May 7, 2025 • 46 mins
Nobody knows for sure the exact number of men that Herb Baumeister killed. Investigators have an idea of certain individuals who went missing during Baumeister's reign of terror, but Dan Halloran was not on anyone's list as a possible victim. In a previous episode of Body Bags, 10,000 Human Remains Found on Serial Killer's Farm, we told you the horror story of a killer named Herb Baumeister. In this update Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the story of a little girl whose father was sent away when she was just 2. For 29 years she has wondered what became of her father, and now, thanks to the incredible work of a dedicated county coroner and the scientists at Othram, she knows.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction
02:12.39 Herb Baumeister update
05:15.43 Do not know the number of Baumeister victims
09:55.47 Halloran fit the victim profile
15:50.60 Victim remains were burned and crushed
20:07.88 Odd behavior from an early age
25:08.98 Man escapes Baumeister and tells police he was lucky to get out alive
30:01.47 What happens with suicide gunshot wound to the head
36:14.67 Hamilton County Coroner, heroic effort to try and identify victims of Baumeister
41:12.15 Othram is helping families find answers
45:38.59 Conclusion
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality times, but Joseph's gotten more. Our discussion today is
going to center around the death of a person who
ended their own life with a three fifty seven handgun
(00:22):
in Canada. But that's not near the end of the tale,
as a matter of fact, it's it's only the beginning.
In that interesting in life, you know, you have these
beginnings that sometime occur at the end because there's an
entire story that is going to be revealed, and has
(00:46):
been revealing itself over many, many years and still to
this day, new pages are written. We're going to talk
about a case that Dave and I have previously covered,
but there has been a new development, and that development
is the identification of a long since dead young father
(01:10):
who went missing back in nineteen ninety three. We now
know who he is and he died apparently at the
hands of arguably one of the biggest monsters in the
history of serial killers in the United States. I'm Joseph
(01:32):
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks. Dave. I was singing
about something, you know, as I was kind of putting
my thoughts together about what we're going to discuss, and
I'll go ahead and open the door for this right now,
but her ball moister, who you know, had this large
(02:00):
farm outside of Indianapolis. He had been a successful businessman,
and in the wake of his death there are particulated
bits of human remains found all over his property. But
that is of interest. But I got to back up
(02:22):
just for a second and kind of relay this. And
I'd given this a bit of thought. This guy blew
his brains out in Ontario, Canada, he cited in a
note that he had written, which turned out to be
about three pages long. By the way, suicide notes are rare.
(02:46):
They don't happen like most people think that it does happen.
But this guy took the time to write a note
that went for three pages. And in that note he
stated how he was. He felt down about his marriage
falling apart, and about business problems and all this, and oh,
by the way, he shot himself in apparently like a
(03:07):
park in Ontario, and he was regretting, lamenting the fact
that he had left a mess for the people to
clean up. And I felt just though that that was
much akin to the captain of the Titanic apologizing for
(03:30):
the quality of the food at the last meal. The
people ate on the Titanic after it had already struck
an Iceberg, because that's really the only way I could
really frame it in my mind. He never mentioned in
his note, not even a whisper about all of these
(03:51):
young men whose lives he had taken and their families
whose lives he had also destroyed. It's almost like this
kind of twisted, twisted worldview. And I think, to say
the very least, this guy did, in fact have a
very twisted worldview.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Buddy. You know, when we did the story the first
time on herb bomb Eister, it was because of the headline,
if you remember, I think it was the New York
Post that had ten thousand remains found on you know,
which it's correct and not correct at the same time,
you know.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
But it's what caught my attention with it, because if
you're saying ten thousand remains, I'm thinking we're I'm thinking
that we're down in the catacombs somewhere over in France
or one of these places where they take all of
the bodies and bury them under ground. You got thousands
of That's not what they're talking about. They're actually talking
about particulated or.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, pieces of it. I mean, my one finger. You know,
my index finger on this hand could be a thousand pieces,
you know, But anyway you look at it, it got attention,
and it did bring about the fact that herb bomb Eister,
before he killed himself, was possibly one of the top
ten serial killers in the United States of America, because
(05:07):
we still don't know the total of number of people
he actually killed. We in this case today, Joseph Scott Morgan,
we actually have somebody who has now been identified as
a victim whose remains were found out on bom Meister's property,
but he was never part of the discussion within law
enforcement as a victim. As a matter of fact, he
(05:30):
had gone missing. The man went missing. I'm gonna have
to have to be very gentle on this because I
don't know the situation of the marriage. But we do
have a man, his name Daniel Thomas Hallerin. Dan Hallarin
was married and he and his wife had a daughter.
(05:51):
But for whatever reason, his daughter, now telling the story
all these years later, said basically, her mother put him
on the road, put him on a plane back to Indiana,
and that it was before I think she was not
even two years old yet when this hat was And
so she's a baby mom's hatter pill. We don't know.
(06:13):
We're only getting one side of this story. And the
reason is because Daniel Halleran went missing. Almost immediately they
got him on the plane or whatever sent him back Daniana,
and nothing, He's gone. And so this girl, this woman
grows up and imagine this, growing up your entire life
not knowing where your dad is, knowing that you know
your dad was put on the road that he doesn't know.
(06:36):
He doesn't It wasn't there at kindergarten. He wasn't there
at your sixth grade, he wasn't there at your prom.
He's missed out on your entire life. You've never known.
And in her case, bless her heart, she said that
she wondered some days, you know, is he in the crowd?
Is he watching? Is he going to just show up?
The dream of every child who has been abandoned by
(06:57):
a parent. But in this case, she found out all
these years later. And this is the not the closure
that people think it is, but it actually does actually
begin the process of healing. I think, Joe, and it's
why you and I love sharing stories of authorm because
(07:18):
this is such an authorum story. You know, dnasolves dot
Com the whole thing. This young woman who has grown
up without her dad, wondering what happened? Is he here?
Is he there? She finds out that he's never been there.
He has been dead pretty much since the day he
(07:39):
was sent back to Indiana. They don't know exactly when
he died, but they do know that because of Authorm,
they were able to solve at least the remains who
this is. But Joe, He's one of the people they
didn't even consider as a possible victim on the property.
(08:01):
I've Herbert, and that boggles my mind.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
It does. It does for me too. Look, I gotta
tell you I love Indiana and I love Indianapolis. I've
been there several times throughout my career. I've taught, I've
taught corners in in Indiana and lovely people. Uh, my
family have spent time up there. I've almost said. I've
always said it's it's kind of like the South in
(08:27):
the North, uh, kind of an aggra based environment. I've
never once said, yeah, it's kind of got one big city,
you know, you got a lot of little small farm
in towns. I love the movie Hoosiers. What can I say?
I can't help it God Rest Jean Gene Hackman soul. Uh.
But yeah, I've I've I've often thought, you know, well, Indianapolis.
(08:51):
I've been there a couple of times for the n
c A as uh, the basketball tournament. JESU has played
up there. And it's a big town. It's not the
biggest town, okay by far, it's not the biggest town
in the US. So when you've got a person that
(09:13):
is missing that fits a type, okay, young relatively young
white male that has gone missing out of here and
seems to have just vanished into thin air, I'm really
I'm really wondering why was he not on the list
(09:34):
of Bollmuster's victims. Why was he never considered? I tell
you who did consider him? According to according to Halaren's daughter,
her name.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Is Coral, not Carol, but Coral.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Like Coral Reef. She reports to us that Halarin's mother,
who would be her grandmother, had told her in the
past that she felt as though that her son had
been a victim, had actually been a victim of Ballmeister.
(10:12):
And I find that very intriguing because I think there's
a lot of I think there's a lot that we
can kind of speculate about in in in that in
that context, knowing now what we know about ball Meister,
he had very according to what the police have said,
(10:33):
he had very specific areas that he would literally hunt
in and and they are hunters. You know, it makes
me think of I noticed in one of your notes
you had the word Dahmer written written in there where
he would frequent the gay bars in Indianapolis and he
(10:58):
would victimize, victimized young men there and he would take
them out and you know, do away with them. But
here's here's another interesting part. You hear a lot about
the hunting grounds that he had, and also these particulated
remains that they're finding at this Fox Hall of farm
(11:19):
that he owned. I think it's like nineteen acres or something.
He lived there with his wife and his three kids,
bamb Eister that is. And you know, they make it
sound like this this beautiful bucolic place. I think that
it probably was, had a large house on it, extensive property.
You hear a lot about those remains, but Dave, you know,
(11:41):
there had been young men that were disappearing prior to
him moving to Fox Hall, purchasing Fox Hollow and moving there,
and that individual had been had been named as the
ICE seventy Strangler, and all of the and this this started.
The first of these bodies started popping up in nineteen eighty,
(12:04):
Dave in nineteen eighty these bodies that started, and the
bodies would be in various states of dress. They were
found in wooded areas and ponds, and they were all
along the I seventy corridor through that area. It's just
that when he moved, the bodies that were dying at
(12:26):
the hands of the I seventy Strangler cease turning up
like that. It just stopped, like as of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So you know how the I seventy Strangler is active.
They know they're onto something here. They've got a name
for him, and then all of a sudden those stop
and no solution they got. They're going to assume, like
the Bundy cases when they ended in Washington and started
(12:59):
in Utah, they assumed that whoever was doing the Washington killings, Oh,
that guy's either in jail or dead. Same thing here,
the I seventy Strangler stopped. Okay, maybe he's in jail
or debt, you know, on other charges, or came up
against somebody and he couldn't beat him or whatever. But
in this case, you've got bomb eister who was leading
a double life out on that Fox Hollow Farm where
you mentioned the wife and kids. He's got these secondhand
(13:21):
thrift stores he's operating, got money coming in. Meanwhile, we've
got remains, pieces of remains all over Fox Hollow Farm,
And it's beyond frustrating to think that he might have
been the I seventies strangler in that unsolved case before
(13:42):
he goes to Fox Hollow. Is that what we're looking
at now? But he was this guy and then he
buys Fox Hollow Farm and now he has a new
hunting ground.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah, that's that's what I'm thinking. And I'd be very
very curious to try to understand, you know, if his
hunting ground changed as well, you know, because his geographic
location obviously changed. The calling this the I seventy Strangler
almost gives it, almost gives it an air of what's
(14:22):
it kind of a transient nature to it that is
found in the Ice seventy corridor, but it's not like
a specific location. Now you've you've actually got a person
allegedly I hate that word, allegedly that has now got
a central location where they're going into a large the
(14:44):
closest metropolitan area and you know, kind of hunting in
that area and bringing them back to to this place
and either killing them there or kill them in another location,
bringing them back there, and then rendering the bodies down
(15:04):
till they're particulated.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Okay, you're going to have to explain particulated a little bit, Joe.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
But here's my other the reason I put the note
in there about Dahmer, it's because the Fox Hollow Farm investigation.
It's right on the heels of Dahmer where we had Dahmer,
you know, going and frequently cruising. Yeah, yeah, homosexual establishments
and killing and all that, and we've got a very
(15:33):
similar thing taking place. We're not talking twenty five or
thirty years at we're talking they were actively going on
while they while Dahmer was killing in Milwaukee, there were
some deaths down here in Indiana. I'm just wondering why
there wasn't some kind of thought process going, Wait a minute,
we've got a very similar thing going on down here
(15:54):
with dead gay men or missing game in I guess
because they didn't find the bodies because they were out
particulated at some point they're gone, they're missing. But now, particulator,
are we talking about you? And I went through this before,
and I'm trying to remember. Wasn't it crushing them down
to the smallest possible Yeah?
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah, And that's I'm glad you said that because one
of the terms that has been used to talk about
to talk about the condition of the remains two of
them burned and crushed. So if you're going to crush something,
(16:36):
first off, you have to get it to a let's see,
how can I say this. You have to get it
into a state where it can be crushed. Now people
would think, well, yeah, you can. You can actually crush
somebody's somebody's arm. That's intact. It can be crushed in fact,
(16:56):
But is it possible to actually crush it down to
its base elements? No, it's not. So it has to
be rendered down either by stripping tissue or burning tissue,
and in this case, I think it was probably burning.
(17:25):
Let me throw out some names city names to you
real quick. Chicago, St. Louis, Evansville, Indiana, Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, Dayton, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio,
(17:46):
Fort Wayne, Indiana, all of these cities literally surround Indianapolis
as if Indianapolis is the center of a target, and
they're all connected, each one of these cities to interstates
(18:07):
that run through each of them, that almost like a
giant spiderweb spread out from Indianapolis, Dave. They have said
that Baumeister was a prolific serial killer. Some have even
opined that, for all we know, he could be one
(18:27):
of the most prolific. When you begin to look at
the central location of Indianapolis, and I would encourage anybody
to go onto your computer and just search Indianapolis, and
then there's always a map that pops up with it,
particularly if you do a Google search, click on that
(18:47):
map and zoom out, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
It looks like a bullseye with Indianapolis right in the center.
I really wonder, Dave, how many other young men, young
gay men, and perhaps were disappeared out of these other
metropolitan areas within easy driving distance of Indianapolis, because I
(19:11):
think that there's a method to his madness. And as
we've learned, there was madness here because Ballmeister had at
some point in his life been diagnosed as a schizophrenic
and untreated schizophrenic And what.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Does that actually mean untreated because obviously to get that diagnosis,
he's under the care of a physician of some sort,
but they chose to not medicat or he chose to
not take it. I mean, that's a dangerous thing to
save about somebody.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, it is. My stepfather was a diagnosed schizophrenic at
some point in tom and he had always wondered. When
I was a kid, he take us to church all
the time, and he talked about how evil psychiatrists and
psychologists were, and you know, and it wasn't until many
years later he's gone. Now, it wasn't until many years
(20:05):
later that I discovered he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
And he had this, uh, just this incredible hatred for
mental health workers. And it's it's almost like a sign
of weakness. I guess that if you've been diagnosed this way,
that uh, you know, just through sheer willpower, you're going
(20:27):
to go out and try to heal thyself or whatever
the case might be, or I'll show them. And of
course that that when you have a diagnosis of schizophrenia
and you're and you're going around untreated, that's a problem
and what's really interesting is that, you know, Ballmeister had
had shown evidences of really odd, aberrant behavior even as
(20:54):
a young man. You know, there's stories of him playing
with dead animals. There's actually he was apparently a Europhile,
which is one of the pelias.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
He had a fascination with with urine. He had been
I think working We'll see what was it. He was
working in a at some organization like in where he
would have access to the mail. And there was a
(21:28):
letter that was addressed that was either originating from this
location or was coming in I'm not I can't remember now,
addressed to like the governor of Indiana, and he urinated
on the on the envelope.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And he this is Babes you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, this is Ballbmeister that we're talking about. So he
had he had these uh, these paraphilias, at least one
that we know of, which is this kind of avarant
sexual fascination. You know that he would have uh and
you know, I look at and not only that, but
he he was always described as being very odd. I
(22:06):
watched an interview with one of his former employees who
had been a teenager and now get this tell me
this that I bet this. I bet this man is
terrified every single day. You know, he kind of reflects back.
He had been fifteen years old and had worked for
Bob Meister at the Save a Lot, one of the
Save a Lot thrift stores, not to be confused with
(22:27):
Save a Lot grocery stores. We have those all over
the South. There's a lot of people that go to them.
They're fine stores, it's not the same thing. These thrift
stores that he owned were in the Indianapolis area, and
so this young man was talking about how they would
take in items like you do you know at a
thrift store. My wife spends a lot of time in
(22:49):
thrift store, so I know this sort of thing. She
loves going to them with my daughter. And you know,
they have to sort, they have to sort all of
this stuff that comes in and you put it in
separate binds, you know, by whatever the item is, is
it jackets or is it pants, or is it shoes
or is it children's toys? And he described how Ballmeister
(23:15):
would present in this Really he would become highly agitated
if there was something that had been discarded as like
worthless that they couldn't use, and that the kid had
tossed it aside or put it on the side and
didn't include it in the bend that would go out
on the floor, and not that some other person would
(23:39):
would not have, you know, been equally as enraged. But
he said it was almost at an inappropriate level, and
people were terrified anytime to see him coming. And you know,
he tries to comport himself as this this young business
business dude that had been very successful, you know, and
(24:00):
he's moving up the Laddie's he's got himself a wife,
he's got himself three kids. You know, he's got he's
got this big spread. The only thing about it is
at this point in time, and like, you know, kind
of echoing what this young man had said in the interview,
no one knew that there were thousands of particulated body
(24:22):
parts that were on that property that had been crushed up.
The last thing I'll say about this interview, the young
man said that he had been literally in the store
alone with him at night. This kid was he was
fifteen when this was going on, and he thought, you know,
that could have been me, you know that that could
(24:44):
have happened to and ball moister would slip away and
not be there for protracted period of time. Then this
kid was kind of reminiscing over this and saying, I
wonder when he was not at the store and I
was working for him, was he cruising bars in Indianapolis
and picking out victims and taping them and torturing and
(25:04):
killing them and then disposing of the remains.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That's a rough thing to live with, you know, Gosh,
basically it really is. Now in nineteen ninety four, Bombmeister
picks up a guy in the neighborhood of an Indianapolis
gay bar and he brings him out to their home
for a sexual encounter. But the man says he's so
lucky he escaped alive that he went to cops. Now,
(25:30):
this is a very short cliffs version of the you know,
we're those things using college cliff quotes. Yeah, cliffs nuts,
all right, because we don't know a whole lot of
what went on. We know that it was a consensual
homosexual encounter that was planned. Yet whatever happened, this guy
got out and went straight to the cops, saying he
(25:51):
felt lucky to be alive. And this is again where
I'm I'm back to that time period. I I guess
in nineteen ninety four, there had been so much chot
talk of the Jeffrey Dahmer case nationwide that I'm struck
by this story of a man comes into the police
(26:12):
department and says, I'm really afraid of what just took place.
And this encounter matches up with what we know of
Jeffrey Dahmer, and it's in that same time period. Why
couldn't they put two and two together and at least
look at him. Oh wait a minute, Joe. They did.
They did put two and two together and they started
looking at Bommeister. So I'm thinking, this is nineteen ninety four.
(26:34):
Now we know we've already said that bom Meister took
his own life just a couple of years later. So
from the ninety four incident when this man goes to
police saying I'm lucky to be alive, and they were
able to put things together and realife we might have
a bad actor here, we might have Againe, they did.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And they had confirmatory information day from another person as well,
where this guy reported there was a guy at one
of these bars that reported that his friend was missing,
and he tried to give a description of the guy,
and the cops told him at the time, if you
see him again, let us know. And guy's using a
(27:16):
very specific nom de gere, a false name at this
particular time. Sure enough, he shows up again, and you
talk about developing probable cause. This guy gets his license plate. Wow.
And so when he gets that information, so you've got
these two sources that are coming at you. And this
is this is an investigator's ultimate dream here where you
(27:37):
can get multiple confirmatory sources. They were able at that
point in time to go and begin to question or
begin to watch ball Miser and what he was doing,
and that led them to this farm that he possessed.
And strangely enough, Balls they came to this location where
(28:02):
these bodies had already been deposited. Can you imagine being
a cop and you're this You're on the same nineteen
acres that there are tens of bodies located on, and
you're you know that something's up, Your spoty senses are tingling,
and you're talking to this guy. Do you mind if
we come in and just kind of look through your property? No,
(28:24):
you can't. They show up when he's not there, They
ask his wife, and his wife is like fervent, No,
you can't. Well, as time went by, she got a
little bit scared. She got scared of what he might
do and his behavior, because suddenly, isn't it odd that
(28:45):
you can be married to somebody and maybe not think
that their behavior is odd because it becomes so normalized
in your life, their appearance, their actions, their responses to things,
and all of a sudden, it takes like a sudden
jolt or you know, a splash of cold water in
(29:05):
the face to say, wait, I need to wake up
from this fantasy I'm living in. I'm scared of this
guy now. And as it turns out, you know, they
wind up getting a warrant for the property. But you know,
BA meister knew that all was at an end at
this point in time that he there was. You know,
he was in an unrecoverable flat spin at this point,
(29:28):
and I guess he interpreted that is I have nothing
that I can do. I'm going to hop in my
car and I'm heading out to the Great White North.
And you know, of course that ended with him blowing
his brains out up there.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
When we looked at his suicide, he used at three
fifty seven, right, Yeah, what would that do. In terms
of the actual physicalness of something like that, I mean,
is that going to just be blood pouring out of
the mouth or is it going to be an exit
wound that blows out the back of your head.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
It all depends on, first off, where the shot is initiated,
where the point of entrance is. If anyone is familiar
with the case of the former Secretary of Treasury for
the State of Pennsylvania, Bud Dwyer, that went on, that
(30:26):
was on camera at a news conference. Yeah, as a
matter of fact, when that happened, I was still working
in New Orleans and we had a friend of ours
that was a reporter and got us the first unedited
edition of that. And back then during that period of time,
I think that was the late eighties early nineties. I
(30:47):
can't remember budwire, but at any rate, that old adage
about the camera never blinks, Well, he used a three
P fifty seven magnum and that was an intra orial
gunshot wound where he plays, he takes it out of
a paper bag, sticks it the muzzle in his mouth
and for a second, if you slow it down, you
can actually see his cheeks expand with gas. His expansion
(31:10):
because one of the things you learn about about the
destructive people always ask me relative to gunshot wounds, what
is it that people naturally think that it's the projectile
that is doing so much disruption to the head, And yes,
it does. I'd be a fool to say otherwise. However,
(31:33):
the other piece of this is the rapidly expanding gas.
We all know scientifically that hot air always expands, okay,
always expands, it doesn't contract. And people might not realize
the force of this hot gas as it as it
comes out of the muzzle of the weapon, it's looking
(31:54):
to expand out as far as it possibly can. Well,
you're firing of a barrel. Projectile is coming out, but
the hot gas is coming out as well. Well, if
it's an intra oral gunshot wound, it's going to find
that gas is going to find the weakest spots. If
you feel along the roof of your mouth with the
tip of your tongue, the bony surface up there, you've
(32:17):
actually got what is referred to as a palaton suture,
which is and there's actually three I think there's a
primary that runs down a central one, and then there's
two and like let's see if we flipped it, it
would be running east and west and kind of north
and south, like points of a compass. I was going
(32:39):
to say in the vertical plane, in the horizontal plane,
but we won't do that. Those are the weakest spots
in the mouth. So those sutures that draw our body
together as we're forming a Mommy's tommy, those are weak spots.
And so when you see heads that will open up.
First off, those will part, the hard palette will split,
(33:02):
the gas is continue to travel up through the cranial
vault as we and when it gets into the cranial vault,
you've got sutures that are on the outside. And when
I'm saying suitres, guys, I'm not saying sutures like you're
sowing something up like a wound. Suture Lines are these
points of fusion that run along our skulls. And so
those are weak spots. And if you see a skull,
(33:23):
do yourself a favor. Look at a human skull and
look at those kind of real interlocking plates. You'll see
the suture line that runs across air and the plates
are actually locked together. It looks like teeth. Those are
suture lines, and so will that expanding gas will fracture
along those lines, so you'll have these heads that will
(33:43):
come apart. So yeah, a three fifty seven magnum would
certainly do that. I find it very interesting that he
chose a weapon like that BALLB miister to do this,
but when it came to killing his victims will never
I don't think know how many of the victims were
(34:06):
killed that were found at Fox Hollow. However, what we
will what we do have is if we are to
believe that he was, in fact the I seventy strangler,
we have a real insight into what his methodology was.
Why did it vary with him? Why didn't he wrap
(34:29):
a noose around his neck and hang himself? Why didn't
he do that? You know, if he so fixated on
depriving individuals of oxygen, these poor men that had no
idea what was coming, he wrapped his hands around their
throats and squeezed the life out of him. It looks
(34:51):
as though the BALLB Moister was rather merciful to himself.
I gotta sing the praises to somebody real quick. Here.
(35:15):
These people go without name most of the time, and
unheralded heroes, and who I'm talking about are elected corners.
They do more in depth investigation than people will ever know.
They in their own little way, they they grieve for
(35:44):
these individuals that have no one else to agreeve for them.
And I know that's very theatrical. I apologize for that. However,
please hear me right when I say this. They're really
the only ones that the dead remain fresh in the
minds of. Okay, all these individuals that are unidentified out there,
and the person that I really want to sing the
(36:05):
praises of here is the Hamilton County Corner in Hamilton, Indiana.
Uh Jeff Jellison. Uh Jeff actually took upon himself the
mission of getting bodies identified, particularly those that were involved
(36:29):
in the Fox Hollow case. Now Hamilton is immediately adjacent
to the Indianapolis area, and he he took it upon
himself to try to do his best to take these
again particulated, crushed, burned remains and put a name with him.
(36:54):
I would love to interview this guy and to and
to talk to him about what that process was like,
particularly going back all these years. What I think that
one of the things that I always reflect upon, particularly
relative to my career, is that, yeah, I had. I
had cases involving lots of bodies at one time. But
(37:15):
you know, as you go forward in time and you're
still working as a death investigator. Yeah, that at that moment, Tom,
it was a huge deal when you're out there recovering remains.
But there are other cases that begin to kind of
stack on top of even a mass death event where
the things aren't as fresh. Jeff Jellison actually literally breathed
(37:38):
life into this case, Dave, where he had recovered these remains,
His office had recovered these remains, and he was holding
tight warning to finish, finish the job. Let me just
remind everybody, because I've done a whole seg I've done
a whole episode on the corners before. Our primary goal
(37:59):
as medical egal death investigators is not to solve homicides.
That's not what we do. That is the job of
the police. Now. If we provide information to them and
it helps God bless go in peace, I hope that
it does help our main job. And you have to
(38:19):
know what your job is in order to do it right.
Our main job in the medical legal field is to
determine the cause of death, the manner of death, and
the third leg to the stool is identification of the dead.
That's it. That's what we do. And kind of a
subset of the identification of the dead is to try
(38:40):
to find the family. Try to find the family. In
this particular case involving this poor young man who apparently
died at the hands of ballmeister Dave, his parents were
dead and all of his siblings were dead. There was
nothing left. But there was one thing that happened. His
(39:03):
mother actually died of a drug od and I've never
talked about this on air. At the time of her death,
when she died, they took a blood card on her.
And that's something we don't talk about much. That people
don't want. Is that more. There is a particular type
(39:25):
of little card. If you'll envision the size of a
business card. Every you know, everybody's ever worked in where
you had business cards, it's the size of a business card.
And you syringe up blood from the victim and you
take and you put one little droplet of blood. There's
(39:49):
two separate boxes, one in one box and one or
the other and you retain it, you store it appropriately,
and you retain it. And guess what, Dave that blood
that they took it that autopsy ultimately led to the
identification of the young man. And you know one other thing,
(40:09):
Coral his daughter. The police didn't even know he had
a daughter, because that would have obviously have been the
person you would have gone to. It actually took the
blood of his deceased mother in order to aid in
getting this young man's body identified.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
So they didn't know that because they don't know who
they have, they don't know anything. There's nothing to go on.
You mentioned something at the very start, you know, about
an offhanded comment about from Kral about now maybe you
know there's this serial killer over here, and maybe you know,
maybe there's something to it. All I'm thinking, and I
(40:49):
mentioned this to you earlier, was when we talk about Authorman,
what they're doing in helping families. This is like, to me,
it's the textbook. I didn't even know what you're talking
about when you said they got a card on her,
you know, on his mom. I didn't know what was
going on with any of that. All I knew is
(41:09):
that there was a young woman who didn't know where
her dad was, didn't think he was dead, but didn't know.
She had no idea if he was right around the
corner or if he had been killed because his death.
First of all, the guy was twenty years old. He
was a young man. His baby is two years old
(41:30):
when he's told to go home pretty much, and that's it.
She has no relationship with him. And in her whole
adult life, growing up, trying to figure out life. It's
tough enough, but when you've got that big question mark
in the back of your head, you look for answers.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Yeah. In addition to Daniel Holleran, mister Jellison got another
young man identified Alan Livingstone, who's twenty seven when he
went missing an August of ninety three. He got him identified.
And not only that, he also reconfirmed through DNA matches.
(42:07):
And this is jealoson. Two of the eight original victims
that had been identified back in the nineteen nineties, he
was able to reconfirm their identity. Because you know you're
dealing with just to imagine what a nightmare this is.
I've already told you of my disdain for jigsaw puzzles.
It's not something I have the patience for. Okay, imagine
(42:30):
the ultimate jigsaw puzzle. You've got thousands of commingle fragmented
remains that are in various states of decay, many of
them burned, and you just look at this mess that
you have before you, and you know, for all you know,
this animal is out there killing people and then stirring
(42:53):
the remains together, mixing them all up. And it is
such a hodgepodge to be able to do this, to
try to put a name with these fragmented remains, and
ultimately that is in fact what had happened in the
case of Daniel and these other cases, and they're still
(43:14):
I think to date. If I'm not mistaken, somebody make
sure you go back and check me on this. But
I think there's still three that they're looking to get
identified at this point. And that brings me to this.
Our friends at Authoram try to move heaven and hell
with limited resources. They do things that fifty years ago
(43:40):
this would have seemed like it was an episode of
Star Trek. It is so amazing what they have literally
been able to do and almost breathe the breath of
life into these old, old cases where families just didn't know.
And that leads me to what I always say about
(44:01):
Authoram is it might be the most noble work that
is going on at that point in time. There are
thousands and thousands of unidentified persons that are out there.
They're not all homicides, but yet at some point in time,
some person out there held them right after they were
(44:23):
born and they were somebody's baby, and since that time
they died lonely deaths, or were killed or discarded without
a name. Authorm Labs is giving them a name and
(44:43):
you can help. All you have to do is go
to d n A solves dot org. You go to
dnasols dot org. You look through the list. If it's
regional to you, if it's in your state, if they
have cases in your state that are open and need funding.
(45:05):
Just a few bucks thrown their way could make the difference,
could make the difference to give families the answer for
the empty chair that they've always had at Thanksgiving. Just
do it. Just go check it out, pick out a
case that you want to support, throw your support behind,
give them whatever you have, whatever you're capable of giving,
(45:29):
and you could be the reason that someone finally has answers.
Tip of the cap to our friends at authorm Labs
in the Woodlands, Texas, but also special recognition to corner
Jeff Jellison for his continued efforts and to try to
(45:53):
bring answers to these families that have no idea that
maybe their family member was a victim of Herb Baummeister.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body bags
Quality times, but Joseph's gotten more. Our discussion today is
going to center around the death of a person who
ended their own life with a three fifty seven handgun
(00:22):
in Canada. But that's not near the end of the tale,
as a matter of fact, it's it's only the beginning.
In that interesting in life, you know, you have these
beginnings that sometime occur at the end because there's an
entire story that is going to be revealed, and has
(00:46):
been revealing itself over many, many years and still to
this day, new pages are written. We're going to talk
about a case that Dave and I have previously covered,
but there has been a new development, and that development
is the identification of a long since dead young father
(01:10):
who went missing back in nineteen ninety three. We now
know who he is and he died apparently at the
hands of arguably one of the biggest monsters in the
history of serial killers in the United States. I'm Joseph
(01:32):
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks. Dave. I was singing
about something, you know, as I was kind of putting
my thoughts together about what we're going to discuss, and
I'll go ahead and open the door for this right now,
but her ball moister, who you know, had this large
(02:00):
farm outside of Indianapolis. He had been a successful businessman,
and in the wake of his death there are particulated
bits of human remains found all over his property. But
that is of interest. But I got to back up
(02:22):
just for a second and kind of relay this. And
I'd given this a bit of thought. This guy blew
his brains out in Ontario, Canada, he cited in a
note that he had written, which turned out to be
about three pages long. By the way, suicide notes are rare.
(02:46):
They don't happen like most people think that it does happen.
But this guy took the time to write a note
that went for three pages. And in that note he
stated how he was. He felt down about his marriage
falling apart, and about business problems and all this, and oh,
by the way, he shot himself in apparently like a
(03:07):
park in Ontario, and he was regretting, lamenting the fact
that he had left a mess for the people to
clean up. And I felt just though that that was
much akin to the captain of the Titanic apologizing for
(03:30):
the quality of the food at the last meal. The
people ate on the Titanic after it had already struck
an Iceberg, because that's really the only way I could
really frame it in my mind. He never mentioned in
his note, not even a whisper about all of these
(03:51):
young men whose lives he had taken and their families
whose lives he had also destroyed. It's almost like this
kind of twisted, twisted worldview. And I think, to say
the very least, this guy did, in fact have a
very twisted worldview.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Buddy. You know, when we did the story the first
time on herb bomb Eister, it was because of the headline,
if you remember, I think it was the New York
Post that had ten thousand remains found on you know,
which it's correct and not correct at the same time,
you know.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
But it's what caught my attention with it, because if
you're saying ten thousand remains, I'm thinking we're I'm thinking
that we're down in the catacombs somewhere over in France
or one of these places where they take all of
the bodies and bury them under ground. You got thousands
of That's not what they're talking about. They're actually talking
about particulated or.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, pieces of it. I mean, my one finger. You know,
my index finger on this hand could be a thousand pieces,
you know, But anyway you look at it, it got attention,
and it did bring about the fact that herb bomb Eister,
before he killed himself, was possibly one of the top
ten serial killers in the United States of America, because
(05:07):
we still don't know the total of number of people
he actually killed. We in this case today, Joseph Scott Morgan,
we actually have somebody who has now been identified as
a victim whose remains were found out on bom Meister's property,
but he was never part of the discussion within law
enforcement as a victim. As a matter of fact, he
(05:30):
had gone missing. The man went missing. I'm gonna have
to have to be very gentle on this because I
don't know the situation of the marriage. But we do
have a man, his name Daniel Thomas Hallerin. Dan Hallarin
was married and he and his wife had a daughter.
(05:51):
But for whatever reason, his daughter, now telling the story
all these years later, said basically, her mother put him
on the road, put him on a plane back to Indiana,
and that it was before I think she was not
even two years old yet when this hat was And
so she's a baby mom's hatter pill. We don't know.
(06:13):
We're only getting one side of this story. And the
reason is because Daniel Halleran went missing. Almost immediately they
got him on the plane or whatever sent him back Daniana,
and nothing, He's gone. And so this girl, this woman
grows up and imagine this, growing up your entire life
not knowing where your dad is, knowing that you know
your dad was put on the road that he doesn't know.
(06:36):
He doesn't It wasn't there at kindergarten. He wasn't there
at your sixth grade, he wasn't there at your prom.
He's missed out on your entire life. You've never known.
And in her case, bless her heart, she said that
she wondered some days, you know, is he in the crowd?
Is he watching? Is he going to just show up?
The dream of every child who has been abandoned by
(06:57):
a parent. But in this case, she found out all
these years later. And this is the not the closure
that people think it is, but it actually does actually
begin the process of healing. I think, Joe, and it's
why you and I love sharing stories of authorm because
(07:18):
this is such an authorum story. You know, dnasolves dot
Com the whole thing. This young woman who has grown
up without her dad, wondering what happened? Is he here?
Is he there? She finds out that he's never been there.
He has been dead pretty much since the day he
(07:39):
was sent back to Indiana. They don't know exactly when
he died, but they do know that because of Authorm,
they were able to solve at least the remains who
this is. But Joe, He's one of the people they
didn't even consider as a possible victim on the property.
(08:01):
I've Herbert, and that boggles my mind.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
It does. It does for me too. Look, I gotta
tell you I love Indiana and I love Indianapolis. I've
been there several times throughout my career. I've taught, I've
taught corners in in Indiana and lovely people. Uh, my
family have spent time up there. I've almost said. I've
always said it's it's kind of like the South in
(08:27):
the North, uh, kind of an aggra based environment. I've
never once said, yeah, it's kind of got one big city,
you know, you got a lot of little small farm
in towns. I love the movie Hoosiers. What can I say?
I can't help it God Rest Jean Gene Hackman soul. Uh.
But yeah, I've I've I've often thought, you know, well, Indianapolis.
(08:51):
I've been there a couple of times for the n
c A as uh, the basketball tournament. JESU has played
up there. And it's a big town. It's not the
biggest town, okay by far, it's not the biggest town
in the US. So when you've got a person that
(09:13):
is missing that fits a type, okay, young relatively young
white male that has gone missing out of here and
seems to have just vanished into thin air, I'm really
I'm really wondering why was he not on the list
(09:34):
of Bollmuster's victims. Why was he never considered? I tell
you who did consider him? According to according to Halaren's daughter,
her name.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Is Coral, not Carol, but Coral.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Like Coral Reef. She reports to us that Halarin's mother,
who would be her grandmother, had told her in the
past that she felt as though that her son had
been a victim, had actually been a victim of Ballmeister.
(10:12):
And I find that very intriguing because I think there's
a lot of I think there's a lot that we
can kind of speculate about in in in that in
that context, knowing now what we know about ball Meister,
he had very according to what the police have said,
(10:33):
he had very specific areas that he would literally hunt
in and and they are hunters. You know, it makes
me think of I noticed in one of your notes
you had the word Dahmer written written in there where
he would frequent the gay bars in Indianapolis and he
(10:58):
would victimize, victimized young men there and he would take
them out and you know, do away with them. But
here's here's another interesting part. You hear a lot about
the hunting grounds that he had, and also these particulated
remains that they're finding at this Fox Hall of farm
(11:19):
that he owned. I think it's like nineteen acres or something.
He lived there with his wife and his three kids,
bamb Eister that is. And you know, they make it
sound like this this beautiful bucolic place. I think that
it probably was, had a large house on it, extensive property.
You hear a lot about those remains, but Dave, you know,
(11:41):
there had been young men that were disappearing prior to
him moving to Fox Hall, purchasing Fox Hollow and moving there,
and that individual had been had been named as the
ICE seventy Strangler, and all of the and this this started.
The first of these bodies started popping up in nineteen eighty,
(12:04):
Dave in nineteen eighty these bodies that started, and the
bodies would be in various states of dress. They were
found in wooded areas and ponds, and they were all
along the I seventy corridor through that area. It's just
that when he moved, the bodies that were dying at
(12:26):
the hands of the I seventy Strangler cease turning up
like that. It just stopped, like as of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So you know how the I seventy Strangler is active.
They know they're onto something here. They've got a name
for him, and then all of a sudden those stop
and no solution they got. They're going to assume, like
the Bundy cases when they ended in Washington and started
(12:59):
in Utah, they assumed that whoever was doing the Washington killings, Oh,
that guy's either in jail or dead. Same thing here,
the I seventy Strangler stopped. Okay, maybe he's in jail
or debt, you know, on other charges, or came up
against somebody and he couldn't beat him or whatever. But
in this case, you've got bomb eister who was leading
a double life out on that Fox Hollow Farm where
you mentioned the wife and kids. He's got these secondhand
(13:21):
thrift stores he's operating, got money coming in. Meanwhile, we've
got remains, pieces of remains all over Fox Hollow Farm,
And it's beyond frustrating to think that he might have
been the I seventies strangler in that unsolved case before
(13:42):
he goes to Fox Hollow. Is that what we're looking
at now? But he was this guy and then he
buys Fox Hollow Farm and now he has a new
hunting ground.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah, that's that's what I'm thinking. And I'd be very
very curious to try to understand, you know, if his
hunting ground changed as well, you know, because his geographic
location obviously changed. The calling this the I seventy Strangler
almost gives it, almost gives it an air of what's
(14:22):
it kind of a transient nature to it that is
found in the Ice seventy corridor, but it's not like
a specific location. Now you've you've actually got a person
allegedly I hate that word, allegedly that has now got
a central location where they're going into a large the
(14:44):
closest metropolitan area and you know, kind of hunting in
that area and bringing them back to to this place
and either killing them there or kill them in another location,
bringing them back there, and then rendering the bodies down
(15:04):
till they're particulated.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Okay, you're going to have to explain particulated a little bit, Joe.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
But here's my other the reason I put the note
in there about Dahmer, it's because the Fox Hollow Farm investigation.
It's right on the heels of Dahmer where we had Dahmer,
you know, going and frequently cruising. Yeah, yeah, homosexual establishments
and killing and all that, and we've got a very
(15:33):
similar thing taking place. We're not talking twenty five or
thirty years at we're talking they were actively going on
while they while Dahmer was killing in Milwaukee, there were
some deaths down here in Indiana. I'm just wondering why
there wasn't some kind of thought process going, Wait a minute,
we've got a very similar thing going on down here
(15:54):
with dead gay men or missing game in I guess
because they didn't find the bodies because they were out
particulated at some point they're gone, they're missing. But now, particulator,
are we talking about you? And I went through this before,
and I'm trying to remember. Wasn't it crushing them down
to the smallest possible Yeah?
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah, And that's I'm glad you said that because one
of the terms that has been used to talk about
to talk about the condition of the remains two of
them burned and crushed. So if you're going to crush something,
(16:36):
first off, you have to get it to a let's see,
how can I say this. You have to get it
into a state where it can be crushed. Now people
would think, well, yeah, you can. You can actually crush
somebody's somebody's arm. That's intact. It can be crushed in fact,
(16:56):
But is it possible to actually crush it down to
its base elements? No, it's not. So it has to
be rendered down either by stripping tissue or burning tissue,
and in this case, I think it was probably burning.
(17:25):
Let me throw out some names city names to you
real quick. Chicago, St. Louis, Evansville, Indiana, Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, Dayton, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio,
(17:46):
Fort Wayne, Indiana, all of these cities literally surround Indianapolis
as if Indianapolis is the center of a target, and
they're all connected, each one of these cities to interstates
(18:07):
that run through each of them, that almost like a
giant spiderweb spread out from Indianapolis, Dave. They have said
that Baumeister was a prolific serial killer. Some have even
opined that, for all we know, he could be one
(18:27):
of the most prolific. When you begin to look at
the central location of Indianapolis, and I would encourage anybody
to go onto your computer and just search Indianapolis, and
then there's always a map that pops up with it,
particularly if you do a Google search, click on that
(18:47):
map and zoom out, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
It looks like a bullseye with Indianapolis right in the center.
I really wonder, Dave, how many other young men, young
gay men, and perhaps were disappeared out of these other
metropolitan areas within easy driving distance of Indianapolis, because I
(19:11):
think that there's a method to his madness. And as
we've learned, there was madness here because Ballmeister had at
some point in his life been diagnosed as a schizophrenic
and untreated schizophrenic And what.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Does that actually mean untreated because obviously to get that diagnosis,
he's under the care of a physician of some sort,
but they chose to not medicat or he chose to
not take it. I mean, that's a dangerous thing to
save about somebody.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, it is. My stepfather was a diagnosed schizophrenic at
some point in tom and he had always wondered. When
I was a kid, he take us to church all
the time, and he talked about how evil psychiatrists and
psychologists were, and you know, and it wasn't until many
years later he's gone. Now, it wasn't until many years
(20:05):
later that I discovered he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
And he had this, uh, just this incredible hatred for
mental health workers. And it's it's almost like a sign
of weakness. I guess that if you've been diagnosed this way,
that uh, you know, just through sheer willpower, you're going
(20:27):
to go out and try to heal thyself or whatever
the case might be, or I'll show them. And of
course that that when you have a diagnosis of schizophrenia
and you're and you're going around untreated, that's a problem
and what's really interesting is that, you know, Ballmeister had
had shown evidences of really odd, aberrant behavior even as
(20:54):
a young man. You know, there's stories of him playing
with dead animals. There's actually he was apparently a Europhile,
which is one of the pelias.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
He had a fascination with with urine. He had been
I think working We'll see what was it. He was
working in a at some organization like in where he
would have access to the mail. And there was a
(21:28):
letter that was addressed that was either originating from this
location or was coming in I'm not I can't remember now,
addressed to like the governor of Indiana, and he urinated
on the on the envelope.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And he this is Babes you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, this is Ballbmeister that we're talking about. So he
had he had these uh, these paraphilias, at least one
that we know of, which is this kind of avarant
sexual fascination. You know that he would have uh and
you know, I look at and not only that, but
he he was always described as being very odd. I
(22:06):
watched an interview with one of his former employees who
had been a teenager and now get this tell me
this that I bet this. I bet this man is
terrified every single day. You know, he kind of reflects back.
He had been fifteen years old and had worked for
Bob Meister at the Save a Lot, one of the
Save a Lot thrift stores, not to be confused with
(22:27):
Save a Lot grocery stores. We have those all over
the South. There's a lot of people that go to them.
They're fine stores, it's not the same thing. These thrift
stores that he owned were in the Indianapolis area, and
so this young man was talking about how they would
take in items like you do you know at a
thrift store. My wife spends a lot of time in
(22:49):
thrift store, so I know this sort of thing. She
loves going to them with my daughter. And you know,
they have to sort, they have to sort all of
this stuff that comes in and you put it in
separate binds, you know, by whatever the item is, is
it jackets or is it pants, or is it shoes
or is it children's toys? And he described how Ballmeister
(23:15):
would present in this Really he would become highly agitated
if there was something that had been discarded as like
worthless that they couldn't use, and that the kid had
tossed it aside or put it on the side and
didn't include it in the bend that would go out
on the floor, and not that some other person would
(23:39):
would not have, you know, been equally as enraged. But
he said it was almost at an inappropriate level, and
people were terrified anytime to see him coming. And you know,
he tries to comport himself as this this young business
business dude that had been very successful, you know, and
(24:00):
he's moving up the Laddie's he's got himself a wife,
he's got himself three kids. You know, he's got he's
got this big spread. The only thing about it is
at this point in time, and like, you know, kind
of echoing what this young man had said in the interview,
no one knew that there were thousands of particulated body
(24:22):
parts that were on that property that had been crushed up.
The last thing I'll say about this interview, the young
man said that he had been literally in the store
alone with him at night. This kid was he was
fifteen when this was going on, and he thought, you know,
that could have been me, you know that that could
(24:44):
have happened to and ball moister would slip away and
not be there for protracted period of time. Then this
kid was kind of reminiscing over this and saying, I
wonder when he was not at the store and I
was working for him, was he cruising bars in Indianapolis
and picking out victims and taping them and torturing and
(25:04):
killing them and then disposing of the remains.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That's a rough thing to live with, you know, Gosh,
basically it really is. Now in nineteen ninety four, Bombmeister
picks up a guy in the neighborhood of an Indianapolis
gay bar and he brings him out to their home
for a sexual encounter. But the man says he's so
lucky he escaped alive that he went to cops. Now,
(25:30):
this is a very short cliffs version of the you know,
we're those things using college cliff quotes. Yeah, cliffs nuts,
all right, because we don't know a whole lot of
what went on. We know that it was a consensual
homosexual encounter that was planned. Yet whatever happened, this guy
got out and went straight to the cops, saying he
(25:51):
felt lucky to be alive. And this is again where
I'm I'm back to that time period. I I guess
in nineteen ninety four, there had been so much chot
talk of the Jeffrey Dahmer case nationwide that I'm struck
by this story of a man comes into the police
(26:12):
department and says, I'm really afraid of what just took place.
And this encounter matches up with what we know of
Jeffrey Dahmer, and it's in that same time period. Why
couldn't they put two and two together and at least
look at him. Oh wait a minute, Joe. They did.
They did put two and two together and they started
looking at Bommeister. So I'm thinking, this is nineteen ninety four.
(26:34):
Now we know we've already said that bom Meister took
his own life just a couple of years later. So
from the ninety four incident when this man goes to
police saying I'm lucky to be alive, and they were
able to put things together and realife we might have
a bad actor here, we might have Againe, they did.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And they had confirmatory information day from another person as well,
where this guy reported there was a guy at one
of these bars that reported that his friend was missing,
and he tried to give a description of the guy,
and the cops told him at the time, if you
see him again, let us know. And guy's using a
(27:16):
very specific nom de gere, a false name at this
particular time. Sure enough, he shows up again, and you
talk about developing probable cause. This guy gets his license plate. Wow.
And so when he gets that information, so you've got
these two sources that are coming at you. And this
is this is an investigator's ultimate dream here where you
(27:37):
can get multiple confirmatory sources. They were able at that
point in time to go and begin to question or
begin to watch ball Miser and what he was doing,
and that led them to this farm that he possessed.
And strangely enough, Balls they came to this location where
(28:02):
these bodies had already been deposited. Can you imagine being
a cop and you're this You're on the same nineteen
acres that there are tens of bodies located on, and
you're you know that something's up, Your spoty senses are tingling,
and you're talking to this guy. Do you mind if
we come in and just kind of look through your property? No,
(28:24):
you can't. They show up when he's not there, They
ask his wife, and his wife is like fervent, No,
you can't. Well, as time went by, she got a
little bit scared. She got scared of what he might
do and his behavior, because suddenly, isn't it odd that
(28:45):
you can be married to somebody and maybe not think
that their behavior is odd because it becomes so normalized
in your life, their appearance, their actions, their responses to things,
and all of a sudden, it takes like a sudden
jolt or you know, a splash of cold water in
(29:05):
the face to say, wait, I need to wake up
from this fantasy I'm living in. I'm scared of this
guy now. And as it turns out, you know, they
wind up getting a warrant for the property. But you know,
BA meister knew that all was at an end at
this point in time that he there was. You know,
he was in an unrecoverable flat spin at this point,
(29:28):
and I guess he interpreted that is I have nothing
that I can do. I'm going to hop in my
car and I'm heading out to the Great White North.
And you know, of course that ended with him blowing
his brains out up there.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
When we looked at his suicide, he used at three
fifty seven, right, Yeah, what would that do. In terms
of the actual physicalness of something like that, I mean,
is that going to just be blood pouring out of
the mouth or is it going to be an exit
wound that blows out the back of your head.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
It all depends on, first off, where the shot is initiated,
where the point of entrance is. If anyone is familiar
with the case of the former Secretary of Treasury for
the State of Pennsylvania, Bud Dwyer, that went on, that
(30:26):
was on camera at a news conference. Yeah, as a
matter of fact, when that happened, I was still working
in New Orleans and we had a friend of ours
that was a reporter and got us the first unedited
edition of that. And back then during that period of time,
I think that was the late eighties early nineties. I
(30:47):
can't remember budwire, but at any rate, that old adage
about the camera never blinks, Well, he used a three
P fifty seven magnum and that was an intra orial
gunshot wound where he plays, he takes it out of
a paper bag, sticks it the muzzle in his mouth
and for a second, if you slow it down, you
can actually see his cheeks expand with gas. His expansion
(31:10):
because one of the things you learn about about the
destructive people always ask me relative to gunshot wounds, what
is it that people naturally think that it's the projectile
that is doing so much disruption to the head, And yes,
it does. I'd be a fool to say otherwise. However,
(31:33):
the other piece of this is the rapidly expanding gas.
We all know scientifically that hot air always expands, okay,
always expands, it doesn't contract. And people might not realize
the force of this hot gas as it as it
comes out of the muzzle of the weapon, it's looking
(31:54):
to expand out as far as it possibly can. Well,
you're firing of a barrel. Projectile is coming out, but
the hot gas is coming out as well. Well, if
it's an intra oral gunshot wound, it's going to find
that gas is going to find the weakest spots. If
you feel along the roof of your mouth with the
tip of your tongue, the bony surface up there, you've
(32:17):
actually got what is referred to as a palaton suture,
which is and there's actually three I think there's a
primary that runs down a central one, and then there's
two and like let's see if we flipped it, it
would be running east and west and kind of north
and south, like points of a compass. I was going
(32:39):
to say in the vertical plane, in the horizontal plane,
but we won't do that. Those are the weakest spots
in the mouth. So those sutures that draw our body
together as we're forming a Mommy's tommy, those are weak spots.
And so when you see heads that will open up.
First off, those will part, the hard palette will split,
(33:02):
the gas is continue to travel up through the cranial
vault as we and when it gets into the cranial vault,
you've got sutures that are on the outside. And when
I'm saying suitres, guys, I'm not saying sutures like you're
sowing something up like a wound. Suture Lines are these
points of fusion that run along our skulls. And so
those are weak spots. And if you see a skull,
(33:23):
do yourself a favor. Look at a human skull and
look at those kind of real interlocking plates. You'll see
the suture line that runs across air and the plates
are actually locked together. It looks like teeth. Those are
suture lines, and so will that expanding gas will fracture
along those lines, so you'll have these heads that will
(33:43):
come apart. So yeah, a three fifty seven magnum would
certainly do that. I find it very interesting that he
chose a weapon like that BALLB miister to do this,
but when it came to killing his victims will never
I don't think know how many of the victims were
(34:06):
killed that were found at Fox Hollow. However, what we
will what we do have is if we are to
believe that he was, in fact the I seventy strangler,
we have a real insight into what his methodology was.
Why did it vary with him? Why didn't he wrap
(34:29):
a noose around his neck and hang himself? Why didn't
he do that? You know, if he so fixated on
depriving individuals of oxygen, these poor men that had no
idea what was coming, he wrapped his hands around their
throats and squeezed the life out of him. It looks
(34:51):
as though the BALLB Moister was rather merciful to himself.
I gotta sing the praises to somebody real quick. Here.
(35:15):
These people go without name most of the time, and
unheralded heroes, and who I'm talking about are elected corners.
They do more in depth investigation than people will ever know.
They in their own little way, they they grieve for
(35:44):
these individuals that have no one else to agreeve for them.
And I know that's very theatrical. I apologize for that. However,
please hear me right when I say this. They're really
the only ones that the dead remain fresh in the
minds of. Okay, all these individuals that are unidentified out there,
and the person that I really want to sing the
(36:05):
praises of here is the Hamilton County Corner in Hamilton, Indiana.
Uh Jeff Jellison. Uh Jeff actually took upon himself the
mission of getting bodies identified, particularly those that were involved
(36:29):
in the Fox Hollow case. Now Hamilton is immediately adjacent
to the Indianapolis area, and he he took it upon
himself to try to do his best to take these
again particulated, crushed, burned remains and put a name with him.
(36:54):
I would love to interview this guy and to and
to talk to him about what that process was like,
particularly going back all these years. What I think that
one of the things that I always reflect upon, particularly
relative to my career, is that, yeah, I had. I
had cases involving lots of bodies at one time. But
(37:15):
you know, as you go forward in time and you're
still working as a death investigator. Yeah, that at that moment, Tom,
it was a huge deal when you're out there recovering remains.
But there are other cases that begin to kind of
stack on top of even a mass death event where
the things aren't as fresh. Jeff Jellison actually literally breathed
(37:38):
life into this case, Dave, where he had recovered these remains,
His office had recovered these remains, and he was holding
tight warning to finish, finish the job. Let me just
remind everybody, because I've done a whole seg I've done
a whole episode on the corners before. Our primary goal
(37:59):
as medical egal death investigators is not to solve homicides.
That's not what we do. That is the job of
the police. Now. If we provide information to them and
it helps God bless go in peace, I hope that
it does help our main job. And you have to
(38:19):
know what your job is in order to do it right.
Our main job in the medical legal field is to
determine the cause of death, the manner of death, and
the third leg to the stool is identification of the dead.
That's it. That's what we do. And kind of a
subset of the identification of the dead is to try
(38:40):
to find the family. Try to find the family. In
this particular case involving this poor young man who apparently
died at the hands of ballmeister Dave, his parents were
dead and all of his siblings were dead. There was
nothing left. But there was one thing that happened. His
(39:03):
mother actually died of a drug od and I've never
talked about this on air. At the time of her death,
when she died, they took a blood card on her.
And that's something we don't talk about much. That people
don't want. Is that more. There is a particular type
(39:25):
of little card. If you'll envision the size of a
business card. Every you know, everybody's ever worked in where
you had business cards, it's the size of a business card.
And you syringe up blood from the victim and you
take and you put one little droplet of blood. There's
(39:49):
two separate boxes, one in one box and one or
the other and you retain it, you store it appropriately,
and you retain it. And guess what, Dave that blood
that they took it that autopsy ultimately led to the
identification of the young man. And you know one other thing,
(40:09):
Coral his daughter. The police didn't even know he had
a daughter, because that would have obviously have been the
person you would have gone to. It actually took the
blood of his deceased mother in order to aid in
getting this young man's body identified.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
So they didn't know that because they don't know who
they have, they don't know anything. There's nothing to go on.
You mentioned something at the very start, you know, about
an offhanded comment about from Kral about now maybe you
know there's this serial killer over here, and maybe you know,
maybe there's something to it. All I'm thinking, and I
(40:49):
mentioned this to you earlier, was when we talk about Authorman,
what they're doing in helping families. This is like, to me,
it's the textbook. I didn't even know what you're talking
about when you said they got a card on her,
you know, on his mom. I didn't know what was
going on with any of that. All I knew is
(41:09):
that there was a young woman who didn't know where
her dad was, didn't think he was dead, but didn't know.
She had no idea if he was right around the
corner or if he had been killed because his death.
First of all, the guy was twenty years old. He
was a young man. His baby is two years old
(41:30):
when he's told to go home pretty much, and that's it.
She has no relationship with him. And in her whole
adult life, growing up, trying to figure out life. It's
tough enough, but when you've got that big question mark
in the back of your head, you look for answers.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Yeah. In addition to Daniel Holleran, mister Jellison got another
young man identified Alan Livingstone, who's twenty seven when he
went missing an August of ninety three. He got him identified.
And not only that, he also reconfirmed through DNA matches.
(42:07):
And this is jealoson. Two of the eight original victims
that had been identified back in the nineteen nineties, he
was able to reconfirm their identity. Because you know you're
dealing with just to imagine what a nightmare this is.
I've already told you of my disdain for jigsaw puzzles.
It's not something I have the patience for. Okay, imagine
(42:30):
the ultimate jigsaw puzzle. You've got thousands of commingle fragmented
remains that are in various states of decay, many of
them burned, and you just look at this mess that
you have before you, and you know, for all you know,
this animal is out there killing people and then stirring
(42:53):
the remains together, mixing them all up. And it is
such a hodgepodge to be able to do this, to
try to put a name with these fragmented remains, and
ultimately that is in fact what had happened in the
case of Daniel and these other cases, and they're still
(43:14):
I think to date. If I'm not mistaken, somebody make
sure you go back and check me on this. But
I think there's still three that they're looking to get
identified at this point. And that brings me to this.
Our friends at Authoram try to move heaven and hell
with limited resources. They do things that fifty years ago
(43:40):
this would have seemed like it was an episode of
Star Trek. It is so amazing what they have literally
been able to do and almost breathe the breath of
life into these old, old cases where families just didn't know.
And that leads me to what I always say about
(44:01):
Authoram is it might be the most noble work that
is going on at that point in time. There are
thousands and thousands of unidentified persons that are out there.
They're not all homicides, but yet at some point in time,
some person out there held them right after they were
(44:23):
born and they were somebody's baby, and since that time
they died lonely deaths, or were killed or discarded without
a name. Authorm Labs is giving them a name and
(44:43):
you can help. All you have to do is go
to d n A solves dot org. You go to
dnasols dot org. You look through the list. If it's
regional to you, if it's in your state, if they
have cases in your state that are open and need funding.
(45:05):
Just a few bucks thrown their way could make the difference,
could make the difference to give families the answer for
the empty chair that they've always had at Thanksgiving. Just
do it. Just go check it out, pick out a
case that you want to support, throw your support behind,
give them whatever you have, whatever you're capable of giving,
(45:29):
and you could be the reason that someone finally has answers.
Tip of the cap to our friends at authorm Labs
in the Woodlands, Texas, but also special recognition to corner
Jeff Jellison for his continued efforts and to try to
(45:53):
bring answers to these families that have no idea that
maybe their family member was a victim of Herb Baummeister.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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