The FBI is joining local and state investigators in efforts to determine whether an alleged serial killer's victims lie beneath a rural stretch of Iowa where a woman says her father buried dozens of young women he had murdered, the local sheriff and an FBI source said.
Lucy Studey had alleged for 45 years that her father was a murderer, abducting and killing the women and at least two men. Few had paid her much attention. But last week, cadaver dogs sniffed out suspected human remains at the site she had long identified as a burial ground in Thurman, Iowa, about 40 miles south of Omaha.
At least one agent from the Omaha field office of the FBI is in direct communication with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) and the Fremont County Sheriff's Office, which has overseen investigations so far, the local sheriff said. All will be at a meeting as early as next week to discuss next steps in investigating the allegations by Studey, 53, against her father, Donald Dean Studey, who died in 2013 at the age of 75.
"We're in a holding patten until everyone gets together," Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope told Newsweek. Officials from the FBI and the Iowa DCI confirmed the agency would attend the meeting. They were not authorized to speak to the media.
At this point, the Fremont County Sheriff's Office remains the lead investigative body, and it is unclear what role will be played by the FBI. Law enforcement sources said the agency was watching the case closely and being cooperative.
Lucy Studey's older sister, Susan Studey, told Newsweek that the allegations their father was a serial killer were untrue.
Susan Studey said by phone she believed the cadaver dogs that searched the property last week must have been fooled by animal bones, including a golden retriever buried on the land, and the remains of a stillborn sister of Donald Studey, who was buried in a shoebox on the property.
Both the dog handler and the sheriff said they believed the dogs had found human remains. The dogs are trained to ignore animal bones.
"The first time I ever heard about bodies was when I talked to Lucy about a year ago," Susan Studey said. "My father was not the man she makes him out to be. He was strict, but he was a protective parent who loved his children... Strict fathers don't just turn into serial killers... I'm two years older than Lucy. I think I would know if my father murdered. I would know if my dad was a serial killer. He was not, and I want my father's name restored."
Newsweek could not reach a third sister. A brother died of suicide when he was 39.
Lucy Studey has repeatedly offered to take a lie detector test, and has given authorities at least two recorded statements – one to the FBI and the other to the sheriff's office.
Susan Studey said the only time she remembers her father getting violent was when a neighbor ran over their dog — and Donald Studey fought the man.
Next steps in the investigation could include further searches by cadaver dogs of the area, spread over two properties totaling about 10 acres, and mapping the site with the locations where Lucy Studey believes up to 70 bodies are buried – many of them in a 100-foot well. Steps could also eventually include boring into the well and, if remains are found, excavating it.
The local source said the search could start with investigating suspected shallow graves, which the dogs scented in four locations with "multiple hits" in one of the locations. Newsweek accompanied investigators to the scene last Friday.
Lucy Studey said she first started telling people about what she accuses her father of doing in second or third grade, telling her story to teachers, principals and priests. She said some advised it was better for family secrets to remain within the family.
She said over the years, she would call law enforcement in Iowa and Nebraska, but her stories were mostly dismissed as the imaginings of a young child: she was a preteen then. Officials have never explained why investigations were not carried out.
Aistrope said that about 10 years ago Lucy Studey had called the sheriff's office to report her allegations and a deputy went to look for the well. The deputy was unable to find it. Then, Fremont County Sheriff's Deputy Mike Wake got the call early last year and that was when investigators started taking Lucy Studey's claims seriously.
Wake, along with others in the department, had grown up hearing the stories about an erratic, often violent and inebriated Studey, a slight man who bet and lost frequently and who regularly started fights.
Wake, a former police chief in nearby Tabor, Iowa, became more interested when Lucy Studey was able to pinpoint the well – which sits on land heavily altered by bulldozing and logging – despite the area being so drastically changed. Lucy Studey herself said last Friday that the landscape was nothing like she remembered as two cadaver dogs, of a breed known as Heelers, appeared to show hit after hit of suspected human remains.
