Crime Weekly - S3 Ep215: Crime Weekly News: DNA Tech Identifies Possible Victim of Indiana Serial Killer

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

In 1996, Indiana investigators discovered the remains of at least 11 men in the yard of suspected serial killer Herb Baumeister. Only some of the remains were able to be identified due to limitations in technology, until now. Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod

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from a variety of expert-led workouts, from strength to aero hit to yoga and mobility to keep you coming back for more. For a limited time, go to tonal.com to get $500 off your Tonal purchase plus a free four-year warranty. That's tonal.com for $500 off, plus a free four-year warranty. Tonal.com. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derek Levasseur. And I'm Stephanie Harlow. And Stephanie, you actually brought this article up to me. So why don't you dive right into it? Because you know more of it than I do. So apparently they believe that there's a suspected serial killer in Indiana named Herb Bomeister.

And authorities believe that Bmeister, who they claim was living a double life. So in one of his lives, he was an upstanding family man. He lived on a million dollar property in Indiana. And then on the other end, when his family was out of town or not around, he would go to gay bars and pick up men. And then the authorities are saying that they believe he brought them back to his Westfield, Indiana home, which is called Fox Hollow Farm, and murdered them and then buried their remains on his 18-acre property. Now, the police believe that he could be responsible for 25 or more murders. They've only officially linked him to 12. So the remains of Bomeister's victims were discovered in 1996. He never faced any charges in connection with the slayings nor admitted to

any of them. And at the time that the murders took place, he was married with three children. Now, in late 2022, the Hamilton County coroner, Jeff Jellison, he brought renewed interest to the case when he asked family members of men who were going missing in the Indianapolis area in the 80s and 90s to submit DNA samples to the coroner's office to determine if they could be possible victims of Herb Boimeister. Now, on May 22nd, the Hamilton County coroner's office in Indiana announced that another victim has been identified, Jeffrey Jones. He was reported missing in August of 1993. His remains were identified by using this genetic genealogy investigation, which we have some experience with because that's what they've been doing with, you know, criminal coffee. When we do these cases, we got to go to the lab. You've met my two genealogists, Jeremy and Ryan. Shout out Jeremy and Ryan.

Jeremy and Ryan. Both certified genealogists. And we may have some news for you guys. Very soon, we're going to be partnering up with a lab and a very well-known, prominent organization that you absolutely are aware of, where Stephanie and I, with Criminal Coffee and using Jeremy and Ryan through my investigative firm are going to be teaming up for a big, big undertaking that may involve the solving of many cases. So they were working out a lot of the details, but once we can announce it publicly, we will if it all comes to fruition. It's very cool. Very cool how they're solving these right now. Because remember, these remains were found in 1996 and it wasn't just remains, right? Because there was more than 10,000 bone fragments on this guy's extensive property. So they have to obviously work.

They've got to put these skeletons together. They have to test the bones, which once again, we do have some experience with because that's what happened in Preble Pete's case. We actually got to see them grind the bone down and then they do something to it and then they can extract DNA from it. It's super cool, but they would have to get the DNA from the bones and things. A lot of money too for all that. Yeah. So to see something come to fruition now, now you're starting to get these victims identified. You've got Jeffrey Jones. He went missing in August of 1993, three years before

all those bone fragments were found. And then earlier this year, the coroner's office also announced the identification of another man, Manuel Resendez, whose remains were found in 1996. Additionally, another man, Alan Livingston, was identified as being one of Bowmeister's victims through that same process. Now, according to the coroner's office, investigators have four additional DNA profiles that have not yet been identified, bringing the total number of victims to 12. Jeff Jellison said in a statement, quote, because many of the remains were found burnt and crushed, this investigation is extremely challenging. However, the team of law enforcement and forensic specialists working the case remain committed, end quote. So it looks like Herb, good old Herb over here, didn't just bury these people. He burned their bodies, crushed their bodies, most likely to do this very thing, which is to help prevent them from being identified. But 10,000 bone fragments of humans on this person's

property, and they're only getting 12 DNA profiles at this point, this is going to be a long time, a long investigation, a long process of identifying all the victims. But I think it was a great idea for the coroner's office to go back and check with people and say, hey, did you have a son or a husband or a brother or a cousin who went missing in this time period in this area? Now, that's not going to account for, you know, maybe people being there on vacation that he victimized, but hopefully, or, you know, maybe people who are unhoused and didn't have families to report them missing, but hopefully this will help at least supply the investigators with names and DNA profiles that they can then check against these bone fragments in her bone loyster's property. Yeah, it's going to be an uphill battle. I can name 10, 20 issues that we're going to have going with this one, because first off,

the fragments are very small. I know with Preble Penny, they were able to take an entire femur and drill into it and get everything they needed. But you also have outside factors that play a major impact on the effectiveness of this process, whether it's the weather, where the bones were located and how much they were exposed to the elements, bacteria, the mixtures of DNA amongst all the other bones. They have to put that into sequencing and try to separate those DNA profiles, which can be very difficult to do. You even see issues of that when you have a mixture of DNA between the victim and the offender. There's

multiple people that touched it. So that was another cool thing we saw how they separate those two things. Yeah, it's not it's not an easy process. And again, it's very expensive. And, you know, you don't know what other methodology was taken. Those bone fragments, are they all human remains or did he mix them in with animal bone fragments and other fragments to throw off the anyone if they happen to find it, because now you may be testing something that belongs to a dog. And when we think about fragments, you got to use your imagination about how small are these fragments, because one single body could be hundreds of fragments, depending on how small it was crushed up into.

So you could be looking at maybe five, 10 people, or you could be looking at 15, 20, 30 people. You really don't know, but it is going to come down to the collection of those bones, the ability to separate them, process them, extract DNA from them. And then to have, you're going to need a plethora of IgG experts, investigative genetic genealogists to come in there and really start to upload this DNA and hopefully find familial DNA within the databases to try to make a match. But it's not a guarantee, and it will also be affected by the nationality of the victims as well. Databases are hard with indigenous individuals. It can be harder to make an identification because there is less familial DNA in the databases as of right now. So it could be hard, even if you have a successful extraction where you're able to create a profile, will there be a DNA profile already in the database

that will match them? That's another issue. And so much time, so much time to have passed too, you know, that if people did go missing, and yeah, if people did go missing, kind of like Preble P, like he never even got, he never got reported missing

because he was kind of just like always on the go and never really had a place that he settled. So his family was just like, well, you know, whatever. It does drive home how I do think some of us get desensitized when we hear about a case that's been solved through DNA because it's becoming more prevalent, but it is really a difficult thing to do. And there's a lot of different pieces that have to go right. So with this, you know, I'd rather have these fragments than not have them because it's an opportunity to maybe solve 10, 20, 30, 40, who knows, cases in Indiana, maybe the surrounding area. So it's promising and I can't wait to see where they go with this one. Yeah, absolutely. Lowe's knows you want the best for dad. This Absolutely. But before we go, I do want to talk a little bit more about Herb Bollmeister because he was an interesting figure.

He was born in Indianapolis in 1947. He married his wife, Juliana, in 1971. They had three children. And in the late 1980s, he actually founded the successful Save-A-Lot thrift stores and operated two locations in the Indianapolis area. Now, his wife, Juliana, filed for divorce in January of 1996. This is just months after police questioned her about her husband's possible link to the disappearances of several young men, which means she probably suspected something was going on with this dude. Now, when his wife, Juliana, and children would go and leave for summer vacations, he

would stay home because, you know, he's this big, important businessman. He's got all of these locations and he's got to stay home and work and do things. So the police say he would go to these gay bars, pick up men, take them home, strangle them to death. And then investigators believed he burned the bodies, pulverized the bones and disposed of most of the remains on parts of his 18 acre farm. So when authorities went to his property in 1996, he fled the country. And according to the Indianapolis Star, he shot himself in the head in Pioneer Provincial Park in Canada on July 3rd, 1996. He died before he could be arrested and put on trial for the killings at his home, which at this point, I mean, it's like there's no better admission of guilt than that. Coward move, man. That's what they do. Coward move. So easy for

them to kill a ton of innocent people. But when they have to answer for what they did, they take the easy way out. and crumbling businesses. His suicide notes had nothing about the bones found on his property two weeks prior to that. It said nothing about the missing men. It said nothing about his victims. It is interesting, though, that when police questioned his wife, Juliana, she told investigators that in December of 1994, one of their kids had found a human skull on May 28, 1993. Alan Wayne Broussard, 28, of Indianapolis, went missing on June 6, 1994. Roger Allen Goodlett, 33, of Indianapolis, missing on July 22, 1994. Richard Hamilton, he was 20, of Indianapolis, missing on July 31, 1993.. Stephen Hale, 26 of Indianapolis, went missing on

April 1st, 1994. Jeff Allen Jones, 31 of Indianapolis, missing on July 6th, 1993. Michael Kierne, 46 of Indianapolis, missing on March 31st, 1995. And Manuel Resendez, 31, of Lafayette, missing on August 6, 1993. Very, very sad. Yeah, and that's great information from a detective's perspective because we talked about the complexities of doing it through the DNA process and trying to identify these individuals through the investigative genetic genealogy that results that you're going to have. But you can also do it where go back and look at the circumstances surrounding the disappearances of all these male individuals that you just named, right? Talk about their profiles. You develop a victimology

analysis on ages, jobs, where they frequented, again, the circumstances surrounding their disappearance, where they were last seen alive. When they went missing, so how often he struck and what was going on in his life at the time, because they say serial killers will be more active when they are going through a hard career time, which it sounds like he was. I would even say more so, look at the victimology and figure out if there's anybody else on your unsolved case list as detectives that you have that would be within that radius of where those male individuals went missing. And also look at females as well who may fit the profile and think about how many missing persons cases you currently have that fit the similar parameter of these individuals that you've already identified. Because yes, you may not have their bones yet, but you can start to reverse engineer it and say, okay, we have this person, John Smith, similar MO, similar profile, similar age range around the

time when all this was occurring. Are there any connections to Herb? Was he in the area at that time? Was this a bar where some of our other victims who were already identified were found? Did they belong to a similar club or organization? There's other ways to solve the case. You may not have that definitive evidence like a DNA result, but with a high degree of certainty, you may be able to say, okay, listen to the loved ones of so-and-so we're not a hundred percent sure yet, but it's our belief based on what we've gathered from the other individuals we've already identified that your loved one might've been a part of this as well in some way, shape or form where they unfortunately might've encountered herb at some point or another.

We still don't know yet for sure, but it does all line up. So this may result in the solving of a lot of cases, which would give answers to many desperate families that are seeking results from what happened to their loved ones. And on that same vein, before we wrap up, in April of 1998, investigators actually announced that they believe Herb Bollmeister was responsible for the deaths of nine more men and teenage boys whose bodies were left in ditches and remote areas across central Indiana and western Ohio between 1980 and 1990. So he didn't have his, you know, he hadn't started burying them on his own property by that point. So they think that that was his. He evolved. He evolved.

His M.O. changed. We talk about, allegedly, Rex Hureman. He evolved. His MO changed. We talk about allegedly Rex Huriman, his MO changed as well, depending on circumstances, depending on what he was doing at the time. He did kind of change up his methodology as far as how he carried out these crimes. And that can happen with serial killers as well. So there's going to be a lot more to come from this. This is interesting because obviously, this is interesting because we might have a probable P connection here. So when they think these other men and teenage boys who were left kind of like just all over the place, not hidden anywhere, they were obviously younger.

So when you look at his victims that they found on his property, a lot of them were in their 30s. Well, these victims, we've got a 15-year-old, we've got a 22-year-old, we've got a 21-year-old, a 19-year-old, a 17-year-old, a 29-year-old, a 26-year-old, and then a 32-year-old, Clay R. Boatman, found near a bridge in Preble County, Ohio on August 14th, 1990. But remember, Preble P. was murdered. We just don't know who did it. Well, we don't know for certain he was murdered. People involved do believe it's possible he was. He was missing his arm. Obviously, his body was badly decomposed, but he was missing his right arm. So there are questions about his

death. We do not know the manner of death, and he absolutely could have been murdered. We haven't been able to rule that out either. So yes, homicide was still in play in Albert Frost's case. Yeah. I mean, obviously Albert Frost was killed many years ago, 60 years ago. So I would say- More than likely not the same guy, but- But interesting because we were talking about him and then to see that some of his victims, and one of his victims was right in Preble County. And many of the other victims were sort of placed around that Ohio area and going into Indianapolis. It's just it's it's what you just did there. Right. Just we're talking 20, 30 minutes here. That's what happens in the in the war room when you're investigating these cases. You start to open up all your case files and you may have a case over here where you've made some headway on this one you haven't, but then you start to get a couple of additional puzzle pieces and those pieces fill in the gaps in the puzzle. And now you have the full picture, just like that. It's really fascinating how quickly something can come together once you get the right pieces in place. So we'll see what happens. We'll keep an eye on this one. We're covering here on Crime Weekly News.

It may be something that eventually is being covered nationally because of how many victims there may be in this case. This may be just the start of something. So we will keep you guys updated on it. We're going to get into the episode. We have a, we're in the middle of the Julie Jensen series right now. Part two is going to be coming out this Friday on audio, YouTube on Sunday. We're looking forward to that. So until then, everyone stay safe out there and we'll see you next week. Bye.