Herbert Richard Baumeister was born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1947, the son of an anaesthetist. He was an odd child who was assessed as schizophrenic as a teenager, and an erratic adult who lost a succession of jobs, but by the 1980s he and his wife Julie had built up a chain of thrift shops called Sav-A-Lot and were prosperous enough to buy Fox Hollow Farm, an eighteen-acre estate at Westfield, north of the city.
He picked up young men at gay bars in downtown Indianapolis, under the name Brian Smart, and took them home when his family was away. Men had been disappearing from those bars since the early 1990s and the community had been telling police so, largely without result; one man who had escaped from Baumeister gave a description and a partial number plate in 1994. He was also linked to a separate series along Interstate 70 and called the I-70 Strangler.
The men named in the record are Johnny Bayer, twenty; Allen Wayne Broussard, twenty-eight; Roger A. Goodlet, thirty-three; Richard D. Hamilton, twenty; Steven S. Hale, twenty-six; Jeff Allen Jones, thirty-one; Michael Kiern, forty-six; and Manuel Resendez, thirty-one.
In 1994 his teenage son found a human skull in the woods on the property. Julie Baumeister accepted her husband's explanation that it was a medical specimen of his father's. In June 1996, during divorce proceedings, she let police search. They recovered thousands of bone fragments and the remains of at least eleven men from the woods and a burn area.
He drove to Ontario and shot himself at Pinery Provincial Park on July 3, 1996, leaving a note about his failed marriage and business that said nothing about any of it.
Two things about this case are unfinished. Investigators also linked him by pattern to nine men strangled and dumped along Interstate 70 in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1990, a series that stopped when his business travel did, and that was never resolved. And in 2022 the Hamilton County coroner reopened the identification work on some ten thousand bone fragments recovered from the property, using modern DNA, and has since put names to further victims. The total is not known and is probably higher than eleven.