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.