August 27, 2025 • 32 mins
Young gay men begin disappearing from downtown Indianapolis. One by one, missing persons fliers go up, and rumors spread about a serial killer. Families are frustrated by a lackluster investigation. And then a killing field is discovered in a shocking location.
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
It dawned on me that my cousin's a possible victim
of her boumeister, and he's never been identified. He was
a pretty fun going guy, loved a party, always the
center of attention. Jeff didn't know how to help me
at first, but he told me he would, and I
(00:33):
busted this case wide open.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
In the summer of nineteen ninety three, something strange started happening.
Young men began to disappear one by one. Friends and
family didn't know what happened to them, only that they vanished.
The truth was far worse than anyone could have imagined,
(01:01):
and the crime scene was so large that investigators were overwhelmed.
Back then, police had clues that they were onto a
serial killer, but the investigation was dropped for nearly thirty years.
Families were left with no answers, but that changed when
(01:23):
one man looking for his cousin made a phone call
and more bodies turned up. This is America's crime Lab.
I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Producer Katherine Fenlosa is here, and Catherine,
I have to admit this case has me intrigued.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
While there is something I think about serial killers, It's like,
you know, the saying of like a car crash, everyone
sort of slows down to watch. Yeah, because it defies
normal human behavior, and so maybe there's a heart at
least for me. That's like, oh my gosh, what makes
these people tick because it's so abnormal?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, like, how is it even possible.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
This case is also unique because it involves the second
largest amount of unidentified human remains ever discovered at a
crime scene in this country. It's second only to the
World Trade Center site.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Oh my god, that's so this is a big deal.
I mean a mass grave.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Basically, this one actually gave me nightmares and kept me up.
So this case, a lot of people refer to it
as fox Hollow Farm or the Fox Hollow Murders.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, do you know of it? I know a little
bit about it.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
This takes place in the nineties in a suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana,
just north of the city, about forty five minutes and
there is a couple, Julie and Herb Baumeister, and they
meet at the University of Indiana. Herb is known as
a little quirky. For example, he and a friend co
(03:11):
owned a used hearse as a car and people would
just sort of laugh it off. Like, Oh, that's Herb.
He's a little eccentric, but very nice guy.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Okay, so maybe a little quirky, a little different.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yeah, he was the son of a doctor, so maybe
he was used to being around medical stuff and not
spooped by it. So they end up getting married and
Julie goes to teach at a high school. Herb gets
a job as a clerk at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
Julie says she was drawn to her because of his
good looks. He was sort of tall and skinny with
(03:47):
dark hair. She said he was funny and just easy
to get along with. She said she always had a
good time with him. They eventually have three kids, and
he finds a job at a thrift store like a
used clothing store, and he likes this job, and so
(04:08):
he and Julie have a joint dream to open up
their own thrift store. They borrow money from Herb's mom
and they open up their first store.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I love that they open up a store as a team.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, And I called Steve Ainsworth to get some of
the backstory. So Steve spent his career as a detective
in Boulder, Colorado. He worked homicides in major crimes. And
now he works with Authorm, America's crime lab.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Okay, so what does he do there.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
He's a law enforcement liaison, which means it's his job
to work with local authorities when they bring evidence to
AUTHORM for advanced DNA testing. And Steve says, Herb and
July named their store Save a Lot, and it.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
Was basically like a goodwill or a salvation army where
he would take used clothing, used appliants, as all used furniture,
all that he would put them in these stores and
he would sell it. Well. It became very popular and
he made quite a bit of money, so he's able
to purchase Fox Hollow.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Fox Hollow is the property that Herb and Julie buy,
and it's in a wealthy suburb of Indianapolis. It's known
for being a very conservative area. It's pretty with lots
of horse farms and rolling hills. You kind of get
the picture.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Wow, So Herb and Julie must be doing really well.
They are.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Steve Ainsworth has actually visited the estate and I asked
him to describe it.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
It's an English tutor stay home with ariage barn off
to the side in its huge garage, and then it's
surrounded by these very very dense woods.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
The house has a long sort of winding driveway and
there are a number of outbuildings. There's a horse stable,
I believe, there's like a three car garage.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
The house itself, it is big. I mean it's really big.
It has three levels, county in a basement, but it's
really dark. Inside.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
The house is really impressive. There's like a real darkwood
library and a huge kitchen. There is an indoor.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Pool, oh my goodness.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, it's in the basement. And there is also a
bar area with like a legit bar, like one or
two bartenders could be behind there, and then there are
doors that go out to a back patio and from
the back patio there's a green lawn. At the time
when Herb and Julie bought this, behind the house was
(06:42):
a very dense wooded area and the woods came up
pretty close to the back of the house. So in
the summers, Julie and the kid's head about one hundred
miles north of Fox Hollow Farm where the family has
a place on a lake.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Wow, they're living the life.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, they're doing really well, and I think the place
might be in Herb's family. Herb spends essentially Monday through
Friday at home going to work, and then on the
weekends he'll go join them. For the most part, they
do this, you know, for a number of years, and
this is sort of their lifestyle.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Where is this going?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Around nineteen ninety three, something starts happening in Indianapolis and
it's a little bit under the radar, but young men
(07:41):
start disappearing and a lot of these men are part
of the gay community who frequent some of the gay
bars in Indianapolis. And at the start, it's not reported
on the news, and there are aren't like big search
parties being organized to look for these men. It's almost
(08:04):
more like little murmurings at the bars, you know, like
people are saying like, hey, have you seen John?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Have you seen Richard?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
And after a while, missing persons posters start showing up
in some of these bars. They're made by family and
friends with just like a picture of the person and
some description about what.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
They look like.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
And pretty soon people in the gay community are starting
to get worried about what's happening, and there's some concern
like are all of these related?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, it sounds like maybe they're being targeted in some way.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
These bars were located in downtown Indianapolis, which in the
nineties was a very conservative area and it was also
a nine to five city, Steve says, when it emptied
out at the end of a workday and became a
ghost town, the bars these men went to came to life.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
They were disappearing from these now gay clubs, places where
they could go to field stafe.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
And this is also during the AIDS crisis. Yeah, you
would see somebody frequently and it wasn't always clear that
they were sick, and then all of a sudden they
stopped showing up at the clubs, and no one really
knows why. I mean, it was just a very fragile
and vulnerable community.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Absolutely, and I mean that kind of makes sense that
maybe it's harder to track people down because of that.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, and it was also pretty common for people to
go buy a different name at these clubs. I mean
they were worried, you know, if their true identity came
out and they were found out to be gay, that
they could lose their jobs. But in the summer of
ninety three, five men who frequented this gay nightclub scene
(09:52):
go missing in ninety four, they're three more. Ninety five,
they're two more. Detectives from that time period will say that,
especially in this community, there were not a lot of
missing person reports being made.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
And you have to remember back in the eighties and
even the mid nineties, it was really underground. These are
gay men, so it's like it's a subculture. It wouldn't
be reported like that eighteen year old coed goes missing
from Lindy or something like that. I don't think the
public was really aware of what was going on.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, that's the thing with stigma, or I don't know,
just prejudice in general. It's not only that people have
to directly be victimized by it, but then it's like
people don't feel safe to even ask for help or
seek out resources, and who knows if they will get
the support when they do ask.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So more and more of these posters start showing up
of these men disappearing. Then one day, Julie Baumeister is
at her house. Her thirteen year old son Eric has
a friend over and they're playing outside.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Baumeister told his kids not to go into the woods
around the house because they could catch all kinds of diseases.
Get sick. There is all kinds of bugs, and he
just scared him not to go out into the woods.
But his son, and I think a friend of his
son went into the woods and they were just kind
of looking around and exploring.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
The next thing Julie knows is that Eric comes running
into the house and he is holding a fully intact
human skull.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
So Eric, their son, comes into the house holding a
human skull, and I'm really hoping his mom. Julie freaks
out because I mean, if someone came into my house
with a skull from my yard, I would go berserk.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
She's like, oh my god, is that really real? How
could that have been behind the house. So she takes
it from Eric, and when herb gets home from work
that night, she says, HERB, look at what the kids found.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
And when she confronted HERB about it, he said it
was left over from when his dad was a doctor,
and it was an anatomy specimen that his dad had
used before, and that's how he explained it away.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
And Julie thinks, oh, okay, I mean that's a legitimate explanation.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
I mean, I guess it's her husband, so she must
have a level of trust with him also, though I
don't know, I just that would really be jarring to me,
and I feel like I would need to call the
police pretty much right away.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Well, there don't seem to be any other like red
flags for her. She does say that through their entire marriage,
Herb was a great dad, Like he was super involved
when it came time to select a preschool or help
with homework. He was like a completely present father. The
(13:50):
other thing, too, is that they lived on eighteen acres,
and as I was saying, it's like really dense woods.
I mean, they were certainly finding like animal bones back there.
Maybe this had actually been back there for a long time.
So it was surprising and shocking to her. But Herb
was able to calm all of her fears and she
(14:12):
sort of put it out of her mind. These men
keep disappearing. A guy named Stephen Hale is last seen
in April of ninety four. Alan Brussard is last seen
at one of the gay bars in June. In July,
(14:33):
Roger Allan Godette helps his mom put together a bench,
he plays with his kitten, and then he goes out
to a bar. That's the last time he was seen
in public. In nineteen ninety six, a group of families
of these missing men hire a private detective because they're
not getting any answers from police, and Steve Ainsworth says
(14:54):
that leads investigators to someone, a.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Guy by the name of Mark Goodyear, who frequented these
clubs and he had all of these stories he was
telling to get this really going.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
So Mark Goodyear meets with police and he says, you know, yeah,
I've met this guy, Brian Smart at a gay bar
and he invited me back to his house. We went
down to the basement where he has an indoor pool
and there's a bar, and it was a little weird.
So there were a lot of mannikins. Stop and the
(15:28):
mannikins are set up around the pool area and they're
posed so it looks like they're like lounging by the water.
And in the bar area they're even more mannequins. These
ones are dressed in clothing and they're posed so it
looks like they're like having drinks and talking. And the
pool area is really foggy and misty, and Mark says,
(15:53):
the whole scene has this really eerie vibe to it.
Mark says, Brian offers me an from the bar and
I just kind of had a bad feeling about it.
So I make an excuse and I go to the
bathroom and Alan, I think he pours it out and
comes back with water quick thinking, and I was worried
that there were drugs in the drink. Anyway, we swam
(16:16):
in the pool. Mark says, you know, I wasn't really
into this. This guy Brian kept coming up behind me,
one time with a hose putting it around my neck,
another time with a belt whoa a piece of rope.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
That is kind of scary in that he thinks he's
being drugged, and it sounds like he's calming up behind
him that he's not getting consent, because I do get
in the BDSM community or something, content is a huge part,
and it sounds like that's not what was happening here.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
No, and Mark said, you know, he was so persistent
that had I been drugged and a little sleepy and
not fully aware of what was going on, he could
have overpowered me. I mean, I would not have been
able to resist what he was doing.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
It's terrifying.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
But then it's a little confusing because then Mark Goodyear
goes on to say, but you know, we engaged in
consensual sex, even though he's now thought that this guy
drugged him. He's a little weirded out by these mannequins
in the house, and you know, this guy, Brian has
(17:26):
essentially tried to strangle him a few times. Right, But
Mark spends the night okay, and the next day Brian
drives him back to Indianapolis.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It is a little weird.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Like I would think he would want to get the
heck out of there.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, I also get though, how if you're in a
scary situation, maybe and he is your ride. This is
before car share services, you know, it might be hard
to get out of there. True, I don't know. I'm
just giving him the benefit of the doubt that if
you're in a scary situation, you just kind of deal
(18:09):
with it and get out when you can. And maybe
that was just what worked.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, And so Mark does
mention to the police. You know, I felt like this
wasn't the first time this guy had had an evening
like this, and I honestly felt like if he wanted to,
he could have murdered me. Like there was a very
thin line between fetishy sex and something much more dangerous.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
This is giving me the chills a little bit, just
the idea that he was able to leave. And I
don't know if this is going where I think it's going.
I mean, maybe he narrowly escaped.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
So the police can't figure out who this Brian Smart is.
They do look into it, but it almost seems like
the investigation ends before it began, if that makes sense.
Clearly it was an alias Mark Goodyear. Couldn't tell them
where the house was. It couldn't give them any description
(19:10):
of like, oh, yeah, we took this highway to that
highway and we got off on this road. At one point,
another witness comes forward and he says a man approaches
him at a bar with an offer.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Hey, I've got this really, really wealthy friend. He's got
this great house. He's got an indoor swimming pool. You've
got to come.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
And see it.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
Baummeister did not take him out there, and he had
this encounter with this person who took him out there.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Wait, so someone else is inviting men back to Herb's house,
So that suggests there are other people involved. Are the
police putting it together that this could be a serial
killer or killers targeting the gay community to be honest.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
I mean, back then, there just weren't a lot of
resources devoted to an investigation. And Steve says, it's because
these men were gay.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
I think they would have been a connected sooner if
it was a different community. I think that it kind
of fell on deaf ears for a while until these
remains started going up.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
So a year goes by and someone meets a man
who resembles Brian Smart. They write down the license plate
of his car and give it to police. Cops run
the plate and the car doesn't belong to Brian Smart.
It belongs to a man named Herb Baumeister. Oh, the
guy with a big house, the big house with the
(21:00):
wife and three kids, the guy that goes to church
with his wife and kids, who owns the save a
lot stores, her Boutmeister. So the police go and pay
him a visit at one of his stores, and the
detectives say, he seems really strange. He's very nervous. He's
(21:25):
almost like jumping out of his skin. The detectives tell
him that they know about his secret lifestyle of frequenting
the gay nightclub scene in Indianapolis. He kind of freaks out.
He says, nobody knows about this. He's clearly panicked that
(21:47):
this news is going to get.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Out, which could be just that maybe he feels like
he'll lose his family or his shop, his livelihood. I mean,
for that reason alone, it's reasonable that he's nervous.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
They do ask to search his property, he says no. Now,
they don't have any actual evidence of anything, so they
don't get a search warrant. The police then decide to
go to the house, and the day that they go,
Herb's wife, Julie, is there. She's like, why are police
(22:30):
coming to my property? She initially doesn't let them look around,
but in talking to detectives she does start to think
about a few things that seemed off. One is the
skull that her son had found in the woods while
playing with a friend. Yeah, And when police ask her
(22:52):
more about that, she's like, yeah, but I mentioned it
to Herb, and you know, he reminded me his dad
was an anesthesiologist, probably used it for meta research. Herb
said he had stored it in the garage, that maybe
raccoons had got into the garage and dragged it out
into the woods.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I'm glad she shared that with the police, because I
don't think I would buy his explanation, but that's just me.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
She does explain to police that their marriage is rocky.
They sort of separated a couple of times and then
got back together. I will say that shortly after they
got married, Herb's father suggested or put into action Herb
being committed to a hospital for severe depression, and he
(23:40):
stayed about a month. Julie was in full support of
that because she said he was really hurting and that
he needed help.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
Oh wow, he was having some issues in his marriage
as well as the businesses, and that they kind of
bled over into each other. They just kind of mounted
on each other.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Steve Ainsworth says the day detectives visit the house Herb
was living elsewhere, eventually Julie allows them to look on
the property and she leads them out to the area
where the boys found the human skull, and the police
walk out there.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
They were just really just feet away from the house,
and these woods are incredibly dense and a really a
good place to hide a body.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
And they find some bone fragments, human bones, what they
think are human bone fragments. So all of a sudden,
this is like a bigger situation detectives bring in a
forensic anthropologist from the University of Indianapolis who brings in
(24:49):
a whole team of people to search, and they literally
descend on the property looking at photos from this time.
They set up a grid pattern, almost like an archaeological dig,
and anytime somebody finds a bone fragment, they put a
(25:12):
small red flag in the ground. There are literally hundreds
of red flags, almost like someone has taken a handful
of bird seed and just tossed it in the woods,
and then you put a flag every place where those
seeds have landed. Like it was that enormous.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
My god, a sea of red flags.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
A sea of red flags.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I mean, I don't even know what to say. That's
a horrific picture. I mean, especially because each one of
those flags represents a piece of actual human remains.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
I have never personally seen anything like that, with that
amount of remains and the condition that they're in. I've
just never seen anything like that.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
You know, You've got the indoor pool and they're sliding
glass doors that lead out to a patio and there's
an outdoor table with chairs and it's set up for
like grilling, and then there's a little bit of lawn
beyond the patio, like not much, I mean enough for
kids to like kick a soccer ball around, and just
(26:37):
beyond that starts the woods, so they are like feet
within the woods. When they start finding these bone fragments,
the police start walking deeper into the woods and as
they're walking, they're finding more and more and they're actually
finding like a footbone, a leg bone. They find shotgun shells,
(27:04):
they find a pair of handcuffs.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
We've found handcuffs in the woods. One of them had
an armbone sticking through.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
It, as if someone just kind of sat there and decayed.
Oh my, without even much hiding or anything.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
They end up searching the area behind the house for
two weeks and they recover thousands of remains. I think
it was an eighteen acre property, so they don't search
all of it, but they sort of section off three
different areas that they're focusing their search in. And while
(27:47):
they're searching in one of these areas, there's a fence
that divides the Fox Hollow property from the neighbors and
from the other side of the fence, two young men
show up and say, hey, we've found something over on
our edge of the property that you might want to see.
(28:07):
The police go over there. There's a creek bed. On
either side of the creek bed, it is like a
virtual graveyard. There are ribs sticking out of the mud.
There's a full hit bone, what leg bones, a lower
jawbone with the teeth still intact.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
I mean, no wonder this has been keeping you up
at night. I mean, this is I feel like, even
hearing about this, I'm in some weird nightmare.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
One of the detectives said, it's almost like somebody took
a skeleton and just started pulling, you know, limbs off
of it and just like tossing them into this creek.
They aren't buried, you know, no one's taken any effort
to like hide any of this or bury any of
(29:08):
the remains.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, it's just so bold, and it's like someone who's
been getting away with this for a long time and
knows they can get away with it.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
So police keep walking through the woods and Steve says
they find another site.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
There's a burn pit which is very near to where
the skull and the skeleton were found. Those were obviously burned,
so they're getting burned and crushed really to obliterate any identification.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
It's almost like a never ending map of just burnt, crushed,
scattered human remains over this property. And police start wondering,
like we don't even know how many victims were even, Yeah,
like how many people are here?
Speaker 2 (29:56):
That was my first thought. Yeah, what is the wife think?
Speaker 3 (30:03):
So she's starting to panic. Yeah, and she's home with
two of her kids, but her son is actually spending
time with herb right now, and Herb is at the
family's lake house.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, oh my god, how terrifying. It's like, what could
he do to our son? Could he hold him hostage?
Could he hurt him? Might they run away together and
never to be found again? I mean, I would imagine
shouldn't police go up there and try to talk to
him or follow him or maybe arrest him.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
With You'd think that's what would happen, But Steve says
it doesn't.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
It's not as simple as Herb Baumeister took these people
out to his house. It's actually assaulted and MC killed
him and dumped him in the woods. It's not that simple.
It's much or complicated.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Next time on America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
I was pissed because it seemed as though the investigation
shut down. We we're done. We're not going to try
to identify these people.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
If you have a suspect in mind, or if that
person is in codis, you can confirm their identity. But unfortunately,
for most crimes, you don't have an actual suspect. You
don't know who might have committed the crime. And that
(31:40):
was something we couldn't live with.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
And I said, hey, I hope you don't get upset
with me, but I called the Hamilton County Coroner's Office
to get this case reopen. That was one of those
soul searching moments that Okay, you've agreed to help, you're
committed to help, Now how in the heck are you
going to do this?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor, and sound design is
by David Woji. Our producing team is Catherine Fenalosa, Emily
Foreman and Jessica Albert. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart
(32:27):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank,
and the entire team at Authrum. I'm Alan Lance Lesser.
Thanks for listening.
It dawned on me that my cousin's a possible victim
of her boumeister, and he's never been identified. He was
a pretty fun going guy, loved a party, always the
center of attention. Jeff didn't know how to help me
at first, but he told me he would, and I
(00:33):
busted this case wide open.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
In the summer of nineteen ninety three, something strange started happening.
Young men began to disappear one by one. Friends and
family didn't know what happened to them, only that they vanished.
The truth was far worse than anyone could have imagined,
(01:01):
and the crime scene was so large that investigators were overwhelmed.
Back then, police had clues that they were onto a
serial killer, but the investigation was dropped for nearly thirty years.
Families were left with no answers, but that changed when
(01:23):
one man looking for his cousin made a phone call
and more bodies turned up. This is America's crime Lab.
I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Producer Katherine Fenlosa is here, and Catherine,
I have to admit this case has me intrigued.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
While there is something I think about serial killers, It's like,
you know, the saying of like a car crash, everyone
sort of slows down to watch. Yeah, because it defies
normal human behavior, and so maybe there's a heart at
least for me. That's like, oh my gosh, what makes
these people tick because it's so abnormal?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, like, how is it even possible.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
This case is also unique because it involves the second
largest amount of unidentified human remains ever discovered at a
crime scene in this country. It's second only to the
World Trade Center site.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Oh my god, that's so this is a big deal.
I mean a mass grave.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Basically, this one actually gave me nightmares and kept me up.
So this case, a lot of people refer to it
as fox Hollow Farm or the Fox Hollow Murders.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, do you know of it? I know a little
bit about it.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
This takes place in the nineties in a suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana,
just north of the city, about forty five minutes and
there is a couple, Julie and Herb Baumeister, and they
meet at the University of Indiana. Herb is known as
a little quirky. For example, he and a friend co
(03:11):
owned a used hearse as a car and people would
just sort of laugh it off. Like, Oh, that's Herb.
He's a little eccentric, but very nice guy.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Okay, so maybe a little quirky, a little different.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yeah, he was the son of a doctor, so maybe
he was used to being around medical stuff and not
spooped by it. So they end up getting married and
Julie goes to teach at a high school. Herb gets
a job as a clerk at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
Julie says she was drawn to her because of his
good looks. He was sort of tall and skinny with
(03:47):
dark hair. She said he was funny and just easy
to get along with. She said she always had a
good time with him. They eventually have three kids, and
he finds a job at a thrift store like a
used clothing store, and he likes this job, and so
(04:08):
he and Julie have a joint dream to open up
their own thrift store. They borrow money from Herb's mom
and they open up their first store.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I love that they open up a store as a team.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, And I called Steve Ainsworth to get some of
the backstory. So Steve spent his career as a detective
in Boulder, Colorado. He worked homicides in major crimes. And
now he works with Authorm, America's crime lab.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Okay, so what does he do there.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
He's a law enforcement liaison, which means it's his job
to work with local authorities when they bring evidence to
AUTHORM for advanced DNA testing. And Steve says, Herb and
July named their store Save a Lot, and it.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
Was basically like a goodwill or a salvation army where
he would take used clothing, used appliants, as all used furniture,
all that he would put them in these stores and
he would sell it. Well. It became very popular and
he made quite a bit of money, so he's able
to purchase Fox Hollow.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Fox Hollow is the property that Herb and Julie buy,
and it's in a wealthy suburb of Indianapolis. It's known
for being a very conservative area. It's pretty with lots
of horse farms and rolling hills. You kind of get
the picture.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Wow, So Herb and Julie must be doing really well.
They are.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Steve Ainsworth has actually visited the estate and I asked
him to describe it.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
It's an English tutor stay home with ariage barn off
to the side in its huge garage, and then it's
surrounded by these very very dense woods.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
The house has a long sort of winding driveway and
there are a number of outbuildings. There's a horse stable,
I believe, there's like a three car garage.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
The house itself, it is big. I mean it's really big.
It has three levels, county in a basement, but it's
really dark. Inside.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
The house is really impressive. There's like a real darkwood
library and a huge kitchen. There is an indoor.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Pool, oh my goodness.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, it's in the basement. And there is also a
bar area with like a legit bar, like one or
two bartenders could be behind there, and then there are
doors that go out to a back patio and from
the back patio there's a green lawn. At the time
when Herb and Julie bought this, behind the house was
(06:42):
a very dense wooded area and the woods came up
pretty close to the back of the house. So in
the summers, Julie and the kid's head about one hundred
miles north of Fox Hollow Farm where the family has
a place on a lake.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Wow, they're living the life.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, they're doing really well, and I think the place
might be in Herb's family. Herb spends essentially Monday through
Friday at home going to work, and then on the
weekends he'll go join them. For the most part, they
do this, you know, for a number of years, and
this is sort of their lifestyle.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Where is this going?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Around nineteen ninety three, something starts happening in Indianapolis and
it's a little bit under the radar, but young men
(07:41):
start disappearing and a lot of these men are part
of the gay community who frequent some of the gay
bars in Indianapolis. And at the start, it's not reported
on the news, and there are aren't like big search
parties being organized to look for these men. It's almost
(08:04):
more like little murmurings at the bars, you know, like
people are saying like, hey, have you seen John?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Have you seen Richard?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
And after a while, missing persons posters start showing up
in some of these bars. They're made by family and
friends with just like a picture of the person and
some description about what.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
They look like.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
And pretty soon people in the gay community are starting
to get worried about what's happening, and there's some concern
like are all of these related?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, it sounds like maybe they're being targeted in some way.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
These bars were located in downtown Indianapolis, which in the
nineties was a very conservative area and it was also
a nine to five city, Steve says, when it emptied
out at the end of a workday and became a
ghost town, the bars these men went to came to life.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
They were disappearing from these now gay clubs, places where
they could go to field stafe.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
And this is also during the AIDS crisis. Yeah, you
would see somebody frequently and it wasn't always clear that
they were sick, and then all of a sudden they
stopped showing up at the clubs, and no one really
knows why. I mean, it was just a very fragile
and vulnerable community.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Absolutely, and I mean that kind of makes sense that
maybe it's harder to track people down because of that.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, and it was also pretty common for people to
go buy a different name at these clubs. I mean
they were worried, you know, if their true identity came
out and they were found out to be gay, that
they could lose their jobs. But in the summer of
ninety three, five men who frequented this gay nightclub scene
(09:52):
go missing in ninety four, they're three more. Ninety five,
they're two more. Detectives from that time period will say that,
especially in this community, there were not a lot of
missing person reports being made.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
And you have to remember back in the eighties and
even the mid nineties, it was really underground. These are
gay men, so it's like it's a subculture. It wouldn't
be reported like that eighteen year old coed goes missing
from Lindy or something like that. I don't think the
public was really aware of what was going on.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, that's the thing with stigma, or I don't know,
just prejudice in general. It's not only that people have
to directly be victimized by it, but then it's like
people don't feel safe to even ask for help or
seek out resources, and who knows if they will get
the support when they do ask.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So more and more of these posters start showing up
of these men disappearing. Then one day, Julie Baumeister is
at her house. Her thirteen year old son Eric has
a friend over and they're playing outside.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Baumeister told his kids not to go into the woods
around the house because they could catch all kinds of diseases.
Get sick. There is all kinds of bugs, and he
just scared him not to go out into the woods.
But his son, and I think a friend of his
son went into the woods and they were just kind
of looking around and exploring.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
The next thing Julie knows is that Eric comes running
into the house and he is holding a fully intact
human skull.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
So Eric, their son, comes into the house holding a
human skull, and I'm really hoping his mom. Julie freaks
out because I mean, if someone came into my house
with a skull from my yard, I would go berserk.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
She's like, oh my god, is that really real? How
could that have been behind the house. So she takes
it from Eric, and when herb gets home from work
that night, she says, HERB, look at what the kids found.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
And when she confronted HERB about it, he said it
was left over from when his dad was a doctor,
and it was an anatomy specimen that his dad had
used before, and that's how he explained it away.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
And Julie thinks, oh, okay, I mean that's a legitimate explanation.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
I mean, I guess it's her husband, so she must
have a level of trust with him also, though I
don't know, I just that would really be jarring to me,
and I feel like I would need to call the
police pretty much right away.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Well, there don't seem to be any other like red
flags for her. She does say that through their entire marriage,
Herb was a great dad, Like he was super involved
when it came time to select a preschool or help
with homework. He was like a completely present father. The
(13:50):
other thing, too, is that they lived on eighteen acres,
and as I was saying, it's like really dense woods.
I mean, they were certainly finding like animal bones back there.
Maybe this had actually been back there for a long time.
So it was surprising and shocking to her. But Herb
was able to calm all of her fears and she
(14:12):
sort of put it out of her mind. These men
keep disappearing. A guy named Stephen Hale is last seen
in April of ninety four. Alan Brussard is last seen
at one of the gay bars in June. In July,
(14:33):
Roger Allan Godette helps his mom put together a bench,
he plays with his kitten, and then he goes out
to a bar. That's the last time he was seen
in public. In nineteen ninety six, a group of families
of these missing men hire a private detective because they're
not getting any answers from police, and Steve Ainsworth says
(14:54):
that leads investigators to someone, a.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Guy by the name of Mark Goodyear, who frequented these
clubs and he had all of these stories he was
telling to get this really going.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
So Mark Goodyear meets with police and he says, you know, yeah,
I've met this guy, Brian Smart at a gay bar
and he invited me back to his house. We went
down to the basement where he has an indoor pool
and there's a bar, and it was a little weird.
So there were a lot of mannikins. Stop and the
(15:28):
mannikins are set up around the pool area and they're
posed so it looks like they're like lounging by the water.
And in the bar area they're even more mannequins. These
ones are dressed in clothing and they're posed so it
looks like they're like having drinks and talking. And the
pool area is really foggy and misty, and Mark says,
(15:53):
the whole scene has this really eerie vibe to it.
Mark says, Brian offers me an from the bar and
I just kind of had a bad feeling about it.
So I make an excuse and I go to the
bathroom and Alan, I think he pours it out and
comes back with water quick thinking, and I was worried
that there were drugs in the drink. Anyway, we swam
(16:16):
in the pool. Mark says, you know, I wasn't really
into this. This guy Brian kept coming up behind me,
one time with a hose putting it around my neck,
another time with a belt whoa a piece of rope.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
That is kind of scary in that he thinks he's
being drugged, and it sounds like he's calming up behind
him that he's not getting consent, because I do get
in the BDSM community or something, content is a huge part,
and it sounds like that's not what was happening here.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
No, and Mark said, you know, he was so persistent
that had I been drugged and a little sleepy and
not fully aware of what was going on, he could
have overpowered me. I mean, I would not have been
able to resist what he was doing.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
It's terrifying.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
But then it's a little confusing because then Mark Goodyear
goes on to say, but you know, we engaged in
consensual sex, even though he's now thought that this guy
drugged him. He's a little weirded out by these mannequins
in the house, and you know, this guy, Brian has
(17:26):
essentially tried to strangle him a few times. Right, But
Mark spends the night okay, and the next day Brian
drives him back to Indianapolis.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It is a little weird.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Like I would think he would want to get the
heck out of there.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, I also get though, how if you're in a
scary situation, maybe and he is your ride. This is
before car share services, you know, it might be hard
to get out of there. True, I don't know. I'm
just giving him the benefit of the doubt that if
you're in a scary situation, you just kind of deal
(18:09):
with it and get out when you can. And maybe
that was just what worked.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, And so Mark does
mention to the police. You know, I felt like this
wasn't the first time this guy had had an evening
like this, and I honestly felt like if he wanted to,
he could have murdered me. Like there was a very
thin line between fetishy sex and something much more dangerous.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
This is giving me the chills a little bit, just
the idea that he was able to leave. And I
don't know if this is going where I think it's going.
I mean, maybe he narrowly escaped.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
So the police can't figure out who this Brian Smart is.
They do look into it, but it almost seems like
the investigation ends before it began, if that makes sense.
Clearly it was an alias Mark Goodyear. Couldn't tell them
where the house was. It couldn't give them any description
(19:10):
of like, oh, yeah, we took this highway to that
highway and we got off on this road. At one point,
another witness comes forward and he says a man approaches
him at a bar with an offer.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Hey, I've got this really, really wealthy friend. He's got
this great house. He's got an indoor swimming pool. You've
got to come.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
And see it.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
Baummeister did not take him out there, and he had
this encounter with this person who took him out there.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Wait, so someone else is inviting men back to Herb's house,
So that suggests there are other people involved. Are the
police putting it together that this could be a serial
killer or killers targeting the gay community to be honest.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
I mean, back then, there just weren't a lot of
resources devoted to an investigation. And Steve says, it's because
these men were gay.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
I think they would have been a connected sooner if
it was a different community. I think that it kind
of fell on deaf ears for a while until these
remains started going up.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
So a year goes by and someone meets a man
who resembles Brian Smart. They write down the license plate
of his car and give it to police. Cops run
the plate and the car doesn't belong to Brian Smart.
It belongs to a man named Herb Baumeister. Oh, the
guy with a big house, the big house with the
(21:00):
wife and three kids, the guy that goes to church
with his wife and kids, who owns the save a
lot stores, her Boutmeister. So the police go and pay
him a visit at one of his stores, and the
detectives say, he seems really strange. He's very nervous. He's
(21:25):
almost like jumping out of his skin. The detectives tell
him that they know about his secret lifestyle of frequenting
the gay nightclub scene in Indianapolis. He kind of freaks out.
He says, nobody knows about this. He's clearly panicked that
(21:47):
this news is going to get.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Out, which could be just that maybe he feels like
he'll lose his family or his shop, his livelihood. I mean,
for that reason alone, it's reasonable that he's nervous.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
They do ask to search his property, he says no. Now,
they don't have any actual evidence of anything, so they
don't get a search warrant. The police then decide to
go to the house, and the day that they go,
Herb's wife, Julie, is there. She's like, why are police
(22:30):
coming to my property? She initially doesn't let them look around,
but in talking to detectives she does start to think
about a few things that seemed off. One is the
skull that her son had found in the woods while
playing with a friend. Yeah, And when police ask her
(22:52):
more about that, she's like, yeah, but I mentioned it
to Herb, and you know, he reminded me his dad
was an anesthesiologist, probably used it for meta research. Herb
said he had stored it in the garage, that maybe
raccoons had got into the garage and dragged it out
into the woods.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I'm glad she shared that with the police, because I
don't think I would buy his explanation, but that's just me.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
She does explain to police that their marriage is rocky.
They sort of separated a couple of times and then
got back together. I will say that shortly after they
got married, Herb's father suggested or put into action Herb
being committed to a hospital for severe depression, and he
(23:40):
stayed about a month. Julie was in full support of
that because she said he was really hurting and that
he needed help.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
Oh wow, he was having some issues in his marriage
as well as the businesses, and that they kind of
bled over into each other. They just kind of mounted
on each other.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Steve Ainsworth says the day detectives visit the house Herb
was living elsewhere, eventually Julie allows them to look on
the property and she leads them out to the area
where the boys found the human skull, and the police
walk out there.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
They were just really just feet away from the house,
and these woods are incredibly dense and a really a
good place to hide a body.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
And they find some bone fragments, human bones, what they
think are human bone fragments. So all of a sudden,
this is like a bigger situation detectives bring in a
forensic anthropologist from the University of Indianapolis who brings in
(24:49):
a whole team of people to search, and they literally
descend on the property looking at photos from this time.
They set up a grid pattern, almost like an archaeological dig,
and anytime somebody finds a bone fragment, they put a
(25:12):
small red flag in the ground. There are literally hundreds
of red flags, almost like someone has taken a handful
of bird seed and just tossed it in the woods,
and then you put a flag every place where those
seeds have landed. Like it was that enormous.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
My god, a sea of red flags.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
A sea of red flags.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I mean, I don't even know what to say. That's
a horrific picture. I mean, especially because each one of
those flags represents a piece of actual human remains.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
I have never personally seen anything like that, with that
amount of remains and the condition that they're in. I've
just never seen anything like that.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
You know, You've got the indoor pool and they're sliding
glass doors that lead out to a patio and there's
an outdoor table with chairs and it's set up for
like grilling, and then there's a little bit of lawn
beyond the patio, like not much, I mean enough for
kids to like kick a soccer ball around, and just
(26:37):
beyond that starts the woods, so they are like feet
within the woods. When they start finding these bone fragments,
the police start walking deeper into the woods and as
they're walking, they're finding more and more and they're actually
finding like a footbone, a leg bone. They find shotgun shells,
(27:04):
they find a pair of handcuffs.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
We've found handcuffs in the woods. One of them had
an armbone sticking through.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
It, as if someone just kind of sat there and decayed.
Oh my, without even much hiding or anything.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
They end up searching the area behind the house for
two weeks and they recover thousands of remains. I think
it was an eighteen acre property, so they don't search
all of it, but they sort of section off three
different areas that they're focusing their search in. And while
(27:47):
they're searching in one of these areas, there's a fence
that divides the Fox Hollow property from the neighbors and
from the other side of the fence, two young men
show up and say, hey, we've found something over on
our edge of the property that you might want to see.
(28:07):
The police go over there. There's a creek bed. On
either side of the creek bed, it is like a
virtual graveyard. There are ribs sticking out of the mud.
There's a full hit bone, what leg bones, a lower
jawbone with the teeth still intact.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
I mean, no wonder this has been keeping you up
at night. I mean, this is I feel like, even
hearing about this, I'm in some weird nightmare.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
One of the detectives said, it's almost like somebody took
a skeleton and just started pulling, you know, limbs off
of it and just like tossing them into this creek.
They aren't buried, you know, no one's taken any effort
to like hide any of this or bury any of
(29:08):
the remains.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, it's just so bold, and it's like someone who's
been getting away with this for a long time and
knows they can get away with it.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
So police keep walking through the woods and Steve says
they find another site.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
There's a burn pit which is very near to where
the skull and the skeleton were found. Those were obviously burned,
so they're getting burned and crushed really to obliterate any identification.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
It's almost like a never ending map of just burnt, crushed,
scattered human remains over this property. And police start wondering,
like we don't even know how many victims were even, Yeah,
like how many people are here?
Speaker 2 (29:56):
That was my first thought. Yeah, what is the wife think?
Speaker 3 (30:03):
So she's starting to panic. Yeah, and she's home with
two of her kids, but her son is actually spending
time with herb right now, and Herb is at the
family's lake house.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, oh my god, how terrifying. It's like, what could
he do to our son? Could he hold him hostage?
Could he hurt him? Might they run away together and
never to be found again? I mean, I would imagine
shouldn't police go up there and try to talk to
him or follow him or maybe arrest him.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
With You'd think that's what would happen, But Steve says
it doesn't.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
It's not as simple as Herb Baumeister took these people
out to his house. It's actually assaulted and MC killed
him and dumped him in the woods. It's not that simple.
It's much or complicated.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Next time on America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
I was pissed because it seemed as though the investigation
shut down. We we're done. We're not going to try
to identify these people.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
If you have a suspect in mind, or if that
person is in codis, you can confirm their identity. But unfortunately,
for most crimes, you don't have an actual suspect. You
don't know who might have committed the crime. And that
(31:40):
was something we couldn't live with.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
And I said, hey, I hope you don't get upset
with me, but I called the Hamilton County Coroner's Office
to get this case reopen. That was one of those
soul searching moments that Okay, you've agreed to help, you're
committed to help, Now how in the heck are you
going to do this?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor, and sound design is
by David Woji. Our producing team is Catherine Fenalosa, Emily
Foreman and Jessica Albert. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart
(32:27):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank,
and the entire team at Authrum. I'm Alan Lance Lesser.
Thanks for listening.
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