Fox Hollow Farm Remains Identified as Manuel Resendez, Missing Since 1993
DNA from a relative matched bones recovered in 1996 on Herb Baumeister's Indiana estate to Manuel Resendez, who was 34 when he was reported missing.
Published
For almost three decades, the bones taken from the woods behind Fox Hollow Farm had sat in storage, about 10,000 charred and broken pieces with too few names attached. On Thursday, January 25, 2024, the Hamilton County Coroner's Office in Indiana put one more name to them. In a press release, Coroner Jeff Jellison said forensic experts had matched human remains recovered in 1996 from the Westfield estate of Herb Baumeister, the businessman suspected of killing men he met in Indianapolis gay bars, to Manuel Resendez. Resendez was 34 when he was reported missing in August 1993.
The match came from a family reference sample, DNA that one of his relatives had submitted early the year before. "I would like to thank the entire team of law enforcement and forensic specialists that have come together to support this effort," Jellison said.
Resendez's name was not new to the case. He was one of eight men identified in the 1990s as potential victims of Baumeister. The new work tied him, through DNA taken from the bones themselves, to the remains found on the property.
Jellison had reopened the identification work in 2022. His office asked relatives of young men who disappeared between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s to come forward with DNA samples. The first result came in October 2023, when bone fragments were identified as those of Allen Livingston, who was 27 when he vanished in 1993, with the help of a sample his mother gave. Livingston's cousin, Eric Pranger, had asked for the case to be reopened. Livingston disappeared the same day as Resendez, according to the Doe Network, a database of missing persons and unidentified remains.
Investigators said the fragments could represent at least 25 people. Baumeister, a married father of three, was never charged with any killing. In July 1996, as investigators sought to question him about the bones found at Fox Hollow Farm, he killed himself in Canada at 49. By 1999, authorities had linked him to the disappearance of at least 16 men since 1980, including several whose bodies were found in shallow streams in rural central Indiana and western Ohio.
Sources
- Remains found at Indiana estate of suspected serial killer identified as victim who has been missing since 1993, NBC News
- Remains found at a central Indiana estate are those of a man who has been missing since 1993, Associated Press, via Indiana Public Media
- More remains identified at suspected serial killer's Indiana estate, now 13 presumed victims, CBS News (CBS/AP)