Buried Secrets: The Murders at Fox Hollow Farm

In the 1990s, the quiet burg of Westfield, Indiana was rocked to its core when a mass burial ground was discovered at the home of a prominent local businessman.

Before becoming a property tainted by the scourge of deceit and murder, Fox Hollow Farm had been the pride and joy of its owners, Herb and Julie Baumeister. A successful businessman who founded two popular thrift stores in 1988, the family patriarch had spared no expense when it came to making the farmhouse a luxurious haven for himself, his wife and their three young children.

A straight arrow who was highly respected by his peers, Baumeister was the last person anyone would have suspected of keeping dark secrets too horrid to utter aloud. It was only later on down the road that the world would learn the truth. Apparently, when his family were away, the sinister side of the hardworking husband and father would surface, leaving a slew of bodies in its wake.

Though few were aware of it at the time, Baumeister was spreading his wings as a fledgling serial killer in 1992. It was during this period that a man named Tony Harris had gone to authorities claiming that he had been picked up at a gay bar in Indianapolis by a patron who had introduced himself as Brian Smart.

After spending some time getting to know the soft-spoken Smart, he had agreed to accompany him to a farmhouse under cover of darkness. Once they were alone, his host transformed into a completely different person. Instead of the mutually satisfying experience he was anticipating, Harris was subjected to hours of violent sexual abuse, culminating in his being strangled within an inch of his life.

Harris recalled that the entire ordeal had taken place near an indoor swimming pool. What made the encounter even more surreal was the fact that an odd assortment of store mannequins had been set up all around as if to give them front row seats to the attack.

The brutality of the assault had been so traumatic that he had passed out several times, only to be revived by his tormentor. After Smart tired of the sadistic game, he helped his disoriented guest get dressed before loading him into the car and dropping him off in town, bruised and dazed but still breathing.

After regaining his senses, he had attempted to track down the perpetrator, but could find no trace of anyone named Brian Smart, leading him to believe that he had been duped. This was made all the worse by his suspicions that his assailant was also responsible for the disappearance of a close friend who had come up missing a few weeks earlier after leaving the bar with a man matching Smart’s description.

Since the location of the attack was unknown, and there was no physical evidence linking anyone to the crime, police could do little more than take Harris’ statement and send him on his way. Three years would pass before a chance encounter would lead him back to their door, where he would learn just how lucky he was to have survived the night in the house in the country.

The Chameleon

Herb Baumeister had always been somewhat of an odd duck. Anti-social as a child, he had kept to himself throughout most of his adolescence. Concerned about his behavior, his parents had him evaluated by a mental health professional who diagnosed the boy as suffering from schizophrenia. Despite the finding, no treatment protocol was ever put in place, leaving them right back where they started.

Since Baumeister had no friends to speak of, he found other ways to entertain himself. One of his favorite pastimes should have raised red flags everywhere, but somehow went unnoticed by the adults around him. Rather than playing baseball with the other kids in the neighborhood, he spent his days torturing and killing animals. Toying with the corpses of the creatures he slaughtered had given him endless hours of pleasure.

In the late 1960s, Baumeister enrolled in college, but dropped out before graduation. In November of 1971, he married his sweetheart, Julie Saiter. Though their relationship would span twenty-five years, she would later admit that they had been intimate a total of six times. Their less-than-blissful union finally came to an end when his unsuspecting spouse learned of the beast that had dwelt inside her husband all along.

Though Julie may not have known that her partner was capable of murder, she was all too familiar with his erratic, and often frightening, behavior. A few years into their marriage, he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital for observation after having a breakdown during which his family had briefly glimpsed his dark side. Unbelievably, he was found to be mentally sound and released a short while later, a poor decision that would ultimately cost at least a dozen innocent victims their lives.

Although no one outside of Fox Hollow Farm suspected that anything was amiss, the occupants were making odd discoveries that should have clued them in to the fact that there was a killer in their midst.

In 1994, while exploring the property, one of the children had come running up to his mother with a human skull perched atop a stick. Proud of his find, he announced that he had stumbled upon the grisly remnant in the woods behind the house.

When a horrified Julie asked her son to show her the exact spot where the skull had lain, he led her to an area littered with bones. She didn’t need an anthropologist to tell her that she was gazing upon the skeletal remains of more than one human being.

Herb Baumeister, who was at work at the time, didn’t seem a bit concerned when he learned of the macabre discovery. According to him, the bones were leftover teaching tools from the days when his father, a prominent doctor, moonlighted as an anatomy instructor. At some point, the skeletons had ended up in his possession and rather than disposing of them properly, he had decided to scatter them in the woods surrounding the estate. With no reason to doubt the far-fetched explanation, Julie had accepted it at face value and dropped the subject.

A few months later, survivor Tony Harris was about to enter the bar where he had met the mysterious Brian Smart when he saw the vehicle his assailant had driven sitting in a parking lot across the street. Seizing the opportunity, he jotted down the plate number.

In the years since his ordeal, several gay men who frequented the local nightspots had gone missing. Though authorities were slow to act, members of the community, including Harris, were convinced that they were being targeted by a serial killer.

After making a beeline to the nearest police precinct, Harris had reiterated his story before handing over his attacker’s license plate number. After learning that the car was registered to one Herb Baumeister, detectives decided to pay a visit to Fox Hollow Farm.

When officers showed up at the residence and asked to have a look around, Herb and Julie had refused to cooperate unless they produced a warrant. With little evidence except for Harris’ account of having been assaulted by a man he believed to be Baumeister three years earlier, officers had no recourse but to retreat until they got a break in the case. They would get what they were waiting for a few months later when Julie had an unexpected change of heart.

In the summer of 1996, Baumeister had packed his bags and informed his family that he needed to get away for a while. Given his increasingly volatile behavior, they made no effort to stop him. It was apparent that, as the walls were closing in, he was finding it more and more difficult to maintain the facade of normality.

By that time, Herb and Julie were married in name only. Lovebirds no more, they had long-since decided to live separate lives, albeit under the same roof. Fed up with the sham their relationship had become, she had filed for divorce, but the paperwork had not yet been finalized when the secrets of Fox Hollow Farm finally came to light.

In her husband’s absence, Julie — who was beginning to suspect that something was up — had contacted authorities and invited them to search the home, inside and out. What they uncovered would effectively end her world as she had known it.

Within a matter of hours, investigators discovered a cache of human remains on the grounds of Fox Hollow Farm. When all was said and done, the bodies of eleven men were found buried a stone’s throw away from the house where the family had resided for years, unaware that their yard had become a gravesite. Only later would they learn that their husband, father and sworn protector was also a vicious killer who had been disposing of his victims on the eighteen acres of land on which they lived and played.

The Manhunt Comes to an Abrupt End

As evidence against him was being gathered at break-neck speed, a warrant was issued for Herb Baumeister. Unfortunately, news travels fast and he fled to Canada after getting wind of the goings-on in Indiana. Realizing that he would have to answer for his crimes sooner or later, the forty-nine-year-old suspected serial killer had put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. His body was found on July 3, 1996. This final selfish act meant that the victims’ families would never know exactly how their loved ones had met their fate.

It hadn’t taken much detective work to figure out that Baumeister’s happy family life had been a lie orchestrated to hide his homosexuality. Experts have theorized that it was his self-loathing that had led him to take out his pent-up aggression on those who embraced their sexual orientation, something he was never able to do.

A Proficient Killer

Investigators estimated that upwards of twenty men died by Baumeister’s hand. Besides the eleven bodies uncovered at Fox Hollow Farm, an additional nine were discovered dumped in remote areas along Interstate 70 between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio in the early 1980s.

Though authorities suspected at the time that these deaths were the work of a serial killer they dubbed the “I-70 Strangler,” no connection was made between those victims and the disappearances taking place in Indiana. It was only when witnesses reported that they had seen one of the victims, Michael Riley, in the company of a man they identified as Herb Baumeister on the night he disappeared that the extent of his reach was revealed. While he has never been definitively named as the culprit behind these murders, they have all the earmarks of his work.

In the Aftermath of Evil

Following her estranged husband’s suicide, Julie sold the family home — which had doubled as a makeshift cemetery — and moved her children to an undisclosed location. A victim in her own right, it was the only way she knew to distance herself from the past.

Since he took the details of his atrocities to the grave, the scale of how far Baumeister’s murderous arm stretched will probably never be known. Though he was never made to atone for his crimes, there is some comfort in knowing that his days of preying on those who trusted him without question are over.

A Partial List of Known Victims:

·John Lee Bayer (20) Date of death: May 23, 1993

·Jeffrey Allen Jones (31) Date of death: July 6, 1993

·Manuel Resendez (31) Date of death: August 7, 1993

·Steven S. Hale (26) Date of death: April 1, 1994

·Roger Allen Goodlet (33) Date of Death: July 20, 1994

·Richard Douglas Hamilton (20) Date of Death: July 31, 1994

·Michael Frederick Kiern (46) Date of Death: March 31, 1995

Resources:

·wrtv.com

·murderpedia.org

·findagrave.com

·wthr.com

·cbs4indy.com

·courttv.com

·ranker.com

Images used under provisions of the Fair Use Act for purposes of reporting and education.