Woman Claims She Helped Dad Bury Bodies of 70 Women Over 3 Decades Timespan

Police are currently investigating a woman’s claims after she confessed that her now deceased father killed dozens of women and made her help him bury the bodies on their family’s Iowa property.

Lucy Studey says her late dad Donald Dean Studey, who died in 2013 at age 75, killed 50 to 70 women. Most of the women were sex workers and his killings took place over the course of three decades.

Lucy also claims that as a child, she and her siblings were forced to help him dispose of the bodies in a well near Thurman, Iowa.

“I know where the bodies are buried,” Lucy said. “He would just tell us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant.”

“My dad would stab, shoot, or strike the heads of his victims inside a trailer on our property. Then he would make us help him transport the bodies to the area of the well with a wheelbarrow during the hot months and a sled in the winter. We would then cover them with dirt and lye,” Lucy described her father’s killing methods in detail.

“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,” she said.

Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope said, “Lucy’s claims are being investigated. We are actively investigating this, and who wouldn’t? I would hope any sheriff’s office in the state, if somebody came across like this, would say, ‘Ok, we’re going to investigate it.”

“We have a scene, but we don’t know whether it’s a crime scene,” said Aistrope. “We don’t have victims, bodies. Nothing.”

However, on Friday, two cadaver dogs detected the scent of human remains across four different sites on the property.

“Today told me there is the odor of human decomposition in the area,” the dogs’ handler Jim Peters said. “More work needs to be done to confirm that suspicion. I feel pretty good about what I saw from the dogs, but I’m not going to hang my hat on that.”

“I really think there’s bones there,” Aistrope added, according to the outlet. “It’s hard for me to believe that two dogs would hit in the exact same places and be false. We don’t know what it is. The settlers were up there. There was Indian Country up there as well, but I tend to believe Lucy.”

“According to the dogs, this is a very large burial site,” he said.

After Lucy had contacted the sheriff’s office at least twice in 2021 with her claims, authorities finally took the initiative to look into the possible serial murder case.

Lucy had told police her dad, who died in 2013, would hunt for his victims some 40 miles away in the Omaha, Nebraska.

“My dad murdered about 5 or 6 women per year, before he disposed of their bodies in or around the 90-foot-deep well on their Iowa property,” Lucy confessed.

“If we had had 70 missing persons from Omaha-Council Bluffs, we would have picked up on that. So, if there is 70 people, they’re not all from here,” Aistrope said.

Lucy says she tried to alert teachers, church leaders, and law enforcement over the years, but her claims were never taken serious or investigated.

“No one would listen to me,” Lucy 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.”