Herb Baumeister

Early life

Herb Baumeister was born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1947, the oldest of four children to anesthesiologist Dr. Herbert Eugene Baumeister and Elizabeth Baumeister. His childhood was reportedly normal, but he began exhibiting antisocial behavior by adolescence, including urophilia and playing with dead animals. In his teens, his father had him submit to mental examinations, leading to diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder, though he received no further psychiatric treatment.

He attended Indiana University briefly in 1965 and again in 1967, and one semester at Butler University in 1972. Six months after marriage, his father committed him to a psychiatric hospital for two months. Baumeister founded the Sav-A-Lot thrift store chain in Indianapolis in 1988.

Murders

The I-70 Strangler is the nickname of an unidentified serial killer who killed at least eleven young boys and adult men in Indiana and Ohio between June 1980 and October 1991, dumping their bodies near Interstate 70. The killer met victims in gay bars within a four-block radius in Indianapolis; victims were found naked or partially clothed near I-70, often in rivers, streams, and ditches, each strangled to death. Law enforcement named Baumeister as a prime suspect in 1999.

Bodies related to the Strangler case stopped being found in 1991 after Baumeister purchased Fox Hollow Farm, which he used as a burial site. On June 16, 1980, the body of 15-year-old male prostitute Michael Sean Petree was found naked in Hamilton County, Indiana; he had been strangled. On July 21, 1982, the topless corpse of 22-year-old Maurice Allen Taylor was found in Weasel Creek; strangulation was suspected. On October 3, 1982, 14-year-old Delvoyd Lee Baker was found semi-nude near a river in Hamilton County; he had been cruising Indianapolis gay bars and was a victim of child sexual abuse.

Identification, investigation and death

In the early 1990s, Indianapolis authorities were looking into the disappearances of several gay men who shared similar physical traits. A man named Tony Harris contacted them in 1994, saying a person he knew as "Brian Smart" from a gay bar had likely killed his friend Roger Goodlet. Harris had survived an attack by "Smart," who tried to kill him with a pool hose during an erotic asphyxiation encounter. Police identified "Brian Smart" as Herb Baumeister and told him he was a suspect, but he and his wife refused a search of their home.

After his wife filed for divorce and allowed a search, investigators found the remains of eleven men, eight of whom were identified. Baumeister fled to Ontario and shot himself in the head at Pinery Provincial Park. His three-page suicide note expressed regret about his marriage and business but made no mention of the victims or any crime.

Media coverage

An independent documentary, The Haunting of Fox Hollow Farm, explores the crimes and possible hauntings.

Did You Know?

• Baumeister's son found a complete, partially buried human skeleton on their property in 1994; Baumeister claimed it was one of his father's dissecting skeletons.
• Baumeister and his wife had been sexually intimate only six times in over twenty-five years of marriage, and she never saw him nude.
• Bodies related to the I-70 Strangler case stopped being found in 1991 after Baumeister purchased Fox Hollow Farm.