SUSAN STUDEY HAS been wanting to defend her father’s reputation since her sister Lucy Studey’s claims that he was a serial killer blew up in the news more than a month ago. “The entire time, I knew it wasn’t true,” Susan tells Rolling Stone.
In October, Lucy said in an explosive Newsweek interview that she believed her father, Donald Dean Studey, had murdered as many as 70 of people over three decades and buried them on the family property in the Green Hollow area of Southwest Iowa. Law enforcement had opened an investigation, lending credence to her claims, and an initial sweep of the property with cadaver dogs had indicated that human remains could be present.
At the time, members of the sheriff’s department told the press they believed human remains were buried where Lucy said they were. “I believe her 100 percent that there’s bodies in there,” Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope said in Newsweek. “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.” Furthermore, Deputy Michael Wake told local news station KMTV that he’d grown up in the area hearing stories about “bodies in a well,” so he thought Lucy’s claims were “worth looking into.”
As law enforcement agencies prepared to dig for potential remains, the story took off. Donald Studey, who died in 2013, was suddenly all over the internet. On TikTok, #donalddeanstudey drew 3.2 million views on videos from true crime accounts sharing the story of the investigation and the cadaver dogs’ hits. Susan told Newsweek her sister had made it up, but the story was already spreading, bolstered by the sheriff department’s confidence in the investigation. Now, law enforcement has declared they’ve found no bodies, and Susan, 55, who asked to be identified with her maiden name Studey, has spoken exclusively with Rolling Stone, rebutting her sister’s allegations.
Hellbound and Down 