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.