Tracey Dyess

Lest we forget the real human being who today sits in prison, here is Tracey Dyess.

New Appeal for Clemency to Culver

After Brian Street's sentencing this past week, here is a new letter (with a few names removed) sent to Gov. Culver, encouraging him to grant executive clemency to Tracey:

May 25, 2007

Dear Governor Culver,

Greetings from Mt. Pleasant.

I'm writing to you -- for the second time -- to encourage you to grant clemency to Tracey Dyess. Her abusive stepfather, Brian Street, has now been sentenced to 30 years for sexually exploiting her, so there are no outstanding court cases complicating action on the clemency application she submitted last fall.

Yesterday, I attended the sentencing as a supporter and friend of Tracey. She was present, and her victim's impact statement was read. Several things struck me as having a bearing on clemency.

First, Judge Pratt made clear that a significant factor in his choice of the maximum sentence was the court's determination that Brian Street was indeed in a position of authority and trust over Tracey, as her stepfather. That seems to me clear. And it also seems to undercut the decision of the state to have prosecuted Tracey as an adult, even though she was seventeen at the time of the fire. The circumstances that led her to start the fire are inextricably bound to her having been a minor. She was being abused by the head of her household, who systematically isolated her by, among other things, withholding her from school and moving the family often. It was the very fact that she was a minor that put her into a desperate corner. The more the actual situation comes to light, the more it seems to me to have been hasty and inappropriate to charge her as an adult. Perhaps there is some way that decision could be de facto revisited in your decision on clemency.

Secondly, yesterday I witnessed for the first time Brian Street's attempts to manipulate and control both Tracey and the court itself. Even in shackles at his sentencing, he shouted out complaints when others were talking and berated Tracey as a "liar" who didn't "tell the truth" that they were supposedly "in love." It was sickening to watch her have to go through that, given everything else she's had to go through.

I suspect that if Street's trial had been before Tracey's, it would have cast her own situation in a whole different light. It would not have been about her "alleging" abuse. It would have been about abuse proven in court (as Street's has now been) and an abuser whose vicious, demeaning, and controlling behavior all could see. Because Street's daily sexual abuse of Tracey and her siblings is the context of the fire Tracey set in Griswold, it seems to me that her counsel did her a grave disservice by not pushing for Tracey's case to be postponed until Street's case had been completed. I suspect that -- if they had the full situation now proven in court before them and if they watched Street testify -- a jury would likely find the fire to have been an act rooted in self defense.

Shortly before serving as Tracey's counsel, her court-appointed defense counsel had represented Dixie Duty on the charge of murder for killing her abusive husband. The jury convicted her despite the overwhelming evidence of vicious abuse. Gov. Vilsack granted her a partial clemency in December, but at the time Tracey's case was before the court, her attorney seems still to have been stunned by that conviction and therefore advised Tracey to plead guilty, as an adult, to the charges that were only slightly reduced. He told her that juries in that area were likely to convict people who killed (or tried to kill) their domestic abusers. As a teenager who had known only a prison of abuse and then a jail cell, she was totally dependent on the advice of counsel.

Third, at the sentencing, a victim's advocate in the U.S. Attorney's office read Tracey's victim's impact statement aloud in court. One of the questions was if Tracey had received counseling as a result of the abuse. Tracey's answer was "no."

This is true and deeply disturbing to me. The reason she has received no significant counseling is that the state correctional system has provided none and has specifically barred her from discussing her experiences of abuse with visitors, even those who in other contexts do counsel abuse victims. The only two people on her authorized visitation list are myself -- a pastor in Mt. Pleasant, with some experience counseling abuse victims -- and Father Val Peter -- director of Girls and Boys Town of Nebraska, who specializes in working with abused teenagers.

The spokesperson for the correctional system -- in phone conversations and letters -- has specifically said to me and to Father Peter that Tracey is not allowed to discuss with either of us her experiences of abuse when we visit her. Directives to that effect have been issued. Initially, he had even ordered that she not be allowed to talk with either of us at all -- which, since we were the only people on her visitation list, meant she could have no visitors. The official reason is so that correctional system counselors can do the counseling, but that counseling has yet to begin and I'm convinced it is unlikely to.

Tracey's "counselor" of record told me directly in a meeting last December that they didn't want Tracey discussing her abuse because they were afraid it would make Tracey upset and thus a more difficult inmate to manage. This despite no evidence that Tracey is ever difficult to manage -- except as a public relations issue.

In my experience with abuse victims, giving them opportunities to talk with compassionate people about what has happened to them is essential to healing. Tracey went directly from her home -- a prison of daily sexual abuse -- to incarceration by the state, with not a single day of freedom in between, and has received no significant counseling as a victim of abuse that's been proven in court and that was so horrific that the perpetrator received a 30-year sentence. To me, this is an outrage.

If she is released, I will do everything possible to ensure that she gets the long-term counseling she surely needs.

As a side note, even though Tracey and I have completely complied with the prison system's ban on conversations with Tracey about her being abused, they require Tracey to visit with visitors only in the presence of a prison guard. Most other inmates are allowed to sit at tables throughout the visiting room, with guards present in the room but not listening in. The constant presence for Tracey of a guard listening means that she can't speak freely to visitors even regarding things like how the prison is treating her and how she's getting along with people there. This seems to be about the prison system treating her primarily as a public relations problem, with the result that they isolate her from the outside as much as possible in ways disturbingly similar to the techniques of her controlling stepfather.

I realize that the prison system is not equipped to have a sympathetic inmate like Tracey. It isn't the correctional system's fault that she was prosecuted for murder as an adult for trying to put an end to daily sexual abuse when she was 17. And it isn't the correctional system's fault that her court appointed attorney advised her to plead guilty to slightly reduced charges instead of defending her vigorously in court. But the correctional system is a bad place for her. Apparently because they're uncomfortable that she gets sympathetic press stories, they treat her worse even than other inmates.

In my previous letter in January, I shared some of my impressions of Tracey as a person, so I won't repeat those now. I will add what's new in the past four months, though.

On the positive side, Tracey -- despite having been kept out of school by her mother and stepfather -- has now completed her GED. She's a smart and hard working young woman who should be in college now.

On the negative side, my observation is that Tracey is increasingly stressed emotionally from the tumultuous nature of prison life. We had all been hopeful that Governor Vilsack might grant her clemency before he left office, but he chose to leave action on her application to you. Tracey allowed herself to look ahead hopefully to ways she might, upon release, draw upon her horrific experiences to serve other abuse victims. My guess is that the realization that she may well be looking at being imprisoned for her full sentence has depleted her.

Also, she's a sensitive, wounded kid surrounded by some rough and scary people, and she seems much more on her guard and worried than when I first met her last fall. Probably related to that constant anxiety, she's lost a lot of weight, even though she was a slender person to begin with.

She's still a friendly, soft-spoken, sharp-minded, and compassionate person, of course. I was struck that, even in her victim's impact statement, she chose to talk about one day being able to forgive Brian Street and already being able to forgive him for most everything except for what he was doing to the younger kids in the home. She's a compassionate person. In fact, I think it's her compassion which stopped her from just running away or killing herself. That would have meant leaving the younger kids alone in Street's hands. My impression from conversations with her is that that fear was a big part of why she dealt with the overwhelming horror by setting the fire.

I'd also renew my encouragement of you to visit with Tracey yourself! At the moment, she's imprisoned in Mitchellville, right near Des Moines, so access would be easy. I have no doubt that you'll find her sympathetic and willing to talk with you about all aspects of her situation. She'll answer honestly any questions you have for her, I'm sure.

Already in your governorship, I've been impressed that you're a person willing to stick your neck out and do what's right for those who have less power -- advocating such things as discrimination protection for gay and lesbian people and enhanced organizing rights for labor unions.

No one can prevent the abuse that's already happened or bring back Tracey's siblings who died in the fire. The one thing that can be done to bring some justice to the situation is to treat the surviving victim decently. As our governor and as her governor, please do so.

Thank you so much for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

John Zimmerman
pastor of Pleasant View Mennonite Church

Abusive Stepfather Sentenced to 30 Years

Here's the Register article on the sentencing:

Brian Street sentenced to 30 years in prison
JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

May 24, 2007


Brian Street has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for sexually exploiting his 17-year-old stepdaughter, who confessed to setting her house on fire to end the abuse.

Street, who recently began a hunger strike, allegedly to attract attention to his contention that he set fire to the family home, not Tracey Dyess, was sentenced this morning in federal court in Des Moines.

He received a 30-year sentence, and a 10-year sentence, which can be served at the same time.

In a telephone interview from the Polk County Jail on Monday, Street told The Des Moines Register that on May 7 he stopped ingesting everything but coffee because he wants a new lawyer and a new trial, and for law enforcement officials to take seriously his confession that it was he, not Dyess, who started the March 2005 fire at the family's home in Griswold.

"If they want to lock me up for the rest of my life, they can lock me up for the fire," he said Monday. "But they are not going to classify me as some sick, pathetic pervert that I'm not. I can't live with that. Tracey's all I care about."

Officials investigating the fire that killed Dyess' sister and brother - Jessica Dyess, 13, and Kaleb Dyess, 6 - say Tracey Dyess confessed to pouring the gasoline and lighting the fire as her family slept. In her confession, Dyess said she wanted to stop Street from molesting her.

Investigators found a pile of nude photographs of Dyess in a locked safe in Street's charred bedroom, exactly where Dyess told investigators they would be.

Dyess was convicted of arson and four other felonies and is serving a 45-year sentence at the state women's prison in Mitchellville.

Father Peter on Tracey

Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The Rev. Val J. Peter On The Tracey Dyess Case

The Rev. Val J. Peter, in an opinion piece in this morning's Des Moines Register:

I challenge your Sept. 27 editorial, "Resist Call to Intervene in Tracey Dyess Case," which recommended that Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack take no action to lessen Dyess' 45-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter.

Dyess was the 17-year-old Griswold girl, sexually abused since age 4, who set fire to her house, resulting in the deaths of her younger brother and sister. She "couldn't take it anymore" and was trying to stop the abuse, she told a social worker.

First, my credentials. For 20 years from 1985 to 2005, I was executive director and now am emeritus executive director of Girls and Boys Town in Omaha, coming to the aid of young people like Dyess who are the road kill of molesters and abusers...

...Consider the mission of Father Edward Flanagan, founder of Boys Town... Flanagan was successful in Billy Meagher's case, a 15-year-old Denver boy charged with the slaying of his father. Pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter, Meagher was paroled to Boys Town on March 6, 1937. Billy had seen his mother's back broken as a result of one of many savage beatings administered by his father.

Flanagan stood before the judge and said: "You and I, your honor, with our many years of experience behind us would have known how to answer that problem had we been confronted with it as Billy was. We would have known the proper sources of law to appeal to. But Billy is only a boy. He took what seemed the only answer to the staggering problem confronting him."

That sounds like the plight of Tracey Dyess.

When you see the governor, tell him the petition for clemency is coming and solicit his support. I am just pleading for, as Father Flanagan did, a young person who deserves a chance at a normal life, which she has never had.

And here are comments from blogger State 29, after citing Peter's letter:

Dyess's sentence is a travesty. This girl should have been allowed an insanity defense. What else can you call her mental condition after years of this kind of abuse? Tracey Dyess probably should have been institutionalized rather than thrown in prison. It's a wonder that this girl hasn't been found hanging from a bedsheet.

Although the Dixie Shanahan Duty case is different in nature, that case, along with the Dyess case, shows that women in Iowa who have been horrifically abused and who eventually cause the deaths of others get disproportionate sentences compared to a rich doctor's wife who stabs him in the heart after he announces plans for a divorce.

Lifetime of Secrets

Part one of the Register features:

Tracey Dyess Part 1: Deadly plot reveals lifetime of secrets
JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
Copyright 2006, Des Moines Register and Tribune Company

January 25, 2007

This piece was first published in September 2006


Griswold, Ia. — The quickest way to get rid of something was to burn it, Tracey Dyess’ stepfather told her more than once.

As her family slept one night in spring 2005, Tracey doused the carpeted floors of their Griswold house with gasoline. Her starting point: just outside her mother and stepfather’s bedroom.

The 17-year-old girl poured gas up to the living room couch where her sister, Jessica, 13, was asleep, according to state investigative reports obtained by The Des Moines Register. She tipped gas down a hallway past her 6-year-old brother Kaleb’s bedroom and up a staircase.

Then she flicked a lighter.

“She said it went up — poof,” said Cass County Sheriff Bill Sage in an interview. “It was chilling how she sat here afterward and described how she did it.”

Eighteen months after the fire a priest is pushing for Gov. Tom Vilsack to commute her 45-year sentence. Tracey has repeatedly said she only meant to kill her stepfather, Brian Street, who is awaiting trial on charges that he sexually exploited Tracey and Jessica. Tracey told investigators she had been molested by other men since age 4 and “couldn’t take it anymore.”

“Life failed Tracey,” the Rev. Val Peter said in an interview. “Not at the end and not at the middle but right at the very beginning, and the punishment does not fit what she did.”

But newly available information also gives insight into why Cass County prosecutors pressed for a long prison term for Tracey, who pleaded guilty in November to five felony charges, including two counts of voluntary manslaughter.

Investigators’ reports from the arson case conclude that Tracey plotted her actions: She made a list of tasks she had to do before setting the fire and wrote letters to out-of-town relatives saying she regretted to inform them that her entire family had died in a fire. The day of the blaze, she calmly interacted with her mother, stepfather, brother and younger sister until they all fell asleep, then she splashed gasoline in front of all the doors.

She did not shout a warning before she climbed out a window to safety.

“The investigators told us she wanted us all to die,” her mother, Debbie Dyess Grothe Street, said in an interview with the Register.

Her paternal grandmother, Frances Dyess, who is the only family member Tracey regularly telephones from prison, said in an interview that the girl was simply scared and traumatized.

“I do know she loved Jessica and Kaleb,” said Frances, who lives in Texas. “I just can’t get it straight that she would do that unless she was trying to rescue them from something horrible. You know, there are worse things than death.”



BEFORE THE FIRE: A PAINFUL POEM AND 'LADDER 49’

Those closest to Tracey Dyess were clueless she was upset, according to her mother, Debbie, who now lives in Hastings, Neb., and her stepfather, Brian Street, who was interviewed by telephone and by letter from the Polk County Jail.

After 15 moves in three years, partly to escape police attention after several check-writing scams, the family settled in the tidy, 10-block town of Griswold, Ia., in November 2004. They paid cash to rent a 114-year-old house at 307 Main St.

Townspeople noticed that Brian treated Tracey more like a girlfriend than a daughter. According to Brian, when he and Tracey were out in public, they would “hold hands, laugh, kiss.” When the family picked out a dog, Penny, at a humane society in Omaha in 2005, the staff mistook them for a couple — and figured Debbie was Brian’s mother-in-law, he said.

The stepfather told the Register in an interview that he and Tracey pledged their love and longed to marry each other.

Meanwhile, the teenager wrote poetry laced with pain.

“If these walls could talk, you would know my body is dead, my mind has been taken over, that’s why I’m so scared,” she wrote on an undated piece of paper that’s now part of the investigative reports. “I can’t control it, anger is making me blind, I’ve been left here on my own, chained to a hate of some kind.”

In early March 2005, Tracey went to the annual firefighters’ dance at the Griswold Community Center and sat by herself, silently observing. She politely refused to be drawn into conversation. A couple weeks later, she brought home the movie “Ladder 49,” a drama about firefighters’ valiant attempts to rescue one of their own from a warehouse blaze.

March 30 was a regular day. In the morning, the family ran errands together: to Toys R Us in Council Bluffs; to Kmart in Atlantic, where Tracey charged a $50 PlayStation game for Brian to her credit card; then to a veterinarian in Atlantic for a sick cat the family had rescued.

It was a Wednesday, but the three children were not enrolled in school.

That afternoon Debbie painted her daughter Jessica’s new bedroom. After months of listening to Tracey and Jessica argue over the upstairs front bedroom, the biggest in the house, Debbie and Brian created a bigger bedroom for Jessica by ripping out an upstairs wall. Until the room was painted blue and dolphin wallpaper was hung, Jessica was sleeping downstairs on the couch.

The neighbor kids came over to play with Kaleb and Jessica.

In the master bedroom, Brian and Tracey tested the new PlayStation game, “Cold Fear,” until Brian paused it to watch a rerun of his favorite TV show, “Highway to Heaven.” Then Brian entertained the younger kids by pretending to be a monster, stomping around the house as they chased him.

Debbie would be driving to Hastings the next day, as she did at the end of every month, to pick up government checks direct-deposited at a bank there. Jessica and Kaleb usually went with her; Tracey never wanted to go.


At some point, Tracey “stormed out of the house,” Brian recalled later. “She slammed the door.” He said he didn’t know why. Debbie remembered some small arguments during the day, mainly between Brian and Jessica, who kept telling her stepfather that she wanted to move back to Hastings. Brian responded that it wouldn’t happen.

Tracey rode her bicycle to the self-service BP gas station with two antifreeze containers, she later told investigators. Her Capital One Platinum credit card records show that at 7:26 p.m. she bought 2.085 gallons of gas. She lugged the containers home in a shoulder bag and hid them in the garage.

In the house, her mother smelled gas on her clothing and quizzed her about it. Tracey said she fell into a puddle on Main Street.

According to Debbie and Brian, the neighbor kids wanted to spend the night, but their mother said no — it was a school night.

Jessica flopped on the couch in front of the TV.

Debbie said she gave Kaleb a bath, read him a story, then tucked him into his bed wearing gray sweat pants, a blue sweat shirt and a diaper. The 6-year-old had curbed a bed-wetting problem for a while — Brian said he paid him $1 if he stayed dry and in his own bed instead of crawling into his and Debbie’s — but he was wetting again.

In the master bedroom, Tracey watched TV with Brian until her parents decided to go to sleep, sometime between 11 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.

Tracey did some Internet shopping, using her credit card to order a shirt for Jessica’s birthday in April, just a few weeks away. Jessica pestered Tracey to get off the computer, so after midnight Tracey let her use it. “I kept telling her to just go to bed because it was late,” Tracey told investigators.



FAMILY FRANTIC AS IT AWAKES TO FLAMES

About 1 a.m. on March 31, 2005, when everyone was asleep, Tracey lighted the gasoline. She said she wasn’t thinking about the children at that moment.

Nor was she thinking about the dog, Penny, locked in a kennel in the front hallway, or the five family cats — Patches, Jake, Tigra, Mittens and Princess — for whom she felt a deep affection.

Upstairs, Tracey hid one of the gas containers in her sister’s bedroom closet. She waited five minutes as flames raced through the house, she told investigators. Then she climbed out a window onto a lower roof and dropped the 10 feet to the ground.

The shrill beep, beep, beep of the smoke detector — or maybe the sound of Tracey’s feet on the roof over the master bedroom — awakened Brian. He jolted upright, sloshing the water bed.

“What the hell is that?” Debbie heard him say.

A fierce light shone from the crack under the door.

When he opened the door, it looked like a giant flaming circus hoop had fallen inside the house.

Brian told investigators he found Jessica in the living room, jumping up and down on the couch and screaming. He remembers batting at the flames with a pillow.

Tracey, unseen, was outside the bay window, looking into the living room.

“I knew the pillow Brian had wasn’t going to be big enough,” Tracey told a social worker during one interview four months after the fire. However, during other sessions with investigators and the same social worker, Karla Miller, Tracey denied that she stood outside watching the fire.

Brian said he grabbed Jessica’s hand and told her to jump over the flames.

“I have trouble living with this fact, but I let go of her wrist,” he said, voice heavy with tears, in a telephone interview with the Register. “I thought she was going to follow me out.”

Debbie, wearing only a sweat shirt and underwear, fumbled for her eyeglasses in the master bedroom. She broke the shade getting her window open, and remembers worrying that Brian would be angry about that. She could hear the children’s high-pitched cries of pain and terror.

“Go to a window!” she yelled to them. “You have to go to the window!”
Brian made it out the front door, in stocking feet and sweat pants.

Tracey, he said, was already in the front yard. She was wearing shoes.

“The smoke was yellowish red color and smelled like burnt rubber and burnt wood,” Tracey wrote in a police statement. “You could hear the kids screaming and then it was so quiet.”

Tracey asked Brian if she should wake up the police chief, who lived across the street.

Yes — go, Brian told her.

At the sound of his doorbell, Griswold Police Chief Clarence Waddell rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. The mystery doorbell, as he and his wife, Jan, called it, sometimes chimed for no reason.

Then they heard a girl calling out: “My house is on fire!”

Records show Jan Waddell called 911 at 1:10 a.m. She told the dispatcher she could hear “lots of screaming.”

In the yard of the burning house, Brian kicked open the side door trying to reach Kaleb. Roaring heat from 5-foot-tall flames knocked him back, singeing his eyebrows.

He smashed Kaleb’s bedroom window, and, according to medical records from Cass County Memorial Hospital, sustained second-degree burns on his fingers.

Kaleb was invisible in the smoke that had swallowed his room, but Brian said it sounded as if he was on his mattress, backed as far away as possible from the fire chewing at his bedroom doorway.

Brian told investigators that he called to the 6-year-old: “Come to the window!”

“I can’t!” the boy answered.

The heat was like a blowtorch.

No one heard Kaleb’s voice again.

Brian pounded on a neighbor’s door, in a panic for someone to call 911.

At some point, Tracey asked Debbie: “Where’s Jessie?”

“I said, 'What do you mean, where’s Jessie? She’s not outside?’” Debbie said in an interview with the Register, her words cracking with hysteria at the memory.

She said Tracey broke out a living room window and called Jessica’s name.

But 307 Main St. was an inferno, so hot it was melting the neighbors’ flower pots and bubbling their house paint. Debbie collapsed in the yard, weeping.

A local medic who was driving home along Main Street at 1 a.m. had not noticed smoke. When firefighters arrived at 1:16a.m., holes were burned through to the basement.



INVESTIGATION LEADS TO A CONFESSION

For the next hour, Tracey distracted herself by wandering the neighborhood looking for her dog, which Brian had seen galloping out the front door. Tracey’s cries of “Penny! Penny!” unnerved Griswold Fire Chief Jim Wyman, who kept thinking he was hearing one of the victims in the house.

When the flames were mostly out and the smoke vented, Assistant Fire Chief Kent Gade spotted the children’s charred bodies. Kaleb was sprawled on his bedroom floor, inches from his window.

Jessica’s body was in the living room — not on the couch, but sitting upright in an overstuffed chair, Gade said. Maybe she had furniture-hopped, trying to get to her mother. Burns covered 90 percent of her body, according to the autopsy report.

A medic at the scene said that when Debbie and Brian were told the bodies had been found, they became more distraught, but Tracey displayed no emotion.

At the hospital, Brian curled up in a bed with his wife, who was being treated for breathing problems. Tracey tucked into a ball in an empty bed and fell asleep easily, a nurse told investigators.

Brian, who later said he was worried about warrants for his arrest, told all the police and hospital officials his name was Mike Dyess.

After sunrise, as investigators sifted for evidence in the blackened house, Penny the dog limped in the front door — one ear burned off and blind in one eye — and laid down near the melted kennel.

Just after 8 a.m., an accelerant-sniffing dog named Rocket alerted officials to the scent of gasoline two feet from the master bedroom door. Authorities immediately shifted into a criminal investigation and sought a search warrant.

At 10:30 a.m., a state fire investigator asked Brian and Tracey about flammables in the house and garage. Brian said there were only normal household items like WD-40.

“Anything else you can think about that may have caused the fire?” asked Raymond Reynolds of the Bureau of Arson and Explosives, according to a transcript.

“I wish I knew,” Brian said.

Tracey volunteered: “I collect lighters.”

The investigator asked her why. She said it was a hobby.

“This is so weird,” Brian said, referring to the fire.

“I know,” Tracey said. “And we just watched the movie 'Ladder 49.’”
Later that day, Brian tried to go inside 307 Main St., but police barred him from entering. Brian said he had hoped to find the car keys.

When taking a closer look at the living room floor, arson investigators discovered a disturbing pattern to the scorch marks. The deepest burns were along the traffic pattern, but a clear branch went to the couch on which Jessica had been sleeping, according to the fire marshal’s report. The pour mark ended at a deep scorch on the couch. The rest of the couch was not burned to that degree.

At 6:30 p.m., Brian gave parental consent for investigators to question Tracey alone.

Within minutes, she confessed.

“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she told Special Agent Don Shreffler of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

When Shreffler asked what she meant, she said: “Being made to do things I didn’t want to do.”

Sexual abuse? he asked her.

Tracey nodded yes.



POLAROIDS AND SEX ABUSE ALLEGATIONS

Tracey told investigators that Brian’s name was not Mike Dyess, and that there were photographs in a fireproof safe in the master bedroom that proved he was abusing her.

Investigators put Brian and Debbie in separate rooms and told them Tracey said she set the fire because her stepfather had been molesting her for three years.

Debbie broke down in tears. She said Tracey had been abused by two other men.

Brian, however, acted dumbfounded and said his relationship with Tracey was consensual and that he didn’t believe she would ever try to hurt him. “I told them they were full of (crap),” he said.

At 8:30 p.m. in the hospital chapel, Tracey balled up in a chair under two blankets.

Agent Shreffler sat across the room, mainly to keep an eye on her, he said, not to interview her.

But after a few minutes of silence, she opened up to him again. He was puzzled when the teenager smiled at inappropriate times, like when she revealed that she’d last had sex with her stepfather about a week and a half earlier.

Tracey asked what would happen next. Shreffler explained that she was going to be charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Jessica and Kaleb, with a possible punishment of life in prison. Prosecutors later added charges of arson and two counts of attempted murder for trying to kill her mother and stepfather.

The next day, Brian was charged with sexually abusing Tracey. His fingers were so burned he couldn’t be fingerprinted that day. Federal prosecutors later charged him with six counts related to child pornography and sexual exploitation of both Tracey and Jessica.

Investigators found the charred safe that Tracey had told them about. Inside it were five pairs of women’s underwear, two letters from Tracey to Brian expressing her love for him, and 65 Polaroid photos, some of which showed Tracey nude or semi-nude engaged in various sex acts, according to court documents. At least one clearly showed Brian, court records show.

There were also checkbooks from three checking accounts. In police interviews , Tracey and Debbie said Brian had taught them how to create the false documents needed to open scam accounts, and recommended they burn any evidence. Brian acknowledged to the Register that he wrote “a bunch of bad checks out of my own account.” He was charged four times with check fraud in Nebraska between 1997 and 2003 and convicted once, court documents show.

Investigators never found the originals of Tracey’s list of things to do or the “regret to inform you” letters she wrote relatives, but captured imprints of the letters from blank notebook pages.

Authorities also obtained undated letters from Jessica telling her family she was running away. In a letter to Brian, she told him if he tried to find her, she would “tell the cops that u raped me and it’s the truth.” The Register obtained a photocopy of the letter from the investigative file.

When investigators asked Tracey after the fire if Brian was molesting her sister Jessica, Tracey said she didn’t know. But in a letter she wrote in July 2005 from the Cass County Jail, Tracey said she woke up one night and heard her stepfather “doing things to Jessica.”

Brian Street is adamant that he never molested Jessica — or Tracey, a woman he says he’s in love with.

“I have never forced or threatened anyone into sexual compliance,” he told the Register.

In the remains of Tracey’s bedroom, investigators found anguished poetry she’d written, as well as notebook paper where she had jotted down the lyrics from “Independence Day,” a Martina McBride song about a mother and daughter who are freed from an abusive man by burning down the house.

Tracey copied only the third verse:

“Well she lit up the sky that fourth of July, By the time the firemen came, They just put out some flames, and took down some names, And sent me to the county home, Now I ain’t saying it’s right or wrong, But maybe it’s the only way, Talk about your revolution, It’s Independence Day.”



QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS

The relationship between Brian and Tracey was complicated. Several of Tracey’s relatives said it seemed evident she enjoyed his company.
Brian argues that she is not his stepdaughter — his marriage to convicted polygamist Debbie Dyess Grothe Street was never legally valid.

“Yes, I am romantically involved with an underage girl, but I did want to — and still do — marry her and spend the rest of my life with her,” he told the Register. “She was my partner, my equal, my lifeline.”

Brian said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Richards “throws a fit if I tell people that I love Tracey. I’m not going to deny my feelings for Tracey.”

In July 2005 at the Cass County Jail, Brian’s lawyer at the time, Angela Campbell, asked Tracey why she hadn’t waited to set the fire until Debbie and the children left for Hastings.

“If you really wanted to hurt Brian during the fire why didn’t you wait until the next day?” Campbell said.

“Well, I was just so mad that night,” Tracey answered. She didn’t explain.

And when federal agent Shane Nestor asked a similar question, Tracey said her mother always stayed with her second husband, Steve Grothe, when the family visited Hastings. Tracey couldn’t stand Grothe. Nestor asked her if staying with Brian was like the lesser of two evils; Tracey agreed.

The Rev. Val Peter of Girls and Boys Town believes it’s possible Tracey was convinced for a while that Brian truly cared about her, but as soon she suspected he was harming Jessica, her feelings for him evaporated.

Peter told Tracey if he was going to advocate for executive clemency, he had to know the full truth. He asked her: Did you light the fire because you were jealous of Brian’s relationship with Jessica?

Tracey looked at him like he was crazy, he said. She said that was not the case at all.

The priest believes Vilsack should commute Tracey’s sentence, making her eligible for parole within months instead of 16 years.

“Seventeen-year-olds are not mature adults,” Peter said. “It wouldn’t be at all unusual for a 17-year-old to write things down at one point but not carry them out. Adult premeditation is not what Tracey had.”

A few days after the fire, Tracey wrote her mother a letter:

“Mom, I am so sorry for everything that has happened. I am sorry I could not tell you. Things have been so hard for me lately. ... My heart is breaking right now and I don’t know what to do.”

Tracey said she couldn’t explain all that happened with the sexual abuse because she didn’t know how to say it. “Can you tell everyone that I am sorry for everything and tell Brian that I am sorry that I told but I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

As time passed, Tracey reached out to investigators she had grown to trust. In a letter, she wrote that she had a whole lot of stuff to tell, that she’d been told her whole life not to tell, and that she’d always been afraid something would happen to her family if she told.

Now she felt the urge to talk.

The words were inside her, she said, but the words were not nice.

Where Are They Now -- from fall 2006

The Dyess case: An epilogue
JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

January 25, 2007

This piece was first published in September 2006


DIXIE SHANAHAN DUTY
She has lost her parental rights to her three children, ages 9, 7 and 3.

A juvenile court judge in Shelby County terminated Duty’s parental rights in August. Duty promptly appealed the decision to the Iowa Supreme Court.

After her murder conviction two years ago, Duty wanted the state to place her children with her new husband, Jeff Duty, but in fall 2004 she agreed to stop fighting their placement with her sister Dianne in Texas. Duty is in prison at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women at Mitchellville.

[note: Since the original publication of this article, out-going Iowa governor Tom Vilsack acted on Duty's clemency application by reducing her sentence significantly.]

DALE “STEVE” GROTHE

He is still emotional about the death of Kaleb Dyess, who moved into Grothe’s home in the arms of Debbie Street shortly after his birth.

“I was his Daddy,” said Grothe, who services hottubs in Hastings, Neb.

By age 6, Kaleb lived elsewhere, but Debbie brought him to visit often. Grothe would hide a packet of strawberry Bubblicious somewhere in his clothing.

Kaleb would pounce on him, searching all Grothe’s pockets until, with delight, he’d find his bubblegum.

After the fire, Grothe purchased a double headstone for Kaleb and Jessica and made payments on the $2,200 bill every two weeks for a year.

He bought the locket of ashes Debbie wears around her neck, and paid the $400 to restore a large oval portrait of Jessica salvaged from fire.

Debbie Street thinks he’s trying to assauge the guilt he feels for molesting Tracey — a charge that was filed in Nebraska, but later dismissed with prejudice, meaning Grothe can't be charged again.

Asked if that’s true, Grothe answered: “Yes, I’m ashamed about it, but how can I make amends? I don’t know. (Tracey’s) life has spiraled and there’s been so many accusations and so many lies.”

He said he admitted in 2001 that he had inappropriately touched Tracey, but a couple months later his lawyer told him the sex abuse charges had been dropped.

“I don’t know why,” said Grothe, who has missing teeth, and wears the back of his hair long enough to curl over the collar of his dusty work shirts.

He said he has checked the Nebraska sex offender registry a couple times. He was relieved to see his name is not on it.

FRANCES DYESS

Throughout Debbie Street’s marriage to Mike Dyess, his mother, Frances Dyess, dispensed cash and advice, but felt helpless to divert them from what she felt were bad lifestyle choices.

Every time she saw her grandchildren, Frances Dyess said, she stressed manners and the importance of a good reputation. For years, she had no idea where the family was because Debbie switched addresses so often.

Tracey never told her grandmother she and Brian Street were having sex, according to Frances.

After the fire, Tracey cringed at her Grandma Frances hearing about the sex, and told investigators it would “break her heart.”

Frances Dyess wept at the news.

She told Tracey she had failed her granddaughter.

“I said, ‘Didn’t I let you know I loved you enough that you could tell me?’ She said, ‘Grandma, you didn’t let me down. I didn’t know how to tell you.’”

Tracey still hasn’t told Frances all that happened.

“She said, ‘Grandma, at some point I will tell you in person what was on my mind,’” Frances Dyess said. “She didn’t want to write it in a letter or say it on the phone.”

For now, Frances Dyess offers Tracey almost daily encouragement: take care of your blemished complexion, get your GED, plan your future.

Tracey said when she’s released she’s leaving Iowa and Nebraska behind and will go straight to her grandmother in Texas.

“I said, ‘We’re going to go on an adventure, did you know it?’” Frances Dyess said. “‘We’re going to teach you the life skills you never learned.’”

DEBBIE STREET

Although investigators remain baffled that Tracey didn’t report the sexual activity with Brian Street instead of lighting the fire, her mother thinks she understands: her daughter had told in the past, but little happened.

“When you’re being abused and you want out, does it matter how you get out?” Debbie Street said.

“Everybody says, ‘How could she kill them?’ You have to understand, the kids are not being mistreated anymore, they’re not starving, they’re not being dragged around the country. She didn’t want to see us get split up. Until Tracey tells me otherwise, that’s what I’ll believe: She wanted to set us free.”

Debbie Street, who was convicted of bigamy and a felony for fraudulent check writing, said the reason she hasn’t tried to contact Tracey at the Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility is that it would violate the conditions of her probation.

She said she can’t stop analyzing her own actions as a parent.

Each time a new live-in boyfriend entered her life, she filled them in about prior molestation because she wanted them to understand if the children exhibited “inappropriate boundaries,” she said.

There’s no way of knowing whether those details planted seeds for future molestation.

Debbie Street said she feels the glare of public opinion that she was a rotten mom.

“They don’t know what my kids mean to me,” she said as she and her daughter Amy Dyess flipped through photo albums carefully arranged with family snapshots of birthday parties and visits to a pumpkin patch, a cave, swimming pools.

“My kids are my life,” Debbie Street said, then paused. “They were.”

She is trying to do better with Amy, she said.

Amy nestled her head against her mother’s shoulder and blinked back tears.

AMY DYESS

After the funeral, Amy — Tracey's twin sister, now 19 — returned to Arizona, where she was living in a friend’s trailer in the desert, unemployed and in extreme poverty.

In October 2005, seven months after the fire, she gave birth to twin boys during an emergency C-section.

Jake Dyess was stillborn.

She gave Tyler Dyess up for adoption.

“It was best for him,” said Amy, who has no high school diploma and no job.

About a month ago, her mother drove south and fetched Amy back to Nebraska.

BRIAN STREET

He pleads for a pardon for Tracey, writing letter after letter to Gov. Vilsack, President Bush, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and others.

He hopes it will come through before his Nov. 6 trial, when he said he will have to pick apart Tracey’s statements and use words like “liar.”

Brian Street said he refused U.S. Attorney Richard Richards’ offer of 20 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea. He is determined to go to trial despite stiff penalties if he’s convicted on all six counts, which include sexual exploitation of two underage girls, possession of child pornography and transporting the girls across state lines.

“I’m facing 140 years in a federal prison all because I fell in love with a teenager,” he said in a telephone interview from the Polk County Jail.

Three months after the fire, in July 2005, Diane Street contacted an investigator about a Polaroid photograph her sister-in-law had found of Jessica in a box in the basement of the Griswold house.

Shane Nestor, an agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in an report that “the picture is sexual in nature and clearly depicts Jessica Dyess’ genital region.”

Brian Street said his lawyer told him the photo shows Jessica sitting in a computer chair, wearing a tank top and underwear, with her legs spread.

“Jessica was not very lady-like,” he said. “I never touched Jessica in any inappropriate way.”

He was reluctant to talk about the Polaroids of Tracey, but said he didn’t want a judge to look at them during a detention hearing.

“I was like, ‘No! That’s not anybody’s business to see her without any clothes on.’”

Street said he is not allowed to contact Tracey.

“Richards and Nestor call that tampering with a witness,” he said. “But I just want Tracey to know that I am keeping my promise to her when I promised her ‘my full love and devotion and unyielding support of her.’”

He chafes at his lack of control over what he considers an unfair incarceration and has fired two court-appointed lawyers because of disagreements over his defense. His trial has been postponed eight times.

Some Key Figures in the Case

Here's a Register run-down of some of the key figures in the case -- and because some relationships are so intertwined, it is hard to keep everyone straight:

Key figures in the Tracey Dyess story
JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

January 25, 2007

This piece was first published in September 2006


Tracey Dyess, 19: She has memories of sexual molestation that date to her preschool years. After having sex with her stepfather Brian Street for two years, she said in court that she couldn’t take it any more and ignited a deadly fire to kill him. The fire killed Jessica Dyess, 13, and Kaleb Dyess, 6. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, attempted murder and arson and is serving a 45-year prison sentence.

Amy Dyess, 19: Tracey’s identical twin. She experienced a similar childhood but moved to Arizona three years ago to get away from Brian Street. Now lives in Hastings, Neb., with her mother and grandmother.

Debbie Street, 38: Tracey’s mother. She is in therapy to deal with grief and her own childhood molestation.

Diane Street, 59: Tracey’s grandmother. She kicked her husband, Frank Street, out of the house when he confessed to her in December to molesting five of his stepdaughters.

Frank Street, 64: Tracey’s stepgrandfather. He admits molesting five stepdaughters, and was charged with sexually assaulting Tracey and Amy when they were 4, but those charges were dropped. He served eight months in prison for spanking a 7-year-old with a belt and was released Sept. 14.

Brian Street, 38: Tracey’s mother’s third husband. He admits he had sex with Tracey, but said she was a willing participant. He goes to trial in November on charges of sexually exploiting Tracey and Jessica.
Dale “Steve” Grothe, 45: Tracey’s mother’s second husband. He acknowledged to The Des Moines Register that he molested Tracey when she was 14. He was arrested for it in 1991, but the charges were dropped.

Mike Dyess, 48: Biological father of Tracey, Amy and Jessica. He lives in Arizona.

Jessica Dyess: Tracey’s sister, who died in the fire. The 13-year-old girl, who had a learning disability, wrote letters saying she was running away to get away from Brian Street.

Kaleb Dyess: The 6-year-old died in the fire. Debbie took legal guardianship of the boy shortly after his birth. Tracey, Amy and Jessica grew up believing he was their brother.

Frances Dyess, 66: Tracey’s grandmother and the only relative who talks to her regularly. She lives in Texas.

Dixie Shanahan Duty, 39: Her mother was once married to Frank Street, who admits molesting Dixie when she was a teenager. Twenty years later, she was sentenced to 50 years in prison for killing her abusive husband, Scott Shanahan.

The Rev. Val Peter, 71: A priest at Boys and Girls Town in Omaha, Peter talks to Tracey frequently and is pushing for her early release from prison.

Tracey Dyess, born 5/31/87

How to Respond

Here's another feature from the Register:

Dyess story part 3: Focus on abuse misguided, advocates say
By JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

January 25, 2007

This piece was first published in September 2006


Tracey Dyess' story of molestation is a red flag that Iowans need to shift a misguided focus on "stranger danger" to a bigger threat - sexual abuse by someone known to their family, children's advocates said Monday.

Dyess' situation was extraordinary in many ways, but it's typical of Iowa abuse cases in that her alleged abusers were trusted people in her life. None were convicted sex offenders. New laws such as one restricting where registered offenders can live would not have offered her any protection, said Steve Scott of Prevent Child Abuse Iowa.

An Iowa child under the age of 7 was 40 times as likely to be raped by a family member or an acquaintance as by a stranger, according to the Iowa Uniform Crime Report.

There were 847 cases of child sex abuse perpetrated by a parent or caretaker last year in Iowa, according to the state Department of Human Services.

Dyess' memories of more than a decade of sexual abuse were told in a front-page series in The Des Moines Register on Sunday and Monday. The teen set her house ablaze in 2005 to put an end to years of sex with her stepfather, Brian Street. The fire killed her brother and younger sister.



A NEW FOCUS FOR THE LEGISLATURE?

The Iowa Legislature has poured millions of dollars into trying to stop child sexual abuse by strangers, when the most common source of harm is from a relative or a friend, Scott said.

"In essence, the legislative response is like a town that, in response to a crime wave, sets up roadblocks to prevent criminals from coming into town, while doing nothing to address the sources of problems already within the community," Scott said.

Rep. Clel Baudler, a Republican from Greenfield, said he can think of one effective new law.

"Everyone knows what needs to be done to fix these sick SOBs, and no one has the guts to say it," he said Monday. "No one has the guts to pass a law that would require surgical castration."

After church on Sunday morning, Baudler said people approached him to say they were upset to read about the repeated abuse in Dyess' life.

"How dysfunctional does a family have to be before you stop any more forks in the family tree? I don't know," Baudler said.



DYESS' PRISON TERM GENERATES DEBATE

An Omaha priest wants Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack to commute Dyess' 45-year sentence.

The governor's office said that a formal request to commute the sentence has not been made, and Vilsack was out of state Monday and could not be reached for comment on the Dyess case.

But a nationally renowned expert in child abuse and the medical director of the Child Abuse Program at Blank Children's Hospital in Des Moines said that by punishing Dyess with a long prison term, "we are victimizing her one more time."

"We failed to look at what caused those actions," said Dr. Rizwan Shah. "She would be better served if she received mental health treatment rather than being locked up 45 years behind bars."

No one will ever understand what went through Dyess' mind the night of the fire, Shah said.

"Children try to find escape routes and coping mechanisms, and not all are reasonable. Their efforts to rescue themselves and others from a situation may end up being more destructive, and that speaks to the pathology of the brain as a result of an avalanche of trauma."

Baudler said he believes Dyess needs to stay in prison for a long time - for her own good.

"While she's there, she needs treatment and education and needs to feel safe," he said. "She can get more help inside than outside, where she could so easily be victimized again. I don't think she's strong enough to stand the attention she would get when she got out. Someday, hopefully."

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said society has a responsibility to evaluate the degree to which Tracey poses a danger and decide if prison is the best place for her. There's a good reason for not imposing adult sentences on teens - some are amenable to rehabilitation, despite "a crummy childhood," he said.

"But this is a complicated evaluation, and the decision shouldn't be made on slogans of 'The poor kid suffered too much' and 'The state let her down' and 'Her offenders didn't get as much as she did.' "



FINDING HELP FOR IOWA KIDS

Advocates said chances are Iowans know a child who is suffering silently, and it's up to adults - a neighbor, an aunt, a teacher - to figure it out.

"All of Iowa's Traceys deserve far better than we have offered," said Beth Barnhill, executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault. "Children need to know there is hope, that there is a way out. Tracey saw no way out, for herself, or siblings."

Shah said the children's mental health care field is sorely lacking in resources and experts.

"This is discussed umpteen times during the year, and the legislature takes a back seat," Shah said. "This can remind them that by ignoring children's mental health issues, these problems don't go away."

Prevent Child Abuse Iowa sought $250,000 last session to expand efforts to teach children and adults how to recognize and respond to threats of child sexual abuse. Scott said the proposal had significant support but failed because of opposition from the House leadership and because the governor and legislative leaders failed to include it in the final budget deal.

More attention needs to be focused on counseling within the correctional system to help sex abuse survivors who are locked up, Barnhill said. Among women prison inmates in Iowa, 1 in 4 say they were sexually abused before age 18. For men in prison, it's 1 in 20, she said.

Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault is working with five prisons to offer groups for sex abuse survivors, most of whom also began to use drugs and alcohol to cope with their abuse, she said.

Dyess is in a program called "Managing Emotions, Seeking Safety," and will eventually be in a program for victims of a sex crime, a prison spokesman said.

Iowans need to shift the focus away from the "Say no, go and tell" programs aimed at children, which largely address stranger danger and put the responsibility on children to report abuse, Barnhill said. The focus should move back to the adults who are truly responsible for community safety, she said.

Iowans should be taught how to recognize adults who may harm children, such as adults who are more interested in children than their adult peers, ones who offer free child care and buy expensive presents, and ones who are overly interested in children's sexual development, Barnhill said.

For families who have experienced intrafamilial child sexual abuse, there are programs throughout Iowa to help the victim, the nonoffending parents, the siblings and, in a limited capacity, the offenders. The Iowa Sexual Abuse Hotline at (800) 284-7821 offers referrals.

Family Abuse Spanned Generations

A feature article by Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register on Tracey:

Family abuse spans generations
By JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

January 25, 2007

This piece was first published in September 2006


It ticked off Frank Street to be questioned by a reporter about the girls he sexually molested.

He shifted his weight to the handle of his walker, struggled to rise from his seat, and tried to make eye contact with the prison guards outside the visitors' room at the Nebraska state prison where he was serving time for spanking a 7-year-old boy with a belt.

He wanted to get away from these questions. But something made him listen - and answer.

Were there more than just the five girls?

"Hell, no, there ain't no more," he snapped, his breathing labored.

Street is 64, with diabetes, high blood pressure and emphysema from smoking for 28 years as an over-the-road trucker. A tube snakes from his nose to an oxygen tank he cannot breathe without.

He admits he molested five of his stepdaughters during the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes at their family home in Denison, Ia., but most often in the sleeper bunk inside his semitrailer while he was making deliveries across the country.

His wife, Diane Street of Hastings, Neb., said he confessed to her a few months after his stepgranddaughter, Tracey Dyess, set the deadly fire. Diane promptly kicked him out of the house.

But he firmly denies molesting Tracey and Amy Dyess, even though court documents in Clay County, Neb., state Tracey told authorities he offered the 4-year-old twins candy and toys for keeping secret that he fondled their genitals and made them touch his penis. "That never happened," he said, staring irritably into the distance. "I passed a lie detector test." That's true, but the test was flawed, said Dee Wilkerson, the Clay Center police chief.

One of the teenage girls Frank Street acknowledges molesting was his stepdaughter Dixie, who ended up marrying a boy from the next town who abused her, too. After years of being punched, tied up and dragged around by her hair, Dixie Shanahan Duty shot her husband, Scott, and left his corpse in their bed in Defiance, Ia., for more than a year. Dixie told authorities that when she was a girl, no one would listen when she told them her stepfather, Frank Street, was molesting her. Another admitted victim is Tracey's mom, Debbie Dyess Grothe Street. He touched her once, they both said in separate interviews.

Because the abuse of the five stepdaughters took place so long ago, Frank Street doesn't worry about being charged. Under current Iowa law, the statute of limitations for prosecuting sexual abuse of a child is 10 years after the child turns 18, or three years after a DNA match.

Frank Street said he is aware of the pain he has wrought.

"Yes, I wish I hadn't done it," he said during the interview at the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services Diagnostic and Evaluation Center in Lincoln. "I wished it had never started. I have no idea why it started."

Allegations of Frank Street molesting Tracey and Amy first surfaced when the twins were 4. After 17-year-old Tracey burned her house in 2005 - she said in court that the fire was to put an end to sex with stepfather Brian Street, who is Frank Street's son - she again leveled accusations at Frank. Ten months after the fire, Frank Street was charged with two felony counts for sexually assaulting the twins in 1991.

Three of his stepdaughters submitted written testimony to Clay County, Neb., district court stating Frank Street assaulted them as children. The Des Moines Register does not name sex abuse victims, unless they give permission, as Debbie Dyess Grothe Street did, or unless they forfeit their privacy through criminal testimony, as Dixie Shanahan Duty did.

One stepdaughter said the molestation began at age 4, another at 9 or 10. Frank Street denies that. "The youngest was 10 or 12," he said. "The others were all teenagers."

Then the stiffness in his shoulders softened. "It makes a person feel very insignificant, to think he takes advantage of young girls," he said. "As young as they're trying to say it happened, that's the part that makes me sickest."

In May 2006, prosecutors offered Frank Street a deal: They'd drop the charges that he sexually assaulted the twins if he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor child abuse charge for beating a 7-year-old boy in fall 2005. Nebraska social services workers had removed four young boys in Frank and Diane Street's care in December 2005 and sent them to foster homes.

Diane Street is furious with Frank for the abuse he admits, but she thinks he's telling the truth about the twins. Tracey's mother, Debbie, doesn't need proof. "What 4-year-old could make that up?" she said.

Frank served eight months at the Lincoln, Neb., state prison before being released on Sept. 14. He will not be listed on any sex offender registries. "I have no desires whatsoever for younger girls. I'm getting to the point where I ain't going to have no more problems," he said. "I can look at a female now and see she has a nice figure and I don't think, 'What is she going to look like naked?' "

A Lifetime Without Love

Here is one of Jennifer Jacob's feature stories on Tracey in the Des Moines Register:

Tracey Dyess' story, part 2: A lifetime without love
BY JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
COPYRIGHT 2006, DES MOINES REGISTER AND TRIBUNE COMPANY

January 25, 2007

This piece was first published in September 2006


Tracey Dyess picked up a photograph of her fire-blackened house, a tight smile on her face.

A social worker watched the teenager closely and asked how she was feeling.

"Sad," she answered, according to the social worker's report. "Because I got rid of more than I intended."

She said she wanted to keep her family and her pets and meant to get rid of only her stepfather when she drenched her house in Griswold with gasoline and lighted it on fire. She told the social worker she wasn't sure she wanted Brian Street dead, she just wanted everything to stop — the scams, the arguing, the abuse.

A smile tugged at her lips. Investigators say it took hours of interviews before they realized that facial expression was more of a grimace, and it appeared when she was confronted with unavoidable pain.

The girl who loves country music, animals and poetry had a childhood marred with memories of men stripping naked in her bedroom, reaching hands into her panties, and forcing sex acts upon her.

It has been 18 months since Tracey set her house afire. No one has been convicted for the years of abuse she says triggered her act of arson, which killed two siblings. A stepfather she says was the target goes to trial this fall.

Meanwhile, investigative reports obtained by The Des Moines Register, as well as extensive interviews with Tracey's relatives, show how Tracey and her identical twin sister, Amy, now 19, were born into a family with a history of sexual abuse and dysfunction. Amy says she remembers very little about their past.

Tracey remembers most of it.

The twins were placed in foster care twice, attended school only sporadically and worked at age 15 for a traveling carnival. Their restless mother moved with her children more than 25 times, lived for periods of time in a car, was arrested for prostitution when the girls were toddlers and was later arrested for being married to three men at once.



SEXUAL ABUSE LEADS TO LIFE ON THE RUN

Debbie Dyess Grothe Street, 38, knows the public condemns her for the way she raised her children and exposed them to abusive men.

She blames herself, too.

"I've made a lot of bad choices, and I've paid dearly for them," she told the Register during an interview at her home in Hastings, Neb. "What people don't understand is that I love my children. My children were my life."

But as a teenager, then as a mother, Debbie felt an urge to flee each time her world collapsed around her. Debbie herself was raped, between the ages of 11 and 15, by a close relative, she said. When she told, her stepmother accused her of lying. That's when she started running. She said she lived on the streets for two years as a teen.

"I'm not saying the problems in my life are anyone's fault. I made my own choices. But does sexual abuse affect your choices? Yes," she said. "Being abused affects everything in your life, from what you wear to how you feel about yourself."

At 17, Debbie hitched a ride with a passing trucker, a Texan named Mike Dyess, and soon she was pregnant with Tracey and Amy. She had trouble showing the twins much love or affection once they were born - seven weeks early, purple and fragile - in 1987.

"I was scared to death of them," she said.

Her mother, Diane Street, cared for the twins until Debbie and Mike moved to Texas. There, Debbie was busted for prostitution, while pregnant with her youngest daughter, Jessica. After Mike lost his job, he advertised "massages" by posting notes in bar bathrooms and on car windshields, according to Debbie. He invited men to the family's motel room, collected the cash then took the 3-year-old twins for a walk. Sometimes the twins slept in the next bed, but Debbie said she's sure they never woke.



TWINS BOUNCE FROM ONE HOME TO ANOTHER

After a short time in foster care, the twins ended up in the custody of Debbie's mother and stepfather, Diane and Frank Street, in Clay Center, Neb.

Grandma Diane adored them.

"In a lot of ways," Debbie said, "she was the mom I should've been. The way she held them, talked to them. ... I tried so hard, but I couldn't be the kind of mom I wanted to be."

But 4-year-old Tracey said Grandpa Frank was touching her and Amy. To this day Diane is certain it's not true, and Frank denies it. Charges of first-degree sexual assault for penetrating the twins with his fingers were dropped in a plea deal earlier this year, according to district court documents in Clay County, Neb.

A judge sent the preschoolers to their paternal grandparents, Frances and Royce Dyess, in Texas in 1991. When Frances saw the girls playing with each other's private parts, then talking about how Grandpa Frank didn't wear underwear, she said she called the county sheriff in Nebraska.

Eventually the twins were placed in foster care. At age 6, the girls were returned to their mother, who had completed parenting classes, but by then, "we were all strangers," Debbie said. Two-year-old Jessica was her favorite, she said, and it showed.

It wasn't long before Debbie got the itch to run. Mike Dyess' beat-up red car was home as the family rambled through Arizona. When that became too miserable, Debbie begged her friend Dale "Steve" Grothe in Hastings, Neb., for help. He paid for bus tickets for Debbie and her three girls, and let them move into his house.

Debbie found a night job at Kmart, but when she was short on cash she harvested food from the trash bins behind Allen's grocery store in Hastings. She never told the girls where she got the boxes of stale crackers and outdated canned vegetables.

In 1998, Debbie took in a troubled 16-year-old girl, Tina Bombar. When Tina gave birth to a baby boy, Debbie listed herself as the mother on Kaleb Dyess' birth certificate. The twins grew up thinking Kaleb was their brother; Nebraska court records show Debbie was named his legal guardian.

By 2001, Debbie had been married to Steve Grothe for about a year - she never divorced Mike Dyess - when Grothe started coming into the twins' room at night. He would stand there naked, touching himself, Tracey told police, according to district court documents in Adams County, Neb. Eventually he started touching the girls and having sex with them, she said.

"It hurt all the time but he said the more that he did it we would start to get used to it," Tracey wrote after the Griswold fire in a letter that became part of authorities' investigative reports.

On one road trip, in an overflowing green Suburban, Debbie and Grothe and all the children stopped by Mike Dyess' mother's home in Texas. Frances Dyess said their arguments and bad manners grated on her nerves. She gave the twins a frank talk, she said in an interview with the Register.

"I said, 'People are calling y'all the Beverly Hillbillies and white trash. You are old enough to make decisions by yourself. If your mother is not going to help you make a better life, you need to make better decisions for yourself,' " she said.

Tracey was hurt and offended. Her grandmother wonders if that's why she didn't confide about Grothe.

"I was so mad at their mother for dragging them around the country," Frances Dyess said, "that I missed the bigger picture. I feel guilty about that every day of my life."



CRIES FOR HELP YIELD LITTLE IN RETURN

A 14-year-old Tracey tried to befriend Hastings police, leaving notes on squad cars and mailing them letters, officers said. She met some of the officers when they were called to Grothe's house on reports of neglect. One report states that the house was dirty enough that everyone had to leave while it was cleaned.

In April 2001, Tracey told her friend Jessica Wempen that Grothe beat on her and tried to rape her. Wempen told her school counselor, who called police, Hastings police records show. Another police officer was called to the house in August 2001 on a report of "inappropriate contact," and Grothe was arrested on two felony counts of sexual abuse of a child, according to Adams County court documents.

In an interview with the Register last month, Grothe admitted that he molested Tracey.

"I don't deny that. There was a couple incidents," he said as Debbie stood next to him in his living room, listening.

Hanging on his front door was a cloth banner with a photo of Tracey and Amy and their siblings and the message "What dreams are made of."

Grothe, a 45-year-old spa repairman, said he was guilty only of the two specific offenses outlined in the 2001 court documents. But a judge dismissed those charges with prejudice, meaning they can never be refiled.

It’s not clear why the charges were dropped. Grothe said he admitted to police that he was guilty. According to Adams County prosecutor Donna Fegler-Daiss, Tracey recanted. Tracey said her mother refused to let her testify against Grothe and quickly moved the family away.

Debbie temporarily moved out of Grothe’s house, but in April 2002 she made Grothe apologize, then moved back in with him.

Tracey started sleeping with a BB gun under her pillow.



A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP BEGINS

Debbie bumped into Frank Street’s son, Brian Street, at a yard sale in September 2002 at Diane and Frank Street’s house. Although Brian is her stepbrother, they didn’t grow up together.

That night, Tracey was sitting in her grandparents’ house when Brian “just started touching me,” she wrote from her jail cell after the fire. “He stopped when I pulled away but everything got worse after that night.”

Brian remembers it differently: Tracey flirted with him.

Debbie confided to Brian, who was living with his sister in Council Bluffs, that she had to get out of Grothe’s house.

“I said, 'Why don’t you come down and stay with me for a while,’ ” recalled Brian, who at that time had been convicted of felony robbery, car theft and burglary.

Debbie made weekend trips to Council Bluffs, leaving the children at Grothe’s house, then moved in.

“Brian said, 'I have a stable life, I have a home, you can share the house, my sister’s there, you’ll be safe, the kids’ll be safe, everything’ll be great,’ ” Debbie said. “But that wasn’t the way it turned out.”

Over the next few months, everywhere Brian went, 15-year-old Tracey followed. Debbie told her mom, “Tracey is so stuck on Brian, it’s unreal.”

Tracey started dressing like Brian, and adopted his interest in motorcycles, wolves and eagles, relatives said. She got an identical haircut, bought his brand of Skechers shoes, and wore clothing from his closet. She fetched him coffee and played video games with him. Her moods reflected his.

Tracey later told investigators she liked the attention from Brian, but not the sex.

One afternoon, Tracey was watching a movie on Brian’s bed when he came in and locked the door, she told Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation special agent Don Shreffler. “He got on top of me and made me take off my clothes and he made me have sex with him,” Tracey wrote in a letter detailing her memories of abuse.

In March 2003, Debbie packed up her family again, this time for a trip to see a friend at the Grand Canyon. Brian left his job at Xerox and tagged along; he and Tracey rode in a car while the others piled into a $500 van.

“All we did was talk and talk,” Brian told the Register. He said he opened up to Tracey about his own sexual abuse, telling her he was molested at 14 by a friend’s uncle. He didn’t tell anyone until he was in his 20s.

“It’s embarrassing enough for a child to be abused, but to me it was worse, being a boy raped by a man. I didn’t figure anybody’d believe me,” he said.

Brian said that to him, Tracey wasn’t a child but a mature woman.

“I just felt so comfortable with her,” he said. “I don’t trust people very well. I have lots of reasons why I shouldn’t. With Tracey, I didn’t have to pretend to be something I wasn’t. I wasn’t even embarrassed to cry in front of her.”

Brian said both quickly developed romantic feelings.

“I can say I fell in love with her before we even left,” he told the Register.

He said Tracey had a choice in everything. “We all know the woman makes the rules in a relationship,” he said.

The vacation quickly turned into what the family calls “the road trip from hell.” Out of money, they begged cash off strangers for gas and food. They joined a carnival for a few weeks; the twins worked midway darts and ring toss games.

During a fight with Brian, Debbie swallowed a bottle of pills. Brian bought ipecac syrup, and Debbie vomited for hours before passing out, both recalled. In April 2003 in Arizona, Debbie married Brian — without divorcing Mike Dyess or Steve Grothe — so that they could get social services vouchers as a family, and so that Debbie could open checking accounts under a new name and not be flagged for past bad checks, they said.

On the highway one day, the van’s brakes failed. Brian saw Debbie gesturing wildly and maneuvered his car so that the van could ram it. He braked until both vehicles stopped. After that, the family crammed into the car, with everything they owned tied to the roof, covered by a shower curtain.

While wandering around California, Amy got fed up and wanted to go back to her dad, Mike Dyess. Brian refused to take her, so at a truck stop, Debbie found a trucker willing to deliver her 16-year-old daughter to Arizona.



MONTHS OF HOPING SOMEONE WOULD 'FIGURE IT OUT’

The family returned to Council Bluffs in May 2003, then moved 15 times in the next two years, partly to avoid police attention on their check scams, Debbie said.

“It was how we paid for everything: food, a place to sleep, everything,” she said.

Brian’s biological daughter, Loriann Mudra, visited them in Underwood, Ia., for Father’s Day 2003 and thought she overheard her dad and Tracey in the bedroom having sex, according to a Division of Criminal Investigation report.

Loriann said that on other visits, 12-year-old Jessica never wanted to be alone. She insisted her stepsister sleep with her whenever she was in town.

Tracey told investigators that when the family lived in Omaha in the fall of 2003, Brian forced her to have sex after everyone was asleep. She locked her door once, but Brian climbed in through the window and removed the lock, she said.

During an argument in Omaha, Brian tried to run over his wife but missed, according to both Debbie and Brian.

More than once, Tracey witnessed him slicing his arms with a knife when upset. He told her she couldn’t have a boyfriend because she had to be with him forever, she said.

In April 2004, Brian took the family to Branson, Mo., to celebrate Jessica’s 13th birthday with go-cart and boat rides. The photos depict a happy family laughing together.

Tracey was arrested in September 2004 while the family was living in Springfield, Ill., for returning to a hardware store a $203 faucet purchased with a bad check, police and court records show. The family moved. Brian repeatedly promised that their lives were going to get better and that they’d never have to live with poverty or abuse again.

Tracey said Brian complimented her on how she dressed, how she smelled. He said he liked to watch her sleep. She told investigators she liked those comments because it was the first time anyone had said anything nice like that to her, but it didn’t feel right.

“I just kept hoping someone would figure it out,” she said.

Tracey said she believes her mom knew about the sex but ignored it because she wanted a man around. Debbie is adamant that she did not know. But she suspected.

“I asked her once if Brian was abusing her, and she told me 'no,’ and then she ran and told Brian I asked,” Debbie said. “She defended Brian to me all the time.”

The family moved to Bellevue, Ia., in fall 2004. Brian would tell Debbie that he and Tracey were going to Wal-Mart or on other errands, then check into a motel, Tracey told investigators. “Even when my mom and everyone else was out of town he would still rent a motel room because he said it made it more romantic,” Tracey said.

When Diane and Frank Street caught wind of one motel stay, Frank said he called authorities in Pottawattamie County and reported that his teenage granddaughter was in a motel room with his 35-year-old son. Tracey told the officer who responded that she was fine, according to Frank.

One day, Brian asked Tracey to let him take some nude photos, according to investigators’ reports. She said no, but Brian kept asking, she told his lawyer in a December 2005 interview. She finally agreed “because there wasn’t no getting out of it.”

Tracey told investigators that when she and Brian were alone, he took her up to the attic, gave her fancy underwear and told her how to pose. They took dozens of photos, some of Tracey’s pubic area and some of their genitals together as they had sex, according to federal court documents in the case against Brian.



NEW HOME, SAME LIFE IN GRISWOLD

The family moved into a skinny house in Griswold in November 2004.
Townspeople rarely saw anyone but Tracey, who liked to walk her dog, Penny. They couldn’t tell if the teenager with close-cropped hair, drab clothing and no makeup was a boy or a girl.

When Tracey in-line skated past Police Chief Clarence Waddell’s squad car, she would smile and wave, he said.

Brian granted his stepdaughter adult status he denied his wife: keys to the house, her own credit card, freedom to bike to the store without asking his permission.

Once, on an Internet chat site Tracey liked, Brian pretended to be a guy named Mike Mechanic. After he drew Tracey into a sexual conversation, he confronted her about the racy chat . Tracey apologized in a gushy letter that investigators found in the fireproof safe in Brian’s bedroom.

“I love you with all my heart and I never want to hurt you,” she wrote. “You are the only one that I will ever love or do anything with.” She told investigators she’d written it “to avoid a fight.”

In early March 2005, Tracey wrote in the letter detailing her abuse that she woke up and heard Brian with Jessica.

“I just froze at the top of the stairs crying,” Tracey wrote. “I couldn’t make myself move to stop him. That is one night I really regret because she was my baby sister and I was supposed to be the one to protect her.”

Jessica told her sister the next morning that she had to get away from Brian “no matter what she had to do,” Tracey wrote.

Three weeks later, Tracey lighted the house on fire.

In jail in Cass County, Tracey asked her lawyers if she could see the photos of Jessica and Kaleb’s burned bodies. They said they’d leave it up to social worker Karla Miller, director of the Iowa City-based Rape Victim Advocacy Program.

Miller said in her report that she asked Tracey repeatedly if she was certain she wanted to look at the photos.

“They’re horrible,” she said.

Tracey was very quiet. Then she said: “Yes.” Miller handed her the photos, one at a time.

Tracey looked at them briefly, then silently handed them back.
She was struggling with tears, Miller wrote.



AFTER THE FIRE, A JAIL CELL BRINGS SAFETY

Before Tracey was sentenced, those close to the teen wondered what she would do if she were freed from jail. The next time she got angry, would she burn another house as her relatives slept? Prosecutors argued she needed prison time — and years of mental health counseling.

Tracey at first pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and other felonies — and then she considered the fate of her step-aunt Dixie Shanahan Duty, whom Frank Street has admitted molesting when she was a girl. One of Tracey’s lawyers, Greg Steensland of Council Bluffs, also defended Duty, who shot her husband in 2002 and left his corpse in a bed for a year. Duty turned down a plea bargain that would have set her free within a decade. A jury didn’t accept Duty’s self-defense claim and convicted her of second-degree murder, which carries a 50-year sentence.

When Tracey heard that, she accepted a plea bargain — and sidestepped a possible sentence of life in prison.

As a judge sentenced Tracey to 45 years, the teen’s lopsided smirk didn’t play well with TV news viewers. But those who had gotten to know her understood.

“They said I must feel scared or uncomfortable here and do you know what? I’m not,” Tracey wrote from her jail cell to Division of Criminal Investigation special agent Mitch Mortvedt. “I actually like it here more than my own home.”

Cass County Sheriff Bill Sage talked to Tracey for hours after the fire. He said he saw her cry only once: the day she was being transferred from the jail, a place where Linda the jailer and Wendy the victim’s advocate and Chuck the public defender and Father Peter had shown her such kindness.

The only place she’d ever felt safe in her life, she told Sage, was in that jail.

Appeal to Gov. Culver

What follows is the clemency request letter I mailed to Governor Culver in January:

1/11/07

Dear Governor Culver,

Congratulations on your inauguration as governor. I had a Culver/Judge bumper sticker on my car, attended your rallies in both Mt. Pleasant and Iowa City the Sunday before the election, voted for you on Election Day, and celebrated your victory on election night.

I am writing to encourage clemency for Tracey Dyess.

I was only just beginning to get to know Tracey when her clemency application was filed in the fall, so I’m not one of the references included in her clemency application. I have come to know her since then through visits and correspondence, and I’m sending this reference to supplement her clemency application.

I serve as pastor of Pleasant View Mennonite Church in Mt. Pleasant. When I learned in a Des Moines Register article last fall that Tracey, whose situation I'd followed in the paper for over a year, was incarcerated here at the women's unit in Mt. Pleasant, I wrote her a sympathetic note. She responded and included a visitation form, and since then, we've had many visits and several letters exchanged.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the unusual circumstances for which Tracey Dyess is in prison: that in an attempt to end her stepfather's abuse of her and her younger sister and unwilling to simply run away and her abandon her younger siblings for whom she felt great responsibility, she set fire to the house.

In my view, it was an injustice that the book was thrown at her for this in the first place, and I have little doubt that if she’d had enough money for a quality legal defense team, a jury would have acquitted her. The state that intervened seriously neither when she and her siblings were being sexually abused nor when they were withheld from school finally took notice of her only to prosecute her for a sad and failed attempt to put an end to the abuse. From the very beginning, her harsh sentence has been an offense to justice, in my view. I’m glad that Iowa gives the governor the option of clemency for just such situations.

At the time of this writing, I've had approximately eight 2-hour visits with Tracey. My impressions of her are as follows.

Tracey Dyess is not a threat to anyone. Her life situation two years ago pushed her to a breaking point that few of us could withstand, especially when seventeen. I know she deeply regrets the deaths of her siblings and often replays how she could have dealt with their collective nightmare differently. Even if she would ever find herself backed in a corner by an
abuser again, I'm confident that she -- more than the most of the rest of us -- has given thought to ways to escape and get help.

If Tracey would be released from prison and needed a place to stay for a while, I would not hesitate to welcome her into our home with my family -- including my wife, college-age niece, and 13-year-old son. I consider Tracey to be absolutely no risk.

I also know that Tracey has given much thought to her mother's negative example of involvement in a series of abusive relationships. Tracey knows that abuse victims have a tendency to fall into future abusive relationships. Though anyone can get involved with an abuser, I suspect that Tracey's antennae are tuned to pick up danger signs and get out of such situations quickly.

Tracey is a kind, polite, and pleasant-to-be-with young woman. Often at our visits, we spend part of our time just playing Scrabble. She’s a relaxed, non-competitive person (and the fastest Scrabble player I’ve ever played against). She’s someone who will easily have positive, healthy friendships when given the opportunity. My observation of her interaction with the prison guards is that they, too, like her and enjoy relating to her.

Tracey has given much thought to what she’ll do with her life when she leaves prison. Her neglectful mother and abusive stepfather kept her out of school to care for her younger siblings, but Tracey is working to finish her GED. She also has college ambitions that seem to me very realistic. Among other things, I’ve discovered that she’s a voracious reader of fantasy novels.

As for ambitions beyond school, Tracey understandably has a special interest in finding a way to be an advocate for victims of domestic abuse. She wants to play a positive role in the world, and I’m confident that she will when given the opportunity.

My impression is that Tracey is probably the member of her dysfunctional family who has it most together. That’s why she was the one who did the caring for her younger siblings and why she – rather than any of the adults – was the one who felt all the pressure to do something to try to end a horrible situation. Now older and wiser and away from her childhood of domestic abuse, Tracey’s natural leadership abilities will be something she and society will be able to draw upon in good ways. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find her doing something like running an effective domestic violence center in ten years. Or maybe, as she moves away from her past, her talents and interests will flower in other ways.

Finally, my impression is that the state prison system is not well equipped to provide the kind of therapy from which Tracey could most benefit as an abuse victim. Prisoners with substance addictions and several other issues have effective programs, but my impression is that Tracey’s core issues are not being effectively addressed and could best be worked at through quality professional counseling outside the prison system.

Also, some of the news accounts of the fire in Griswold in 2005 have made a point of describing Tracey as emotionless. My sense of her is that she’s a person who’s had to deal with such an unbearable amount of sadness that, to hold it together, she’s learned to bottle it up tight. In my experience, this is a common survival mechanism for long-term abuse victims -- as well for others, such as combat veterans -- whose extreme trauma seems too overwhelming to deal with.

If you get a chance, I’d encourage you to consider visiting with Tracey yourself as part of the discernment process regarding her clemency application.

Thank you for your time and for your attention to Tracey’s situation. I wish you all the best.

Sincerely,

John Zimmerman
Pastor of Pleasant View Mennonite Church