By Tim StellohNBC
News
Authorities in Iowa are investigating claims by a woman that her late father was a prolific serial killer who killed dozens of people over decades before dying in 2013.
Fremont County Sheriff Sgt. Andrew Wake said his office is investigating allegations first reported last week in Newsweek magazine that
a man identified as Donald Dean Studey buried dozens of bodies on his property
in Thurman .
, in southwestern Iowa, near the Nebraska border.
The man's daughter, identified as Lucy Studey, told the magazine she knew "where the bodies are buried" because her father required her and her siblings to help him move them using a wheelbarrow.
"He told us we had to go to the well, and I knew what that meant," Newsweek quoted the woman as saying.
Fremont County Sheriff Kevin Aitrope told the local Des Moines Register newspaper that, according to Studey's daughter, her father killed "five or six" women a year for several decades.
Lucy Studey also said
her father seduced Omaha sex workers and bystanders
onto his property before killing them.
Last year, the woman had filed these complaints for the second time with the sheriff's office, the Register reported.
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"She made these allegations to the office and we are investigating," Sgt. Andrew Wake told NBC News, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo, on Tuesday.
"We are trying to gather information to determine the credibility [of what he says] and see if we can get proof whether there are bodies buried there or not," he added.
Finding of possible human remains
Aistrope told the aforementioned outlet that
two body-sniffing dogs visited the family's 5-acre plot of land on October 21
and found the possible existence of decomposing remains in an area near a well on the property.
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"She has told a tremendous story, but we have no further evidence apart from the find made by one of the body-sniffing dogs," he added.
NBC News tried unsuccessfully to contact Lucy Studey on Wednesday.
Aitrope said it seemed unlikely that such a large number of people could have disappeared from the Omaha area without anyone noticing, the newspaper reported, though he acknowledged the killings would have been possible if the victims lived elsewhere.
Public records show that Donald Dean Studey died in 2013, at the age of 75.
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A spokesman for the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation said the agency is in the early stages of the investigation, assisting the sheriff's office and cannot say how long it will last.
The Omaha Police Department is also assisting in the investigation, a spokesman for that agency said.