” Shasta says.

“I felt Dylan’s hand slip from mine. Shaking, I watched in horror as Dylan fell to his knees, trying to scoop his organs back inside his body. Jet had shot him in the stomach,” Shasta recalls.

“It felt like my soul had left my body as Jet made me move Dylan’s body onto a tarp, placing his unsent letters to Dad on top of him, along with my blood-soaked shoes.

“Then he set it all on fire, forcing me to sit and watch as my brother’s body was reduced to ash. I cried until I ran out of tears.

“Afterwards, Jet filled three garbage bags with Dylan’s remains.

“We dumped them into a pipe that washed down to the river. When we got back to our campsite, Jet said we were leaving,” she adds.

Jet then drove Shasta to another campsite, and told her to tell anyone she met that her name was Katie.

It was there Shasta learnt the horrific reason her family had been targeted. She and Dylan had been playing in a paddling pool in their front garden in their swimming costumes the morning before the attack.

“He told me he’d spotted us and ‘needed me’,” Shasta says. “He added: ‘You taught me how to love.’”

That night he came back with night vision goggles, a gun, hammer, and duct tape.

He also admitted killing other children across the US – Anthony Martinez, Sammiejo White and Carmen Cubias.

“I realised I was being held captive by a serial killer,” says Shasta.

Jet then told Shasta he was going to kill her – and asked her if she would prefer to be shot or hanged.

“I said [use the] rope, thinking it would at least buy me some time.”

But as he was doing it, he stopped, telling her that he couldn’t go on and that instead he was going to take her to meet his mother.

“The next day, July 2, 2005, nearly seven weeks since he’d abducted us, he told me we were leaving. He planned to visit his mum and wanted me to meet her. Like a couple would, ” she explains.

“On the way, we stopped for petrol. Outside, a police officer in his car had his head down, busy in a report he was filling out.

“As we strolled past his open window, I willed him to look up and notice me. Inside the store, I bit my tongue as we wandered the aisles, fighting the urge to scream, ‘Help!’” Shahsta adds.

“But when we reached the register, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. There on the counter was a missing persons poster of me and Dylan. I shuddered as Jet placed the money down, right on top of my photo.”

No one seemed to notice, however, and the pair then got back inside the car, and Jet then insisted they stop for food.

“We passed a huge billboard with my and Dylan’s faces on it. ‘Missing Children’, it read, promising a reward for information on our whereabouts. Jet seemed not to have seen it.

“Around 2am we finally arrived at a 24-hour restaurant. My clothes – blue shorts and a blue T-shirt – were filthy. I hoped someone would notice how out of place I looked.

“Around 30 minutes later, I was slurping down my vanilla milkshake when I saw a police officer enter the restaurant. Approaching our table, the officer turned to me and asked my name.”

In his sick final words, he told Shasta to visit him in prison.

At a medical centre, it was discovered she needed surgery and was also malnourished.

Two weeks later, with her dad by my side, she helped police find Dylan’s body. After a month in hospital, she moved in with her dad.

She was the only member of her family who survived Joseph Edward Duncan III

Shasta was malnourished when she was found by police – a video clip of her being found

Smirking serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan III – he held Shasta and her beloved brother captive

In October 2006, Joseph Edward Duncan III, then 43, pleaded guilty to the murders of Brenda, Slade, and Mark McKenzie, so he could kidnap Dylan and Shasta for sex.

More than a year on, in December 2007, Duncan pleaded guilty to 10 federal counts in relation to the kidnapping and sexual abuse of Shasta and Dylan, including kidnapping resulting in death, sexual exploitation of a child resulting in death, and using a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence resulting in death.

In August 2008, he was sentenced to death. In 2011, while on death row, he pleaded guilty to the 1997 murder of Anthony Martinez, resulting in an additional life sentence.

Due to the sentences he’d already received, he wasn’t prosecuted for the murders of Sammiejo White and Carmen Cubias, although he described to investigators how he’d committed the crimes.

Shasta and her dad, who died in 2019 from lung cancer, aged 62, started a petition for a law to keep convicted sex offenders behind bars. It had emerged that when he’d killed her family, he was on the run from a child molestation charge.

Sadly, Shasta fell into addiction. But Duncan’s death in March 2021, aged 58, from brain cancer helped her to get clean.

She says: “It felt like my soul was finally free. I dropped to my knees and sobbed. He was the worst kind of evil that anyone could imagine.

“For so long, I battled with shame. I want survivors to know they’re not alone. Over 20 years later, I’m sober, strong, resilient, and feel I can survive anything.”

Source: https://www.the-sun.com/lifestyle/16745503/daddy-headline/