ELDORA, Iowa — An Ackley couple faces first-degree kidnapping charges in the alleged physical and mental torture of an 8-year-old boy, according to a statement released Wednesday by Hardin County Attorney Darrell G. Meyer.
Traci Lynn Tyler, 39, and Alex Craig Shadlow, 30, were arrested Wednesday and booked into the Hardin County Jail. According to court documents, the couple confined the child for long periods in the basement of their house in Ackley, a town of about 1,500 lying on the Hardin-Franklin county line.
The criminal complaint said the child was “intentionally subjected to physical and mental torture,” including depriving him of food, shelter and normal bodily comforts. The child allegedly slept on a cement floor without bedding, used a coffee can as a toilet and was subjected to unusual cruelties.
The complaint said Tyler, Shadlow’s girlfriend, often urged the couple’s dog to bite the child, leaving him permanently scarred.
The child is Shadlow’s biological son.
Shadlow admitted to confining the child in the basement every night “because of his bad behavior and food-stealing,” according to the court documents.
Ackley Police Department Chief Brian Shimon said the AGWSR Community School District and the Iowa Department of Human Services began examining conditions in the home during the last school year. Shimon said his office became involved last July and soon contacted the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI).
“With some of the other calls that we’d had there, I just felt that I needed to consult with the DCI on this,” Shimon said, “and that’s when it began to open up.”
Shimon said repeated calls from concerned neighbors convinced him a deeper investigation was in order.
“The neighbors were concerned, and they’d called in,” Shimon said, “and we’d get there and see this kind of stuff — reports from neighbors that the kid’s walking around the garage holding weights for punishment, that the child is being made to sleep outside in a tent. I get there one day, and I go there, and the child’s inside the tent, and it’s raining and lightning, and the tent’s collapsed, and this kid’s buried inside the tent. I mean, you know, just stuff like that. That’s not a normal thing to me. I just felt like I wanted to call in the DCI to make sure that everything was looked into, and thank God we did because then everything else surfaced as we moved along.”
Shimon, a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, said he and Ackley Police Department Office Todd Ruszkowski, a 25-year police officer, sensed something was wrong in the home.
“You just get a gut feeling,” Shimon said, “and you realize that, okay, I’m going to make sure that we really check into what’s going on here. This is not a normal thing. I have eight children of my own, you know what I mean? It’s just not normal.”
The police chief was grateful to the state investigators for bringing the needed resources to bear on the investigation.
“Thank God we’ve got a hell of a DCI unit,” he said. “They got on it right away.”
First-degree kidnapping is a class A felony, punishable by life in prison without the possibility of parole. Tyler and Shadlow are being held on $500,000 bond. Their initial appearances are scheduled for Thursday, July 19 in Hardin County District Court.
