45 years and counting, Lucy Studey told anyone who cared to listen that her father had murdered scores of young women and buried them with her help and other siblings. his children – to teachers, priests and “law enforcement all over Iowa and Nebraska trying to get something done.”
No one believed her. “No one would listen to me,” Studey said. “The teacher said family matters should be handled as a family, and law enforcement has said they couldn’t trust the memory of a child. I was just a kid then, but I remember it all.”
Cadaver dogs have now pinpointed suspected human remains at the spots she identified in a remote stretch of western Iowa, to confirm her claims.
Her father, Donald Dean Studey carried “love” tattooed across the knuckles of one hand and “hate” across the other, he is suspected by law enforcement authorities to have lured women — most of them sex workers or transients picked up in nearby Omaha, Nebraska — to his five acres of forested hills and farmland before killing them.
Both of his wives died before him, with police records saying one died after strangling herself with an electrical cord and the other shot herself.
Studey said her father not only made sure his children knew what he was doing, but forced them to help with the burials.
“I know where the bodies are buried,” Lucy Studey told Newsweek, whose reporters were at the scene of the investigation in the scrub outside Thurman, Iowa. She recalled how her father, Donald Dean Studey, would direct her and her siblings to help him as he transported bodies – using a wheelbarrow in the warmer months and a toboggan in winter.
As at press time, the property, on Green Hollow Road, is not an official crime scene because officers have not yet discovered any remains.
She was then joined at the scene of the investigation by Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope, two deputies, a dog handler and his two dogs.
Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope confirmed the investigation, saying ‘I believe there’s bodies in there’ and said if they do excavate the scene it will be a ‘big mission’. He added that the cost of boring the well would be around $25,000 while a full excavation would be more than $300,000.
The cadaver dogs went directly to the spots where Studey had said since she was a child that bodies had been buried, they went without being led by their handler, Jim Peters, who runs Samaritan Detection Dogs and did Friday’s search pro bono.
One of the dogs signaled likely human remains by barking, the other by sitting still where remains were potentially located. The science on cadaver dogs raises doubts for some people in criminal justice and forensic science.
Scientific studies have shown mixed results for their effectiveness and that their ability to detect remains can depend on time since death, soil composition and moisture levels as well as the individual dogs and their training and handling.
Many of the victims were buried in the 90-to-100-foot well, clothed and wearing jewelry, Studey confirmed.
“My father, quick to anger and routinely drunk, would stab and shoot people, but his preferred method of killing was smashing or kicking in the heads of the women inside a trailer in which they lived on the property.” Study said.
Lucy Studey claims that her father Donald Dean Studey, who died in 2013, murdered between 50 to 70 women, and buried them on the property, if this is confirmed true. Then Donald Dean will be set up as the biggest serial killer in America history.
