What would you do if your father was a murderer? That’s what the children of Donald Dean Studey are trying to reconcile with. The children, who are now all adults, are featured in a new documentary about their father and the deaths of their mothers and other women, My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders. According to Studey, both of his wives died by suicide. But those who knew them believe that isn’t exactly what happened. Much of the documentary focuses on the children trying to put together the bits and pieces of what they know to be true based on their own memories and what they’ve learned about their father over the years.
One of his daughters swears she was his accomplice.
Lucy Studey McKiddy claims that her father killed between 50 and 70 people, including her mother, stepmother, and a girlfriend, before he died in 2013 at the age of 75, People reported.
“He’s got two wives and a girlfriend who he called in to the police reporting their deaths,” McKiddy said in the documentary. “What’s the odds of that? I think he’d be better off winning the lottery.”
In 2022, Iowa state officials met with federal officials to discuss a plan for acting on McKiddy’s assertion that she and her siblings helped their father bury bodies in wells on the property where they lived in Thurman.
Her claims haven’t been fully researched.
“We have heard about this for years,” Fremont County Deputy Sheriff Tim Bothwell told WHO-TV in October 2022. According to Bothwell, McKiddy “told us in 2007 and we went out and there was only one well on the property that we could see, we didn’t realize that it was on other people’s property.”
He said they brought cadaver dogs to a well behind the Studey property, and they indicated that human remains were present. However, they weren’t rushing to excavate.
“The initial excavation of the area was a little over $300,000,” the sheriff explained. “And with a county with a $1.8 million law enforcement budget, that would just devastate our budget.”
It was decided there would be more of an investigation into McKiddy’s claims before they broke ground, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Assistant Director Mitch Mortvedt told CNN.
Not everyone in the family believes Studey was a killer.
“My dad was an abusive p—k, but he was no murderer,” Susan Studey told the Missoulian in October 2024. She recalled having to protect her stepmother Charlotte from her father “because [Donald] was beating her to a pulp.”
“He beat everybody that he knew. But there are no bodies in those hills,” she asserted to the Missoulian. “He was not a serial killer; there’s nothing there.”
His other daughter, Marilyn Hill, told the outlet he physically and sexually abused her mother, Barbara. “He was a very scary man and he exuded that,” Hill said. “I just felt like he was evil personified.”
So what happened to his wives?
Lucy Studey, McKiddy’s mother, allegedly died by suicide in 1970. Donald Studey claimed she hanged herself in a small closet in their home, but investigators found blood and signs of a struggle, People reported. Family claimed the closet was too small for her to be successful.
McKiddy said her father admitted to accidentally killing her mother. “My father stated for decades that he didn’t mean to kill my mom,” she told The Citizen. “He said he either choked her too hard or too long.”
Charlotte Studey was a different story and the focus of My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders. She had broken up with Donald Studey in 1984 and moved out. The night of her death, she returned for her things and the estranged couple got into an argument.
“I can’t remember what went down that night. I just remember when they started arguing, we all went to our rooms,” Susan Studey said per People, conflicting her sister’s assertions that their father killed Charlotte Studey.
In the documentary, Charlotte Studey’s daughters met with a forensic pathologist to learn more about their mother’s alleged suicide. There were too many unanswered questions, however, to make a definitive assertion about her death.
My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders is now airing on Paramount+.
