Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Herb Baumeister allegedly murdered about two dozen gay men and boys, dumping their bodies along I-70 or burying them on his Fox Hollow Farm estate in Indiana.
Indianapolis Police DepartmentPolice suspect Herb Baumeister was the “I-70 Strangler.”
On July 3, 1996, a group of campers in Ontario’s Pinery Provincial Park made a gruesome discovery. Lying in the woods near Lake Huron was a body, shot through the head. Nearby, they found a revolver and a three-page suicide note.
This note painted a picture of a man suffering in the face of the collapse of his business and failing marriage. But what it didn’t mention was that the man who wrote it, Herb Baumeister, was being investigated for a string of horrific murders that had taken place in the American Midwest over the years.
Between June 1980 and October 1991, the police had uncovered the naked or partially clothed bodies of a dozen men and boys near Interstate 70 between Indiana and Ohio. Their killer, dubbed the “I-70 Strangler,” had apparently met his victims in popular gay bars in Indianapolis, then strangled them to death before dumping their bodies in rivers, streams, and ditches in the rural lands surrounding the interstate.
Strangely, these bodies stopped turning up in 1991 — around the time Herb Baumeister moved with his wife and children to Fox Hollow Farm, a vast estate in the suburbs of Indianapolis, and allegedly began to bury his victims there instead.
In fact, since 1996, investigators have recovered more than 10,000 pieces of human remains at the estate, adding to an ever-growing list of Baumeister’s alleged victims. But because Herb Baumeister died by suicide before the police could interrogate him, the full extent of his crimes remains a mystery.
The Early Life Of Herb Baumeister, The Alleged I-70 Strangler
Herbert Richard Baumeister was the oldest of four children born to Dr. Herbert Eugene Baumeister, an anesthesiologist, and Elizabeth Baumeister. By all accounts, he had a normal childhood — but early on, he exhibited signs that not all was right in his mind.
As a child, Herb Baumeister was constantly getting in trouble at school for disruptive behavior. He allegedly had a disturbing habit of playing with dead animals; at one point, he put a dead crow on his teacher’s desk. Friends later recalled that he also seemed to be a urophiliac. According to a Radford University report, he would often “ponder what it would be like to taste human urine.” There were even rumors he’d urinated on a teacher’s desk.
By his teenage years, Baumeister’s antisocial behavior became impossible for his parents to ignore. His father took him to visit multiple mental health professionals, who diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.
Baumeister enrolled at Indiana University in 1965, but dropped out after his freshman year. While there, he met his future wife, Julie Saitor. The pair married in November 1971 and went on to have three children together.
HandoutHerb Baumeister and his wife Julie.
The I-70 Strangler Begins To Terrorize The Midwest
After leaving school, Herb Baumeister worked a series of odd jobs but continued to show signs of troubling behavior. In one particularly shocking case, he was fired from a job at the Indiana State Bureau of Motor Vehicles after he was caught urinating on a letter addressed to the Indiana governor.
After losing this job, Baumeister took up work at a local thrift shop. In 1988, he opened a thrift store of his own, and at first, everything seemed to be going well for Baumeister. The store was turning a profit, and Baumeister and his wife Julie even opened a second location. But within a few years, the business began to fail.
The couple’s financial problems put strain on their marriage, and Julie began spending weekends at her mother-in-law’s condo, often taking the kids with her. Herb Baumeister stayed behind, claiming he needed to look after the store.
He also made a number of “business trips” to Ohio around this time. Meanwhile, a killer known as the “I-70 Strangler” had begun murdering gay men and boys in Indianapolis — and dumping their bodies along the interstate between Indiana and Ohio.
In 1991, the Baumeisters purchased the Fox Hollow Farm property, a sprawling 18-acre estate. It was also around this time that police suddenly stopped finding bodies along I-70. At first, it seemed as though the “I-70 Strangler” killings may have stopped.
However, throughout the early 1990s, men continued to disappear from the Indianapolis area. As police began to investigate these disappearances, they quickly observed a pattern: All of the victims had been visiting gay bars in the area shortly before they went missing.
The Horrific Alleged Crimes Of Herb Baumeister
Herb Baumeister was living a double life. On the surface, he seemed like a regular Midwestern family man, living with his wife and three children in the Indiana suburbs while operating his small business.
But when his family was out of the house, Baumeister was frequenting gay bars around Indianapolis. There, he would pick up men and invite them back to his estate — where he allegedly strangled them to death, burned their bodies, crushed their bones, and buried them on his property.
For years, no one suspected that Herb Baumester might be responsible for the disappearances plaguing Indianapolis’ gay community. But in 1994, the police finally got a break in the case.
That year, a man named Tony Harris came to them with a troubling story of a man who identified himself as “Brian Smart.”
As Harris told it, he had met Smart at a gay bar. The two hit it off — though Harris noted that Smart expressed an unusual interest in the missing persons case of Harris’ friend, Roger Goodlet, spending much of the night staring at Goodlet’s missing poster hanging in the bar.
Joe Melillo/YoutubeHerb Baumeister was a small business owner and father of three.
The two men eventually headed back to Smart’s Indiana estate, where Smart initiated a sexual encounter. He suggested they try erotic asphyxiation, and Harris agreed. Smart began to choke Harris with a pool hose — and didn’t stop, squeezing until Harris began to lose consciousness. Panicked, Harris pretended to pass out so that Smart would release him.
Harris managed to escape. But the terrifying ordeal led him to suspect that Brian Smart might be the one behind his friend’s disappearance.
Months after bringing these allegations to the police, Harris happened to run into Smart again in public. This time, he made a point of taking down Smart’s license plate number and brought it to the authorities. But when the police ran the man’s plates, they found out that his name wasn’t Brian Smart at all.
He was Herb Baumeister.
WTHR/YouTubeBaumeister’s property at Fox Hollow Farm, where he allegedly killed many of his victims.
In November 1995, police approached Julie Baumeister and asked for permission to search Fox Hollow Farm, telling her they suspected her husband was a murderer.
At first, Julie refused. But then she remembered that the previous year, her young son had found a human skull on the family’s property. At the time, Herb Baumeister told Julie that the skeleton was part of an anatomical display that had belonged to his father. Now, Julie was suspicious.
In 1996, she filed for divorce and consented to let the police carry out a search of the estate.
Before long, they uncovered the fragmented remains of at least 11 men.
The Discovery Of The Bodies At Fox Hollow Farm
Herb Baumeister knew the police were closing in on him. Cornered, on the verge of bankruptcy, and grappling with the end of his marriage, he fled. By the time the police were conducting their search of his estate in June 1996, Baumeister was driving to Canada.
On July 3, Herb Baumeister took his own life. His suicide note bore no trace of a confession. The police never had a chance to interrogate him about the remains found on his property, let alone charge him with murder. But based on the remains found at the estate, it’s widely believed he was responsible for a long string of murders stretching back to the 1980s.
Indiana State PoliceJust some of Herb Baumeister’s alleged victims.
The victims whose remains were recovered from Fox Hollow Farm are as follows: 20-year-old Johnny Bayer, missing since May 1993; 31-year-old Jeff Jones, missing since July 1993; 20-year-old Richard Hamilton Jr., missing since July 1993; 27-year-old Allen Livingston, missing since August 1993; 26-year-old Steven Hale, missing since April 1994; 28-year-old Allen Broussard, missing since June 1994; 33-year-old Roger Goodlet, missing since July 1994; 46-year-old Mike Keirn, missing since March 1995; and 31-year-old Manuel Resendez, missing since August 1993. The other remains have yet to be identified.
While we may never know exactly how many people Herb Baumeister killed, police estimate that he may have been responsible for as many as 25 deaths, including the I-70 killings. If true, this death toll makes him one of the most prolific serial killers in the history of Indiana.
After learning about the alleged crimes of Herb Baumeister, read about serial killer Robert Pickton, who fed his victims to pigs. Then, step inside the house where John Wayne Gacy killed dozens of people.
If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or use their 24/7 Lifeline Crisis Chat.
