OUT OF THE WOODS

A young woman’s determination to overcome deep trauma and survivor’s guilt in the aftermath of an unspeakable crime.

Shasta Rae Groene and her brother, Dylan, were 8 and 9 years old in the summer of 2005, when they were kidnapped from their home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where their mother, her boyfriend, and an older brother had just been tied up and beaten to death with a framing hammer and a rifle butt. The younger children were the actual targets of the massacre’s perpetrator, Joseph Edward Duncan III, aka Jet, a sadistic pedophile and recidivist sex offender with a Messiah complex. After the murders, Duncan took the children over the Montana state line and up into the wilderness of Lolo National Forest, where he held them captive and repeatedly raped them for seven weeks while regaling them with tales of previous rapes and murders of children in California and Seattle. An unusually strong-willed and resourceful child who was more worried about her brother’s life than her own, Shasta survived the ordeal, but Dylan did not. She would later say of Duncan, “I don’t think he counted on the fact that I was like ten steps ahead of him.” Olsen, a prolific and popular author of multiple true-crime books and fictional mysteries, became close to his subject over several years. His chief concern here is to tell the story of the therapeutic work Shasta did to try to find her way “out of the woods” of her trauma. He weaves that somewhat hopeful story together with the nauseatingly disturbing details of the crime, each parallel path unfolding through the book, dropping hints along the way of ever worse revelations to come.

Not for the squeamish or seekers of uncomplicatedly happy endings.