True Crime Campfire - Fox Hollow: Serial Killer Herb Baumeister, Part 1

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

We talk a lot about masks on our show. Most people wear them sometimes. We have our professional mask, our “make a good first impression” mask, our “fake it til you make it” one, when we don��t want anybody to know how anxious we are…But for most of us, the masks aren’t that different from our real personalities. Just a little more polished, maybe. Most of us don’t absolutely need the masks to survive. To avoid the horror and revulsion of our peers. To avoid prison. We hear it all the time on news reports about horror-movie style atrocities: He seemed like such a nice guy. He seemed so normal. He never even raised his voice. It’s unsettling, to realize how convincing a mask can be…even when what lies behind it is nothing short of monstrous. Sources:You Think You Know Me by Ryan GreenA&E's "Investigative Reports with Bill Kurtis," episode "Secret Life of a Serial Killer"Various articles from this collection: https://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/baumeister-herbert.htmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_BaumeisterFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. We talk a lot about masks on our show. Most people wear them sometimes. We have our professional mask, our make-a-good-first-impress. mask, our fake-it-tell-you-make-it-one when we don't want anybody to know how anxious we are. But for most of us, the masks aren't that different from our real personalities, just a little more polished, maybe. Most of us don't absolutely need the masks to survive. To avoid the horror and revulsion of our peers. To avoid prison. We hear it all the time on news reports about horror movie-style atrocities. He seemed like such a nice guy. He seemed so normal. He never even raised his voice. It's unsettling to realize how convincing a mask can be, even when what

lies behind it is nothing short of monstrous. This is Fox Hollow, serial killer, Herb Baumeister. So, campers, we're at Fox Hollow, we're at Fox Hollow Farm. a spectacular multi-million-dollar home on acres of beautiful woodland in Westfield, Indiana, just a few minutes outside Indianapolis. June 1996. It was hot and still in the woods behind the mansion as Indianapolis police detectives followed Julie Baumister and her lawyer through the trees. Mrs. Baumister, a polite, prepily dressed mother of three,

and the soon-to-be ex-wife of a prominent local businessman, was leading the investigators to the place where, About a year earlier, her children had found a human skull. They'd brought it into the house, all excited to show her, and when she followed them back to where they'd found it, she saw the rest of the skeleton, laid out neatly as though somebody had just lain down and died right there. When her husband Herb had gotten home from work that night,

she'd shown him the skull. Herb just laughed. Oh, that was dads, he told her. Herb's late father had been a doctor, an anesthesiologist, and he'd kept all kinds of weird stuff like that. Herb said he hadn't wanted it lying around the house for the kids to find, so he'd just dumped it out in the woods. Guess that didn't work, huh? They found it anyway.

This seemed to make some sense to Julie, though she did wonder why he wouldn't have just disposed of the thing in a dumpster or something instead. Herb took the skull out of her hands. He said, I'll take care of it, don't worry. And Julie hadn't given it much more thought after that. Until now. Now, Julie's carefully constructed world was crashing down around her. Her soon-to-be ex-husband was under suspicion for what the detectives were calling

homosexual homicides. Herb himself had taken off to their vacation house with their son, refusing to face the situation. And now, as she stood next to her divorce attorney in the hot, windless woods behind the house, she watched the detective's faces change as one of the searchers moved some brush aside and found bones. Hundreds of them. Some charred, some intact. Bones and teeth. For a moment, she thought she was going to pass out, but the moment passed. Twenty-five years of marriage to this man, three children whose lives were about to fly apart like a flock of terrified birds. And the man at the center of this nightmare was off at Lake Wawesi on vacation. How convenient. How convenient. How

Herb Baumeister was born in 1947 in Indianapolis. His dad was a prominent anesthesiologist, so they lived in pretty she-she neighborhoods and had everything they needed and more money-wise. Herb was the oldest of the Baumeister's four kids, and by all accounts before puberty hit, he seemed like a pretty normal kid. He was a loving older brother, a kind-hearted kid with a big sense of humor and a penchant for practical jokes. He had plenty of friends at school, he did well in his classes, but as he rounded the corner from childhood to adolescent, and those puberty hormones hit, it was like a record scratch. Things changed. Big time. Herb became obsessed with all things dark and icky,

and his sense of humor got more and more gross and inappropriate every year while his behavior got more bizarre. Once he put a dead crow on his teacher's desk at school. Allegedly, he had a habit of peeing on stuff too, his teacher's desk especially. One time he just randomly said to a group of friends, hey, I wonder what urine would taste like. Would it be better warm or cold?

Oh, my God. Yeah, I imagine you could hear the crickets chirping a mile away in the aftermath of that extraordinary question. The other kids were obviously grossed out and even more so when Herb started chasing him around the hall saying, give me a drink, give me a drink. Oh, my God. No.

And little content warning on this next part because it is disgusting and involves roadkill. One afternoon during gym class, one of Herb's classmates walked up on him poking his fingers into a rotting crow in the grass. And as if that wasn't bad enough by itself, the friend noticed that Herb was aroused. Ugh. Every single sentence that you just said was infinitely worse than the last. Which actually makes me think, does this sound like anybody else we know, Campers? Herb has a lot in common with Jeffrey Dahmer.

Like Dahmer, he was utterly self-ful. absorbed and consumed with his own wants and needs. Combined that with the lack of empathy for other people, and you've got a recipe for all kinds of deeply unpleasant tomfoolery. And for the uninitiated campers, Jeff's childhood was also filled with strange stories about roadkill and antics that caught the intention of his classmates. In a word, Herb was a necrophile. He was tended dead things. They made him feel powerful. And they turned him on. So not surprisingly, he tended to squick people out. His teachers were always contacting his parents to express concern and plead with them to do something to help their obviously troubled kid. But from the sources we found on this case,

it doesn't look like Herb's parents did a whole lot, if anything, along those lines. According to Ryan Green in his book, You Think You Know Me, Herb's doctor, dad, used his medical connections to create a, quote, circular paper trail of referrals to keep her out of the system and hope that the boy would just deal with his issues. I think that's going to work out. Great. That's pretty shocking to our ears today, especially given the fact that his dad was a doctor. But back then, the treatments for mental illness were not great. It's true. Electroshock therapy, drug therapy, that often made things worse, not better. So it might be a little more understandable then than it would be today.

to kind of ignore it and hope it goes away. I mean, if your kid isn't a crisis like this, especially these days, it's best to not think of it like something to be ashamed of, but that each of their actions is a separate cry for help. Herb made his way through high school pretty much alone, freaking people out with this weird, sometimes scary behavior. He was desperate to ingratiate himself with the cool kids, the jocks and the cheerleaders and whatnot, but nothing doing.

I mean, in fairness, to the popular kids, you start dumping roadkill on people's desks and whizzing all over your homeroom, that's going to tend to make people look askance. Plus, he showed no interest in girls or dating. Whether Herb acknowledged it at this time or not, he was starting to realize he was gay. And for a conservative kid in the early 60s, that was pretty terrifying. So it seems like he may have leaned into the spooky kid thing, partly because he was genuinely fascinated by dad. but also because even the most morbid stuff in the world wasn't as scary as coming out would be. It is. In 1965, Herb started college at Indiana University, but he dropped out after his first semester.

College wasn't going any better than high school for him, at least where his social life was concerned. His dad pulled some strings to get him an entry-level job at a newspaper, and the thing about Herb was, when he wasn't focused on trying to get people to like him with his bizarre or terrifying jokes. He actually did really well at work. He was relentlessly ambitious, determined to either make his dad proud of him or rub success in his face. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think it was probably a little column A, little column B. I agree. The higher-ups at the paper soon noticed that even though he wasn't in management or anything like that, if one of his coworkers made a mistake, Herb would land on him like a pro wrestler. He'd yell, he'd scream, he'd take the poor bastard

to the woodshed in no in certain terms. And these are like complete like his equals, like not underlings. Like he was an entry level employee. The nerve, right? Like, what the hell do you think you are? Imagine your least favorite co-worker of all time, like for any job coming up to you and like yelling at you for fucking up. No, thank you.

And because Herb never made any mistakes himself, there wasn't much anybody could do to retaliate. The little bastard was like a machine. He was so meticulous at his work, so the powers that B started thinking of him as management material, which should tell you something about the management style at this place in the 60s. But with this job, he was succeeding at something for the first time in years, and he liked it. His boss, who apparently abided by the philosophy of, like, rule by fear, took an interest in him. This guy had a bit of a warped sense of humor himself, so when Herb would, Oh, I don't know, joke around about a local man killing and dismembering his wife, boss man would say, oh, that's just Herb.

Oh, that's Just Herb built a protective shield around Baumeister for a while, as his boss evaluated his potential to move up at the paper. But then, as always seemed to happen, Herb overplayed his hand, showed a little too much of his real personality. I'm just going to put this out there. If you have to dismiss someone's bad behavior as, oh, that's just how they are. I have some news for you. At best, they're an insufferable asshole and you should block their number. At worst, they're a necrophiliac

serial killer with a double-digit body count. I think it's probably always the second one 100% of the time. His boss invited him one time to join him in a group of higher-ups at the paper for a basketball game and Herb offered

to give everybody a ride. And he showed up in a hearse. Now, granted, I'm sure some of y'all little weirdos are thinking, awesome, I'd love to go to a game in a hearse. And I hear you, but remember, this was the 1960s. And this wasn't the freewheeling acid drop in 60s. This was early 60s, like business boy world. And this time, even Herb's boss was embarrassed.

So that was the nail in the coffin for Herb's career at the paper. Okay. I can't believe I'm about to defend Herb Ballester. But this is the least weird thing that Herb has done. It is, really. Like, that's the tipping point for this guy. Oh, I can excuse all the uncomfortable jokes, but he shows up in a vehicle that can't go to over 60 and has no air conditioning. Reputation, ruined.

It is a weird thing to get bent out of shape about. It was like a huge deal. Yeah. And after that, he got progressively grumpier about his colleagues not treating him with the respect he felt he deserved. And he started acting like an even bigger asshole than before. And then he quit. which was Herb's go-to solution anytime the going got tough. His father, of course, was furious and embarrassed

because he'd pulled the strings to get Herb that job. And this fuck-up made Herb a little easier to push around for the time being, and his dad took advantage of that by pressuring him to go back to IU. Herb agreed, but only to take one class, a human anatomy course, of course, right? He was secretly hoping he'd get to dissect a cadaver. Ew. And probably do other stuff to it, too. God knows. Once back at IU, Herb started toning down his outrageous behavior.

He dressed in business suits for class, adopted a serious demeanor, buckled down to his studies, and this, of course, pleased his dad. And Herb started doing well in the class, even when he found out he wouldn't be able to dissect anything, which must have been a bitter disappointment for a guy who loved nothing better than getting wrist-deep in something dead. Succeeding in anatomy class gave Herb a confidence boost, and for the first time in his life, he started going out to gay bars and drag shows. Of course. He took a bus instead of his car. Sometimes he would even use a fake name, but he went. And in the gay clubs of Indianapolis, he found a fun, friendly, non-judgmental community. People who laughed at his dark jokes. Not too dark, of course. He still couldn't totally be himself. That's not something a necophile with Herbert Baummeister's personality profile can do anywhere, really. But he could come a little bit closer to it. He could let down his hair a little. And he could act on his attraction to men. Herb was learning to do something a lot of serial killers do, compartmentalize his life. He kept his university or work life in one box, his relationship with his parents in another, and the gay bars in one more. And he never merged these different parts of his personality.

He always kept them completely separate. At the gay bars, Herb actually started making some casual friends. He didn't get really close to anybody, but even casual friendships were a big deal for him. That was more positive human contact than he'd had since before he hit puberty. Gay bars are great places as a general rule, just good vibes all around. I've never had a bad time at a gay bar. Yeah, me neither. It's always been great experience. And this could have been really good for Herb if things had gone a different way.

But soon, Herb's dad started poking at him about how he was spending his time. He was just taking the one class at IU and he wasn't really working. What the hell was he doing the rest of the time? Scoofing off? Rutrow. So, this set off alarm bells in Herb's head. Couldn't let Dad find out about the gay clubs. Gotta get another box, Herb. So, to placate his father, he joined the Young Republicans Club at IU.

Despite the fact that it was the 60s, and peace love and rock and roll were bursting onto the scene all over the country, you'd be hard pressed to find a starchyer group of nerdlings than the IU Young Republicans. In other words, it was a perfect cover for Herb. Well, I say perfect cover, actually, in some ways it was a great fit for him. Despite his sexual orientation, Herb was super conservative politically, and the buttoned-up atmosphere of the club helped him keep his weird humor and inappropriate behavior in check. When he was hanging out with the young Republicans, Herb was on his best, most normal behavior. And it was there that he met a young woman named Juliana Sater.

Juliana was going to IU part-time and teaching journalism at a local high school, and where most of the women he'd met in his life had been creeped out by him, Julie, who had only seen the somber, sport coat, and loafers version of him so far, she kind of liked Herb. They both felt like outcasts in a way. Most of their classmates were listening to Jimmy Hendricks and going to protest and smoking weed and burning their bras. But Julie and Herb's idea of her red-hot Saturday night was to go to a movie and then grab a Coke afterward. Whew, slow down, y'all. Remember Jesus is watching.

was at a fork in the road. Pick the life that would make him seem normal. Mary Julie, have kids, make his dad happy, focus on building wealth and prestige. Or keep pursuing his life as a gay party guy, out of his father's sight, and pursue much darker interests in secret as well. He picked Julie. His dad was thrilled, but his mom had reservations. To Julie, it seemed like she got a sort of frosty reception from Mrs. Baumeister, but it wasn't that Herb's mom didn't like her. Mrs. B understood her boy a lot better than her husband did, I think, and she was worried. She wanted Herb to succeed at a normal life, but there was a little voice in her head that was just screaming at her to warn this poor girl off. Part of her wanted to just take Julie aside and say,

run, run now. There's something wrong with him. But of course, she didn't do that. You know, when somebody's mom is scared to unleash him on you, you know you're in some shit. Like, that's the biggest red flag in the bouquet so far, if he asked me, that his own mom was like, uh-uh, don't do this. Save yourself. I can't agree more. Yeah. And in 1971, Julie and Herb had a big, beautiful wedding. The wedding was so nice, and Julie looked so pretty, and Herb did such a good job of keeping any trace of his real personality in check that the guests got the sense that Herb had grown up and gotten past his weirdness. Cash gifts and offers for job interviews came rolling in, and Herb's dad was just

tickled pink. Herb had learned by now to wear a mask of calm respectability, and I don't know why I find this so creepy, but I do. The more stressed and pent up he got, the calmer and more somber he appeared. It was only when he felt confident and relaxed that he let his weird humor out. And I think like that calm exterior is the scariest kind because it lacks like normal impulsivity and it's like methodical. And you get the sense that there's just stuff just roiling underneath the surface too. And when it comes out, it's going to be bad.

All the wedding cash helped Herb and Julie buy a cute little house. It was all going swimmingly. At least that's the way it looked. Herb and Julie spent almost a hundred percent of their time together, which went a long way towards helping Herb squash his impulses. The only fly in the Chardonnay in those early days was, unsurprisingly, sex. Herb just couldn't handle it. He made every excuse he could think of. He never let Julie see him naked.

Later, Julie would say in an interview that they only had sex six times in the 25 years they were married. six times, and three of those were to conceive their kids. Crazy. So he never let her see him naked. Like he would just go in them. So he's a never-nude, like Tobias from her rest of development. He's a never-nude. He totally was. He should have joined the Blue Man group. He's a real-life, never-nude. I don't know that was a real thing. Julie was confused by it, but she figured he'd grown up kind of repressed like she had, and he was probably just shy. Of course, later she realized there was a lot more to a it than that. But at least in the early years of their marriage, Herb gave her enough of

non-sexual affection to at least somewhat make up for the lack of passion. Later, when Julie started to realize that they had a real problem in the bedroom and started pushing him to address it, he dropped most of that and became distant with her. Just six months into their marriage, Herb must have been feeling the strain of keeping the mask in place, because when his dad came for a visit? Something disturbed Herb senior enough that at the end of the visit, he took Herb to a mental institution and had him committed. Herb didn't fight him on it. There is a frustrating lack of information about how this came about, but those are the bare bones facts. Herb was at the institution for two months,

during which time his psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia and, quote, multiple personality disorder, which we now refer to as dissociative identity disorder or D.I.D. Now, obviously, this was the early 70s, and mental health treatment was a lot less advanced than it is now. Multiple personality disorder slash DID, for example, is a pretty controversial diagnosis now. Some experts don't even believe it's real. And it seems almost certain that both of her baumeister's diagnoses were completely inaccurate. But just the fact that he'd been diagnosed with Something seemed to cheer him up no end.

Author Ryan Green's theory is that in Herb's mind, his mental illnesses absolved him of any responsibility for his urges and behavior. It wasn't really him who wanted to have sex with dead people. It was the other Herb. It wasn't really him who was attracted to men. It was the other Herb. Herb may have taken this to mean he had carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wanted, and it wouldn't be his fault.

Which just, no. I mean, first of all, mental illness isn't your fault, that it is your responsibility, and it does not give you a get-out-of-jail-free card, or a get-out-of-accountability-free card. And P.S., as we've said before, and I'm sure we'll say again, people with mental illnesses are way more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. And I think that's important to say, because there's such a stigma around mental illness that people who suffer from it are dangerous or scary,

and that is some bullshit that needs to be squashed, because it's just not supported by evidence at all. Yeah, and I totally understand that initial relief upon getting a diagnosis. I've been there, but I also realized immediately that it was just the beginning of a long road of hard work. You can't just wave your diagnoses like a shield.

Yeah, and I don't actually think Herb even got any treatment. Like, if he did, I didn't see it mentioned in any of our sources. But for Herb, the idea that he might have multiple personalities was just peachy keen. And when he came home from the hospital, he was in the best mood anybody'd seen him in for years. He told Julie he wanted to start taking some me time. go for long nature walks, for example, go see old friends.

Julie was just so glad to have him home and happy that she didn't ask any questions. I'm sure it will surprise no one to hear that whenever Julie thought he was on his little nighttime hikes or whatever, he was really out picking up male sex workers. Coincidentally, I'm sure. Around this time, police started getting scattered reports of a man who'd gotten too rough, like scary rough, with these sex workers. Like rough to the point where they felt like they'd barely escaped with their lives. But there wasn't much info to go on to identify the guy.

Nobody had a name or a license plate number or anything. And to be frank, the police just didn't seem that interested in trying to figure out who was hurting gay or bisexual sex workers. And, you know, we talk about this a lot, but they're usually not interested in any sex workers at all, but especially those in the LGBT community, which is another call back to Dahmer, who target primarily gay men of color. That's right. So horrible and disgusting as it is, this is still a pretty common attitude today.

I mean, imagine how prevalent it was in the 70s. Meanwhile, he and Julie managed to conceive three kids, a girl in 1979, then a boy a couple years later, and then another girl. Herb was apparently quite the doting dad, just like fellow serial killer BTK. I wonder if spending lots of time with his kids was another way for him to suppress.

his creepy impulses. Anyway, he showed the kids all the affection he'd shown to Julie earlier in the relationship before their non-existent sex life turned the tide on that. As he had several times before, his dad got him a new job, this time at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

And soon, Herb was right back on his bullshit of loudly dressing down co-workers for minor mistakes, while being freakishly efficient himself, so nobody could say, like, well, you're not perfect either. Because when it came to his work, he was. The infuriating little turd And just as they had at the newspaper years earlier

His supervisors at the BMW started eyeing her for a promotion His co-worker should have just shifted to ad hominem attacks Like, you look like the villains henchmen In a movie in which the highest stakes are the results of a skiing contest There were like a lot of movies like that in the 80s, it seems like It's always like a ski tournament or something A danceoff But Herb was, as always, his own worst enemy.

Once he started feeling comfortable at the BMW, his personality oozed out. And he and the button-down folks at the 1970s BMW were pretty much oil and water. They didn't appreciate his jokes about corpses, his fascinating repartee about roadkill, etc. And when Christmas, he gave everybody a Christmas card with a picture of himself on it, posing with a drag queen. Now, today, we'd probably just be like, ha, nice, I love her drink. But in an early 70s workplace, this was social death. Rumors started to circulate that Herb might be gasp homosexual. And this delayed his promotion for almost 10 years, which is horrible, obviously.

I mean, Herb is a shit stain of epic proportions, but that has nothing to do with his being gay. It just has to do with him being a creep. Anywho, he did finally get the promotion, and he immediately started clashing with his new boss. See, Herb couldn't stand deferring to anybody else's authority. He was far too arrogant for that. So he'd just talk to his boss like he talked to entry-level employees, which is not a great idea if you want your job to go smoothly. And eventually, Herb cracked and started pissing on the dude's desk

when he was out of his office. Just peeing on his desk, just like he'd peed on his teacher's desk as a kid. Because apparently, he had a mental age of four and the coping skills of a not-very-bright raccoon. And everybody knew it was him. Like, hmm, who could this be? Probably the guy who openly hates the boss and likes to talk about poop and corpses, right? But they couldn't prove it.

And Herb was so damn good at his job that without absolute proof that he was the mad pisser, they had no grounds to fire him. And I got to say, can we just pause for a second here, by the way? Because I'm pretty sure I've never been that good at anything. Like, anything. Like, good enough that people would just look the other way. I'm dropping trow in their office and taking a squat on their desk. Damn, you know?

He must have been a whiz kit. See what I did there? Yeah, that was a good one. Okay, so this went on for a while with this poor boss forced to repeatedly clean pee off his phone and his stapler. Until finally, Herb went a step too far, a piss too far? Because that wasn't already too far. One afternoon, irked about some clash or other he'd had with his boss, he went in and wazzed all over an important letter to the governor.

Oh, no. And that was it. That tore it. His boss told him he could either resign or the whole town was going to find out about his little pee-pee parade. I imagine Herb knew exactly how that would sit with Herbert Sr. And because one of the organizing principles of his life was how much he wanted to become, successful and wealthy so he could shove it in his dad's face. He resigned. Yeah, to everyone's relief, I'm sure. I wonder how long it took him to get the smell out. God. I know. I'm sorry. Don't

shoot the messenger, but I just know it's really hard with cat pee is all. And human pee is probably much worse. I don't think human pee is worse. But the quantity though, Katie. That's true. To be fair, the first time somebody peed on my desk, I would get a new desk. That would, period. Yeah, that's true. After he left the BMV, Herb took on an array of little sales jobs here and there while Julie went back to teaching part-time to pick up the slack. The sales gigs required Herb to travel a lot, which he seemed to like. Around this time, the bodies of young men started turning up, strangled, and, you know,

dumped alongside the road, along Interstate 70. Some of the men were later identified as sex workers, others as hitchhikers or runaways. Because the murders covered so much ground, Indiana and Ohio, meaning multiple jurisdictions, and because, infuriatingly, the police weren't that invested in chasing down the killer or killers of young men they viewed as drifters, nothing much got done about these killings. To paint how angry that just made me. my watch just informed me then I should take a minute to do a breathing exercise.

My pulse just spiked. Yeah, it's really, really awful. In fact, it would be years before they were even recognized as a series likely committed by one man. However, a few clues did turn up here and there as individual jurisdictions investigated individual cases. In one instance, a young man had been seen

getting into a car with a white, brown, haired, slightly built man. The police sketch was a dead ringer for Herb Baumeister, but nobody would realize that until much, much later. After a few years on the road as a traveling salesman, Herb's dad, yet again, pulled some strings to get him a job at a thrift store. He hated the job. As usual, nobody's work was up to his exacting standards, including the management, who

shot down all his brilliant ideas. He bitched to Julie about how much money a store like that could make if it was run right. And then, a couple of years into this shitty job at the thrift store, his dad, Herbert Sr. passed away. As author Ryan Green points out in his book about the case, and as many experts have pointed out before him, killers often have what we call a precipitating stressor in their lives that kicks off their criminal behavior. This could be anything stressful, a divorce, losing a job, an illness, a death. The idea is that a stressful enough experience or change can wear down the person's defenses so much that they can't keep their darker urges under control. For her Baumeister, this precipitating stressor may have been the death of his dad.

It's not as if he and his dad were the best pals or whatever, but from what I can tell, it seems like they had a pretty troubled and toxic relationship. but Herb Sr. had a tight psychological grip on his son. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, Herb had always been obsessed with the idea of making it big and proving dad wrong. He wasn't just a weirdo and a fuck-up who needed his dad's help to stay afloat. He was a success on his own. Now that dad was dead, Herb was out of opportunities to make that happen. I suspect this a ate at him, though he didn't immediately go on a killing spree or anything.

It took a little while for Herb's mask to slip all the way off. off. In the meantime, in 1988, Herb's mom stepped in to try and help her son chase his dreams of entrepreneurship. She loaned him the money to buy a thrift store of his own. And soon, he and Julie were off to the races. They named the store, Save a Lot, and it took off like mad. Soon they opened a second store, one for Herb to run and one for Julie. And by 1991, they were making enough money to move to the Shishi Westfield neighborhood outside Indianapolis, and buy a property called Fox Hollow Farm. This place was spectacular, a huge Tudor-style mansion with four bedrooms, a writing stable, 20 acres of woodland, and an indoor pool. Oh man, I want an indoor pool so bad.

Yeah, um, you might not anymore after we finish telling this story. Remember? Yeah, you know what? You're right. I'm not going to give out any spoilers, campers, but for now just suffice it to say that Herb's idea of festive poolside decor was to place a bunch of mannequins all around the pool. Just a bunch of residents of the uncanny valley with their glassy, little staring eyes watching you doggie paddle around the deep end. Yeah, going to pass, thanks. You know, Dahmer liked mannequins too, by the way. He used to steal them from stores and take them home to do God knows what with them, but it fits with the profile of a necrophil. That idea of wanting quote-unquote friends who don't have wants and needs of their own and can't run off and leave you.

So anywho, the Balmeisters had officially made it. The kids had loads of room to play outside, they had a new level of status in the community, what more could you want? Granted, their marriage was pretty miserable by this point. Herb had turned off the spout of fake affection for Julie and started steamrolling over her whenever there were decisions to be made, and on top of that he'd started hoarding. excess stock from the thrift stores. Julie was so embarrassed about the cluttered state of her big, beautiful house, that she refused to let the kids have friends inside, which I think is super sad. Not the kid's fault.

They could only play outside, and if a kid dared to step a toe into the house and happened to get a glimpse of the hoarder's nest, Julie would freak out and forbid the kids from hanging out with that kid ever again. Julie had threatened to file for divorce a couple of times. And Julie's in an episode of the classic true crime show, American justice about this case, like probably from, you know, 2000 or something like that. And it's really interesting hearing her talk about her life with Herb because she never mentions a word about like any of the stuff we've talked about, any of his bizarre behavior or the two of

them fighting. And she paints this really rosy, like Ozzy and Harriet type picture of her life with him and the kids. And we're going to talk later about whether we think she had any idea that something sinister was going on right under her nose. But for now, I'll just say that she's. seems to have been real, real good at denial. Either that, or she just didn't want to talk publicly about the bad stuff.

All this inside baseball about the rift between the two of them comes mostly from Julie's divorce attorney, not from Julie herself. Julie comes across in interviews as very prim and proper and very nostalgic about her life with her. It's pretty bonkers considering what happened later, you know, that you would have nostalgia about it. And this is also interesting, by the way. According to multiple sources on this case,

at this stage of their lives, Herb was the one that their neighbors regarded as the nice one, the friendly one, the gregarious one. He was apparently real good with the neighborhood kids, like he'd bring up cookies and lemonade while they were playing outside and kind of horse around with them. And Julie, on the other hand, struck people as kind of brittle and pissy. And she hardly ever went outside to visit with the kids or the neighbors.

Now, if that ain't irony, I don't know what is. Like, this woman's unraveling under the straining. of living with the platonic ideal of creep, and people are wondering why he put up with her. Oi, right? That is just unfair. So things weren't all that rosy behind the scenes at Casadel Baumeister, but hey, you know, if you didn't poke your head inside the door, if you were just looking from the outside in, everything looked awesome. And in the summers, Julie escaped by taking the kids to Grandma Baumeister's condo at Lake Wawesi for a long vacation.

This, of course, left Herb all alone in that big house, all summer, with nothing and nobody to distract him from his demons. It was just Herb and the mannequins. He started haunting the gay bars again, but this time he avoided the places where his old friends from the scene liked to hang out. He didn't want anybody to recognize him. And he used a fake name, Brian Smart. Unlike the Herb Balmeister of years ago, Brian Smart had money. He had a flashy car And he had a practically

Limitless supply of cocaine to share A habit he'd just recently developed Which was probably part of the reason for the hoarding And the fighting with Julie With the coke tamping down his inhibitions Brian came across as gregarious, outrageously funny, kind of roguish and free And not long after he burst onto the indie gay club scene

Men started going missing Jeff, Alan, Manuel, Richard All gay men all regulars at the gay bars downtown. Some had been seen getting into a white car and were never seen again. Things were about to get very dark and very scary for the LGBT community of Indianapolis, and it would take far, far too long to get the attention of the authorities. And in the meantime, Herb Balmeister was honing his fantasies and perfecting his craft,

with no one to see him but the mannequins. We can't possibly do justice to this case in one park campers, so we're going to leave it there for part one. Next week, we'll get into the series of missing persons cases that ultimately led to Her Baummeister's downfall. And we'll tell you how a brave eyewitness and a PI right out of central casting helped crack the case. So that was the first half of a wild one, right, campers?

You know we'll have part two for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Emma, Donna, Paul, and Nicole. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more,

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