Field of Nightmares?

For years a woman has said her father killed and buried as many as 70 people in western lowa. State and federal authorities are finally taking her seriously

- ERIC FERKENHOFF , NAVEED JAMALI

FOR 45 YEARS, LUCY STUDEY, 53, TOLD ANYONE who would listen that her father had murdered scores of young women and men, burying some of them with the help of his children. No one believed her. Cadaver dogs have now pinpointed suspected human remains at the spots she identified in a remote stretch of western Iowa, about 40 miles south of Omaha, Nebraska, investigators tell Newsweek.

"I know where the bodies are buried," Lucy Studey previously told Newsweek. She recalled how her father, Donald Dean Studey, would transport bodies, using a wheelbarrow in the warmer months and a toboggan in winter. Many bodies, she says, were dumped in a well about 100 feet deep.

Others, she says, were buried in shallower graves along trails.

"He would just tell us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant," Studey said. "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." He sometimes called on the kids to pile dirt and lye on top of the bodies, she said.

If further investigation confirms the story, it could show her father was one of the most prolific known serial killers in American history. Studey believes he killed 50 to 70 women and men over three decades. He died in March 2013 at age 75.

On October 21, Lucy Studey was at the scene of the investigation in the scrub outside Thurman, Iowa. She was joined there by Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope, two deputies, a dog handler and two dogs trained to detect human remains. "I believe her 100 percent that there's bodies in there," Aistrope tells Newsweek.

With "love" tattooed across the knuckles of one hand and "hate" across the other, Donald Studey, according to authorities, may have lured victims, most of them young women he’d met in nearby Omaha, to his five acres of forested hills and farmland before killing them.