The FBI is joining alongside local and state authorities to determine if victims of an alleged serial killer lie beneath a rural stretch of Iowa, Newsweek reported.
Lucy Studey, for the last 45 years, had alleged her father was a killer. For decades few had paid her much mind. But last week, two cadaver dogs picked up "hits" of suspected human remains at a site she had long identified as her alleged serial killer father's burial ground in Thurman, Iowa, approximately 40 miles south of Omaha.
"She's got a hell of a story but we don't have any proof of anything other than we had a cadaver dog hit," Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope told the Des Moines Register. "We've got to have more proof than that."
Beginning as early as next week, the Omaha field office of the FBI, along with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) and the Fremont County Sheriff's Office, will hold a meeting to discuss the next steps in investigating the allegations by Lucy, 53, against her now deceased father Donald Dean Studey, who died in March 2013 at the age of 75.
Lucy Studey says her father killed an estimated 50 to 70 women over the course of 30 years. If further investigation confirms, Lucy's father could be one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
As Lucy maintains, her father enlisted her and her sibling's help to move the bodies of the young women to the burial site near his property, using a wheelbarrow in the summer and a toboggan in the winter.
"I know," Lucy Studey told Newsweek, "where the bodies are buried."
"He would just tell us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant," she reportedly stated.
"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."
While it's unclear which of the sisters Lucy referred to helping her move the bodies, her older sister, Susan Studey, said the allegations against their father were untrue.
Speaking by phone, Susan Studey said she believed the cadaver dogs' search last week must have picked up animal bones, as well as the remains of their father's stillborn sister buried in a shoebox on the property.
But both the dog handler and the sheriff said they believed the dogs found human remains; they maintained the dogs are trained to ignore animal bones.
Despite Lucy's claims, her sister Susan denies her father ever being violent, insisting instead that he was just "strict."
"The first time I ever heard about bodies was when I talked to Lucy about a year ago," Susan 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."
Lucy's and Susan's third sister could not be reached, and their brother died of suicide at 39.
Lucy said she first began telling people about her father's alleged crimes in second or third grade, divulging them to teachers, principals, and priests. But as she tells it, they told her it was better to keep family secrets within the family.
Last Friday, Lucy said that the landscape of her father's alleged burial ground was nothing like she remembered, which sits on land that has since been heavily altered by bulldozing and logging.
But the cadaver dogs, which descend from a breed known as Heelers, appeared to show hit after hit of supposed human remains.
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