She spent the first eight years of her life physically, mentally, and sexually abused by her father. At a hotel in Dallas, TX, Eve stopped the abuse by killing her father. She wandered out of the hotel for three miles before passing out. A police officer found her and took her to a hospital. They named her Eve Dallas. She spent the next ten years bouncing from foster home to foster home before leaving the system at She immediately travelled to New York to become a police officer.
The next few years were spent in uniform. During her time in uniform, Lt. Ryan Feeney took notice of her and brought her into the Homicide Division. Throughout the course of the investigation, Eve comes across a connection between the victim and Roarke , a very wealthy businessman and possible suspect. Eve did her best to ignore her attraction to him but her efforts were futile. In the end Roarke is ruled out as a suspect and the real killer is identified.
At the end of the investigation, a relationship has formed between Roarke and Eve. Throughout the series, her memories return, mostly through a series of nightmares , revealing a history of incestual rape and patricide with her father, Richard Troy. It is revealed that he was raising her to prostitute her to child molesters. Her mother, Stella, was a prostitute, a drug addict and was occasionally beaten and raped by Troy but hated her daughter.
Eve finds out more about Stella in the book New York to Dallas. It was implied that since Eve had lost her memory, she had forgotten her name, as well, but it is eventually revealed in Reunion in Death that the reason Eve cannot remember her name is because her parents never gave her one.
The fact that no one in Dallas could track down her ID indicates one of two things: that either Homeland Security interfered and deleted her data, or that her parents never had her registered in the first place. For all intents and purposes, Eve did not exist in any records before she was eight years old. After her relationship and subsequent marriage to Roarke, Eve was a much happier and, to some extent, calmer person; she was more willing to work with and depend on other people.
