
Herbert Richard Baumeister ran two thrift stores in Indianapolis and shared eighteen wooded acres in Westfield, Indiana, with Julie, his wife, and their three children. The family called the place Fox Hollow Farm. In 1994 his thirteen-year-old son found a human skull in the woods behind the house. Baumeister said it came from an old teaching skeleton that had belonged to his father, an anesthesiologist.
Men had been vanishing from gay bars in downtown Indianapolis. A survivor described someone calling himself Brian Smart who took him to a house with an indoor pool ringed by store mannequins, and a license plate number led detectives to Baumeister. He refused a search. After Julie filed for divorce she agreed to one, and on June 24, 1996, investigators began recovering bone fragments from the woods behind the house. More than ten thousand were eventually collected, from at least eleven men.
Baumeister drove to Ontario, Canada, and shot himself at Pinery Provincial Park on July 3, 1996. The note he left behind said nothing about the deaths. Nearly all the remains sat unidentified for decades, until Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison reopened the work in 2022. Allen Livingston was identified in October 2023, and by mid-2025 ten men had names again.




Westfield, Indiana, site of Baumeister’s Fox Hollow Farm
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