A three-day excavation failed to turn up any evidence in connection to a woman’s claims that her now-deceased father was a prolific serial killer who buried dozens of victims on his Iowa property.
According to the Iowa Department of Public Safety, earlier this week, authorities brought in several experts and used “significant assets to excavate, collect and examine soil samples from a site identified by a reporting party” in Fremont County, Iowa.
According to the Des Moines Register, KETV-TV and NBC News, the property searched belonged to the late Donald Dean Studey.
Donald died in 2013 at the age of 75.
“After exhaustive efforts, no evidence or other items of concern were recovered,” a DPS news release reads.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation and the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office coordinated the investigation.
In October, Lucy Studey, 53, told Newsweek her late father killed between 50 and 70 sex workers over the span of three decades.
Lucy said Donald would hunt for victims — mostly sex workers — in the Omaha, Neb., area, about 40 miles away from his home.
After the alleged killings, Lucy claimed she and her siblings were forced to help her father bury his victims near a well on their family’s property, PEOPLE previously reported.
“I know where the bodies are buried,” Lucy told Newsweek in October. “He would just tell us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant.”
Two cadaver dogs detected the scent of human remains across four different sites on the property, according to the outlet’s report at the time.
