Either the late Donald Dean Studey of Thurman, Iowa, was, as his daughter claims, one of America’s most prolific serial killers, or the whole story is ludicrous, even comical.
An article recently appeared in Newsweek magazine about Lucy Studey (her maiden name) who claims her father murdered up to 70 women over the span of decades and forced his children to help him get rid of the bodies down an abandoned well on their rural property in southwest Iowa. According to Lucy, after each murder, they would move the body to the well in a wheelbarrow. In winter months, they used a toboggan. She said she has been trying to convince people of what her father did for 45 years. “No one would listen to me,” she told Newsweek.
Thurman is a poor, dwindling town of 165. In 2012, a tornado swept through and damaged 90 percent of the homes. In a place like that, everybody knows everybody else’s business. If a guy sneezes, half the town says, “Bless you.” It’s a little hard to imagine somebody in Thurman murdering 70 people, getting his kids to help hide the bodies and no one suspected a thing. It would certainly be a, um, well-kept secret. Also, 70 people don’t disappear unnoticed. Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope remarked, “If we had had 70 missing persons from (nearby) Omaha-Council Bluffs, we would have picked up on that.”
But now, after all these years, Fremont County is looking into Lucy’s allegations. They even brought in two “cadaver” dogs to the well area which appeared to make a positive identification, indicating the presence of a corpse. Aistrope suggested it must a large burial site, he said, “according to the dogs.” The problem is, there are only 8,500 people in the whole county and spending $300,000 to excavate the 90-foot deep well would break their budget. At one point, the FBI was called in. They did some digging but left without saying if they found anything. Aistrope told Newsweek, “I believe her 100 percent that there’s bodies in there.”
Lucy claims her father preyed on transient women and prostitutes, murdered them brutally and even kept gold teeth as trophies. But when her sister Susan was asked about the story of her father as a crazed murderer, she said she only heard about it last year from Lucy. Susan admitted her father was “strict” but insisted, “I would know if my dad was a serial killer.” (Especially if she helped dump the bodies down a well.) The sisters had a brother who died by suicide in 2004 and another sister who, when asked for comment by Rolling Stone, declined to answer. Donald, who died in 2013 had had two wives, one who, according to police records, strangled herself with an electrical cord and another who shot herself.
Donald Studey had “love” tattooed across the knuckles of one hand and “hate” on the other. Curiously, so does the character of Rev. Harry Powell, played by Robert Mitchum in the 1955 film “The Night of the Hunter” about a misogynistic serial killer. The difference between them is that Rev. Powell is eventually caught and convicted.