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‘My Killer Father - The Green Hollow Murders’ · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: So imagine, imagine living with a memory that is just
0:05
so violently horrific that it like completely defines the entire
0:10
architecture of your mind, right, Yeah, like a memory that
0:13
just dictates your nightmares, your family relationships, I mean, the
0:16
very way you interact with the world. But every single
0:19
time you try to hand that memory over to someone else, right,
0:23
like a teacher, a priest, maybe a police officer, they
0:26
just look at you, shake their heads, and well, they
0:29
completely refuse to hold it.
0:30
Speaker 2: It's just incredibly isolating, exactly.
0:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, you are entirely alone with this truth that you
0:36
know everyone else has just decided as a total fiction. Because,
0:40
I mean, when you break a bone, right, you go
0:41
to a hospital, the doctor holds up an X ray,
0:43
points to that jagged white line and says, well, there's
0:46
the fracture. It's an undeniable empirical fact. But trauma, especially
0:51
you know, decades old trauma involving accusations of just unimaginable violence,
0:56
it doesn't leave an X ray, No it doesn't. You're
0:58
just left carrying this mas a fracture that no one
1:01
else is even willing to look at.
1:02
Speaker 2: And that invisible, just agonizing fracture that forms the absolute
1:07
core of the documentary series we're looking at today. It's
1:10
called My Killer Father The Green Hollow.
1:13
Speaker 1: Murders, which just a quick note for you listening. As
1:16
of today, Tuesday, April twenty eighth, twenty twenty six, Paramount
1:20
Plus has just dropped all three episodes of this massive
1:23
new true crime docuseries.
1:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we are examining the story of a woman
1:27
named Lucy Study McKitty, because for over four decades she
1:31
has carried an allegation that honestly defies the boundaries of
1:35
standard true crime.
1:36
Speaker 1: It really does.
1:37
Speaker 2: She claims that her father, this man named Donald Deane
1:40
Study or Dawn Study, systematically murdered up to seventy.
1:43
Speaker 1: People, seventy which is just a mind blowing number.
1:46
Speaker 2: It's staggering. And she claims he buried them in a
1:49
mass grave on their remote five acre property in Green Hollow, Iowa.
1:53
Speaker 1: And so our mission for this deep dive into the
1:55
source material today, you know, it isn't just to do
1:57
a standard recap of a ten show, right, We're not
1:59
just a summary here exactly. We're going to tear into
2:03
the forensic science, dissect the decades of well institutional paralysis
2:08
and just really analyze what happens when a fifty year
2:11
old childhood memory collides with the limitations of our modern
2:15
criminal justice system.
2:16
Speaker 2: Because the tone of this investigation is set by the
2:19
people who actually knew the man. Like, the documentary features
2:22
these quotes that are just they're difficult to shake.
2:25
Speaker 1: Oh, the trailer alone is chilling.
2:27
Speaker 2: Right. One individual literally states, and I quote, he loves
2:31
you or he hates you, and if he hates you,
2:34
you're dead. Wow. Yeah. Another bluntly claims there's no question
2:38
in my mind that Don was a killer. He's a
2:40
personification of evil.
2:42
Speaker 1: So we are really exploring the anatomy of an accusation
2:44
to see, if you know, one woman's memory can literally
2:47
rewrite the history of American serial murder.
2:50
Speaker 2: Before we get too deep, we need to say some ground.
2:52
Speaker 1: Rules, right, yes, absolutely, it is super critical to establish
2:56
a baseline for this discussion right up front. We are
2:58
analyzing deeply divisive family claims centered around a suspect who
3:02
actually died back in twenty thirteen, And.
3:04
Speaker 2: The most vital piece of context here is that, to date,
3:07
despite various searches, no human remains have actually been recovered
3:12
from that property.
3:12
Speaker 1: Which is a huge point it is.
3:15
Speaker 2: So we're analyzing the psychological claims, the historical contexts, the
3:19
forensics exactly as presented in the source material. But we
3:22
are not assigning legal guilt. We're just, you know, examining
3:25
the ecosystem that allowed this massive allegation to survive for
3:29
half a century.
3:30
Speaker 1: Right, So, to even begin to understand the weight of
3:33
an accusation this huge, you really have to look at
3:35
its genesis, like where it started. Lucy didn't just walk
3:39
into a police station as a forty year old woman
3:41
looking for a podcast interview.
3:43
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
3:44
Speaker 1: According to the timeline in the docu series, she started
3:48
telling this story way back in nineteen seventy three.
3:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, she was only four or five years old, which
3:52
is wild.
3:53
Speaker 1: She took this horrific narrative to her teachers, to local priests,
3:58
to Fremont County law enforcement. I mean, and she basically
4:00
went to every adult authority figure in her orbit.
4:03
Speaker 2: And the chronological persistence of her claim is really the
4:07
bedrock of this entire investigation, because I mean, to understand
4:12
why she was completely ignored, we have to look at
4:15
the systemic response to child testimony in the mid nineteen seventies.
4:18
Speaker 1: Right, because it was a very different world back.
4:21
Speaker 2: Then, completely different. The prevailing attitude in both child psychology
4:27
and rural law enforcement during that era. It was just
4:30
steeped in this profound skepticism toward pediatric witnesses.
4:34
Speaker 1: Meaning they just didn't believe kids.
4:36
Speaker 2: Pretty much. The institutional belief was that young children possessed
4:40
an inability to cleanly separate fantasy from reality.
4:44
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
4:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. So when a child, especially one from a chaotic
4:48
or impoverished rural background, reported this extreme cinematic violence, the
4:52
default mechanism of the state was just to classify them
4:55
as a troubled child, like.
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Speaker 1: They thought she was just fabricating stories for attention exactly,
4:59
which is frank an incredibly convenient blind spot for the
5:02
system to have. It's like the tragic boy who cried
5:04
Wolf scenario, but it's totally weaponized against the child.
5:07
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
5:08
Speaker 1: The adults just assumed the wolf is some I don't know,
5:11
metaphor for a messy home life, but the child is
5:14
standing there trying to tell them no, there is a
5:16
literal predator in the house.
5:18
Speaker 2: And the child welfare infrastructure of the nineteen seventies was
5:21
structurally designed to just defer to the privacy of the
5:24
nuclear family.
5:24
Speaker 1: So they didn't want to get involved.
5:26
Speaker 2: Right unless a teacher saw undeniable like severe physical bruising,
5:30
the threshold for state intervention was incredibly high. So the
5:35
system basically built this massive wall of denial around the.
5:39
Speaker 1: Study property, and according to Lucy, the consequence of trying
5:42
to breach that wall was pretty immediate and it was brutal.
5:45
She alleges that every single time she attempted to report
5:47
her father, the information would just you know, filter right
5:51
back to him.
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Speaker 2: Which is terrifying.
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Speaker 1: Totally, and it resulted in severe beatings and threats.
5:56
Speaker 2: So her brain is trying to process the trauma of
6:00
allegedly witnessing murders while simultaneously processing the trauma of being
6:04
violently punished for asking for help.
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Speaker 1: That isolates a developing mind completely. The system essentially forces
6:11
her into absolute silence and then well decades pass. We
6:16
jump all the way to two thousand and.
6:18
Speaker 2: Seven, right a huge sleep forward.
6:20
Speaker 1: This story finally breaks the surface again. She actually gets
6:23
Fremont County deputies to come out to the property and
6:26
listen to her talk about the bodies and the well.
6:29
But and this is a massive complication. This conversation happens
6:33
right in the middle of a bitter dispute with her father.
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Speaker 2: Yes, over sixteen thousand dollars money that, it should be
6:39
noted she openly admitted to taking from him.
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Speaker 1: Okay, wait, let's unpack this for a second, because if
6:44
you're listening, this is where it gets messy. You are
6:47
a rural county deputy in two thousand and seven, you
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roll up to a property where a father and daughter
6:51
are actively screaming at each other over sixteen grand.
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Speaker 2: Right, it's a heated domestic dispute.
6:55
Speaker 1: Exactly, and right in the middle of this financial war,
6:58
the daughter suddenly poured to the woods and says, Oh,
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by the way, my dad is one of the most
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prolific serial killers in American history. I mean, why wouldn't
7:05
you just write that off as a daughter looking for
7:07
leverage or revenge? It is literally the most obvious rational
7:13
conclusion to draw in that exact moment.
7:16
Speaker 2: It is entirely rational based on the immediate visual evidence.
7:19
I mean, law enforcement training heavily prioritizes establishing immediate motive. Right,
7:24
the why exactly when an accusation is made, the first
7:28
diagnostic question and the detective asks is what does the
7:32
accuser stand again? And in two thousand and seven, the
7:35
deputies observed a financial dispute, and they just allowed that
7:38
immediate context to completely eclipse historical context.
7:41
Speaker 1: They didn't look at the past.
7:43
Speaker 2: No, they failed to cross reference her current accusation with
7:47
the fact that she had been logging the exact same
7:49
narrative with authority figures since the Nixon administration.
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Speaker 1: Which is crazy when you think about it.
7:54
Speaker 2: It is they allowed a localized domestic dispute to invalidate
7:57
a decades long psychological anchor, and.
8:00
Speaker 1: So it takes another fourteen years for someone to actually
8:02
look past that immediate context. It's March twenty twenty one.
8:06
She is talking to a deputy in Florida, of all places,
8:09
right Florida, And somehow that conversation finally finds traction. The
8:13
story slowly works its way back to Iowa, eventually exploding
8:17
into the national consciousness via a Newsweek expose in October
8:21
twenty twenty two.
8:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, fifty years took fifty years for a major publication
8:26
to suggest that someone should maybe test the dirt in
8:29
Green Hollow. Fifty years.
8:31
Speaker 1: That is just I can't even wrap my head around
8:33
that timeline.
8:34
Speaker 2: And when you map the anatomy of her claims over
8:36
those fifty years, you encounter this really fascinating tension between
8:42
peripheral inconsistency and core consistency.
8:45
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that? Well?
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Speaker 2: Critics frequently point out that her estimated victim count fluctuates,
8:50
like in some interviews she focuses on the five to
8:52
fifteen bodies she claims who have personally witnessed being disposed
8:55
of fifteen, but then in other statements she extrapolates from
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the pattern she observed over her entire childhood and suggests
9:02
the true number is likely between fifty and seventy.
9:05
Speaker 1: Which is a staggering jump, right. I mean, five to
9:07
fifteen is a prolific, terrifying killer, but seventy that puts
9:11
him in a category above John wayn Gacy or Ted Bundy.
9:14
It alters the scale entirely.
9:16
Speaker 2: It does alter the scale. But we really have to
9:19
look at how the neurobiology of trauma processes mathematics versus
9:24
how it processes mechanical events.
9:26
Speaker 1: Tell me more about that.
9:27
Speaker 2: So trauma memory does not function like a ledger. The
9:31
peripheral details like the exact timeline or the overarching statistics.
9:35
They can become fluid or blurred because the brain is
9:37
not focused on data collection during a deeply traumatic event.
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Speaker 1: It's focused on survival exactly.
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Speaker 2: However, the core anchor memories those sensory and logistical details.
9:47
They often remain rigidly static. For half a century, Lucy's
9:51
core narrative has never wavered. Never, No, She consistently describes
9:56
the specific one hundred foot disused well, the deliberate application
10:00
lied to the bodies and the use of a wheelbarrow
10:02
for transport in the summer months.
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Speaker 1: And the toboggan in the winter like the mechanics of
10:06
the disposal are just burned into her brain with photographic clarity.
10:09
And what strikes me just as much as her memory
10:11
is her current demeanor.
10:13
Speaker 2: Yes, her presentation in the documentary.
10:14
Speaker 1: When you watch her speak in the docuseries, there is
10:17
this profound emotional detachment. She literally looks at the camera
10:21
and says, I don't feel anything for my father, nothing
10:25
at all.
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Speaker 2: It's very chilling.
10:27
Speaker 1: It is that is not the sound of someone seeking
10:29
passionate revenge against a dead man over sixteen grand That
10:33
is the sound of an emotional fuse that just blew
10:35
out decades ago. Right, She states her only motivation is
10:39
to secure forensic closure for the families of the victims.
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Speaker 2: And the psychological term for that presentation is emotional blunting.
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It's very often a byproduct of complex post traumatic stress disorder.
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Her emotional receptors were fundamentally altered by prolonged exposure to
10:56
an environment she perceives as lethal, which really.
10:59
Speaker 1: Forces us to shift our focus from the accuser to
11:02
the accused. Right. I mean, if an individual is capable
11:04
of murdering dozens of people and running a mass grave
11:06
in his backyard, his daily life must exhibit some profound
11:10
psychological fractures.
11:12
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we have to examine Donald Deane's study.
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Speaker 1: The documentary spends a lot of time reconstructing his life,
11:18
and what emerges is basically a portrait of a man
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who utilized the rural Midwest as a form of camouflage.
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Speaker 2: Camouflage is the perfect word.
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Speaker 1: Right Dawn's study, and that's spelled study without the E.
11:30
By the way, he blended flawlessly into the background of
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Middle America. He was a gas station attendant, a mechanic,
11:36
a tow truck driver operating near the really poorous border
11:39
of Iowa and Nebraska.
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Speaker 2: He held jobs that rendered him effectively.
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Speaker 1: Invisible, exactly because we don't analyze the psychology of the
11:47
guy towing our broken down sedan on the side of
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the highway right, must want to get home. He inhabited
11:53
the blind spots of daily life.
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Speaker 2: He occupied transient spaces I mean truck stops and repair
11:59
garages are environments that are completely defined by brief, transactional interactions.
12:04
You don't get no people there. Right and neighbors described
12:06
his outward persona as gruff and deeply private. He was
12:11
known to carry significant debt from gambling, and he definitely
12:14
exhibited a vulnatile temper, especially when alcohol was involved.
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Speaker 1: I mean, a bad temper and poor financial management do
12:20
not make a serial killer.
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Speaker 2: They don't. But the source material details a much darker
12:25
undercurrent to his daily routine. He had a documented criminal history.
12:29
Speaker 1: Yeah petty larceny and Missouri back in the nineteen fifties,
12:32
a drunk and driving arrest in Omaha in nineteen eighty nine.
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Speaker 2: And more alarmingly, the sources indicate he was deeply entrenched
12:39
in the illicit movement of drugs and weapons. He allegedly
12:42
hollowed out the trunks of large trees on his green
12:45
hollow property to create these hidden caches for contraband.
12:49
Speaker 1: Wait, he hollowed out trees, Yes, and.
12:52
Speaker 2: That is a vital behavioral indicator. It demonstrates a mind
12:55
that is highly adept at environmental manipulation and concealment.
12:58
Speaker 1: Oh, that makes sense right.
13:00
Speaker 2: If you are systematically altering the natural landscape to hide
13:03
weapons and narcotics from visual inspection or law enforcement sweeps,
13:06
you possess a specific tactical intelligence regarding evasion. You understand
13:11
how to make the illicit look totally mundane.
13:14
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the domestic environment. And this is
13:16
where the statistics become genuinely terrifying. We have to look
13:19
at the math regarding his marriages.
13:21
Speaker 2: The marriage statistics are wild.
13:22
Speaker 1: Son study was married at least five times, and of
13:26
those five wives, three of them died by suicide.
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Speaker 2: And the statistical improbability of that figure just cannot be overstated.
13:34
Three out of five spouses equates to a sixty percent
13:37
suicide rate within a single household.
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Speaker 1: And just to give me some context on that, during
13:42
that specific era, in the nineteen seventies and eighties, the
13:44
overall suicide rate for the entire state of Iowa was
13:47
hovering around twelve per hundred thousand people exactly. But inside
13:51
down studies house the rate is effectively sixty thousand per
13:54
one hundred thousand. It is a localized epidemic of death
13:57
under one roof.
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Speaker 2: And when you encounter a statistic variance of that magnitude,
14:02
the math is pointing directly to an epicenter of extreme
14:04
psychological or physical violence. It has to be, and the
14:07
specifics of these debts are really grim. One wife was
14:11
found strangled with a cord, another died from a self
14:13
inflicted gunshot wound. The source material, relying on testimony from
14:17
Lucy and others, strongly implies that these were not tragic coincidences.
14:21
Speaker 1: No, the implication is twofold. Either the environment of domestic
14:24
terror was so absolute, so inescapable, that suicide became literally
14:28
the only viable exits strategy.
14:30
Speaker 2: Or far more sinister, these events were not suicides at all.
14:35
They were homicides meticulously staged to mimic self inflicted violence.
14:40
Speaker 1: Which just creates a portrait of a compound governed by
14:43
pure terror. He fathered at least ten children across these
14:47
various relationships. The documentary details an environment just saturated in abuse,
14:54
physical beatings, relentless psychological threats. Yeah, and here is the
14:59
detail that truly isolates these children. They were explicitly, violently
15:04
warned never to venture into specific wooded areas of the
15:07
Green Hollow property, and.
15:09
Speaker 2: The psychological impact of that spatial restriction on a developing
15:12
brain is profound for a child. The boundary of the
15:15
home is supposed to represent.
15:16
Speaker 1: Safety, right your backyard is your playground, exactly.
15:19
Speaker 2: But if you were told that crossing an invisible line
15:21
in your own backyard will result in unspeakable consequences, the
15:25
perimeter of your safety shrinks to the walls of the house.
15:28
And that house is already filled with violence.
15:30
Speaker 1: So the property itself becomes a psychological prison.
15:33
Speaker 2: It does now.
15:34
Speaker 1: The community wasn't entirely blind to this. The documentary notes
15:37
that law enforcement actually logged over twenty calls to the
15:40
property over the years. People in the area literally whispered
15:44
about the monster of Green Hollow.
15:46
Speaker 2: But intervention in rural jurisdictions during that era required an
15:50
incredibly high threshold of visible, undeniable proof.
15:54
Speaker 1: Like they couldn't just go in on a rumor.
15:55
Speaker 2: No, a rumor of abuse or even a domestic disturbance
15:59
call that quiet it down before deputies finally arrived. It
16:02
was rarely enough to secure a search warrant or justify
16:05
tearing apart a man's property. The system just favored the
16:09
sanctity of the private property. Line.
16:10
Speaker 1: There is this photograph shown in the documentary from twenty
16:13
twenty two, right, It's this retrospective look at a family
16:16
gathering featuring Study and one of his wives, and it
16:19
is just the banality of evil captured on film.
16:22
Speaker 2: It looks entirely normal.
16:24
Speaker 1: It does the mundane facade perfectly masked, the alleged nightmare
16:27
underneath his employment, his volta personality, the remote, densely wooded
16:32
geography of his property. It all converged into the perfect hunting.
16:36
Speaker 2: Ground, which demands we analyze how he allegedly operated, Like
16:41
what was the methodology and who exactly was he targeting?
16:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's get into the victim profile, because Lisi's victim
16:47
profile is what elevates her claim from a vague rumor
16:50
to a terrifyingly specific forensic narrative.
16:53
Speaker 2: She does not offer generalized descriptions.
16:55
Speaker 1: No, she details a highly specific demographic. The alleged victims
17:00
were overwhelmingly women in their twenties and thirties. They possessed
17:03
a specific physical aesthetic too average build, with dark or
17:07
dirty blonde shoulder length hair, and.
17:10
Speaker 2: They also fit a very specific socioeconomic profile. These were transients,
17:14
sex workers, women struggling with addiction or poverty, picked up
17:18
the dimly lit bars or busy truck stops near Omaha
17:21
Council Bluffs or right along the bustling corridor of Interstate
17:24
twenty nine.
17:25
Speaker 1: So women who are vulnerable.
17:26
Speaker 2: In criminological terms, this is the deliberate exploitation of the
17:30
less dead demograph.
17:31
Speaker 1: The less dead. That is a bleak term.
17:34
Speaker 2: It is bleak. It's a sociological concept detailing how predatory
17:38
offenders select victims who have been structurally marginalized by society.
17:44
Women who are unhoused, transient, or completely estranged from their
17:47
biological families are targeted because the offender calculates that their
17:51
disappearance will not trigger an aggressive systemic response.
17:54
Speaker 1: Right there will be no concerned spouse calling the police.
17:57
Speaker 2: Exactly, no employer demanding a way welfare check, no paper
18:02
trail of active credit cards or apartment leases for detectives
18:05
to follow. They are chosen specifically because their absence will
18:10
register as a void rather than an alarm.
18:12
Speaker 1: Now, she does mention two male victims, one in his
18:15
twenties one in his forties, but the overwhelming focus was
18:18
on these vulnerable women, and the lure he allegedly used
18:21
is deeply manipulative.
18:22
Speaker 2: It's incredibly predatory.
18:24
Speaker 1: He would approach them at these truck stops, posing as
18:26
a grieving widower. He would explain that he was overwhelmed
18:29
that he needed help managing his children, offering them shelter
18:31
or cash in exchange for domestic assistance. He weaponized his
18:35
own children, using the concept of a struggling single father
18:37
as a shield to project harmlessness.
18:40
Speaker 2: It is an incredibly effective social camouflage. Yeah, I mean,
18:44
who suspects the struggling single dad asking for help exactly?
18:48
But according to Lucy, once he successfully navigated the victim
18:51
back to the isolation of the green hollow trailer, that
18:53
facade would drop and the violence would commence. She describes
18:57
a spectrum of lethality stabbing, yes, but predominantly severe blunt
19:04
force trauma like smashing or kicking the victims heads.
19:07
Speaker 1: God that is brutal, which brings us to the logistics
19:11
of disposal because you have to move a body from
19:14
a trailer to a grave, and Lasi details this grim,
19:17
repetitive process, transporting the victims via wheelbarrow over the dirt
19:22
in the summer and utilizing a toboggan to drag them
19:24
across the snow in the winter.
19:26
Speaker 2: The details are so specific, right.
19:28
Speaker 1: The final destination was this disused ninety to one hundred
19:32
foot well located right there on the property. He would
19:34
drop the bodies into the shaft and then deliberately layer
19:37
them with dirt and lye.
19:38
Speaker 2: And the inclusion of LIE in her memory is a
19:41
vital forensic detail that indicates severe premeditation.
19:44
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the lye because how does lie actually
19:47
interact with the human body? Over half a century.
19:50
Speaker 2: Well, Lie, which is usually in the form of sodium
19:53
hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, is a highly caustic alkaline chemical.
19:59
When it's introduced to human tissue, it initiates a violent
20:02
chemical reaction known as alkaline hydrolysis.
20:05
Speaker 1: What does that mean exactly?
20:06
Speaker 2: It means it rapidly breaks down the complex chemical bonds
20:09
of the body. It turns the body's fats into a
20:12
soap like substance through a process called spotification.
20:15
Speaker 1: It literally turns it into soap yes, and.
20:18
Speaker 2: It liquefies the proteins.
20:20
Speaker 1: That is horrifying. So it isn't just about making the
20:23
body disappear faster, It's about fundamentally altering the chemistry of
20:26
the grave itself.
20:27
Speaker 2: Precisely, it drastically accelerates the decomposition of soft tissue. But furthermore,
20:33
dumping large quantities of law into a confined space like
20:36
a well severely alters the pH level of the surrounding
20:39
soil environment.
20:40
Speaker 1: And what does that do? Over fifty years?
20:42
Speaker 2: Over decades? This highly alkaline environment can violently degrade the
20:46
collagen matrix and calcium phosphate structure of human bone. It
20:49
renders it brittle, porous, and eventually breaks it down into
20:52
basically a soil like consistency.
20:54
Speaker 1: Wow.
20:54
Speaker 2: And crucially for an offender operating a mass grave just
20:58
yards from his own children, the alkaline hydrolysis chemically neutralizes
21:04
many of the specific volatile organic compounds, the gases that
21:09
are responsible for the intense, undeniable odors of puture faction.
21:13
Speaker 1: So the law accelerates the rot while simultaneously masking.
21:17
Speaker 2: The scent exactly.
21:18
Speaker 1: It's very calculated, But the absolute darkest mechanism of this
21:21
disposal process wasn't the chemicals, it was the complicity. He
21:26
didn't execute this disposal alone in the dead of night, No,
21:28
he didn't. Lucy alleges that she and her siblings were
21:31
physically forced to participate. She recalls him commanding them to
21:35
go to the well, literally saying dig dig dig. He
21:37
transformed his own children into accomplices in a serial murder operation.
21:41
Speaker 2: And coercing a child into participating in the disposal of
21:44
a body is really the ultimate most insidious mechanism of
21:47
psychological control and abuser can wield.
21:49
Speaker 1: Because it makes them feel guilty too.
21:51
Speaker 2: Exactly. The child is forced to internalize the guilt of
21:55
the predator. They are no longer merely a victim observing
21:59
the violence. They're developing brain processes, their physical actions, and
22:03
their conscience dictates that they are now a participant.
22:06
Speaker 1: It binds the child to the abuser through a shared
22:09
unspeakable trauma. It is basically a psychological gag order. It
22:13
is Lucy carries these vivid cinematic anchors of these events.
22:17
She clearly recalls a fifteen year old runaway from the
22:19
late seventies who vanished overnight, and she describes the terrifying
22:23
memory of waking up to the sounds of a homeless
22:25
woman being violently dragged by her hair.
22:27
Speaker 2: So we have a highly specific victim profile, a documented lore,
22:31
a detailed mechanical disposal method involving cost to chemicals, and
22:34
eyewitness testimony. The inevitable next step is the search for physical.
22:38
Speaker 1: Proof, which transitions us to the modern era twenty twenty
22:41
one and twenty twenty two. This forms the narrative spine
22:45
of episode two of the documentary because finally an authority
22:48
figure decides to actually listen. Yes, Fremont County Sheriff Kevin
22:52
Eistrope sits down with Lucy, processes her claims, and publicly
22:56
states I believe her one hundred percent that there's bodies in.
22:58
Speaker 2: There, and validation from an active sitting sheriff is a
23:02
monumental paradigm shift for an accusation that has been ignored
23:06
for fifty years. Sheriff Astrope decides to bypass the standard
23:11
preliminary digs and immediately brings in specialized assets right.
23:15
Speaker 1: He coordinates with the Samaritan Detection dogs Jojoe and Jetty.
23:18
These are two Australian cattle dogs that are rigorously trained
23:22
for cadaver detection. In October of twenty twenty two, their handler,
23:26
Jim Peters, brings them out to the overgrown terrain of
23:30
the Green Hollow property, and this is where the story bends.
23:33
Reality there really does, because the dogs alert the scent
23:37
of human decomposition, and they don't just alert randomly. They
23:41
trigger unprompted, consistent hits at four specific locations that Lucy
23:45
had previously identified, including the immediate vicinity of the collapse
23:48
well and a neighboring fence line.
23:50
Speaker 2: The handler's operational notes are critical here. Jim Peters explicitly
23:54
stated that the dogs were working the wing currents and
23:56
the terrain independently.
23:57
Speaker 1: So they weren't being led.
23:59
Speaker 2: No, they were not being led on a short leash
24:01
to a specific patch of dirt and queued by the
24:04
handler to bark. They independently process the vouatile organic compounds
24:09
venting from the soil and hit on the exact coordinates
24:12
established by a five year old.
24:14
Speaker 1: Girl's memory, which is astounding. Sheriff Astrip goes on camera
24:18
and says, it's hard for me to believe that two
24:20
dogs would hit in the exact same places and be false.
24:23
But this is the part that is incredibly frustrating to process.
24:27
We have independent, unprompted hits from highly trained dogs. We
24:31
have the absolute belief of the local sheriff. So they
24:34
bring in the heavy machinery.
24:35
Speaker 2: Right the real excavation begins.
24:37
Speaker 1: The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation arrives, a multidisciplinary team
24:41
from the FBI, sets up camp. They deploy ground penetrating radar,
24:44
they utilize sonar. In December of twenty twenty two, they
24:48
finally put shovels and back hose into the dirt.
24:50
Speaker 2: And what do they pulled out of the ground.
24:51
Speaker 1: Animal bones, a handful of historical artifacts, likely from early
24:54
settlers or indigenous sites. Zero human remains, Not a single
24:59
fragment of human bone. So how do we scientifically reconcile
25:04
positive independent cadaver dog alerts with completely empty soil.
25:08
Speaker 2: It is the central forensic paradox of the entire investigation,
25:12
and it requires us to understand the vast difference between
25:15
olfactory detection and geological scanning.
25:17
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us.
25:19
Speaker 2: Cadaver dogs do not smell bones. They smell the chemical
25:22
byproduct of decomposition. They are trained to detect specific volatile
25:26
organic compounds like puture, scene and cadaverren, which are released
25:30
as human tissue breaks down. But over a span of
25:32
fifty years, the geology of a rural hillside changes drastically.
25:36
The one hundred foot well collapses inward, the soil composition shifts,
25:40
The underground water tables rise and fall with decades of rainfall.
25:44
Speaker 1: And snowmels, so the scent literally moves underground exactly.
25:47
Speaker 2: Groundwater can carry those volmitile organic compounds laterally through porous
25:52
layers of dirt. The dog might alert to a crack
25:55
in the surface soil where the gas is finally venting
25:57
into the air, But the actual physics source of that
26:00
gas the remains, could be located thirty feet away, very deep,
26:05
beneath a different layer of bedrock.
26:07
Speaker 1: That makes sense, But what about the ground penetrating radar.
26:10
I mean, if you have one hundred foot vertical shaft
26:12
filled with bodies and dirt, shouldn't a radar machine see
26:15
a massive anomaly in the ground.
26:17
Speaker 2: You would think so. Ground penetrating radar or GPR functions
26:22
by transmitting high frequency electromagnetic pulses into the earth and
26:25
measuring the signals that reflect back. When the wave hits
26:28
a subsurface structure, it looks for differences exactly. It relies
26:31
on detecting changes in the dielectric permittivity of the materials,
26:35
essentially the difference in density and moisture between solid rock,
26:38
loose dirt, and a human bone. However, if a well
26:41
has been back filled with the exact same local soil
26:45
and fifty years of rain, snow, and gravitational settling have
26:48
compacted that filled dirt to the exact same density as
26:51
the surrounding undisturbed earth, the electromagnetic wave does not register.
26:55
Speaker 1: A difference, so it just looks like normal dirt.
26:57
Speaker 2: The radar wave passes right through it and bounces back
26:59
in image of solid, uniform ground. Furthermore, if you introduce
27:03
fifty years of alkaline hydrolysis from the lie, degrading the
27:06
bones into a porous soil like powder, the radar becomes
27:10
completely blind to the grave wow.
27:12
Speaker 1: And trying to outsmart fifty years of shifting geology is
27:15
a staggeringly expensive endeavor. The economics of rural justice are
27:19
just grim. The FBI compiled a file over six hundred
27:22
pages long just between twenty twenty one and early twenty
27:25
twenty three.
27:26
Speaker 2: That's a massive file.
27:27
Speaker 1: Right, But to bring in a specialized rig to cordial
27:30
an unstable, collapsed one hundred foot shaft that costs twenty
27:34
five thousand dollars just to turn them, sheene on a
27:37
comprehensive grid by grid excavation of that entire hillside could
27:41
carry a price tag upwards of three hundred thousand dollars.
27:44
Speaker 2: And for a rural county sheriff's department operating on a
27:47
constrained municipal budget, allocating three hundred thousand dollars for an
27:51
excavation with no guaranteed for ends to return, is it
27:53
demonstratively prohibitive.
27:54
Speaker 1: They just don't have the money.
27:55
Speaker 2: They don't. The documentary notes that private production companies eventually
27:59
injected mass of capital upward of three hundred and eighty
28:01
thousand dollars into further private geological probes, but the official
28:06
state sponsored physical digs essentially ground to a halt.
28:09
Speaker 1: Which is so frustrating.
28:10
Speaker 2: It is, but the harsh reality of modern investigations is
28:13
that without immediate, undeniable physical evidence from initial test trenches,
28:18
the public funding inevitably dries.
28:20
Speaker 1: Up, and even if they manage to pull a single
28:22
human femur out of that dirt tomorrow, the forensic curls
28:24
are just beginning. Think about the victim profile transience and
28:28
sex workers operating along Interstate twenty nine in the mid
28:31
nineteen seventies.
28:32
Speaker 2: Right, the less dead demographic.
28:34
Speaker 1: Exactly, These are individuals who were systematically ignored by society.
28:38
It is highly probable that missing persons reports were never
28:41
filed by estranged families, and if there is no missing
28:44
person's report, there is no familial reference DNA uploaded into
28:47
the national databases like COTIS or namis whatick means. If
28:51
you would hold a human bone in your hand, sequence
28:53
the DNA, run it through the computer and get zero matches,
28:57
you would have proof of a murder, but absolutely no
28:59
identity for the victim.
29:00
Speaker 2: It is a perfect impenetrable storm of forensic dead ends.
29:05
The physical evidence dissolves into the soil, the radar fails
29:08
to penetrate the density, and the DNA lacks a comparative database.
29:12
Speaker 1: So what happens then?
29:13
Speaker 2: When the physical science has failed to produce the definitive answer,
29:16
The entire burden of proof crashes violently back onto human
29:19
memory and within the Study family, memory is not just
29:22
a murky concept. It has evolved into an active, destructive battlefield.
29:27
Speaker 1: The human collateral damage of this accusation is just immense.
29:31
The documentary highlights how these allegations have completely shattered the
29:34
remaining fragments of the Study family. It is a profound
29:37
division of reality between siblings.
29:40
Speaker 2: Right, you have two very distinct sides.
29:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have Lucy carrying the torch for this investigation,
29:44
enduring all this public scrutiny. But on the exact opposite side,
29:48
you have her sister, Susan's Study, who vehemently defends their
29:53
deceased father.
29:54
Speaker 2: Susan's perspective is very different.
29:56
Speaker 1: It is Susan goes on the record acknowledging that he
29:58
was a strict discipline AI, but categorically dismissing the serial
30:03
killer allegations as a big fat lie. Another sibling has
30:07
publicly stated that Lucy's terrifying memories are simply trauma induced
30:11
distortions of a difficult childhood.
30:13
Speaker 2: And this deep division requires us to analyze the complex
30:17
neurobiology of prolonged childhood trauma. Because a common misconception is
30:22
that multiple children raised in the exact same household under
30:26
the exact same abusive conditions will naturally process and record
30:30
that environment in the exact same.
30:32
Speaker 1: Way, but they don't know No.
30:33
Speaker 2: The psychology of trauma proves the exact opposite is true.
30:37
When a developing brain is subjected to a constant state
30:39
of severe fear, the amigla of the brain's threat detection
30:43
center becomes hyperactive. Meanwhile, the hippocampus, the region responsible for
30:47
linear memory consolidation, can become fragmented and dysfunctional.
30:52
Speaker 1: So the brain essentially chooses different survival strategies. Like one
30:55
sibling's brain might initiate a process of dissociative amnesia. They
31:00
compartmentalize the extreme violence, locking it away and slapping a
31:04
more manageable label like strict parenting on their childhood, because
31:08
acknowledging the reality of a murderous parent would psychologically destroy
31:12
them exactly.
31:13
Speaker 2: That is a primary defense mechanism. Dissociation acts as a
31:16
vital psychological shield, allowing the child to function day to day. Conversely,
31:21
another siblings' brain, in this case, Lucy's, might adopt a
31:25
strategy of hyperfixation.
31:26
Speaker 1: Meaning she remembers everything right.
31:29
Speaker 2: Her brain records the terrifying mechanical details of the abuse
31:32
with excruciating high definition clarity. As a survival mechanism, it's
31:36
a desperate attempt to predict and navigate the next incoming threat.
31:40
The tragic result, fifty years later is two adult siblings
31:43
who grew up under the same roof but inhabit completely
31:46
irreconcilable realities.
31:47
Speaker 1: The isolation of that reality is staggering. Lucy currently manages
31:52
a private Facebook group to process her complex PTSD, her
31:56
past suicide attempts, and the massive riffs within her family.
32:01
The documentary asks a question that lingers long after the
32:04
credits roll, what if the monster everyone feared was your father?
32:08
With a haunting question, what happens when your personal undeniable truth,
32:13
the reality you know in your bones destroy is what
32:16
little family structure you have left? We are forced to
32:19
act as the jury for scales that are wildly unbalanced.
32:22
Speaker 2: Here we really are, because on the skeptical side of
32:24
the scale, you have the fluctuating estimates of the body count,
32:27
you have the undeniable failure of massive law enforcement digs
32:30
to produce human remains, and you have the shadow of
32:33
motive cast by the two thousand and seven dispute over
32:36
sixteen thousand dollars.
32:37
Speaker 1: But on the supporting side of the scale, you have
32:39
half a century of rigid, unchanging core memories. You have
32:43
the total belief of the local sheriff. You have two
32:46
highly trained, independent cadaver dogs alerting to the exact coordinates
32:49
a five year old girl pointed out decades ago.
32:51
Speaker 2: Don't forget the wives, right, you have.
32:53
Speaker 1: A mathematically impossible sixty percent suicide rate among his wives,
32:58
and you have a man who is already utilizing the
33:00
hollowed out trunks of trees to hide illicit materials from the.
33:04
Speaker 2: World and forensic anthropologists and cold case investigators frequently emphasize
33:08
a crucial maxim when dealing with historical cases of this nature.
33:12
The absence of evidence does not equate to the evidence
33:15
of absence.
33:16
Speaker 1: Say that again, the.
33:17
Speaker 2: Absence of evidence does not equate to the evidence of absence.
33:20
Failing to locate a body after fifty years in an
33:23
environment subject to extreme geological shifting and allegedly saturated with
33:28
caustic chemical accelerants is not a forensic exoneration.
33:31
Speaker 1: It's just a sign of time passing.
33:33
Speaker 2: It is often really a testament to the sheer passage
33:35
of time and the brutal efficiency of the disposal methodology.
33:39
Speaker 1: Which really forces us to zoom out and look at
33:41
the broader historical context. How did the Midwest in the
33:44
nineteen seventies cultivate an environment where a man could theoretically
33:48
murder dozens of people and simply fade into the background.
33:52
How does the infrastructure of society allow that to happen?
33:55
Speaker 2: Well, criminologists frequently refer to the nineteen seventies and nineteen
33:58
eighties as the golden age of serial.
34:01
Speaker 1: Killers, which is such a dark term.
34:03
Speaker 2: It is that this grim designation wasn't born from a
34:06
sudden psychological shift in the population. It was the direct
34:10
result of a society whose technological and law enforcement infrastructure
34:14
had not kept pace with its physical expansion.
34:17
Speaker 1: You mean, like the highways exactly.
34:20
Speaker 2: The completion of the interstate highway system, specifically corridors like
34:23
I twenty nine, created an unprecedented level of transient mobility.
34:28
Vast populations were constantly in motion between truck stops and
34:31
rural towns.
34:33
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, the law enforcement task with policing these massive areas
34:36
was fundamentally localized and way under resourced. A County Sheriff's
34:40
department might have three deputies responsible for patrolling five hundred
34:43
square miles of dense farmland and forests.
34:46
Speaker 2: And crucially, there was a total absence of a rapid
34:49
interconnected digital missing person's database, so.
34:51
Speaker 1: No computers talking to each other.
34:53
Speaker 2: Right. While the National Crime Information Center existed, its utilization
34:57
for transient populations by underfunded rural departments was wildly inconsistent.
35:03
The jurisdictions were functionally siloed.
35:05
Speaker 1: So if a vulnerable woman vanished from a bar in Omaha, Nebraska,
35:09
the deputy sitting in a station Fremont County, Iowa, just
35:12
forty miles away across the state line, would have absolutely
35:15
no mechanism to know she even existed, let alone that
35:18
she was missing.
35:19
Speaker 2: Exactly and studies alleged operational method fits perfectly into the
35:23
profile of a comfort zone offender.
35:25
Speaker 1: A comfort zone offender, yes, he.
35:27
Speaker 2: Didn't have to hunt on the open road. He manipulated
35:30
the transient flow of the highway to bring victims back
35:33
to a terrain he completely controlled. It is the exact
35:36
same spatial strategy utilized by the most notorious predators of
35:40
that era, exploiting the blind spots of a fragmented society.
35:44
Speaker 1: Like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy.
35:46
Speaker 2: Precisely, they preyed on the invisible and hid in plain sight.
35:50
Speaker 1: The documentary producers utilized over fifty hours of interviews and
35:53
extensive on site recreations, But they didn't do it to
35:57
definitively force a guilty verdict down the viewers throat.
36:00
Speaker 2: No, they didn't.
36:01
Speaker 1: They structured the series to meticulously map these systemic failures.
36:05
They explore how the routine dismissal of childhood trauma reports
36:09
and the severe jurisdictional isolation of rural policing created environments
36:13
where predators could operate with near absolute impunity.
36:16
Speaker 2: And this series really aligns with a massive national phenomenon
36:20
in modern true crime media. What's that, Well, the cultural
36:23
focus is shifting away from the traditional neatly resolved who
36:27
doing it. We're moving toward a complex exploration of familial accusations.
36:32
We are collectively examining the agonizing clash between survivor testimony
36:36
and forensic voids.
36:38
Speaker 1: So what is the legacy of Green Hollow and what
36:40
is the road ahead? Officially, the case remains open but inactive,
36:44
constrained by the reality that you cannot indict a deceased suspect,
36:48
and you cannot prosecute empty dirt.
36:50
Speaker 2: True.
36:50
Speaker 1: However, the release of the documentary is actively reigniting demands
36:54
for new advanced technological sweeps of the property using next
36:57
generation soil analysis and remarkable families of women who vanished
37:01
from the Omaha area in the late nineteen seventies have
37:04
actually begun reaching out to Lucy. Yeah. They are looking
37:06
at the timeline, looking at the geography, and wondering is
37:09
my sister, is my mother lying at the bottom of
37:11
that well. For Lucy, the objective hasn't shifted an inch
37:15
since she was five years old. She just wants some
37:17
founds exactly. She wants the site excavated, She wants forensic closure,
37:22
She wants to give those women a proper burial.
37:25
Speaker 2: And when synthesizing the vast amount of source material, the
37:28
ultimate conclusion transcends the exact numerical body count. Whether Donald
37:33
Deane's study murdered seventy people and systematically dissolved their remains
37:37
in lie, or whether the extreme documented physical and psychological
37:41
violence of that household shattered his daughter's developing mind into
37:45
constructing this vivid, lifelong narrative to explain her terror.
37:49
Speaker 1: The damage is still there.
37:50
Speaker 2: The devastation is an undeniable reality. The victims of his
37:54
confirmed physical abuse are real. The mathematical anomaly of the
37:57
suicides is real.
37:58
Speaker 1: And the systemic blind spots of the seventies and eighties
38:01
were very real.
38:02
Speaker 2: The trauma itself serves as the undeniable forensic evidence of
38:06
the environment. Even if the bones remain hidden in the earth.
38:09
Speaker 1: It really does, and it leaves us with a terrifying,
38:12
provocative question to consider as we close. We spend so
38:15
much of our lives reinforcing our perimeter. We install security cameras,
38:19
We lock our dead bolts against the stranger in the dark.
38:21
We teach our children to fear the unknown threat lurking
38:24
in the alleyway. But what if the most profound, dangerous
38:27
secrets aren't hiding in the shadows of a city street.
38:31
What if the worst monsters are buried beneath the top
38:33
soil of our own backyards, protected by the silence and
38:36
the denial of the very people sitting across from us
38:39
at the dinner table. How well do we truly know
38:41
the history of the ground we walk on? Thank you
38:44
for joining us on this deep dive into the source material,
38:47
stay curious, keep asking the hard questions, and we'll catch
38:50
you next time.