[SIZE=7]Dad Was Serial Killer, Woman says, as Cadaver Dogs Scour Field of Nightmares[/SIZE]
BY ERIC FERKENHOFF AND NAVEED JAMALI ON 10/22/22 AT 2:32 PM EDT
For 45 years, Lucy Studey told anyone who would listen that her father had murdered scores of young women and buried them with the help of his children. No one believed her. Cadaver dogs have now pinpointed suspected human remains at the spots she identified in a remote stretch of western Iowa, investigators told Newsweek.
“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.
“He would just tell us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant,” Studey said. “Every time I went to the well or into the hills, I didn’t think I was coming down. I thought he would kill me because I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut.”
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Serial killer investigation in Fremont County Iowa | Watch (msn.com)
As he dumped the bodies into the well, they would pile dirt and lye on top, she said.
If further investigation confirms the story, it could show that her father was one of the most prolific known serial killers in American history. Studey believes her father killed 50 to 70 women over three decades. He died in March 2013 at the age of 75.
https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2138552/search-bodies-iowa.jpg?w=790&f=281ec7ade07f34fd3c7b65de95d1b208
Lucy Studey (center) together with cadaver dog handler Jim Peters and Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope look into the scrub
where the dogs are searching for possible human remains. For 45 years, Studey said her father had been a serial killer, but nobody would listen.
The dogs have now pinpointed suspected grave sites.PHOTO BY NAVEED JAMALI/NEWSWEEK
She was joined at the scene of the investigation by Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope, two deputies, a dog handler and his two dogs.
“I believe her 100 percent that there’s bodies in there,” Aistrope told Newsweek.
[SIZE=6]“Lifelong Criminal and Murderer”[/SIZE]
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Donald Dean Studey, accused by his daughter or murdering people and ordering his children to bury them, is pictured in 2006. Studey said her late father had been a serial killer for 45 years. Cadaver dogs have now pinpointed suspected grave sites. [/SIZE]
“My father was a lifelong criminal and murderer,” Studey said. She said Donald Studey, who used multiple aliases and was born Donald Dean Study – without the ‘e’ – would run drugs and guns with others, hiding them in hollowed-out trees, then trucking them across state lines, with frequent visits to Arkansas. He passed through inspection sites with ease, she said, by having his children in the seat of the truck with him.
Records Newsweek was initially able to obtain showed that Donald Studey spent time in prison in Missouri in the 1950s for petty larceny and that he was jailed in Omaha in 1989 for a drunken driving offense. The sheriff said that he had routinely been in trouble with the police – who never went to the trailer the family lived in alone because they were wary of him. Newsweek has requested files from law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
Dad Was Serial Killer, Woman says, as Cadaver Dogs Scour Field of Nightmares (newsweek.com)