Herb BAUMEISTER was the embodiment of the American dream. He built from scratch a chain of successful local thrift stores in Indianapolis and led a seemingly normal life as a husband and a devoted father of three. However, when police uncovered the remains of seven young gay men in the woods of Fox Hollow Farm -- the family's $1 million estate in the exclusive Indianapolis suburb of Westfield -- Herb's American dream was more like a murderous nightmare.
In fact, Herb's wife of 20 years -- Julie -- had no idea of what Herb was all about. Every summer, while she and the kids went to Herb's mom's lakeside condo, he stayed behind "to work." A big fan of autoerotic asphyxia, Herb is suspected in as many as a dozen unsolved gay murders along the Indiana Interstate, and another dozen young gay men killed in Ohio and Indiana.
In June, 1996, while Herb was at the condo, officers found hundreds of bones -- adding up to the remains of seven people -- in the woods behind his estate. All the victims frequented the same bars that Baumeister did, and all went missing on days when his wife and kids were away. Herb BAUMEISTER took off to Canada where he committed suicide
For Julie Baumeister the shock was monstrous. The man she thought was a hard-working and devoted father -- the man she shared her bed with for 20 years -- was clearly one of Indiana's most prolific serial killers.
In May 1993 gay men began disappearing to the tune of 10 over two years. Police scoured gay Indianapolis for clues. In the fall of 1994, a man told them of a strange tryst he had with someone named Brian: They had gone to Brian's sprawling estate and engaged in autoerotic axphixiation. A year later the man spotted Brian again and, aware of the rash of disappearances, took down his license-plate number. As it turned out, Brian was Herb.
November of that year -- though lacking sufficient evidence for a search warrant -- detectives showed up at Fox Hollow Farm asking to search the estate. When Herb refused, they went to work on Julie. They told her about Herb's cruising and that they suspected him of being a serial killer. She refused to believe them. "The police came to me and said, 'We are investigating your husband in relation to homosexual homicide. I remember saying to them, 'Can you tell me what homosexual homicide is?'"
Five months later they approached her again. Remembering a skull and a cluster of bones her 13-year-old son had found in the woods outside the house which her husband casually dismissed as an old skeleton his father kept, she became more suspicious of her now estranged husband. Finally, with Herb gone for some R & R at the lakeside condo, she allowed police to inspect the property. As the search began, the 49-year-old Baumeister disappeared. Eight days later, on July 3, 1996, campers discovered his body lying beside his car in Ontario's Pinery Provincial Park, with a bullet hole from the business end of a .357 Magnum in his forehead.
On April 28, 1998, investigators concluded that Herb probably killed 16 men in all after linking him to nine other men whose bodies were found dumped along rural roads in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1990.