In 1994 Herb Baumeister's son was playing in the woods behind the family's house at Fox Hollow Farm, an eighteen-acre estate off 156th Street in Westfield, Indiana, when he found a complete human skeleton, partly buried. His father told the family it was one of his own father's dissecting skeletons, kept it in the garage for a time and then buried it again in the garden. Two years later, on June 24, 1996, investigators searching those woods recovered bone fragments from at least eleven people.
Herbert Richard Baumeister was born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1947, the eldest of four children of an anesthesiologist, Dr. Herbert Eugene Baumeister, and Elizabeth Baumeister. As a teenager he urinated on teachers' desks and played with dead animals, and his father had him examined; he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder but received no further treatment. He drifted in and out of Indiana University and through a string of jobs, hardworking but increasingly strange. He married Juliana "Julie" Saiter in November 1971, and six months later his father had him committed to a psychiatric hospital for two months. The couple had three children; she later said they had been intimate only six times in more than twenty-five years. In 1988 he founded the Sav-A-Lot thrift stores in Indianapolis, and that May he bought Fox Hollow Farm.
By the early 1990s the Marion County Sheriff's Department and the Indianapolis police were looking into disappearances of gay men of similar age, height and weight. The named dead from the farm are John Lee "Johnny" Bayer, twenty, missing May 28, 1993; Jeffrey Allen Jones, thirty-one, July 6, 1993; Richard Douglas Hamilton Jr., twenty, July 31, 1993; Allen Lee Livingston, twenty-seven, and Manuel Resendez, thirty-four, both last seen August 6, 1993; Daniel Thomas Halloran, twenty-one or twenty-two, missing sometime after March 1994; Steven Spurlin Hale, twenty-eight, April 1, 1994; Allen Wayne Broussard, twenty-eight, June 6, 1994; Roger Allen Goodlet, thirty-three, July 22, 1994; and Michael Frederick Keirn, forty-five, last seen March 31, 1995. Jerry Williams-Comer, thirty-four, last seen August 8, 1995, whose car turned up at Castleton Square Mall, has also been linked to him, although his remains were never found at the farm.
In 1994 a man named Tony Harris went to investigators. He said a patron of the 501 Club, a gay bar, who called himself Brian Smart, had taken him back to a mansion and tried to strangle him with a pool hose during erotic asphyxiation, and that he believed the man had killed his friend Roger Goodlet. In August 1995 Harris saw him again, followed his car and took the license number. Brian Smart was Herb Baumeister. Told he was a suspect, he and his wife refused a search. By June 1996 Julie had filed for divorce and was frightened enough of his behavior to consent, and the property was searched while he was away on vacation.
With a warrant out for his arrest, he drove to Ontario and shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum at Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron on July 3, 1996. His three-page note, on yellow paper, apologized for messing up the park and spoke of his broken marriage and failing business; it said nothing of the men. He wrote that he had meant to kill himself somewhere else, but children there had changed his mind. His last meal was a peanut butter sandwich.
Since his death he has also been suspected in the killings of men along Interstate 70 in Indiana and Ohio from 1980 to 1991, young men and boys picked up around a four-block stretch of Indianapolis gay bars, strangled and dumped naked or half-clothed near the highway. Police named him the prime suspect in the I-70 Strangler case in April 1999, noting that the bodies along the interstate stopped appearing around the time the farm became a burial ground. In February 1998 a witness told police Baumeister was the man last seen with one of them, Michael Riley, twenty-two, found strangled in Hancock County in June 1983. The case remains officially unsolved.
The work at Fox Hollow Farm is not finished. A new search on December 4, 2022, found another bone and marked twenty more places where remains may lie, and forensic experts have been working to identify nearly ten thousand pieces of human remains from an unknown number of people. Livingston was identified in October 2023, Resendez in January 2024 and Halloran in 2025, by genetic genealogy. Three more sets of remains, all thought to be of men who were murdered, are still unnamed, and the Hamilton County coroner has asked families of men missing from Indianapolis in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s to give DNA. A 2025 Hulu documentary series promoted the theory that he had an accomplice.