It’s been an astounding couple of weeks – but it was quite a departure from my normal reality, and I’m being pulled back. Like any mom, I can’t go away without giving advice, but it comes with a disclaimer. I will not live in fear, nor will I let go of my belief in humanity as a whole. Even though this is not the world in which I grew up, I have to believe that at least some things have not changed. I want to emphasize that I may be naive. I hope not, but I will admit the possibility.
Joseph/Joe/Jet/Jazzi Duncan is a monster, right out of every parent and child’s worst nightmare. It is understandably tempting to pin all the evil we can find on him. It would be a comfort to us all. Unfortunately, I think it’s possible – even likely – that Occam’s Razor applies. To me, that means that he “worked” alone.
Related to that – Duncan liked to make tapes and videos. There may be a market for this, since there’s a market for everything else. His extreme paranoia and very clear understanding that society saw him as ‘evil’ tells me, however, that he kept them for his own sick pleasure.
It’s intriguing to think that everybody he ever knew (and he seems to have known some very foolish people) was involved and complicit in his activities. If I apply Occam’s Razor, though, it’s more likely that they were just as unable as I was to consider that anyone could be as monstrous as Duncan.
His family and friends knew he had slipped his “Happy Joe” tether before the Groene tragedy. He told them about it in his last 3 blog posts, and they tried (from several different angles) to talk him off the ceiling. If you re-read those particular posts and pre-publicity comments as a private dialogue, it is very sad. Sadder yet – without a National Sex Offender Registry, there really was no way to save Dylan. This is NOT to say that he isn’t responsible for other crimes. I think he is… just not all of them.
When he was on parole in the late 1990s, he was indulging his sexual identity confusion, and that just screams danger to me. I’m particularly bothered by the Deborah Palmer case.
I am also worried about his activities in the spring of 2001. That’s when Jazzi-Jet was posting to user groups and the web, and this is clearly a departure from the social “norm” for which he was striving. I think there’s quite a bit more yet to be found out there in the ‘net, given the scant postings thus far surfaced between “Jazzi-Jet” and the onset of the fifthnail blog. Just remember that sometimes, a rose really is just a rose.
Follow Me