June 27, 2019 • 18 mins
Herb Baumeister was spiraling out of control, and the wall that kept his two lives separate was beginning to crumble.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
represent those of I Heart Media, Stuff Media, or its employees.
Listener discretion is advised from my Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV.
Monster presents Insomniac. I'm Scott Benjamin and everything I'm about
(00:32):
to tell you is real. This is Insomniac. The year
was her Baumeister was forty four years old, and he
and his wife Julie's small Save a Lot chain of
thrift stores was successful enough to allow them to buy
(00:52):
a new home, a mansion north of the city. The
home the Bowmasters chose was a million dollar eighteen acre
estate in the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield, Indiana. It was
called Fox Hollow Farm, and the sprawling property, with a
(01:17):
nearly ten thousand square foot house, horse stables, a separate apartment,
wooded areas, and even an indoor pool, was the family's dream.
It also afforded Herb a lot of privacy, enough to
do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, without the fear
(01:39):
of being discovered. Even more privacy came in the summer months,
when Julie and the kids would go to visit Herb's
mother in northern Indiana. Sometimes they were gone for weeks
at a time, leaving Herb at home alone to watch
over the Save a Lot stores. By the family business
(02:04):
was suffering a downturn in fortune. The Save a Lot
stores were no longer successful, and Herb himself was in
the midst of another personal crisis. Aside from the business failing,
he and Julie were no longer getting along due to
his mood swings and erratic behavior. He was arrested for
(02:24):
drinking and driving in Rochester, Indiana, and sentenced to three
days in jail and one year of probation. To make
matters worse, his son Eric found a human skull in
the woods surrounding the family home. Eric brought the skull
to his mother, who then asked him where he had
(02:45):
found it. When they returned to the spot, they found
an entire cluster of bones a half buried, full human skeleton.
That evening, Julie confronted her about the bones, but he
simply told her not to worry. He claimed it was
(03:08):
a medical research skeleton that belonged to his now deceased father,
who was an anesthesiologist. Surprisingly, Julie had no more questions
about the skeleton in the yard, even after she realized
that it had somehow disappeared just a few days later,
probably carried away by animals. She thought to herself. Herb's
(03:32):
entire life seemed to be in a downward spiral, and
things were only getting worse. His wife, his children, the authorities,
and everyone else. Really, we're about to learn the secrets
that Herb kept hidden at Foxhall of Farm. Her pad
(03:59):
a lot of secrets, but people around him were also
aware that he had some problems. Reports from his co
workers at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles show that
his behavior was more than a little erratic, to say
the least. He lacked a sense of propriety, and his
timing and judgment were off. He just didn't quite know
(04:19):
what was socially acceptable. He had a strange fascination with
dead animals. For instance, when he was young and on
the way to school one morning, he picked up a
dead crow, pocketed it, and later placed it on his
teacher's desk when she wasn't looking. He also had an
unusual fascination with urine. Not only did he p on
(04:42):
his teacher's desk and discussed drinking urine. But when he
pete on the letter to the Governor of Indiana, well,
they answered the question about who had pete on Herb's
manager's desk just a month prior. I think all of
this is related to Herb's untreated condition, his schizophre an.
If you don't know what schizophrenia is, it's a long
(05:04):
term mental disorder that can last for years or even
a lifetime. There's a breakdown in the relation between thought
and emotion and behavior. This leads to faulty perception, inappropriate feelings,
and even actions. Schizophrenics are often drawn into a fantasy
or delusional world. There's a broken sense of reality. Things
(05:28):
are mentally fragmented. The good news is that there is treatment,
but there's also no cure. What I found in my
research was that some, but not all, serial killers are schizophrenic.
A lot of them do, however, have a different mental
disorder known as antisocial personality disorder or a p D,
(05:51):
and personality traits of a psychopath as well, which includes
no empathy, the ability to manipulate and intimidate others, but
also to do these things with a sort of charm
that allows them to get exactly what they want, no
matter what it takes. Someone who repeatedly gets away with
murder has to be at least somewhat in control of
(06:12):
the situation. They have to be very cold, calculating, and
extremely careful about what they do that doesn't match up
with the mixed up, confused thoughts and behaviors as someone
who is an untreated schizophrenic, someone like her Bowmeister authorities
(06:41):
knocked on the door of the Bowmeister residence in November
of and asked her for permission to search his estate.
After all, the license plate search of the buick with
Ohio plates had pointed directly to Herb, and the police
were desperate to make any connection that might bring an
end to killings. Herb, of course, refused the search, and
(07:06):
since the police didn't have enough evidence for a warrant,
they had to leave. Julie also refused the search, believing,
as her husband had told her, the request was the
result of a false accusation of theft. They were turned
away at the door, but the investigators knew they had
an option. They had to get to Julie. She needed
(07:31):
to know that her husband was living a secretive double
life and he was now suspected of multiple murders. In June,
at the age of forty nine, Herb's life was continuing
to crumble around him. The authorities were still sniffing around him,
and Julie just waiting for the chance to search the property.
(07:55):
Both of his Save a Lot stores had now failed
and had closed their doors for good. Julie had filed
for divorce, and Herb was so depressed that he threatened
to take his own life. But even all of that
wasn't the worst thing that happened to her. In late June,
while on a visit to his mother in northern Indiana,
(08:17):
Julie decided that she had enough. She gave the police
permission for a full search of the property while Herb
was away. It didn't take long. After just a few days,
investigators had recovered more than five thousand bones, bone fragments,
and teeth that they eventually learned had belonged to four
(08:40):
separate victims. The remains were pulled from the wooded area
of the property, concealed under piles of fallen leaves and trash.
A neighbor of Boumeister's prompted a second search the fox
hall of farm he had found skeletal remains near a
drainage ditch that operated into two properties. Once again, it
(09:04):
didn't take long. M lack of sleep. If it lasts
long enough, I can absolutely wreck you. All right. Well,
it's two o'clock in the morning on Saturday, early Sunday.
(09:30):
I'm just just laying here. I can't seem to shut
it down enough of that my thoughts. I can't seem
to turn everything off and be able to just get
some rest. I started recording myself in these sleepless moments,
the log of my thoughts, my anxieties, my nightmares. It's
killing me. Um exhausted, but at the same time, can't sleep.
(09:52):
I don't know what I'm gonna do. To some extent,
everyone leads a double life, and it's dominia makes me
feel like a different person altogether. But I can share
this with you. Killers like her Baumeister, the I seventies strangler,
couldn't allow anyone to know about their other life, especially
(10:14):
not their families. I want to be very careful when
approaching this topic, and I want to be very clear
when I say that Julie Baumeister is not responsible in
any way for the actions of her husband. But I
(10:36):
would like to know the real answer to the question
how much did Julie know? And when it's a question
I always have regarding the spouses of serial killers, how
is it possible that they don't know their partners guilty
of murdering people outside and sometimes even inside their own home.
(10:57):
Right from the beginning, Julius claimed that the Herb Baumeister
we know the serial killer is not the same Herb
Baumeister that she was married to. What she means by
that she saw him as a devoted if often absent husband,
a good father to their three children, and a successful
provider for the family. She knew he was flawed, far
(11:20):
from perfect, of course, but definitely not a serial murderer.
Even so, it really does make you wonder how she
ignored so many signs that Herb was not necessarily the
man she thought he was. At one point, Julie admitted
that she and her only had sex six times in
their entire twenty five year marriage. The summer weeks she
(11:45):
spent away from home didn't help matters either. She wasn't
able to see her day to day activities, and it
gave him plenty of freedom to use the house and
in particular the indoor pool anyway he wanted. This also
left him completely for you to cruise the Indianapolis gay
nightclubs in the evenings looking for sex partners and potential victims.
(12:07):
Julie claims she had no idea that her was interested
in men. All of this is really just a tip
of the iceberg. Herbs Double Life held a lot of secrets,
But the one point it stands out among the rest,
the one bit of information that's the hardest for most
people to swallow, is that Julie ignored it when her
(12:29):
son handed her a human skull and then led her
to a full skeleton, half buried in her yard. Yet
she did nothing. It's difficult, but try to imagine yourself
in that position. Human remains in your own backyard are
hard to overlook, but that's exactly what Julie did. And
(12:52):
soon after, when the authorities were knocking on her door
and asking to search the property, she refused because herb
told her another lie. All the while, she knew that
someone was buried in the woods behind the house. So
how much did Julie Baumeister know and when did she
know it? Did she really know nothing until the authorities
(13:15):
took her aside and told her their husband was the
prime suspect in what they called at the time multiple
homosexual homicides. That's what she's always claimed, and that's what
we have to believe until we hear otherwise. The authorities
(13:40):
were now conducting a second search at fox Halla Farm,
this time in a ditch that separated the bow maister's
property from their neighbors. After finding the scattered remains of
at least four separate victims, including bones, bone fragments, and teeth,
the investigators felt certain that a search of a ditch
on the Boma Just property would yield additional grizzly results,
(14:03):
and they were right. Authorities immediately found human bones in
and around the ditch, lots of them. Intact rib cages
and spines were poking out from the muddy ground. Every
shovelful of dirt seemed to bring more and more bones
to the surface. Along with the skeletal remains. Investigators on
(14:28):
earth handcuffs no Doubt used on the victims, and several
cans of Miller Genuine Draft, Herb's favorite drink. By the
end of the second search, the serea alone had produced
the remains of seven additional victims. In total, box all
of farm concealed the bodies of eleven men, get only
(14:51):
eight of them wherever positively identified. In addition to the
eleven bodies found in his property, Herb was also suspected
in at least nine other killings along the I sevent
corridor between Indiana and Ohio, killings that all occurred in
Herb's early active years and then abruptly ended when he
(15:13):
bought his home and fox Hall a Farm. All had
been strangled, all fit the profile of his other kills,
and all were dumped on the roadside in bural areas.
According to Julie, Herbert made countless trips to Ohio during
those years, supposedly on store business. Do you remember that
(15:38):
stack of videotapes the Canadian troopers saw in Herb's back
seat the day before he killed himself. Well, based on
the location of a semi hidden video camera found during
a sweep of the house, those were likely videos of
the murders he committed in the pool at fox Halla Farm.
We'll never know for sure, of course, because the tapes
(16:00):
were never found. One common theory is that her tossed
them in a river or a lake before he pulled
the trigger, and because he took his own life, her
bow Moister was never arrested for his crimes, never went
to trial, and he never confessed to a single murder,
(16:21):
not even in the rambling suicide note found near his body.
The story of her bow Meister and Fox Hall of
Farm is bizarre in so many ways, one that will
forever have some amount of mystery attached. We know plenty
about the case, but it's also clear that some of
(16:44):
the dirtiest details went to the grave along with her
bow Moister. The only witnesses to his brutal and unusual
crimes were the mannequins, and they aren't talking. In Upstate
(17:11):
New York, a convicted killer was pearled early after his
deem no longer dangerous to society. They were wrong. He
was a pathological liar, a pedophile, a manipulator, and a
serial killer with the second chance he intended to take
(17:31):
next time on Insomniac. Insomniac is a production of I
Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, written and hosted by Scott
(17:52):
Benjamin and produced by Miranda Hawkins, Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
and Josh Thain. Music composed by Makeup and Vanity, set
and cover art by Trevor Eisler. Follow on Twitter and
Facebook at Insomniac Pod, on Instagram at insomniac Podcast, and
at our website insomniac podcast dot com. For more podcasts
(18:13):
for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
represent those of I Heart Media, Stuff Media, or its employees.
Listener discretion is advised from my Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV.
Monster presents Insomniac. I'm Scott Benjamin and everything I'm about
(00:32):
to tell you is real. This is Insomniac. The year
was her Baumeister was forty four years old, and he
and his wife Julie's small Save a Lot chain of
thrift stores was successful enough to allow them to buy
(00:52):
a new home, a mansion north of the city. The
home the Bowmasters chose was a million dollar eighteen acre
estate in the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield, Indiana. It was
called Fox Hollow Farm, and the sprawling property, with a
(01:17):
nearly ten thousand square foot house, horse stables, a separate apartment,
wooded areas, and even an indoor pool, was the family's dream.
It also afforded Herb a lot of privacy, enough to
do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, without the fear
(01:39):
of being discovered. Even more privacy came in the summer months,
when Julie and the kids would go to visit Herb's
mother in northern Indiana. Sometimes they were gone for weeks
at a time, leaving Herb at home alone to watch
over the Save a Lot stores. By the family business
(02:04):
was suffering a downturn in fortune. The Save a Lot
stores were no longer successful, and Herb himself was in
the midst of another personal crisis. Aside from the business failing,
he and Julie were no longer getting along due to
his mood swings and erratic behavior. He was arrested for
(02:24):
drinking and driving in Rochester, Indiana, and sentenced to three
days in jail and one year of probation. To make
matters worse, his son Eric found a human skull in
the woods surrounding the family home. Eric brought the skull
to his mother, who then asked him where he had
(02:45):
found it. When they returned to the spot, they found
an entire cluster of bones a half buried, full human skeleton.
That evening, Julie confronted her about the bones, but he
simply told her not to worry. He claimed it was
(03:08):
a medical research skeleton that belonged to his now deceased father,
who was an anesthesiologist. Surprisingly, Julie had no more questions
about the skeleton in the yard, even after she realized
that it had somehow disappeared just a few days later,
probably carried away by animals. She thought to herself. Herb's
(03:32):
entire life seemed to be in a downward spiral, and
things were only getting worse. His wife, his children, the authorities,
and everyone else. Really, we're about to learn the secrets
that Herb kept hidden at Foxhall of Farm. Her pad
(03:59):
a lot of secrets, but people around him were also
aware that he had some problems. Reports from his co
workers at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles show that
his behavior was more than a little erratic, to say
the least. He lacked a sense of propriety, and his
timing and judgment were off. He just didn't quite know
(04:19):
what was socially acceptable. He had a strange fascination with
dead animals. For instance, when he was young and on
the way to school one morning, he picked up a
dead crow, pocketed it, and later placed it on his
teacher's desk when she wasn't looking. He also had an
unusual fascination with urine. Not only did he p on
(04:42):
his teacher's desk and discussed drinking urine. But when he
pete on the letter to the Governor of Indiana, well,
they answered the question about who had pete on Herb's
manager's desk just a month prior. I think all of
this is related to Herb's untreated condition, his schizophre an.
If you don't know what schizophrenia is, it's a long
(05:04):
term mental disorder that can last for years or even
a lifetime. There's a breakdown in the relation between thought
and emotion and behavior. This leads to faulty perception, inappropriate feelings,
and even actions. Schizophrenics are often drawn into a fantasy
or delusional world. There's a broken sense of reality. Things
(05:28):
are mentally fragmented. The good news is that there is treatment,
but there's also no cure. What I found in my
research was that some, but not all, serial killers are schizophrenic.
A lot of them do, however, have a different mental
disorder known as antisocial personality disorder or a p D,
(05:51):
and personality traits of a psychopath as well, which includes
no empathy, the ability to manipulate and intimidate others, but
also to do these things with a sort of charm
that allows them to get exactly what they want, no
matter what it takes. Someone who repeatedly gets away with
murder has to be at least somewhat in control of
(06:12):
the situation. They have to be very cold, calculating, and
extremely careful about what they do that doesn't match up
with the mixed up, confused thoughts and behaviors as someone
who is an untreated schizophrenic, someone like her Bowmeister authorities
(06:41):
knocked on the door of the Bowmeister residence in November
of and asked her for permission to search his estate.
After all, the license plate search of the buick with
Ohio plates had pointed directly to Herb, and the police
were desperate to make any connection that might bring an
end to killings. Herb, of course, refused the search, and
(07:06):
since the police didn't have enough evidence for a warrant,
they had to leave. Julie also refused the search, believing,
as her husband had told her, the request was the
result of a false accusation of theft. They were turned
away at the door, but the investigators knew they had
an option. They had to get to Julie. She needed
(07:31):
to know that her husband was living a secretive double
life and he was now suspected of multiple murders. In June,
at the age of forty nine, Herb's life was continuing
to crumble around him. The authorities were still sniffing around him,
and Julie just waiting for the chance to search the property.
(07:55):
Both of his Save a Lot stores had now failed
and had closed their doors for good. Julie had filed
for divorce, and Herb was so depressed that he threatened
to take his own life. But even all of that
wasn't the worst thing that happened to her. In late June,
while on a visit to his mother in northern Indiana,
(08:17):
Julie decided that she had enough. She gave the police
permission for a full search of the property while Herb
was away. It didn't take long. After just a few days,
investigators had recovered more than five thousand bones, bone fragments,
and teeth that they eventually learned had belonged to four
(08:40):
separate victims. The remains were pulled from the wooded area
of the property, concealed under piles of fallen leaves and trash.
A neighbor of Boumeister's prompted a second search the fox
hall of farm he had found skeletal remains near a
drainage ditch that operated into two properties. Once again, it
(09:04):
didn't take long. M lack of sleep. If it lasts
long enough, I can absolutely wreck you. All right. Well,
it's two o'clock in the morning on Saturday, early Sunday.
(09:30):
I'm just just laying here. I can't seem to shut
it down enough of that my thoughts. I can't seem
to turn everything off and be able to just get
some rest. I started recording myself in these sleepless moments,
the log of my thoughts, my anxieties, my nightmares. It's
killing me. Um exhausted, but at the same time, can't sleep.
(09:52):
I don't know what I'm gonna do. To some extent,
everyone leads a double life, and it's dominia makes me
feel like a different person altogether. But I can share
this with you. Killers like her Baumeister, the I seventies strangler,
couldn't allow anyone to know about their other life, especially
(10:14):
not their families. I want to be very careful when
approaching this topic, and I want to be very clear
when I say that Julie Baumeister is not responsible in
any way for the actions of her husband. But I
(10:36):
would like to know the real answer to the question
how much did Julie know? And when it's a question
I always have regarding the spouses of serial killers, how
is it possible that they don't know their partners guilty
of murdering people outside and sometimes even inside their own home.
(10:57):
Right from the beginning, Julius claimed that the Herb Baumeister
we know the serial killer is not the same Herb
Baumeister that she was married to. What she means by
that she saw him as a devoted if often absent husband,
a good father to their three children, and a successful
provider for the family. She knew he was flawed, far
(11:20):
from perfect, of course, but definitely not a serial murderer.
Even so, it really does make you wonder how she
ignored so many signs that Herb was not necessarily the
man she thought he was. At one point, Julie admitted
that she and her only had sex six times in
their entire twenty five year marriage. The summer weeks she
(11:45):
spent away from home didn't help matters either. She wasn't
able to see her day to day activities, and it
gave him plenty of freedom to use the house and
in particular the indoor pool anyway he wanted. This also
left him completely for you to cruise the Indianapolis gay
nightclubs in the evenings looking for sex partners and potential victims.
(12:07):
Julie claims she had no idea that her was interested
in men. All of this is really just a tip
of the iceberg. Herbs Double Life held a lot of secrets,
But the one point it stands out among the rest,
the one bit of information that's the hardest for most
people to swallow, is that Julie ignored it when her
(12:29):
son handed her a human skull and then led her
to a full skeleton, half buried in her yard. Yet
she did nothing. It's difficult, but try to imagine yourself
in that position. Human remains in your own backyard are
hard to overlook, but that's exactly what Julie did. And
(12:52):
soon after, when the authorities were knocking on her door
and asking to search the property, she refused because herb
told her another lie. All the while, she knew that
someone was buried in the woods behind the house. So
how much did Julie Baumeister know and when did she
know it? Did she really know nothing until the authorities
(13:15):
took her aside and told her their husband was the
prime suspect in what they called at the time multiple
homosexual homicides. That's what she's always claimed, and that's what
we have to believe until we hear otherwise. The authorities
(13:40):
were now conducting a second search at fox Halla Farm,
this time in a ditch that separated the bow maister's
property from their neighbors. After finding the scattered remains of
at least four separate victims, including bones, bone fragments, and teeth,
the investigators felt certain that a search of a ditch
on the Boma Just property would yield additional grizzly results,
(14:03):
and they were right. Authorities immediately found human bones in
and around the ditch, lots of them. Intact rib cages
and spines were poking out from the muddy ground. Every
shovelful of dirt seemed to bring more and more bones
to the surface. Along with the skeletal remains. Investigators on
(14:28):
earth handcuffs no Doubt used on the victims, and several
cans of Miller Genuine Draft, Herb's favorite drink. By the
end of the second search, the serea alone had produced
the remains of seven additional victims. In total, box all
of farm concealed the bodies of eleven men, get only
(14:51):
eight of them wherever positively identified. In addition to the
eleven bodies found in his property, Herb was also suspected
in at least nine other killings along the I sevent
corridor between Indiana and Ohio, killings that all occurred in
Herb's early active years and then abruptly ended when he
(15:13):
bought his home and fox Hall a Farm. All had
been strangled, all fit the profile of his other kills,
and all were dumped on the roadside in bural areas.
According to Julie, Herbert made countless trips to Ohio during
those years, supposedly on store business. Do you remember that
(15:38):
stack of videotapes the Canadian troopers saw in Herb's back
seat the day before he killed himself. Well, based on
the location of a semi hidden video camera found during
a sweep of the house, those were likely videos of
the murders he committed in the pool at fox Halla Farm.
We'll never know for sure, of course, because the tapes
(16:00):
were never found. One common theory is that her tossed
them in a river or a lake before he pulled
the trigger, and because he took his own life, her
bow Moister was never arrested for his crimes, never went
to trial, and he never confessed to a single murder,
(16:21):
not even in the rambling suicide note found near his body.
The story of her bow Meister and Fox Hall of
Farm is bizarre in so many ways, one that will
forever have some amount of mystery attached. We know plenty
about the case, but it's also clear that some of
(16:44):
the dirtiest details went to the grave along with her
bow Moister. The only witnesses to his brutal and unusual
crimes were the mannequins, and they aren't talking. In Upstate
(17:11):
New York, a convicted killer was pearled early after his
deem no longer dangerous to society. They were wrong. He
was a pathological liar, a pedophile, a manipulator, and a
serial killer with the second chance he intended to take
(17:31):
next time on Insomniac. Insomniac is a production of I
Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, written and hosted by Scott
(17:52):
Benjamin and produced by Miranda Hawkins, Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
and Josh Thain. Music composed by Makeup and Vanity, set
and cover art by Trevor Eisler. Follow on Twitter and
Facebook at Insomniac Pod, on Instagram at insomniac Podcast, and
at our website insomniac podcast dot com. For more podcasts
(18:13):
for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
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