INDIO, Calif., March 16 (UPI) -- A serial killer already under a federal death sentence has admitted kidnapping and killing a 10-year-old boy in California in 1997.
Joseph Edward Duncan III, 48, entered a guilty plea Tuesday to the murder of Anthony Martinez, under an agreement that spares him a California death sentence, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported. Duncan was convicted of killing four members of an Idaho family and allegedly admitted to the FBI he killed two young Seattle sisters.
Prosecutors said taking the state death penalty off the table in exchange for a guilty plea was likely to speed up Duncan's federal execution.
Anthony disappeared while he was playing with other boys near his home in Beaumont. Investigators said Duncan used a lost cat as a ruse to get the boys to separate, abducted Anthony and tortured and killed him in an isolated canyon in Joshua Tree National Monument where his body was found 10 days later.
"The last 14 years have been the longest road I've ever been on. We waited so long, and I didn't want to wait any longer," Anthony's mother, Diana Gonzales, said. "Now we can mourn Tony's death like we should have in the beginning. When he was buried, we didn't know who did it."
Duncan was arrested in 2005 at a restaurant in Idaho where he was eating with Shasta Groene, a young girl whose mother and two brothers he had killed along with the mother's boyfriend.
