GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — The Pecan Street Apartment complex is like many others in Green Bay. Other than the yellow siding, it’s unremarkable, slotted among so many other residential developments that it can be hard to tell them apart. However, something happened at this one. Something horrible.
Listen to part one of this story:
Listen to part two of this story:
It was the start of a mystery, a mystery that, at the time, was totally unsolvable.
Unsolvable…until now.
On February 18th, 1982, a newborn infant girl was found in the front seat of a car at that east side apartment complex. She was hours old. Police, at the time, were stumped.
Then-TV 11 reporter Chris Bond stands outside of the Pecan Street Apartment complex on February 18th, 1982, reporting on the discovery of an infant child left in the front seat of a vehicle. (Courtesy WLUK)
“The baby was on the seat of the car and wrapped in an old tablecloth,” said then-Deputy Chief of Detectives Fred Mathews in a story aired that day by Fox 11, then TV 11.
“The woman who found me called 911 and said ‘I found a baby in my car’” said Bethany Laska. “I was quite cold.”
Bethany is a hairstylist in San Francisco, California, but 40 years ago, the headlines called her Rachel Brown–the name a group of nuns gave her at St. Vincent hospital. The “Brown” came from Brown County. She was abandoned moments after she was born. She was put into the foster system, and eventually was adopted.
Bethany Laska as a child in the 1980s. (Laska Family)
“I grew up, I was still in Wisconsin, but down around Sheboygan,” Laska recalled. “I grew up mostly around the country, on the lake. It was lovely. I did a lot of swimming, skating and hiking.”
But throughout her childhood, questions remained. Who was she? Who were her parents? Her adopted family didn’t tell her the whole story until she was a teenager–and only after she demanded it.
“I wrote them a letter demanding they tell me everything they know, and then watched them read it,” said Bethany. “Then I watched them read it, and they kind of looked at each other and said ‘well, I guess it’s time.’”
They told her everything, but the whole truth left more questions than answers. Bethany asked when she was 17–the year was 1999–and any means to find her parents simply did not exist.
Bethany Laska as a teenager. (Laska Family)
“We didn’t have DNA, we barely had the internet,” Bethany said. “So at that point I was like, ‘well, I guess I’m never gonna know.”
That took time.
“It was almost like a grief. Like that person didn’t exist. There were no records to look up. It was just a question mark,” Bethany told WTAQ. “I went through a process of becoming more accepting of possibly never finding out who my biological family was.”
Meanwhile, just a county away, a man was at work. Greg Dietzen, when 1999 rolled around, was already building what would be a successful business. Things weren’t always on the up and up for Greg, however. He had a career working in the machining industry in the late 70s. He then decided to go back to school.
“I graduated from [UW] Whitewater in December of 1983, and in the meantime I had this relationship for a couple of years, and it broke off back in 1981,” Greg told us.
It was a sudden break up. It wasn’t an easy one.
“She wanted to move on. I was okay with that. I never held anything against her for that, because it wasn’t going to work. So we just parted ways,” he recalled.
Eventually, years down the road, Greg met and married his now-wife, Sara. He didn’t think much of his relationship back in the 80s. It was a memory, like any other. He wound up raising a family of his own.
Meanwhile, Bethany went to college. She spent time in Illinois, and then in Missouri. But every few years, she’d get the bug. She’d work feverishly, trying to track down something, anything, that would give her some idea of how she ended up in the front seat of that car, just hours after she was born, back in 1982.
“At one point I tracked down a social worker who had been assigned to my case, and at that point she was rather elderly,” said Bethany. “She was very confused as to why some 18 year old was calling her out of the blue.
As the years passed, technology changed. Years of research into DNA technology turned genetic profiles into consumer products. Laska, seizing the opportunity, bought a 23andMe kit, which allowed her to see not only her genetic makeup, but also get in touch with any family members.
Surely enough, she found them… on her mother’s side.
It took years, but she finally found out who her mother was. Some truths, however, are more painful than ignorance.
“It was a big aha moment. Like ‘Oh, wow, I know who this person is now,” said Bethany. “But, she has made it clear she does not want to talk to me.”
Bethany’s mother was the woman who called police on that day, more than 40 years ago.
It was her mother’s car that Bethany was found in.
Bethany’s mother had hid her pregnancy from her ex-boyfriend. In fact, she hid it from everyone, including her own immediate family. To this day she denies, despite clear DNA evidence, that she is Bethany’s mother.
“It sucks,” Bethany said, forcing a laugh. “It hurts, but I can’t say I’m completely surprised…This is a person who obviously was not in a good place when I was born, and I can only assume she is not in a good place now.”
That’s where things stayed, with part of the truth revealed. But there’s a curious issue with babies: like the tango, it takes two to make them.
“I thought, you know, I hit this dead end with my mom’s side of the family,” Bethany said. “But there’s another person here. There’s a father out there. I had figured there was a good possibility that he didn’t know I was even born.”
Bethany wound up getting in touch with a group that helps people like her. They’re called “Search Angels”.
“I had this wonderful woman named Elaine, and she recommended I get my Ancestry DNA done, because you get a different group of people,” Laska recalled.
So she did…and sure enough, there were matched on her father’s side. She was, in fact, able to narrow it down after finding a cousin on her father’s side.
“We knew for sure that this cousin of mine had uncles, and one of those uncles needed to be my father,” said Bethany.
So she started reaching out. She found one of them on Facebook, and sent a message.
Greg, almost half way across the country, got that message.
“I asked ‘Why is this pretty girl in California sending me a Facebook friend request when I have no mutual friends with her? Mmm… Delete!” Greg Dietzen laughed. “That’s trouble.”
I suppose you really can’t blame him for that one.
Nevertheless, Bethany persisted. Eventually, she found a breakthrough…in a very unlikely place.
“My partner’s friend founded a Facebook group for people to share pictures of cats,” explained Bethany.
Cats. Innocuous. Universal. Cats are all over the place. There are cats in California and Wisconsin alike. This was a big Facebook group. It’s name?
“It was called ‘Pussy Shots’” said Sara Dietzen, Greg’s wife and a known cat enthusiast. “It’s all about cats!’
Sara was a member of the group, and she had made a post. That prompted Bethany to reach out with a message.
“‘I know this is weird coming out of nowhere, but I see that we’re part of the same group, I am trying to get ahold of your husband,’” Bethany said, recounting the message she sent. “‘I don’t know how we’re related.’ And then I threw out some specific names of people.”
Sara connected Bethany with Greg. They started talking. Bethany told Greg her story…and told him about her mother.
“He’s like ‘oh, my gosh, I knew that person, we were in a relationship’, and then he interrupts me and says ‘Oh my God, do you think I’m your dad?’ And I said “Maybe?’” Bethany laughed as she recalled the discussion.
It didn’t match up, however, for Greg.
“I said ‘That can’t be. That can’t be Bethany. There’s too much time, there, and then she told me the rest of the story,” Greg said. “She said she was abandoned in a car…and my heart jumped out of my chest because I could remember that story like it was yesterday.”
Greg remembered, but things still didn’t match up in his head. It had been too long, he had thought, between Bethany’s birth and his breakup for him to be the father. He decided, at that moment, to bust out an Ancestry DNA kit that Sara had picked up a few years earlier and send in his DNA sample, just to be absolutely sure.
Greg was at dinner when the results came in. He looked at the phone. He opened the email.
He stood up from the table, dialing Bethany’s number.
“I had turned my phone off, because I was just trying to have a no media afternoon and work on my plants on my patio,” said Laska. “I came back in and there were three missed calls and texts from Greg, and I pick up and he’s like ‘where have you been?’”
“She had a nickname for me at the time, she called me Uncle Dad,” said Greg. “I said ‘well, there’s no need for you to call me Uncle Dad anymore, Bethany,’ and she asks ‘oh, why not?’ and I said ‘because I am your dad’.”
It took 40 years. 40 years of questions for Bethany Laska. 40 years of heartbreak, of dead ends, of mysteries leading to further mysteries…it was finally over.
“I think we just cried. For hours,” said Bethany.
There was a lot to do.
There were a lot of feelings to process. Greg’s mind was thrown back to an age he nearly forgot, a time he committed only to memory–his relationship with Bethany’s mother.
“She probably knew that if I knew anything about you, I would have never given her up,” said Greg.
The moment he knew, he sprung into action: welcoming Bethany into the Dietzen family.
“We talked all night about a lot of stuff,” recalled Greg. “All the things we needed to do, meeting each other, things like that.”
“Once we got confirmation and everybody got the news, I had I don’t even know how many Facebook friend requests from family members,” said Bethany.
It’s not something she ever expected.
“I wasn’t expecting to be invited to family reunions and for people to want to come visit me, and to be part of family pictures,” she added. “None of that crossed my mind…having a family that really wants me to be part of the family. I didn’t expect that.”
But that’s what she got.
Greg immediately made plans to go see Bethany at her home in California. He hopped on a plane just in time to celebrate the 40th birthday of a daughter he never met, who he didn’t even know existed until now.
“I told her, ‘I don’t want to meet you in the terminal, she asked ‘why?’ and I said ‘the first time I see my daughter in 40 years I don’t want you being in a mask okay? So I’m going to meet you in the parking lot,” Greg laughed.
“Just as I was about to call to see where they are, Greg started calling me, and we saw them at the same time,” Bethany said.
Bethany Laska reunites with her father, Greg Dietzen, outside of the San Francisco airport in January, 2022. (Dietzen Family)
They rushed to each other in the parking lot, sharing a hug that lasted minutes. Neither could barely believe that the other was real. For Bethany, she saw and touched her own flesh and blood in a way she had never dreamed before.
“She hugged me for what had to be two minutes, she didn’t stop. She was crying, and you immediately get that bond,” recalled Greg. “I had told her a story about when my youngest daughter was born. Her birth was difficult, and they were about to take her to the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) and take care of her, but before they took her away I put my pinky finger down, and she grabbed it, and there was this immediate connection. I told Bethany that once you get that connection, it’s unbreakable.”
That was a story that Bethany remembered.
“After I was done soaking it all in, I remembered that, and I grabbed his pinky,” Laska said.
Greg was overcome.
“It was really amazing,” added Bethany.
Forty years is a really long time, and there’s a lot of catching up to do. Bethany’s adoptive family provided Greg with pictures of her over the years–a look back on a childhood he missed out on.
Bethany Laska and her father, Greg Dietzen. (Dietzen Family)
“For me that was very helpful, and I would put those pictures together with different times, like ‘oh, that was 1987’, or whatever, and I tried to match that up with what I was doing at the time,” said Greg.
Bethany’s mother, to this day, wants nothing to do with Bethany. She’s denied that she’s the one who gave birth to her, and had hid her pregnancy from everyone around her. That’s not something either Bethany nor Greg are keen to dwell on. They’re looking forward, and catching up on the 40 years they lost.
“We talk like, almost every single day. I talked to her twice this morning,” said Greg.
Even though Bethany didn’t grow up with Greg, and even though Greg had no idea that he had *another* daughter, they say there are some things that are quite simply in the blood. Greg and his wife, Sara, both noticed.
“There’s hard-wiring in DNA. We have similar tastes in things. We both have kind of a crazy sense of humor,” Greg told WTAQ.
“It didn’t take me more than an hour after I met her that I said ‘you’re a Dietzen. You’re a Dietzen through and through. Your whole personality is there,’” recalled Sara.
“She’s my daughter,” laughed Greg.
It was pretty clear to Bethany too.
“I’m definitely Irish. My dad and I like whiskey and wine,” Bethany chuckled. “That’s been kinda fun, to have someone who wants to have a drink with me every once in a while.”
In an undated photo, Bethany and Greg celebrate their very Irish heritage. (Dietzen Family)
On a rainy day at the end of May, Bethany and Greg are together. She’s flown to Green Bay for the first time since learning about her father.
“I came up for a family reunion that was planned before anyone even knew about me,” said Bethany. “It’s my grandmother’s 92nd birthday, so I got to meet her for the very first time on her birthday, which was pretty neat. I got to meet my sisters and my aunts and my uncles…it’s been an amazing time.”
It’s all part of the process of healing–and grieving.
“This is more of an acceptance part of the grieving process for me, because I’ve already been through all of the things I’m seeing Greg go through right now. I’m always saying that I’ve had 40 years to process this. He’s had five months,” said Bethany.
It’s a gloomy day. The skies are gray, much like the day Bethany was found–albeit nearly 30 degrees warmer. We brought Bethany and Greg back to the place it all began: the Pecan Street apartment complex. They stand mere feet away from where Bethany was found.
“It’s hard for me [here]. To me, there are a lot of things that are unresolved,” said Greg. “But as long as Bethany is here, and she came back and found me, that’s all I care about.”
“It’s been such a long journey to get here. It’s amazing to have–maybe closure isn’t the right word, but it’s just like, some grounding. A solid sort of feeling of having a home base,” said Laska.
Green Bay used to conjure an unsettling feeling in Bethany. Now, she says, it feels like home.
“People have asked me, ‘how did you feel when you first found out about this’, and there were a lot of emotions,” Greg said while standing just feet away from where Bethany was found. “The best way I can describe it to someone is that when you lose somebody that you love, when they die, this was like the opposite of that, but you feel all the emotions anyway. There’s anger, sadness, loss. But we have the rest of our lives now to be together, and that’s all that matters now.”
Forty years ago, then-Deputy Chief of Detectives Fred Mathews told this to WLUK-TV.
“We’re not too successful on these things. Usually you come up with zero on these things…we’ve had things like this over the years and to the best of my recollection we’ve never found the parents,” he said.
Forty years from then, the Girl in the Front Seat, who the nuns called Rachael Brown, Bethany Laska has found her family.
“This is beyond my wildest dreams. I told someone early on in this process, when Greg and Sara and everybody were being amazing, that this is the dream I never let myself have,” said Bethany.
The secret is out. This is who she is.
“I didn’t get a choice as to how I started, but I get a choice as to where I go from here. Anybody out there who thinks the world is happening to you, that’s okay, but it doesn’t mean you can’t find something you can do with that.”
Bethany Laska and Greg Dietzen share an embrace in the very parking spot where Bethany was found in 1982. (WTAQ/Casey Nelson)
Casey Nelson, WTAQ contributed to this story.
Special thanks to the Laska and Dietzen families, Fox 11 WLUK, Green Bay Police, and Brown County Health and Human Services for their assistance in telling this story.
