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.