Don Studey: The Re-Autopsy That Changed a Forty-Year Ruling

Charlotte Studey's death was classified as self-inflicted for nearly forty years. She reportedly died in Omaha in 1984 from a rifle shot to the head. She was five-foot-two. Nothing was documented at the scene that she could have used to trigger the weapon. The original crime scene and autopsy photographs are missing from Omaha police records. In 2023, a re-autopsy found a possible defensive wound on her arm and reclassified her manner of death as undetermined. Charlotte was one of Don Studey's wives — and not the only one to die under circumstances that have drawn investigative scrutiny decades later.

Don Studey's first wife Lucy reportedly died by hanging in 1970. Their daughter, Lucy Studey-McKiddy, has alleged since 2007 that her father killed dozens of women and buried them in wells on the family's property in the Green Hollow area near Thurman, Iowa — Fremont County, approximately forty miles from Omaha. The alleged victims were reportedly vulnerable women targeted near bus stops and truck stops. Don's sister Marilyn Kepler reportedly wrote a hundred-and-sixty-eight-page journal describing alleged killings and indicated the body count could reach a hundred. Studey died in 2013 at age seventy-five without ever being charged.

The FBI investigated in 2022. Cadaver dogs alerted at four locations across the property, which spans over four hundred and twenty acres. After three days of searching, investigators departed and announced they found nothing. Lucy McKiddy maintains they searched the wrong well.

Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta — host of Defense Diaries — conducted an independent sixteen-month investigation. He spent over a hundred hours with Lucy McKiddy, accessed the FBI dig site, and uncovered information not previously reported — including a deputy's claim that the first victim of John Wayne Gacy was from Green Hollow and related to the Studey family, alleged ties between Studey and the Kansas City mob, and an unsolved robbery connected to Studey's activities. In Tabor and Thurman, Motta documented accounts from residents who described Studey as the most feared man in the area.

Retired FBI Special Agent Robin Drake provides behavioral analysis of the case — examining the pattern of deaths connected to Studey, the evidentiary basis for the allegations, what the FBI's abbreviated investigation reveals about how the case was prioritized, and whether the totality of documented evidence and witness accounts meets the threshold that should have triggered a more comprehensive search of the property.

Lucy's sister Susan disputes the allegations entirely. The family remains divided. No remains have been recovered. The Paramount+ documentary My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders is now streaming and reportedly presents new witness testimony and alleged accomplice accounts not included in prior investigations.

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