In the summer, she says, her father moved the bodies by wheelbarrow. In the winter, he used a toboggan. She was just a kid. She says she told teachers. She told priests. She told law enforcement. Nobody did anything. Then Donald Dean Studey died in March 2013 at age 75, and Lucy Studey McKiddy was left with a story she couldn’t prove and a well on a rural Iowa hillside that she says holds the answer.
That’s where My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders — a three-part documentary that arrived on Paramount+ in April 2026 — begins. The case had already taken off on TikTok before the cameras showed up, with the hashtag pulling nearly one million views on the strength of those details alone. And after two digs, one exhumed wife and a sealed FBI file, it’s where things still stand.
He died in 2013. The FBI showed up in 2022. The well hasn’t said a word.
Donald Studey was a farmer from Thurman, Iowa — a small town in the southwest corner of the state near the Missouri River. He was married five times. Three of those wives died by what was ruled suicide — one strangled herself with an electrical cord, one shot herself in the head. Iowa court records show a 1950s petty larceny conviction and a 1994 assault charge he pleaded down to criminal mischief. Local deputies, according to Newsweek, knew better than to visit his trailer alone. Rumors about bodies in a well on Green Hollow Road had been circulating in the area for years before Lucy ever went to police.
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When she finally did, in 2021, Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aistrope took it seriously enough to bring in the FBI and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. Lucy described her father beating women in the family trailer — mostly young women in their 20s and 30s, mostly runaways from Omaha — killing them and pulling their gold teeth as trophies. She estimated 50 to 70 victims over three decades. She said she and her siblings moved the bodies to a 90-foot well on the property and covered them with dirt and lye.
What Two Digs Found — and Didn’t
Cadaver dogs were brought to the Green Hollow site and alerted at spots Lucy had identified. A deputy found the well exactly where she said it would be. In December 2022, investigators drilled at least 85 feet down and came up with animal bones. That was it. “We don’t even have a bone,” a sheriff’s official said at the time.
The documentary’s production company funded a second dig in May 2025, led by forensic anthropologist William Belcher of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His team brought five graduate students, cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar. Five days of excavation turned up no additional wells and no human remains. Belcher and McKiddy agreed to keep searching and to flag anything new with law enforcement.
One thing did shift during production. Charlotte Studey, one of Donald’s wives, died in 1984 in what was ruled a self-inflicted gunshot suicide. The filmmakers worked with her daughters to pursue a second autopsy after an exhumation. A pathologist reclassified her manner of death from suicide to “undetermined.” No homicide ruling has been issued, and a legal dispute over the original records was still going when the documentary aired.
The FBI has confirmed it holds at least an hour and 42 minutes of recorded audio interviews and a 612-page report on the Studey case. None of it has been released. The bureau hasn’t said why. McKiddy’s sister Susan has publicly rejected the allegations, saying she grew up in the same house and would have known. The documentary doesn’t settle that dispute. Donald Studey was never charged with any crime tied to the Green Hollow allegations.
There’s a daughter who says she knows. A family that’s divided. Two digs that came up empty. A wife whose death is now officially unexplained. And 612 pages sitting in a sealed file. Lucy Studey McKiddy says she knows what’s in that well. She’s been saying so since she was a child.
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