Out of the Woods: A Girl, a Killer, and a Lifelong Struggle to Find the Way Home

by Gregg Olsen

Brenda Kay Groene, forty at the time of her death, had given life to her only daughter twice. First in a Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, hospital, and then when she sent messages to her little girl in the woods of Montana.

Years later, Shasta would accept that her much-admired will to survive was a double-edged sword. It messed with her. Sometimes a great strength can also be the source of cliff-dive downfall.

Shasta was a constant reminder of those no longer there: her brothers Dylan and Slade.

Even then and throughout her life, Shasta was left to wonder if her father’s reaction would have been the same if Dylan had survived and she’d gone to heaven.

No one who hasn’t lived through that kind of trauma can have any genuine understanding of how events play out when memories are summoned. How memories can be a yanking hook around the neck when everything had seemed, even fleetingly, to be getting better.

It took surgeons more than fifty stitches to repair damage done to her uterine wall.

“I don’t think that they had told my dad about the piece of Dylan’s skull that was stuck in my hair,” she said.

I feel so much for Shasta.

Some people seemed to revel in the role of helping. It was a calling card that they’d present whenever it suited them. Attention for being a good person is as addictive as meth.

He wanted to erase her trauma by denying it had ever existed at all.

They always do

“With a miscarriage, you have to.”

No you do not. Omfg

While Steve hadn’t been the killer, the polygraph exams fueled speculation that he was somehow behind the rampage and the kidnapping.