Iowa cold case: 50 to 70 dead sex workers

THURMAN, Iowa – A Florida woman, who grew up near Thurman, finally has new attention to her story that her father, now dead, was a serial killer on a huge scale. “No one would listen to me,” said Lucy Studey, who tried for years to alert outsiders to what was going on.. This included teachers, preachers and police. This fall Studey went to mass media. Her claims of 50 to 70 bodies on the family property went viral. Suddenly the Federal Bureau of Investigation  was interested. So too the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. Her story has lurid detail. She said her father would bring women, one at a time, to a trailer on the property and shoot, stab or bludgeon them to death. These women, she surmised, were sex workers from Omaha 40 miles away. “He would just tell us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant,” she said. The kids, including herself, used a wheelbarrow or a toboggan, depending on the season, to carry the bodies to the 90-foot well, she said. They covered the bodies with dirt and lye, she said. “Every time I went to the well or into the hills, I didn’t think I was coming down,” she said in the online Newsweek interview that launched the current investigations. “I thought he would kill me because I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut.” The killings went on  20 to 30 years, she said.