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The Murder - "Sprout" by Dale Peck. Part 5 [1]
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Date: 2025-07-03
Trigger Warning: This diary in all its parts, deals with child abuse and a malignant narcissist. ALL the names in this diary have been changed, to protect the innocent and guilty alike.
Part 5
Victor’s newest property where he lived his remaining days. Inside that metal barn is what he parked his 5th wheel,
After Ty was removed from the Victor’s home, Victor sold the property, bought a 5th wheel camper, and another property closer to Newton. The property had a huge metal storage barn on it. My brother-in-law says it was a machine shed, and it was massive. Victor moved the 5th wheel into the dark storage barn and that’s where he lived his remaining days. Inside a 5th wheel, inside a dark barn.
It served his paranoia.
At this point some housekeeping is in order.
L.D.’s wife died in 1991 and he followed her in 1994.
My cousin Karen and I always found the circumstances of his death suspicious and believed that foul play was involved. Hutchinson police disagreed with us.
Aunt Vicky died in 1998, three days after her last unmarried child married. My cousin and his new wife had no sooner touched down in Alaska for their honeymoon then they had to immediately book a return flight back. They did make it in time.
Aunt Nancy died in 1999
Aunt Vicky’s husband died in 2003. My parents, my sister, Aunt Alice, cousin Karen, June and Victor attended the funeral.
By this time Victor was used to not only controlling the narrative about his kids, but he also thought he controlled how others behaved toward his children. Except for my cousin , of course who told him to pound sand.
He may have controlled Aunt Alice and my cousin Karen, of whom he was a frequent guest helping them with all manner of things. He may have also controlled the narrative where aunt Vicky was concerned. I know she bought some of it. But he didn’t control my Dad’s family.
What Victor wanted was for everyone to shun his kids, but that’s not what he got. So when he saw my sister talking to, being very friendly, and cordial with June he was angry.
He cornered my sister in a vacant dark hallway of the church and looming over her said “Why are you doing this to me?!” His manner was threatening and she, making sure her voice did not shake, responded “I’m not doing anything to you Victor.”
She knew what he was capable of and as soon as she could, ducked into a Sunday School room and broke down. June heard her crying as she tried to steady herself and got our Mom, who comforted her and then told our Dad. He was so visibly angry that when she was finally able to pull herself together and get back to the repast they left the gathering almost immediately.
Trying to ease my sister a bit with some levity after I heard what had happened I quipped “What’s he gonna do? Whack you with his walker?”
In 2004 a cousin on my Mom’s side of the family died. He completed a suicide and I wrote about it here on the 6th anniversary of his death . It may not seem important or germane to this dairy in its many parts, but it is. Even after his death.
I attended his funeral and managed some side trips. One was to see June and her mother Connie was there! June had reconciled with her a while back. We spoke for a long time. and she spoke about her regrets with her kids. She still, though, felt helpless given what Victor and the court had done to her. June took care of her and her step dad until their deaths, Connie’s in 2022.
Ty’s life became a familiar routine of working as an electrician, doing drugs, getting in trouble and landing in jail. Add water, rinse and repeat. Unfortunately that meant that he was absent for most of his daughter’s lives and then for his grandchildren’s lives. (He had 8 grandchildren)
He had a rap sheet of more than a dozen charges, mostly drug and non violent crime (one including the theft of a police car),for which he spent time in prison. And a felony drug charge for which he received a sentence of 2 years of probation in Feb 2011.
In many ways my Dad became the dad some of his nieces and nephews needed due to absent or in the case of Victor, asshole fathers. I know he wished he could have done that for Ty. He was certainly one for June. When she got her GED and went on to get a bachelor’s degree he crowed and bragged about her like any proud parent would. Except for Victor, who did not.
Dad was learning more and more about his brother’s abuse as the years went by. That knowledge made him less and less forgiving and his ability to overlook Victor’s behavior was gone. One day when Victor was visiting Denver he came over and while there insulted my Mom. Dad kicked him out immediately.
My Mom, bless her soul, was at times overly forgiving and wanted Dad to ignore it and have a relationship with his brother. But Dad stood firm and Margaret and I supported him. Victor came back for a visit, expecting that his insult had blown over, but Dad wasn’t having it. He didn’t apologize for the insult and doubled down saying he was right. Dad kicked him out again, telling him never to come back. Dad was done with him.
There was a period where it looked like my Dad was going to pass away during this time. I told him that he couldn’t leave June alone with Victor. He rallied and was with us until 2021.
I viewed Victor as more his kid’s tormentor than their father. Even in adulthood they couldn’t escape his malign machinations. So when what I regard(ed) as the inevitable happened, I wasn’t surprised, nor was most everyone else.
A different view of the huge metal barn where Victor’s body was found inside his 5th wheel, inside the barn.
Sunday, March 28, 2011 my Mom called and said that Victor had been found shot to death in his 5th wheel inside the barn. We knew who did it. It seemed everyone did.
Ty was already in jail having been arrested earlier that morning on drug charges. Now he was being charged with first degree murder. He shot Victor twice in the chest with a shotgun. Patricide being something new and different, it seemed that every news organization in Kansas no matter how far away, covered it.
I argued with June that there were extenuating circumstances that the court needed to know. June responded in a couple of ways. First she didn’t want to go into it I think for fear of having to relive all the trauma again. She also felt that she had lived in the same house, experienced the same things and had gotten out just fine, Ty should have too.
This is where I really had work to hold my tongue. Ty’s experiences were totally different than her’s. Forgetting of course how we all experience things differently even if it’s ever so slightly, she and L.D. left so Ty grew up in that house ALONE, with Victor. None of his other children experienced that. He also watched his brother die a horrible death as he fought to live, and Ty could do nothing.
It wasn't really even a house. Victor had the warm cozy 1 bedroom house. He had also moved the kitchen, the sitting area into the his home , Ty had the barn that he slept in alone. Ty only “visited” the house. June also had her husband, that despite some problems he had, he and his family helped her through some of her trauma. Ty and his wife, while married, were the poster children for dysfunction Junction, as they still were after they split.
June also had her deep faith which Ty lacked. It wasn’t for want of trying on June’s part, he just wasn’t reachable with the tact she was using. He may have associated it too much with Victor.
My worry was that with this being the sensational crime of patricide that the state would seek the death penalty. I said that as long as the death penalty was off the table I would not write a diary about this on Dailykos, or any blog.
I don’t know what happened in the courtroom or how a deal was reached, but he plead to involuntary manslaughter and got 19 years.
June became the executor of Victor’s estate. She was determined to do just what Victor had wanted even though he had been such a bastard toward her. I argued with her that she didn’t owe him anything and didn’t need to do what he wished. But she proceeded to follow his wishes.
He was buried in the plot where once the child of aunt Vicky and her husband, who had died in infancy had lain. Her body was moved to be next to her mother in a different cemetery, opening up the space next to my grandparents.
This was another point of contention with my Dad since she did help raise Victor’s kids after he and Connie divorced. Yes grandma was toxic and abusive, but she stepped into the breech when she was needed.
Both he and I were a little annoyed with this since Victor didn’t hide his hatred and contempt for Grandma. This included not buying her headstone which he was given the money and tasked to do by the sibs. After 5 years of no headstone my parents bought one for grandma. Then a few years later low and behold my aunt Vicky secretly bought a new grander head stone that included Grandpa's (which had been a military headstone since he was a doughboy in WWI) with a stone vase between them.
My other irritation with it is now, as it was then, that this skinflint of a man has a headstone and we don’t even know for sure where Hollis’ ashes are buried. Dale wrote this:
He showed me the gravestone. The Petits had a scraggly cedar break planted west of the house to check snow drifts in the winter, and Holly’s ashes were buried beneath them and marked by a single brown brick. Vitrified, ferrous, crenellated: not even the fanciest adjectives in the world could disguise the fact that Mr. Petit had marked the final resting place of his youngest son with a leftover brick from the construction of his dingy subterranean house. Two brass letters had been set in the top. - “Sprout”, page 173
Dale has confirmed that this part of the story is real and what Ty said and showed him. I have no idea now how we would check to see if it’s there.
There is also a rumor that Victor took a post hole shovel to the cemetery one night and dug a hole next to one of my grandparents headstones and dropped the urn, or more probably, the plastic bag in that hole.
One day June’s husband pushed a rod into the ground around the head stones trying to verify, if anything, was there and it struck something. But no one wants to check it out for fear that the cemetery will charge us.
There is plenty of room in the plot where the cremains of my aunt Alice and cousin Karen are buried for Hollis’ urn. They are in the same cemetery as my Grandparents and Victor. We could even include Cam’s remains, if someday we “bring them home.”
A few months, maybe a year after Ty was remanded to Kansas Corrections I emailed June and asked for Ty’s prison number so I could write him. I didn’t get anything back and I dropped it, thinking she was dealing with her own issues over all of this. But I kept searching the web for it and I finally found it May of 2019, beginning another chapter.
end of part 5. Part 6 will be posted Saturday, July 5 at 12noon ET.
<hr>
Some of the other diaries about my family:
I'm 54 and I have a new brother: A tale of 2 different people finding their DNA family
No Sex Education ≠ No Sex Among Unmarried Teens: My Family is Proof
Suicide
When all is made hostile; a story of sexual assault
The freakingly COOL, totally AWESOME phone call
The accidental time capsule
A sonogram, a pro-life cousin, & abortion
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