BOTHELL – A trail of unsolved murders has led local and federal investigators to this city in search of more possible victims of Joseph Duncan, the convicted sex offender accused of murdering four people in Idaho.
Authorities are re-examining the case of two Seattle girls whose skeletal remains were found more than seven years ago buried near a business park east of I-405 in Bothell.
Sammiejo White, 11, and her half-sister Carmen Cubias, 9, disappeared from a north Seattle hotel in July 1996. While police have found no evidence connecting Duncan to their murders, they haven’t fully ruled him out either.
“There were some similarities to his MO in this case,” said King County sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. John Urquhart, “but there also were some dissimilarities, too.”
The girls were last seen alive the night of July 6, 1996, leaving a hotel on Aurora Avenue in Seattle, where they were living temporarily with their mother and siblings. The family told police the girls had gone for dinner at a fast-food restaurant across the street.
The sheriff’s office and Bothell police are conducting a joint investigation into the deaths of the two girls whose remains were unearthed in February 1998. Using a timeline of Duncan’s movements during the 1990s compiled by the FBI, Urquhart said investigators know he was in the Seattle area when the girls disappeared.
After Duncan’s arrest, he said, many police departments in the Northwest likely are taking a fresh look at their cold cases.
“We’re putting together a timeline to figure out where Duncan was at any particular time,” said FBI special agent Robbie Burroughs. “And we’re looking at all cases of missing and exploited children and unsolved murders that fit those times.”
The tedious process recently struck hard evidence in Riverside, Calif., where police announced Wednesday that Duncan was under investigation in the 1997 kidnapping and murder of a 10-year-old boy.
Duncan was arrested in Idaho six weeks after the May 16 bludgeoning deaths of three people at a home near Coeur d’Alene and the kidnapping of Shasta Groene, 8, and her 9-year-old brother, Dylan. Duncan was seized when people at a restaurant recognized the girl. Dylan’s body was later found in Montana.
Records show Duncan was well acquainted with Puget Sound. In 1980, he was convicted for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Tacoma, and sent to prison for 20 years. But the term was suspended and he was put into a sex offender treatment program.
He was resentenced two years later when officials reported he wasn’t responding to treatment. In 1994, he was paroled, and moved to a halfway house in Seattle.
Documents show he got a job as a phone solicitor for a publishing company, went to counseling and later got a second job with a small software company.
He tested positive for marijuana during a routine drug screening in 1996, was arrested and later paroled, records show. After testing positive for marijuana again in March 1997, the month before the California boy was abducted, parole records show that Duncan disappeared.
He was captured and returned to prison in October 1997 and released in 2000.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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