The first clue that something sinister was going on at Fox Hollow Farm came in the winter 1994.
Herb Baumeister’s 13-year-old son was in the woods of the family’s sprawling $1 million estate in the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield when he stumbled across a human skull.
The teen showed it to his mother who returned to the same spot and found a skeleton.
Two years later, police finally zeroed in on Baumeister as the mystery serial killer responsible for the disappearances and murders of multiple gay and bisexual men since the spring of 1993.
In June 1996, a search of his vast 18-acre property uncovered hundreds of human bones including legs and skulls, according to police records from the time.
Within months, the number of skeletal remains found was in the thousands and eight victims, all men, were identified using dental records and the limited DNA technology available at the time.
Now, almost 30 years on, a new team of investigators led by Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison is painstakingly sifting through the 10,000 still-unidentified bone fragments one-by-one to find more victims in what marks the biggest analysis of human remains other than 9/11.
It’s an investigation unlike anything the county, state and even the nation has seen in terms of size and scale, Jellison tells DailyMail.com.
‘This is the second largest investigation into unidentified human remains in United States history, second only to the World Trade Center,’ he says.
Investigators have long thought there could be at least 25 victims whose bodies were burned, ground up and discarded around the wealthy Baumeister family’s estate.
But for 25 years, the bones of these unknown victims sat gathering dust on a shelf in a room in the University of Indianapolis’s Anthropology and Archaeology Department. They had no names. No one was trying to identify who they once were or to reunite them with their families.
Now, with the search now revived, investigators are confident they are homing in on the identities of two more victims who fell prey to the man with a secret double life as a wealthy businessman as well as a depraved serial killer.
The owner of two successful thrift stores in the rich enclave of the Hoosier State, Baumeister was married and known in the community as a family man with three children.
But, in reality, when his wife and children were out of town, he would hunt for young men at local gay bars, using the alias Brian Smart. He would lure his victims to the family home where he murdered them and left their burned and charred remains on the land where his children played.
When those remains were finally unearthed and Baumeister’s secrets came to light, authorities realized they had unmasked one the most prolific serial killers in Indiana and US history – and here was his graveyard.
Despite the magnitude of the case, by early 1998 local authorities considered their work done.
Baumeister was dead. The 49-year-old had fled to Ontario, Canada, during the 1996 search on his home and killed himself in a park, leaving behind a suicide note making no mention of his grisly crimes.
In closing the case, investigators announced they believed Baumeister was also the serial killer nicknamed the I-70 strangler, responsible for the murders of nine other men and boys whose bodies were found dumped near Interstate 70 between Indiana and Ohio from 1980 to 1991.
‘If somebody has any information, we don’t care who it is, we’d be happy to look at it,’ Hamilton County Sheriff James Bradbury said at a press conference at the time. ‘But Herb Baumeister is the only suspect we have in any of them.’
And, just like that, the case of notorious suspected serial killer Herb Baumeister was closed.
But for families whose loved ones were still missing, it was far from over.
A grueling 25 years passed before the incoming county coroner, Jellison, launched the new investigation in 2022 to name each and every one of the still-unidentified 10,000 human remains from Fox Hollow Farm.
Since then, the team has managed to identify a ninth victim among the remains.
And now, Jellison tells DailyMail.com they have found two more victims.
‘We have one DNA profile right now that we know is another individual but we just don’t know who that person is,’ says Jellison.
Just last week, that DNA profile was sent to a forensic genetic genealogy investigator who will then scour DNA databases for a familial match, meaning the team is very close to identifying this 10th victim.
‘I am confident we will identify that person quite soon,’ he says.
‘But it takes time to do forensic genetic genealogy, it’s not that you can get answers in days or weeks. It’s typically months for that process to work out.’
An 11th victim has also been found among the remains.
In this case, Jellison explains that a DNA profile has been produced but, because the human bone fragment is so small, it is not enough for a match.
‘But it looks like it will match a DNA sample from a family member’ who has come forward in the belief they could be among the victims, he says.
The DNA profile from this 11th victim is now undergoing further testing to confirm it is a match and give that victim a name.
Jellison explains that it’s a long process to identify each remain.
First, the University of Indianapolis’s Human Identification Center selects the most viable bones and bone fragments for DNA analysis and sends them in batches of about 40 per quarter to the Indiana State Police DNA lab.
There, forensic experts work to try to extract a DNA profile from the bones.
‘But not all 10,000 remains are viable for DNA profiles,’ says Jellison.
‘Many of the remains were burned and crushed so we’re dealing with very small pieces so out of the 10,000 we have to take a look at each one and say “do we think this remain can provide DNA?” If we say that a remain most likely will not produce DNA, we still preserve it as we don’t know what tomorrow will bring with technology. The DNA field is advancing very quickly so what we can’t do today, we might be able to do tomorrow.’
If a DNA profile is able to be extracted from a bone, there are then two ways it can be used to identify who it belongs to.
One involves the DNA profile being sent to a forensic genetic genealogy investigator who then trawls through genealogy databases looking for the closest possible familial match.
The other involves matching the DNA profile to a living family member who has submitted their DNA to the police lab as part of their search for a missing relative. By taking a simple DNA swab, the lab is able to build a DNA profile from that family member and enter it into CODIS – the national law enforcement DNA database. Then, when a DNA profile is taken from one of the human remains, that profile is also entered into CODIS to see if there is a match.
The second, Jellison explains, is the ‘quickest and most efficient way’ to identify a victim which is why he is appealing to family members of young men who went missing in Indianapolis between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s to come forward to submit DNA samples.
So far, around 40 people have given DNA swabs, including the individual who appears to be a relative of the unnamed 11th victim.
Two other individuals who submitted samples have also been matched – but not to Fox Hollow Farm victims. One, Jellison says, learned through submitting their DNA to the team that their missing loved one’s remains had actually been found in Las Vegas.
Since the start of the probe, Jellison says the DNA lab has analyzed around 120 of the 10,000 bones and bone fragments. Out of this 120, 66 yielded a DNA profile matching one of the nine known victims.
The very first bone analyzed revealed the DNA profile, and ultimately the identity, of the ninth Fox Hollow Farm victim: Allen Livingston.
It was Livingston’s cousin Eric Pranger who made a call to Jellison in 2022 that would spark the mammoth mission to finally identify all of the Fox Hollow Farm victims, put them to rest and bring closure to some families of missing loved ones almost three decades later.
His aunt – Livingston’s mom Sharon Livingston – had long believed he was one of the serial killer’s victims.
His profile, the timeline and the nature of his disappearance matched the other victims. All the known victims had frequented the city’s gay bars. The only known survivor, Mark Goodyear, had told investigators how he met Baumeister in a bar in Indianapolis and was driven by him to a big house in the suburbs where he had tried to choke him with a hose in the swimming pool. Allen, aged 27, was bisexual and was last seen getting into a vehicle in downtown Indianapolis one day back in 1993.
‘The family suspected Allen was a victim at Fox Hollow Farm and were hoping to give Sharon a little bit of closure before she passed,’ Jellison says. ‘So that’s how it all started.’
Following that call, Jellison looked into Allen’s case and decided to launch the investigation. He then tracked down the whereabouts of the human remains, only to discover they were sat on a shelf at the University of Indianapolis Anthropology and Archeology department, which had assisted with the initial excavation back in the mid-90s.
He spoke to Dr Krista Latham, professor of biology and anthropology at the department and director of the Human Identification Center, who told him the extent of the human bone and bone fragments yet to be identified. Soon she, the FBI, Indiana State Police’s DNA Laboratory and forensics experts at Othram Lab were all on board.
‘The thing just kind of snowballed from there,’ Jellison says.
Jellison explains there’s a ‘few reasons’ why that initial call from a presumed victim’s relative led him to decide to take up such a complex, time-consuming and costly investigation.
‘One, it’s the role of the coroner to identify the deceased found in their county so there’s some responsibility there,’ he says.
‘But I also feel a moral responsibility to provide families with closure. And also, those remains represent people, so to give those people dignity – to get them off the shelf at the University of Indianapolis to a proper resting place.’
‘For every remain we identify or every remains we come up with a DNA profile that is a win.’
In 2023, 30 years since she last saw her son alive, Allen was finally identified as one of the Fox Hollow Farm victims.
‘This investigation is the result of Allen Livingston’s family calling me. Then out of 10,000 human remains, Allen Livingston’s were the first to be identified. What are the odds of that,’ says Jellison.
‘To give [his mom] those answers and to be able to return Allen’s remains to her, I think it’s some sort of closure. But I mean put yourself in the position of that mother. For nearly 30 years, she had no idea what happened to her son. And then she knows what happened but she also knows that her son is dead. So it’s a good thing, bad thing type of scenario. She has the closure – that’s the good thing. But also she knows her son was murdered.’
To date, Allen remains the only new Fox Hollow Farm victim to be identified along with the eight men previously named.
Jellison previously estimated that at least 25 victims could be among the 10,000 remains found at Fox Hollow Farm. Now he says he doesn’t work in numbers.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if it was 25 people but we have no way of knowing that… we’re going to look at one person at a time.’
It’s already been almost four decades since a serial killer began terrorizing Indianapolis’s LGBT community.
And around three decades since Herb Baumeister’s so-called killing field was unearthed at Fox Hollow Farm.
But it will still take ‘many’ more years for investigators to analyze each and every one of the 10,000 individual bones and bone fragments to try to determine who it belongs to.
While Jellison won’t put a specific timescale on it, based on the current process of 40 remains going for analysis per quarter, the entire investigation could take more than 60 years.
‘It’s going to take some time,’ Jellison admits.
‘This investigation will exceed my term as coroner. Here in Indiana a coroner is term limited so the maximum a coroner can serve is 8 years,’ he says. (Jellison entered his first term in 2022.)
‘Now when the new guy comes in he could say “no I don’t want to do this” or he could pick up the torch and keep running with it.’
The more years that pass, the more challenging it will be to find living family members, he adds.
‘Around 30 years have passed, people have moved to other parts of the country so it makes it difficult to track down family members for DNA swabs,’ he says.
‘People have also passed away without knowing what happened to their loved one.’
When asked if these factors mean the team is in a race against time to identify the victims and bring closure to their families, Jellison says: ‘It is because you want to identify remains as quickly as you can and give people answers as quickly as you can.’
He adds: ‘But’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon… it takes as long as it takes.’
‘That’s part of the conversation I have with family members who give DNA swabs. We could submit it to CODIS tomorrow and could get a ‘ding ding’ right away and that’s a match. Or we could not match it to any remains for years because we don’t know which remain it is.
‘We have so many remains and we can only test so many at a time.’
So for anyone with a missing loved one, Jellison has a message: ‘To anyone who has a missing person in their family, file a missing person report with law enforcement.
‘And if you have a missing person from the mid-80s to the mid-90s call me. I’m just a phone call away and we’ll guide you to what you need to do to get the best shot of identifying or finding your missing person.’
He adds: ‘We’re not going to stop. This is an expensive investigation, it’s time consuming, it takes a lot of manpower and a lot of agencies are involved but we’re all committed to seeing this through.’