Was Herb Baumeister a Serial Killer Responsible for Murdering 25 Men in Indiana?

Indiana thrift store owner Herb Baumeister died by suicide July 3, 1996, facing accusations that he may have killed upwards of a dozen gay men in the early and mid 1990s.

By 1993, several young men had disappeared from Indianapolis gay bars and nightclubs, but it wasn’t until Allen Wayne Broussard, 28, and Roger Allen Goodlet, 33, disappeared in the summer of 1994 that the wider community began taking notice, in part because their families pushed for answers and hired a private detective.

At that time, Baumeister was living with his wife, Julie, and their three children in a sprawling home on an 18-acre estate called Fox Hollow Farm, located in Hamilton County, Ind., about 18 miles north of Indianapolis. Investigators think that while Baumeister’s family was traveling, Baumeister, who often spent time at Indianapolis gay bars, brought men back to his home, where he killed and buried them.

In early 1995, his teenage son found bones and a human skull in their wooded yard, Julie says in an A&E’s Investigative Reports. Baumeister claimed the bones were from a medical skeleton that had belonged to his physician father, so Julie didn’t call the police.

By the summer of 1995, the Marion County Sheriff’s Department and Indianapolis Police Department were investigating the disappearances of gay men from the Indianapolis area who were all of a similar age, height and weight.

Goodlet’s friend told investigators about being picked up at a gay bar in 1994 by a man calling himself Brian Smart who drove him to a large remote house and nearly strangled him with a pool hose while they engaged in erotic asphyxiation. Without an exact location or more to go on, the lead went nowhere. About a year later, that man saw “Brian,” whom he suspected of killing Goodlet, at a downtown bar, and asked someone to follow him and get his license plate number.

The car was registered to Herb Baumeister.

The investigation stalled because there wasn’t enough evidence to secure a search warrant, and the Baumeisters initially refused to let investigators to search their property.

By 1996, Baumeister’s marriage was crumbling, and his business was failing. After filing for divorce, Julie allowed officials to search the property. They discovered charred and shattered human bones. An extensive search eventually unearthed the remains of at least seven men, four of whom were identified based on dental records, including Broussard and Goodlet.

A warrant was issued for Baumeister’s arrest. On July 3, 1996, Baumeister was found dead in Canada from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

After that, the investigation ceased and the remains were sent to storage.

In 2022, Jeff Jellison—then Hamilton County’s Coroner-Elect—received a call from a man named Eric Pranger who believed his cousin, Allen Livingston, may have been one of Baumeister’s victims in August 1993. Pranger hoped to bring closure to Livingston’s terminally ill mother.

“That was the initial driving force that caused me to reopen the case,” Jellison, who was sworn in as Hamilton County Coroner in 2023, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “I decided to move forward and see what we had. I discovered that we had 10,000 bones and bone fragments at the University of Indianapolis, which had assisted with the initial excavation of the remains.”

The remains had been stored in evidence boxes for 26 years.

Jellison assembled a team including anthropologists, DNA experts, law enforcement officials and genetic genealogists.

“We went to work, and the very first identification we made was Allen Livingston,” Jellison says.

Advances in DNA technology have streamlined the process. Jellison’s team selects a piece of remains and sends it to the Indiana State Police’s DNA lab to see if DNA can be extracted. If it can, the DNA profile is entered into the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database of missing people.

Jellison says the process takes “a couple months.” He explains that if CODIS doesn’t yield a match, a DNA profile from the remain gets sent to a private laboratory for additional DNA work, which then goes to a forensic genetic genealogist who will search public DNA databases like 23andMe in an attempt to identify the person.

That painstaking process can take several months, sometimes a year. For one victim, Jellison says the genealogist needed to trace the DNA sample back to the 1700s to build 3,000 family trees to identify the remains.

“Thirty years ago, genetic genealogy was not a tool available to law enforcement,” Jellison says. Since DNA technology evolves so quickly, any remains that cannot be identified are returned to storage until newer technology is developed.

Something investigators may never know is exactly how many bodies were disposed of at Fox Hollow Farm, but they believe the remains could belong to at least 25 people. In the 30 years since Baumeister’s death, out of 13 profiles, a total of 11 victims have been identified with two unidentified profiles working their way through the investigation, per Jellison. Eight were identified in the initial investigation, while three have been identified in the renewed investigation.

“These remains were burnt, they were crushed and they were scattered in the woods, almost like you're throwing chicken feed down,” Jellison says. “That property is no different than a mass fatality scene like an airplane crash. Some of these remains are as small as the size of your fingernail. And because of the condition of the remains, you can't start putting them back together. We still have 9,000 remains left to go.”

Jellison initially received pushback about the time and costs of reopening a 30-year-old investigation, but he says most of the community supports the effort: “The thing about this case is families tried to get answers during the initial investigation, but didn't get those answers, so for 30 years they've sat and wondered what happened to their loved one.”

He recalls informing one victim’s daughter that her father’s remains had been identified. “She was maybe 2 years old when he went missing and never knew what happened to her dad,” Jellison says. “She told me, ‘I feel like I finally know my dad.’”

Jellison and his team hope to identify as many Fox Hollow victims as possible from the remains they have, though the actual number of Baumeister’s victims may never be known, especially since he’s also suspected of being the I-70 Strangler, responsible for murdering at least 12 males along a stretch of I-70 linking Indiana and Ohio in the 1980s and early 90s. But investigators can only do so much without familial DNA to compare their results against.

“I don't care if it's from this case 30 years ago or someone who went missing today, if you have a family member who went missing, please come forward, provide a DNA swab and allow us to get that entered into the database,” Jellison urges. “It is the quickest, most efficient way to identify a missing person's remains, and we can't do that without having a family reference sample.”