Volume 19 · Chapter 10
Fox Hollow Farm
Herbert Richard Baumeister
Victims: Steven Hale · Richard Hamilton · Jeffrey Jones · Allen Livingston · Manuel Resendez
Case at a glance
- When
- Early to mid-1990s; the remains were found beginning June 24, 1996
- Where
- Fox Hollow Farm, Westfield, Indiana, and gay bars in downtown Indianapolis
- Perpetrator
- Herbert Richard “Herb” Baumeister
- Victims
- Steven Hale, Richard Hamilton, Jeffrey Jones, Allen Livingston, Manuel Resendez
- Outcome
- Never charged; he died by suicide in Ontario, Canada, on July 3, 1996, and identification of the remains was still going on in 2026
The case
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.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 19 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 19 on AmazonWhere it happened
Why this case
“Fox Hollow is the rare case where the ending keeps moving. Most of these men were bone fragments in evidence boxes for twenty-five years while their mothers died not knowing. The coroner who restarted the identifications is doing what I wish more offices would do, and families are still calling him.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
