True Crime Campfire - Fox Hollow: Serial Killer Herb Baumeister, Part 2

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

In Part 1 we introduced you to Herb Baumeister: Husband, father of three, prominent Indianapolis businessman…secret necrophile. By the early 1990s, Herb and his wife Julie were practically printing money with their chain of thrift stores, and they’d recently moved into a spectacular mansion on acres of beautiful woodland. It was the perfect place for the kids to run and play…and even more perfect for Herb’s favorite form of recreation. And in the summer, when Julie and the kids left for their vacation house in Lake Wawasee and Herb took to the Indy gay scene under the fake name “Brian Smart,” men started to go missing at an alarming rate. Join us now for part 2 of this chilling true story.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. So, campers, in part one, we introduced you to Herb Ballmeister. Husband, father of three, prominent Indianapolis businessman, and secret necrophile. By the early 1990s, Herb and his wife Julie were practically printing money with their chain of thrift stores, and they'd recently moved into a spectacular mansion on acres of beautiful woodland. It was the perfect place for the kids to run and play, and even more perfect for Herb's favorite form of recreation.

And in the summer, when Julie and the kids left for their vacation house in Lake Wawesi and Herb took to the indie gay scene under the fake name Brian Smart, men started to go missing. at an alarming rate. Join us now for Part 2 of Fox Hollow, serial killer, Herb Ballmeister. It was May 28, 1998, when a 20-year-old man named Johnny Bear left to go to his job at McDonald's.

He never made it, and he was never seen again. A few months later, in July, 30-year-old Jeff Jones walked out of a rehab center and into oblivion. Later that same month, Richard Hamilton, 20 years old, left his apartment at 2 o'clock in the morning to go buy cigarettes. He never came home again. August 7th, 28-year-old Alan Livingstone was seen getting into a light-colored car and then never seen again. Later that same night, 31-year-old Manuel Resendez went out to a gay club with a young. friends. When they were getting ready to leave at the end of the night, they realized they couldn't find Manuel. None of them ever laid eyes on him again. Now, if you haven't been

keeping count campers, that's five so far, all in the span of a few months, and two of them on the same night. That was the summer of 93, while Julie Ballmeister and the kids were happily ensconced at Grandma's vacation house at Lake Owassey, and Herb was home alone with his poolhouse mannequins. He needed his distractions. The thrift store business was starting to tank for a couple of reasons. First, Herb had been such an overbearing asshole for so many years that Julie barely even tried to challenge him on anything anymore. She could see the storm clouds on the horizon. Herb was collecting too much inventory and not selling enough, and he was letting things slide. But she knew Herb wouldn't consider any of her ideas on how to fix it. Plus, the little bit of success he'd had

in the early years of the business had gone to Herb's head, harder than the cocaine he was becoming so fond of. And he was treating employees like garbage. Yelling at people for minor mistakes, blaming people for stuff that wasn't their fault. He was just a flippin nightmare. And of course, Herb's new cocaine habit was not helping. He had no follow-through for any of his projects anymore, and he seemed to have the attention span of a distracted mosquito. Save a Lot was losing money. Fast. By the time the summer of 94 rolled around, Julie was even more relieved to take the kids and get the hell out of Fox Hollow. For the Indianapolis gay scene, that summer began in much the same way the last one had,

with unsettling reports of missing men. On June 6th, 28-year-old Alan Broussard said goodbye to his friends and left a gay bar, never to be heard from again. His mom was in a panic, but the police told her, look, your son is a grown man. He can disappear if he wants. Oh, can he? Well, to the casual observer, it would seem that a lot of grown men have been doing that over the past year or so. So how about y'all pull your heads out of your asses and take a look?

For God's sake, can you even imagine being that poor mother and trying to get some help from the people who are supposed to help in these situations and having some smug dickwad tell you you're just being hysterical and not to bother him about it anymore? I mean, I just, I would want to burn down the world. The investigators on this case make me burn with the fury of a thousand sons. How dare you look a woman in the eye and act like her fear and grief is in her head? Yep. And guess what, Detective Bungle? She pays your fucking salary.

So get your head out of your ass and do your goddamn job. You know, talking about this case, it made me think of this term coined by Eric Hickey from his book, The Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime, that he referred to as the less dead, which refers to victims of violent crime that often get overlooked. because of their race, occupation, gender identity, addiction, houselessness, or sexuality. Yeah, it reminds me of Stephanie and Eddie Hunsburger, actually, in season one. You know, they went missing. And if the police had had an interest in looking into that and could have figured out, you know, that Stephanie's dad had murdered them, then probably Susan Reinhard and her two kids would still be, you know, alive.

I mean, you see it a lot in, like, the case of the grim sleeper. He was... Oh, yeah. The Cleveland serial killer, right? Yeah, he was primarily going after black sex workers. Yeah. The guy that just recently died, the most prolific serial... Mm-hmm.

Black sex workers. So, I mean, it explains a lot. Yeah, it's really, really shitty, but it does happen a lot, unfortunately. I mean, I would like to think it's getting better, but, you know, it remains to be seen. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, the victims in this case were gay, and that at the time, made a lot of people uncomfortable, but I'm going to be frank. Being uncomfortable is a detective's fucking job.

You, as a detective, don't get to pick and choose what cases you care about solving or which victims you think deserve your attention. Men were dying. Families were going without answers. And the best you could do was shrug your shoulders and say, I don't know what you want us to do about that. Got to pack it up. Fuck you.

it's understandable if it was just one or two people because adults do go missing and you know they don't they're under no obligation to tell their families where they've gone but by the time this has gone on and on and on and you're up to i think at this point five different people all who fit a similar sort of victim profile all who went missing from the same area you know all involved in the gay scene in indianapolis and you've got people in that community telling you like something's going on at that point it's time to you to wake up and smell the coffee, you know? And in the case of Alan Broussard's mom, she hired a private investigator instead. Specifically, she hired a guy named Virgil Vandigriff. Now, this dude is right out of central casting. He's got the gray mustache. He's a retired detective, so he actually got along well with local police, which is kind of rare for PI. I picture him looking kind of like Sam Elliott, you know?

So, woof, woof, right? That dude is a silver fox, and I don't care who hears me say it. all right um we have got to stop simping over these retired investigators silver foxes or not because one of them is gonna hear it oh you think it'll be paul holes oh jesus how's my hair is it paul holes is paul's gonna call me on the side note though paul's if you are listening we'd love to have you on the show just call us we would actually he's awesome he helped catch the golden state killer I'm allowed to fan girl over Paul Holes. So, the gay community was understandably suspicious and wary of cops, but most of them liked

Virgil and would talk to him. And Virgil himself didn't really take Alan Broussard's disappearance very seriously at first until one night he picked up a copy of a gay newspaper at one of the clubs, and there was a story in the paper about a missing man named Jeff Jones. Something about the circumstances. The guy had gone missing the summer before, just like Alan. made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. And when he checked with one of his old contacts at missing persons

and got a look at a picture of Jeff, he felt even more certain that something sinister was going on, because Jeff and Alan looked enough alike to be brothers. And soon after that, another desperate mom sought him out, asking for help finding her son, Roger Goodlett. Roger had gone missing on July 22nd, just over a month after Alan Bursard. One of his friends had seen him get into a light-colored car,

and that was it. He was gone. On the classic true crime series investigative reports with Bill Curtis, Roger's mom described the last day she spent with her boy. He helped her put together some new patio furniture, she said, and they kind of chatted as they worked. They had lunch together. And Roger had just adopted a kitten, so they played with a little kitten too.

And it always, this is obviously a side issue, but it kills me anytime I hear that a murder victim had pets, because I always just wonder what happened to them. You know, it's just so little. sad. I hope Roger's little kitty went to a good home, poor baby, because I'm sure that's what Roger would have wanted. So, anyway, Roger and his mom had a really good day that last day together, and she was glad about that later. Really, like, watching her talk about that day just got me right in the fields. As Virgil made the rounds of the gay scene in Indianapolis,

he got the same story about each of his missing men. They all had open trusting personalities, maybe too trusting, too prone to going home with a guy they just met. By this time, missing persons' posters were everywhere in the gay neighborhoods around Indy. Seven men had disappeared, and neither the police nor the local media seemed especially interested. As you can imagine, this didn't exactly make the gay community feel love and respected. Yeah, I bet. There was a predator among them, and nobody seemed to give a shit. a gay newspaper called The Word

started publishing stories about the missing men and people started talking this reminds me so much of what happened a couple years ago in Toronto don't you think? Oh yeah with the Bruce MacArthur gaze. Definitely and in case you're not familiar campers in 2018 Toronto police caught this guy Bruce MacArthur

now he had been killing and dismembering gay men for at least eight years and the gay community had been trying to get the police to realize they had a serial killer for years before they finally caught a clue. And then they caught this guy red-handed. Like, it was like something out of criminal minds. They burst into his apartment, and he literally had a guy, like, tied up and terrified in his bedroom.

So they saved this guy in the nick of time. And then, so the dude was a landscaper, and they ended up finding the dismembered bodies of a bunch of his victims in, like, just like with Carmen from, for the patrons who were listening. Remember Carmen from our Patreon? extra in big planters because he had done all this expensive landscaping work all over Toronto and he put the body parts of some of these poor guys in the landscaping bananas. It's a crazy case. That was that was bonkers and infuriating. Yeah oh yeah very similar situation with the police

yeah. Anyway a few days after roger goodlett disappeared a 26 year old man named stephen hale went missing from the parking lot of a local library, a place known to be a gay cruising area after dark. This was the eighth man to vanish in just over a year, and at long last, the Indianapolis police were starting to get interested, especially Detective Mary Wilson, who felt it in her gut that these disappearances were connected and that there was foul play involved. Wilson had heard good things about the FBI's behavioral analysis unit in Quantico, so she got in touch with them and requested that a profiler take a look at the situation. Good call. The BAU validated her suspicion that they were dealing with a serial killer, and they gave her a basic profile to work with.

White male, most likely late 30s or early 40s, gay or bisexual, but deeply closeted, most likely married with a family. Hmm. It was a start, but of course, that profile could apply to thousands of men in the area. The profilers also gave her another good idea, though. They said that if she asked around, she would probably find a few men who had had unsettling encounters with this killer, but made it out alive. So, Detective Wilson started making inquiries around the gay bars and clubs downtown, and she put it out there that the police were interested to hear from anybody who had an odd or scary encounter like that. Enter Mark Goodyear. a man who we want to simultaneously hug, give a medal for bravery, and smack upside the head for putting himself in so much danger. If it wasn't for Mark, there's a good chance we wouldn't be sitting here right now talking about this case.

And her Baummeister might still be out there killing. Mark was a close friend of Roger Goodlett, the seventh man, to disappear. When Mark heard that the cops were looking for anyone who might have had a scary encounter with a man from one of the gay bars, His initial reaction was, Pah. Yeah, see, Mark had already been to police with a bombshell story a while back, and they'd pretty much laughed him out of the station.

When he tried to tell his story to the FBI, an agent had helpfully suggested that he'd probably just had a bad drug trip or something. Good God. So now they were allegedly looking for people who'd had encounters, just like the one he had tried to tell them about earlier. So frustrated Mark contacted Roger's mom,

and she put him in touch with P.I. Vandergriff. And once the P.I. heard what he had to say in tape-recorded interviews over the course of several weeks, he said, Mark, you've got to come with me and talk to Detective Mary Wilson. She'll listen to you, I promise. The man had caught Mark's eye because of the wolfish way he was looking at the missing person's flyers on the bulletin board at 501 Club. There was something creepy about it. It didn't seem like concern, more like delight. Some people have better radar than other's campers, and I think Mark Goodyear must have a radar system on him like the stealth bomber. Because from the moment he saw this man eyeing his friend Rogers' missing persons flyer at the

club that night, he knew in his gut that this was the guy who killed him. There are a lot of different paths one could take in a situation like this. Walk away? That would be the safest course, but Mark couldn't bring himself to do it. Get to a phone and call police? Well, and say what? There's the guy here and I don't like the way he's looking at my best friend's missing persons poster, that wouldn't exactly summon the cavalry, would it? Mark only had a few seconds to decide, and what he ended up doing was striking up a conversation with the guy. That's my friend Roger, he said.

The man seemed kind of startled at first, but then he stuck out his hand and said, I'm Brian smart. They fell into conversation. Brian didn't seem to want to talk about Roger Goodlet, but he did seem interested in getting to know Mark. He invited him to grab a drink, and soon the two of them were nursing beers at the bar and getting to know each other. Brian said he was a landscape artist from out of town, and right now he was staying in a spectacular house, about 20 minutes outside Indy, getting it ready for the new owners to move in. Hey, he said, you want to see it?

They have an indoor pool in a full bar. Let's go have a drink and jump in the pool. I just get goosebumps imagining what this moment must have been like for Mark. I mean, here he is. He's hanging out with a guy who's setting off every inner alarm bell he has. a guy he suspects may have murdered his friend. So most of us would have probably said, no, thank you, but Mark,

I'm sure against his better judgment, agreed. He was just feeling this overwhelming drive to find out if his gut instinct might be right if this man had done something to his best friend. Maybe he could find some kind of evidence, something the cops could act on. Now, was this the smartest move he could make? Hell no.

Would we advocate doing this? Hell no, but Mark had started this ball rolling and he felt like he just couldn't bring himself to stop it now. Final girl, energy. Oh, definitely big time. Mark, I would be screaming at you if this was a horror movie, but you got to do what you got to do to get your Scooby-Doo on, I guess. You got to do what you do to be Scooby-Duby-Duby-Doo. So it took a while to get to the place. Mark realized at one point that they were driving, you know, far ways out of the way. the city, and into what he called

rich people territory. When they reached the house, Mark caught a quick glimpse of a sign that said something farm, but he couldn't see what the something was. It was really dark. The house itself was enormous, and it would have been gorgeous if it wasn't for all the clutter everywhere.

Brian led him down a staircase into a big, dimly lit pool room, and for a second, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. There were dark figures standing all around the pool of just watching them. And then he realized they weren't people. They were mannequins, which I think is worse. So much worse. Brian noticed him staring and said, oh, the owner doesn't like to be alone.

They keep him company. Okay, sure. That makes perfect sense. Right? That's a perfectly normal thing to say. Yeah, no problem. Mm-hmm. There's mannequins to keep you company. What? Unbelievable creepy. No, thank you. Brian offered Mark a drink, and in the first self-protective move he'd made so far, he turned it down, saying he was way too drunk already. This was part of Mark's strategy the whole evening to act a whole lot drunker than he really was. Yeah, I think that's actually really smart to give the guy a false sense of security, make yourself seem more vulnerable than you are. It seemed to irritate Brian that he turned down the drink, but after disappearing into a bathroom for a couple minutes, Brian seemed to feel much better, much bouncier.

Mark said later that he felt sure he'd done some kind of speed in there. Oh, yeah. Brian said, jump in the pool. The temperature's great. And as Mark swam laps back and forth, Brian sat on the edge and chattered away about all sorts of stuff. And out of nowhere, he said, hey, want to see a trick I just learned? Okay, for the record, when the creepy guy with the mannequins asks you, hey, you want to see a trick, you say no. Okay, say it with me, campers.

No. Or if you prefer, no thank you, if you want to be polite about it. And you also might want to make it clear to the creepy guy with the mannequins that if he takes one more step towards you, you're going to have to beat him unconscious with his own arm. Or the mannequins. Oh, that's even better. That actually would have been the perfect send-off for her Baumister, you know, just beaten to death with like a torn off mannequin leg.

Too bad we couldn't make that happen. So anyway, Brian said, Want to see a trick? And he picked up a length of hose that was lying along the edge of the pool. He said you could get the best orgasm of your life if you let somebody choke you during sex. He pointed at his neck where the carotid artery was and explained how it worked.

You had to put pressure there and hold it. It was a rush like no other, he said. And the best part, the part he really liked, was how the person looked while you were choking them. He said, the lips change color, and sometimes they crack. The eyes bulge out, the face gets all purple and red. That's how you can tell it's working. Oh, no.

Mark, whose life was probably flashing before his eyes by this point, must have looked pretty freaked out. Oh, God. Possibly to reassure him, Brian lay down on a chaise lounge and said, here, you would do it to me. A little quid pro quo, Clarice. Yeah, that's going to be a quid pro no. Sorry. Mark was too scared to say no. Everything that had happened so far had validated his gut feeling about this guy that he was the one who killed Roger. And maybe the other missing men, too.

He just wanted to get out of there alive. So he got out of the pool and slipped the hose around Brian's neck. Brian told him how to tighten it. He seemed to enjoy himself very much, and that's as descriptive as we want to get about that. You're welcome, campers. We're sorry. Now, of course, it was Mark's turn. I can only imagine how terrifying it was.

was when Brian put his hands around his throat. Mark later said he felt numb and, quote, compelled to do whatever he wanted. But there was also a part of him that thought, If I take this as far as I can, I might get some evidence of what happened to Roger. Wow. Brian was very deft with his hands, and Mark could tell he'd done this many, many times. This is no trick he'd just learned as he claimed a few minutes ago. And as Brian tightened the hose around Mark's neck and he felt himself getting loosey,

he decided that he didn't want to wait around to find out anymore. So he went limp, faking unconsciousness. Brian let go of the hose and whispered his name. Shook him a little. Mark. Mark. Finally, Mark opened his eyes. Brian seemed annoyed.

He said, you scared the shit out of me. People can die doing this, he said. people have had accidents before. Mark decided to let the chips fall where they may and he said, is that what happened to Roger? But Brian didn't say anything. He just smiled. It was obvious he was high as balls by now on whatever he kept disappearing into the bathroom to use and soon he passed out on one of the Chez loungeses by the pool and started snoring. So now Mark was alone in this big dark house and he decided to take advantage of that. And as quietly as he could, he made his way up the stairs and prowled around, snooping in all the various bedrooms and bathrooms.

He noticed that there were several kids' bedrooms in the house and lots of women's stuff, clothes and toiletries, not to mention all the clutter. No way was just a brand new house being prepared for new owners. It was obvious that a family with several kids had been living here, probably for years. He was hoping to find something that had an address on it, or a name. He had a feeling Brian Smart was a pseudonym, but he didn't find anything. He snuck back down to the pool room where Brian was still snoring, and he noticed that Dut had left his pants in a heap on the tile. And in a sphincter puckering scene right out of a scary movie, Mark started pawing through

Brian's pants, looking for a wallet. Oh, God. If he could get a look at a driver's license, he'd have something solid he could show the police. So anybody else feel like you might be about to just pee your pants a little bit? Yeah, me too. but as he was searching for the wallet Brian stirred in his sleep

and Mark cautiously laid those pants back down where he found him and I do not blame him one bit because Brian woke up a couple minutes later and Mark told him he wanted to go back to town. That must have been a tense moment for Mark but Brian just said sure get your stuff and on the ride back

to Indianapolis he said you're a good sport we should hang out again the next day Mark went to the police and as we already know he got laughed out the door and went home pissed off and frustrated. Fuck you. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'd be pissed off and frustrated, too.

I'm still kind of pissed off and frustrated. I mean, imagine, like, you literally just risked your life to try and get some info on this person that you suspect had something to do with these disappearances, and this is how you're treated. My law enforcement. Oi. So, after that, Mark started getting phone calls from Brian.

His new buddy obviously felt like opening up. So what all did Brian tell him during all those late-night calls? Well, he never admitted to murdering anyone exactly. He danced around it. He called them accidents, times when the choking had gone too far. When Mark asked him how many of these accidents he'd had, Brian gave a short little laugh and said, somewhere between 50 and 60, I think. 50 and 60. Holy shit. He would never say whether Mark's friend Roger was one of them. At one point, Mark told him,

You're hurting people. You have to stop doing this. I'm going to tell the police. Surely there was no way Brian could have known that Mark had already spoken to an officer and been sent away, but he laughed anyway. He said, they'll never believe you. That was the most frustrating, most heart-wrenching thing somehow, that he was right about that. Now, though, as he sat in Detective Mary Wilson's office with P.I. Vandergriff, he was getting a very different reaction. Detective Wilson took frantic notes as he talked, and when he finished, she said, Can you take us out and show us this house?

Mark said, yeah, of course he would. But they quickly realized there was a problem. Mark didn't remember exactly where the place was or how to get there. It was dark the night he went there, and he'd been a little drunk and a lot anxious. He and Mary Wilson drove and drove, and Mark felt like they were close, which it turned out later they were. But all the properties out there looked the same. and there were hundreds of them. He remembered the sign at the end of the drive that said something farm,

but most of the places out here were called something farm. So after hours of driving and searching and trying to jog Mark's memory, he and Detective Wilson headed back to Indianapolis. It was horribly frustrating for both of them. And that was it for a while. I mean, the Brian's smart lead was the most tantalizing thing Detective Wilson had so far, but what did they really have on him? The name didn't show up in any of the police.

databases underlining Mark's suspicion that it probably wasn't the dude's real name. They had a basic description of the guy, a description of the car, a light gray sedan, but Mark hadn't gotten the license plate number because he had no way to write it down, and of course he can't like ask for a pen and paper and copy it down without arousing Brian's suspicions. So, you know, what's he supposed to do? They did put a trace on Mark's phone, and they managed to capture Brian's phone number during one of the calls, but he was calling from a cell phone. And this was 1994. Back then, there was no way to connect a cell phone number with the person using it. Once, Mark and the PI tried to lay a trap for Brian's mart. The next time he called, Mark

set up a date with him at the 501 club. When the time came for them to meet up, P.I. Vandergriff and one of his investigators were waiting in the wings, hoping to get Brian's license plate number to give to Detective Wilson, maybe also following him back to the house and get an address. But, of course, Brian never showed. get spooked? Did something more appealing come along? We have no way of knowing. All this took its toll on Mark Goodyear, because how could it not? I'd be surprised if those mannequins didn't haunt his nightmares, not to mention the memory of Brian's face as he choked him.

God, right? Bless his heart. And as dangerous as it was, what Mark did was also incredibly brave, and I can only assume that Roger must have meant a lot to him. Just so you know, Katie, I would totally descend. into the lair of a possible serial killer for you. No, no. You don't need to thank me. I just wanted you to be aware. Not all heroes wear capes, you know.

Bitch, if you did anything like this for me, I would haunt you till the end of time. Call the goddamn police instead. The ingratitude is unbelievable. Yeah, that would have worked out great. You saw how the cops treated him the next day. They wouldn't have done shit. True.

True. I think I'd try to work out some kind of sting or just follow the guy to his car at the end of the night and write down the license plate number just to give the police as a tip, tell them he was acting suspiciously or something. Yeah, that would certainly be a hell of a lot safer. I mean, Mark is extremely lucky to be alive, in my opinion. And I know we're pausing the story for a minute to talk about this, but we'll get back to in a second. I would like to know what you think about why Brian slash obviously Herb didn't just. kill Mark that night. Like, that's the part that confuses me a little bit. You know, it's interesting. I mean, most serial killers let some potential victims go. I mean, you hear tons of those. I had a date with Bundy stories.

And they're, you know, verifiable. They're true stories. Oh, sure, yeah. And I'm sure there are lots of reasons why they do it. Like, you know, the God complex of, oh, well, I giveeth and I takeeth away. I choose who gets to live. I'm a good person. blah, blah, blah. But also maybe once he got him home, he realized Mark didn't quite fit his

ideal victim profile. Yeah, Herb was very particular about victim selection. He tried to go for men he didn't think anybody would miss, which just infuriates me because it's so arrogant to think you can discern that just from like a few minutes of conversation. But of course, serial killers and arrogance go together like cake and ice cream or shit and shineola, whichever you prefer. So it shouldn't surprise us too much. Right. So maybe he thought Mark would be too dangerous a bet. Maybe he struck Herb as somebody with a big social circle. Maybe he mentioned his family during their conversation. Who knows? Yeah, and it's also possible he was afraid he wouldn't be able to overpower Mark. I mean, Herb was a skinny guy. Apparently, he was really insecure

about it, and he might have just realized Mark was too big to subdue, especially once he got him back to the house, because Mark said Herb was drinking and doing Coke, and maybe he realized at some point he was just too messed up. Right. And remember that Mark was purposefully trying to act drunker than he was. Like maybe Herb initially thought he'd be easy to take down because he was so drunk. And then he realized when he asked Mark to choke him that he was really strong or not as impaired as he thought. Oh, and also, remember, he offered Mark a drink and then got annoyed when Mark turned it down. So I bet there was something in that drink, like some kind of sedative. And when Mark didn't take it, maybe that was enough right there to put the kibosh on the plan.

I bet that's it. Yeah, because if I asked, would he get annoyed that he turned the drink down, you know? Right. Yeah, I bet that was totally the case. There had to have been a sedative in there. By the way, it's also odd to me that Herb allowed Mark to choke him. Yeah. I wonder why he'd want to make himself vulnerable like that.

Did he get off on it? Or was he, like, trying to put Mark at ease, like, oh, see, it's okay. I'll let you do it to be first. I think it was probably the latter, like, trying to put him at ease, because people like Herb, despite their lack of empathy, tend to be really good at reading people. And I suspect he probably smelled fear on Mark a mile off. You know what it's like? What is it like? It is like Gacy and his rope trick.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. They're, like, creepily similar. So, for those of you that don't know, John Wayne Gacey, the creepy clown back. bastard, had this little trick where he would show his potential victims the handcuff trick or the rope trick, where he would be able to get out of some handcuffs because he had the key or some rope because he didn't tie it right. And then he'd show them how to get out. Like, he'd showed him, oh, look, I caught out of it. You want to try? And then his victims, of course, couldn't get out of it. And then he had them. So. And then that was the first thing I thought

when he said, want to see a trick. Like, well, it's just like, gay. That is John Wayne, motherfucking Gasey. And with the sedatives, this is like a Dahmer, too. Man. Oh, for sure. Yeah. This was concurrent with Dahmer, pretty much. Gacy, I think it was a little before this.

So Gacy put down the blueprint for this kind of shit. Yeah, it's amazing how similar these guys can be. It's very creepy. So creepy. And it's interesting that her kept in contact with Mark after that night, too. It's like he enjoyed flirting with exceive. exposure. Yeah, it's like he would dance just right on the knife edge of admitting he was a serial killer. I think he probably got off on shocking Mark and scaring him and probably felt confident

in doing that because, you know, Mark didn't know his real name or anything about him. With some serials, I think there's also an element of craving recognition and revealing their true selves. I mean, nobody ever got to see Herb's true face except the people he killed, and that's a lonely life. And people pretend like, you know, violent psychopaths don't have emotions. They do have emotions. They just don't experience emotion in the same way as the rest of us. And they can be lonely. You know, they can, they can have that sense of like nobody else is like me. Nobody understands me. So I think there was probably something he liked about Mark and he just indulged his urge to, just like you said, flirt with disaster. He might have also been trying to keep tabs on the guy. And of course,

he might have been thinking about killing him. Oh, I definitely think he was thinking about killing him. Yeah. All right, let's get back to the story. Mark and the P.I. tried to get Brian to meet Mark again. But he stood him up, thwarting their attempt to get a license number and follow him back to the house. Time went on.

Julie and the kids came back from Lake Wawesi. The kids' school started up again. And then, in early 1995, the Baumeister's son, found that skull in the woods behind Fox Hollow. And, of course, we know that story already from part one. How deftly, expertly, Herb handled Julie's questions and how she seemed to accept his absurd explanation and forget all about it. She never reported it to the police.

And she had a serious conversation with the kids about what kinds of things they were and were not allowed to talk about outside the house. Oh, man, that's so healthy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so there's a full human. and skeleton in the woods behind the house happens to everybody at some point right although i mean i guess in fairness to julie however much our spouses might like like gross pee jokes and whatnot most of us probably wouldn't jump right to my husband must have killed somebody and dumped him in the woods i mean

most of us would just never our brains would never go there yeah your kids unknowingly reenacted stand by me and you're like can't talk about it outside the house got to keep your mouth shut yeah If our girl Julie ever wondered what Herb was doing with all those hours he spent alone while she and the kids were away every summer, she never told anybody about it. Julie had gotten so used to letting Herb run the show, make all the decisions, dictate the narrative of their lives, that it came naturally to her to accept his explanation about the bones in the backyard. Not long after the kids found the skeleton, more men started disappearing in Indianapolis. on April 1st, 46-year-old Michael Kiern didn't show up for work. In August, 35-year-old Jerry Comer dropped off the map. His car was later found abandoned in a mall parking lot.

Jerry was the 10th man to disappear in less than three years. And then, about a year after his close encounter with Brian Smart, Mark Goodyear finally spotted him again. It had been a while since he'd had a phone call from Brian, but now, as he headed into one of his favorite bars, he saw Brian parking his car in the lot. He whispered to his friend, hey, I got to run inside. Can you write down that license plate number? And as Mark ducked into the bar, his buddy carefully noted the number, plus the make and model of the car. Now they were cooking with gas. They finally had something concrete to take to Detective Wilson. It only took a minute for her to run the plate. Brian Smart's car was registered to a Herbert Ballmeister. Detective Wilson raised an eyebrow

when she saw his address, the Ritzie Westfield area, very close to where she and Mark had spent that frustrating afternoon trying to find the big cluttered house with all the mannequins. She did a little preliminary homework on Baumeister and saw that he owned a small chain of thrift stores, a prominent citizen, well-to-do, no criminal record, but he fits some elements of the FBI's profile too. Detective Wilson could feel her blood start pumping. She and her partner headed out to save a lot to talk to Mr. Baumeister. I like Detective Wilson's style. Some detectives might dance around the issue for a while before finally dropping the hammer, but not Mary.

Mary does not dick around. She was just like, so, Mr. Baummeister, we're investigating the disappearances of a number of men in Indianapolis, and your name has come up as a suspect. We'd like to search your house and surrounding property. Please and thank you. And I would pay a large amount of money to go back in time and be a fly on the wall at that moment. Herb looked at her as though she'd just taken a live mouse out of her purse. She said he was the weirdest person I ever met. He instantly started stammering and sweating buckets and generally just giving the impression

that he was about 10 seconds away from peeing himself in fear and trying to run in four different directions at once. Okay. Did Herb only a moat and piss? Is that? Yes, exactly. Like, remember the raccoon, the whole thing we talked about that in part one? So, at first, he denied ever setting foot in a gay bar in his life.

but when Detective Wilson explained about the license played and let him know they had witnesses who would testify otherwise he admitted that he did sometimes go bar hopping at the gay clubs and he said his wife didn't know and he didn't want it getting out

and that's why he lied. Of course, that wasn't what Detective Wilson cared about. She wasn't interested in his sexual orientation except as it pertained to these missing men. After a few minutes of stilted conversation with Herb continuing to sweat bullets the entire time,

Herb unequivocally refused to let them search his property. And he said that if they had any more questions to ask him, they would need to go through his lawyer. All righty then. It's going to be that way, is it? Detective Wilson didn't love the idea of talking to Julie Baummeister. She didn't want to have to be the one to break it to this woman that not only was her husband frequenting gay bars behind her back, but he was also a suspect in a series of disappearances and probable murders. That's not a fun conversation. But if Herb was going to throw up a roadblock like this, she didn't feel like she had much choice. Julie was the only other person in the world who could consent to a

search of their property. So Wilson and her partner motored on over to the Save-A-Lot where Julie was the boss. Julie said later that this first meeting with the detectives was sort of a blur. She remembered them saying the words, Your husband is a suspect in a series of homosexual homicides and thinking, okay, I know what homosexual means. I know what homicide means. Now, what do they mean together? And she said all she wanted was for them to leave so she could cry. But before they did, she rallied herself enough to tell them that if they wanted to search Fox Hollow, they were going to need a warrant, because she sure as hell wasn't going to give him permission. That is an awful lot of loyalty. Yaman's hasn't earned, Julie.

No joke, right? It must have been a surreal day for her. I mean, she knew Herb was an odd person. She knew he had a warped sense of humor and a control. personality. She didn't like how he seemed to love news stories where people got murdered or lost their homes and fires, and how he had a total contempt for anybody he perceived as less successful than he was. She definitely wasn't in love with him anymore or anything, but where did this come from? He was a suspect in a murder? No, no, no, not a murder. A series of murders? And not

only that, but homosexual murders? That is a lot to I digest. Man, I wish we knew what the scene was like that night when Herb got home from work. I imagine it was nuclear. Oh, you know it. In fact, a few days later, Julie called Mary Wilson at work and yelled at her for ruining her marriage. That's what was ruining your marriage, Julie. She said, the police are not coming to my house, tearing through things, upsetting my children, all on the word of a psycho named Mark Goodyear whom my husband has never even heard of. Yeah, this is

all on Mary, really. She's just picking on your husband for shits and giggles. You know, she's for funsies. Because after a while, you get tired of watching that Texaco sign turnaround. You're right, Jules, it's all Mary's fault. Yeah, like, it wasn't your husband's

latent sexuality or his, you know, murderous necrophiliac tendencies. It was a detective doing her fucking job. One of the only ones that did their fucking job in this case. And whatever Herb may have initially told Julie about Mark Goodyear, he eventually told her the guy was someone they should fear. More than once, he told her, Mark Goodyear could bring us all down. We should be afraid of him. Herb and Julie may have seemed like a united front to the police,

both refusing to allow the cops to search Fox Hollow without a warrant. But unsurprisingly, behind the scenes, their relationship was in its final death throes. They spent that Christmas apart that year for the first time in their marriage. The business was floundering so badly by now that they were facing foreclosure. Herb was totally off the rails when it came to save a lot. He was showing up at work drunk, yelling at the staff, demanding they show him the kind of deference a fucking medieval surf would show to a lord. It was becoming a miserable place to work.

Then? He closed one of their stores without consulting Julie. That was it. In January of 1996, she filed for divorce. Yeah, that was the final straw. Like, not the murder investigation. Ms. Julie, you are an odd duck. Meanwhile, Julie's attorney, Bill Windling,

felt like she was in denial about the whole situation, and he stayed in touch with Detective Wilson. Several times he told her, look, you know I can't tell you anything specific, but just don't drop this Baumeister lead. Keep looking into it. It was obvious to Mary that Julie had told her attorney something important, something he wished he could reveal,

but couldn't because of attorney-client privilege. Julie, of course, had told him about the skull. What a horrible position to be in, by the way, right? Like, that's one of the reasons why I think I'd have a hard time being a defense attorney. I mean, as important as they are to our justice system, if I had some tidbit of information that could bring in a serial killer and say, like, God knows how many lives down the line, I'd have a real hard time just sitting on that. And you'd have to. And I understand why they have to. I just don't know if I could do it. So I'd end up getting

disbarred and possibly put in jail. And it'd just be a disaster. Mary Wilson was desperate to file for a search warrant on Fox Hollow, but she'd hit a snag. Herb's house was out of her jurisdiction. and for some reason Hamilton County, the department that would have to issue the warrant, was dragging its feet. I suspect it was probably because Herb was wealthy and still considered a prominent citizen because the abysmal failure of his business

wasn't public knowledge yet. So unless Mary could show the Hamilton County DA more evidence than they had or get permission from one of the Baumeisters, she wouldn't be able to conduct a search. So finally, the final straw came for Julie when Herb, again without consulting her first, picked up their son from school one afternoon

and whisked him off to the vacation house at Lake Wawesi. That same day, Julie discovered that he'd completely emptied out one of their bank accounts. When she finally tracked him down, furious, he said, he just wanted a little vacation and some father-suntime. Yeah, that's unsettling. So she's wondering, like, was he going to take our son and, like, run? Like, what is he doing? So the next day, Julie and her attorney sat down in Detective Mary Wilson's office and told her about the skeleton that the kids had discovered in the woods the year before.

And finally, they had permission to search Fox Hollow. Julie and her attorney led the searchers to the wooded place where a little over a year earlier their son had found the skull. And after that, it didn't take long. There were hundreds of bones. Some had obviously been burned while others were still intact. Eventually, more than 60 volunteers showed up to help search the site. It took days to unearth 5,500 bones.

and teeth, the remains of four bodies. They thought they were finished at this point, but then one of the Baumeister's neighbors showed up. They'd found some bones, too, on their property. So they took the searchers past the crime seam tape and onto their adjoining farm, and it quickly became clear that they weren't even almost done excavating this place. The bones were just laid out, right there in the open. In a ditch, they could see several human rib cages and spines, like just sitting there. It took their breath away. It was so macaw.

It was like seen out of the Texas chainsaw massacre. And over here, they also found some other stuff, some old cans of Herb's favorite beer, Miller Genuine Draft, and pairs of handcuffs. And the fact that there was beer there, by the way, makes me wonder if he was like Bundy

like visiting the sites. Because why would there be just cans of beer there? You know, I feel like he was probably visiting those dump sites. Anyway. And it's horrible as, this is campers, I need to stop for a second and react to just the audacity of this ferret-faced little shit to bury victims on his neighbor's property. Like, I'm sure the Homeowners Association

would have something to say about that. And on this one point, I'd agree with them. Hell hath no fury like an A-choice scorned. Yeah, Karen's going to lose her complete mind over this, and I agree. I'm right there with you, Karen. So when it was all over, they'd found seven more bodies on the neighbor's land, 11 bodies in total, which is one more than they even knew was missing and only eight would be identified through dental records which is really sad so that means three of these men remain unknown which is just the saddest thing i've ever heard so there are still to this day three families still waiting for loved ones to come home and wondering if their loved ones might have been one of those three unidentified bodies the eight men who were definitively

identified from the remains found at fox hollow were richard hamilton Manuel rescindez Johnny Bear, Alan Livingstone, Alan Broussard, Jeff Jones, Michael Keirn, and Mark Goodyear's friend, Roger Goodlett. Once they started unearthing bodies at Fox Hollow, of course, the investigators realized they had to go get the Baumeister's kid out of his father's custody. Because he still had him there at the vacation house, and Julie was in a near panic about it. Finally, Julie has, like, woken up and realized that there's some shit going on that she needs to be concerned about. So a couple of officers went out there not having any idea what to expect, like if Herb would try to fight them or take the kid hostage or God knows what. But fortunately for everybody, Herb surrendered his son without a fight and they brought him home to his mom. But they didn't take Herb into custody at that point for some reason.

In fact, they didn't even bring him in for questioning. Now, why the hell that was? I cannot imagine. It frustrated the ever-loving hell out of poor Detective Wilson who was itching to get him into. to an interrogation room, but again, she was out of her jurisdiction, so it wasn't her call. And in interviews about the case later, she tried to be nice about the Hamilton County detectives and, like, give them the benefit of the doubt, but you can just tell she's just like seething about it under the surface, like, you freaking idiots, and I don't blame her.

I'd have had his ass in a sling before they got that first skeleton out of the ground if it was me, but they had some big bag of bullshit about not wanting to talk to him until they finished the search or some such piffle, because I guess in their minds, you know, one full skeleton, in a dude's backyard isn't enough to justify a little chat with the detective, especially if the dude's wealthy enough or whatever. And actually, the argument was that they didn't know yet whether the bones were human. And they didn't want to make a move until that was confirmed, because this was at the start of the search, obviously.

But I don't know, y'all. I'm mad about it. And I know Detective Wilson was mad about it, too. Like, even if they were dog bones or whatever, just take a minute. And also, they were like full skeletons. They were skulls. Like, there were skulls. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

I completely don't get it. Even if they were chimpanzee skeletons, just take them in. What else has a skull like that? Come on. Just in casees. You know, the dude had his kid. If it was enough to get his kid taken away, just, just, what's the harm of at least saying, like, come down to the station and talk to us? They didn't do it.

We're getting hysterical, and it's for a reason, campers. I think they were hoping it wasn't a serial murderer case because they bungled it so badly. The case is the epitome of the phrase, what else could go wrong? And what else went wrong was this. Pretty much right after the officers picked up his son, Herb did a runner. By the time the forensic anthropologist had confirmed the bones were human, he was nowhere to be found. They didn't, like, leave anybody to just keep an eye on him. A little less than a week later, Mary Wilson got a call from Herb's brother Brad.

Herb had been estranged from all his siblings for years, which is just a shocker. Yeah, I know, right. So Brad had no loyalty to the guy. He said Herb had just called him from Fenville, Michigan, saying he was on a business trip. Yeah, right. And needed some fast cash. The next day, he called Brad again, asking for more money, which is like, geez, dude, what are you spending it on? Which, I know what he was spending it on.

It was probably fucking cocaine. Brad told Herb he needed to call and talk the police, make arrangements to turn himself in. But Herb didn't seem to like that idea. The next day, Herb crossed the border into Canada, and a little less than a week later, Canadian authorities were called to a park. There was a man in a car there, dead from what appeared to be a single gunshot wound to the head. Herb had taken the path that many killers before him took to avoid facing the consequences of their actions. He'd taken his own life.

He left a note, but it didn't mention a word about the murders or the bones in the woods behind Fox Hollow. He said he just couldn't go on anymore, with his marriage and business both failing so badly. The note ended, I'm going to eat a peanut butter sandwich now and go to sleep. And this is interesting. The night before Herp's suicide, a Canadian trooper had spotted him sleeping in his car. She knocked on the window and asked Herb what he was doing there. Herb said he was just driving through. He'd gotten sleepy behind the wheel,

so he was taking a cat nap so he'd be safe to drive again. As she spoke to Herb, the trooper noticed a big pile of videotapes in the backseat of the car. But when Herb's body was found the next day, the tapes were gone. P.I. Vandergriff, author Ryan Green, and others think that these may have been tapes of the murders. tapes he threw out before taking his own life. I absolutely think that's what they were. Because otherwise, why would they be gone?

Like, why would he have disposed of them before he killed himself? And I also think he seems like the type to record his murders. So I completely agree with that. I mean, aside from the bodies, which I think weren't trophies so much as the product he was looking for of his murders, he didn't ever keep a trophy. So that might have been his trophies. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So obviously the consensus is that Herb Baumeister is responsible for the murders of 11 men whose bodies were found at Fox Hollow Farm.

But was he also the I-70 killer? A lot of people close to the case think so. The Ohio and Indiana police even held a press conference years ago to link him to the murderers. Yeah, it's never been proven, and it most likely won't ever be. I mean, Herb isn't around anymore to question the craven little shit basket, but I think there's a strong chance it was him. The MO matches pretty well. I mean, obviously he would have had to commit those murders while he was traveling, so he didn't have access to a house and a wooded backyard for those. So that part would have been different by necessity. The way the victims died by choking, fits, and the times and places match up eerily well with Herb's traveling schedule. Plus, that police sketch of the man last seen with one of the victims looks just like him. And there's an eyewitness who identified Herb's picture as the man last seen with his friend who ended up one of the I-70 victims later that. that night. Not only that, but the I-70 killing stopped right around the time that Baummeister's moved to Fox Hollow. And I mean, if you'd been killing on the road and now suddenly you had a big

private house with 18 acres of woodland behind it and a wife and kids who took off for their vacation house for like months every summer, wouldn't you switch methods? I mean, wouldn't it be better to have all that privacy and all that room for body disposal? And last but not least, if Herb was the I-70 killer, that would fit really well with what he told Mark Goodyear, that he'd killed between 50 and 60 people. Yeah, no arguments for me. I think he absolutely did it. Yeah, and this is very intriguing, too.

According to P.I. Vandergriff, who's gone on record as saying he thought Mary Wilson did a great job, but other than that, the Baumeister case really should have been investigated more thoroughly. Herb had a brother in Texas, who was found dead one afternoon in a jacuzzi. Now, the authorities felt there was foul play involved, but the case is still unsolved. Now, Vandergriff says he has no idea whether or not. Herb was in Texas at the time, but, quote, this incident occurred around the same time Herb was strangling people in his pool. Now, I ask you, does that ring too close to home, or doesn't it?

Yeah, it sure as hell does, if you ask me. And there's a creepy little post script to this story, because of course there is. According to the family who owned Fox Hollow Farm after the Baumeister's left, the place is haunted as all hell. There's a whole documentary about it. It's called The Haunting of Fox Hollow Farm, where the family claims to have had all. all kinds of terrifying experiences there, like, especially in the pool room, where all the mannequins were, and where he most likely committed the murders based on Mark Goodyear's experience. Now, I've seen the documentary, and it scared the shit out of me, and I don't even really believe

in ghosts, so that's saying something. I was like, oh, God, like, I just put the light on tonight. Yeah, I don't believe in ghosts, but I usually love ghost hunting shows purely for their entertainment value. Yeah, they're fun for sure. But I've seen a couple of, like, the famous. crews try to ghost hunt on Fox Hollow Farms and it squicks me out quite a bit. It feels just disrespectful. Yeah, I have to agree with that. I mean, it's one thing if you're like ghost

hunting in an old Civil War battlefield or somewhere. I mean, those folks are long gone. It's part of history. They don't have living relatives who miss them and are still dealing with like the emotional fallout of their brutal murders. But this case is different. I mean, I just wonder how the families feel about those kinds of shows. Imagine not great. Although obviously, they're not all going to feel the same way, of course, because they're all individual people. But I don't know. I can see why it's fascinating if you're into paranormal phenomenon and stuff. But I can also see why it skews you out, KT.

Yeah. So I think we'll all agree that that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one 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 Jamie, Giovanna, Shelley, and Brittany. We appreciate you 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, plus an extra episode a month.

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