Don Studey: Why the FBI Left Green Hollow After Three Days

Cadaver dogs alerted at four locations across Don Studey's property in Green Hollow, Iowa. The FBI drilled. After three days, they packed up and said they found nothing. Lucy Studey-McKiddy — the daughter who has been alleging since 2007 that her father killed dozens of women and buried them in wells on that land — says they searched the wrong well. The property spans over four hundred and twenty acres. The investigation that was supposed to answer decades of allegations barely scratched the surface.

Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta — host of Defense Diaries — spent sixteen months on the ground investigating this case before anyone with a camera showed up. He drove six hours after reading a Newsweek article about Lucy's allegations. He spent over a hundred hours probing her story. When the FBI moved in, he got waved past a checkpoint in a rental Caprice that looked like a cop car and watched the dig from the fence line. A deputy told him the first victim of John Wayne Gacy was from Green Hollow and related to the Studey family — a connection nobody had publicly reported. In Tabor and Thurman, locals lined up to tell Bob their stories. Don Studey was the man everyone in those towns was warned about.

The allegations are staggering in scope. Lucy says her father targeted vulnerable women near bus stops and truck stops in the Omaha area — women who disappeared without anyone looking for them. She says she carried bags of lye to the well as a child. She says she thought every trip might be her last. Don's sister Marilyn Kepler reportedly wrote a hundred-and-sixty-eight-page journal describing alleged killings and told investigators the count could reach a hundred. Bob uncovered alleged ties to the Kansas City mob and an unsolved robbery connected to Studey.

The documented deaths of Don's own wives form their own pattern. His wife Lucy reportedly died by hanging in 1970 — Lucy McKiddy says her father told her for decades he choked her too hard. His wife Charlotte reportedly died from a rifle shot to the head in 1984. She was five-two. Nothing was documented at the scene that she could have used to trigger the weapon. That death was classified as self-inflicted until a 2023 re-autopsy found a possible defensive wound and reclassified the manner of death as undetermined. The original crime scene and autopsy photos are missing from Omaha police records.

Retired FBI Special Agent Robin Drake examines the behavioral evidence — what the pattern of deaths around Studey tells an investigator, what the FBI's abbreviated dig reveals about how the case was prioritized, and whether the evidence Lucy and Marilyn have provided meets the threshold that should have triggered a far more aggressive investigation.

Lucy's sister Susan says it is all a lie. The Paramount+ documentary My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders is now streaming with new witnesses and alleged accomplice testimony. No bodies have been recovered. The wells have not been fully searched. Bob says this case is not finished.

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