Photos By Jay Goldz
“THE HAWKS ARE CIRCLING,” Hunter Vale tells me from a booth at Almost Famous, a bar on the 700 block of Massachusetts Avenue.
Though he’s just 31 years old, Vale is an archivist of the earliest years of the Indianapolis LGBTQ+ community, posting vintage photos, magazine articles, and other ephemera on his Queer Circle City Instagram account. His role as high-profile historian of the scene means he was one of the first stops for true crime content creators when newly elected Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison announced he was reopening the effort to identify the tens of thousands of partial human remains discovered at the family estate of Herb Baumeister.
The wealthy Indianapolis business owner, who lived with his wife and three kids in a massive Westfield mansion, might have been responsible for the deaths of far more men than police had realized, Jellison said in a 2022 press release. A number of the people whose bodies were found at Baumeister’s 18-acre Fox Hollow Farm were last seen just steps from where Vale and I were sitting during Mass Ave’s golden era as a gay nightlife hot spot.
“That announcement was the first time a lot of these true crime shows or podcasts had heard about Baumeister,” Vale says. “Suddenly, they all came calling. ‘What do you know about the case? Can you get us in touch with any of the victims’ families?’
“A lot of it doesn’t feel good. A lot of it feels like they’re ready to make Herb Baumeister into the next Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy. Into a household name.”
But telling the story of Indy’s missing men might be harder than these content creators think. This isn’t a story that received abundant media coverage while it was unfolding, unlike cases such as California’s Night Stalker homicides or the Son of Sam shootings in New York. Instead, “It started as a murmur that this was happening,” says Lawrence Shepherd. The 53-year-old graduate of Center Grove High School has lived in New Orleans since the late 1990s, but before that, he was a fixture in the Indianapolis gay scene. Then a volunteer at LGBTQ+ support organization Indiana Youth Group (IYG), Shepherd spent his days assisting minors kicked out of their homes by parents unwilling to accept their sexuality, as well as providing editorial assistance at The Word, a newspaper that catered to the gay community. At night, you could find him at the same bars from which men were starting to disappear—not that anyone realized that quite yet. “Guys were just gone.”
Ted Fleischaker, then the publisher of The Word, concurs. “At first, nobody was looking and nobody was paying attention,” he says. At the time, the obvious assumption when a regular at a bar stopped coming around was that they’d moved or fallen ill (remember, this was also the height of the AIDS epidemic, which claimed thousands of lives across Central Indiana). “We were 21 or 22,” Shepherd says. “People fell in love, or got a job, or just moved on a whim. Nobody’s first thought was that someone got taken by some serial killer.”
And in the 1990s, you couldn’t just text someone or check their social media to see what might have changed. “By the time you got to the point where you’d say, ‘I haven’t seen him since two weeks ago at the Metro,’ they were already dead,” Fleischaker says.
By May 28, 1993, the last day 20-year-old John Lee Bayer was seen alive, rumors that men had been vanishing had grown wider. Jeffrey Allen Jones, who went by Jeff, was 31 when his absence was noted a few weeks later, around July 6. Richard Douglas Hamilton Jr., who was 20, was last seen on July 31; Allen Lee Livingston (age 27) and Manuel Martinez Resendez (age 31) were last seen on August 6. All of them had been spotted in and around downtown’s gay clubs, which included the 501 Tavern at 501 N. College Ave., the Varsity Lounge at 1517 N. Pennsylvania St., and the Metro, which is still in operation today at 707 Massachusetts Ave.
The bars’ owners pressured Fleischaker to “find out what’s going on and get this fixed,” he says, noting that many of the bars were also advertisers in his paper. “People were disappearing from the same clubs that were doing business with me. They didn’t want that reputation.”
The more Fleischaker looked into the missing men, the more he saw a pattern, and the more earnestly he believed that—as had happened just a few years earlier in Milwaukee with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer—there was a predator at work in our local bars. He wrote as much in The Word, and coverage of the rumors also appeared in other local gay papers such as The New Works News, which published a first-person account of one person’s escape from an assailant (who in retrospect seemed strikingly similar to Baumeister). Eventually, the publications even ran a sketch of a person of interest in some disappearances. But those who followed the mainstream news remained in the dark.
“It never made the TV news ever,” Fleischaker says, nor was coverage of the growing number of missing men a feature on local news radio stations. The same goes for The Indianapolis Star and the News, both of which were owned by Eugene S. Pulliam, an uncle of Dan Quayle, U.S. vice president from 1989 to 1993. By most accounts, Pulliam’s politics reflected those of most conservatives of that era. So did his papers, Fleischaker says. “I think they were glad to see any of us die or disappear that they possibly could see die or disappear, because that was one less bitchy queen out there calling them up,” he says.
Photos By Jay Goldz
There’s an argument, however, that the lack of coverage was actually a sign of restraint. Elon Green is a journalist and author whose 2021 book, Last Call, is a nonfiction look at a serial killer active in New York’s gay community during the same years men were turning up missing in Indianapolis. “There’s this assumption that if a killer’s victims were gay or the killer was presumed to be gay, that there would be less coverage,” he says. “But I learned that depending on the paper, that could go the other way. In the 1990s, some papers were inclined to write about it more because they had a bigoted, prurient interest in painting the community that way.” (The Star was sold to the Gannett Company in 2000. Indianapolis Monthly was unable to reach representatives of the paper’s previous ownership for comment.)
Whatever the reason, the mainstream’s silence continued as more and more men disappeared. Twenty-eight year old Steven Spurlin Hale was last seen on April 1, 1994. Allan Wayne Broussard, who was also 28, was last spotted at an Indy gay bar on June 6. Roger Allen Goodlet, who was 33, spent July 22 helping his mother assemble a bench, then went home to play with his new kitten before going out to a bar. He was never seen in public again.
That same year, a man named Mike Goodyear contacted an IPD missing persons detective named Mary Wilson and told her about an encounter he had with a man named “Brian Smart,” whom he met downtown before traveling with him to a home in Hendricks County. “He told me that his experience with the man scared him and that he could have easily been killed during the incident,” Wilson wrote in a letter to a fellow detective some years later. “He thought that possibly the other missing men could have had a similar experience.”
Wilson wasn’t able to determine who Brian Smart was based on that witness account, but the interaction with the survivor convinced her the gay publications were onto something. “She was always interested in what our community was up to,” Fleischaker says, “and she stayed on the case long after almost everybody else put it in a back drawer and moved on.” (Indianapolis Monthly attempted to reach Wilson for this story but was not successful.)
The police had finally taken notice, but in many ways, the community was still on its own. Bar owners began to post signs urging caution during hookups—some using the person of interest sketch, others with more general warnings. “But it was very clear that those signs that were put up were not from the police departments,” Shepherd says. Meanwhile, Fleischaker says, Wilson “would call me periodically and say, ‘What have you heard?’ And we would spend 20 minutes on the phone talking about what the two of us have come
up with.”
In the fall of 1994, 13-year-old Erich Baumeister found a human skull on the grounds of his family’s farm. His father, Herb, told him it had come from a medical school skeleton that belonged to his late father, who was once a doctor. (Speaking with People magazine two years later, Herb’s wife, Julie, says she took her husband at his word.) The following year, Michael Frederick Keirn, a 45-year-old who went by Mike, disappeared on March 31. A few months later, Goodyear spotted Brian Smart downtown and wrote down his license plate number. It belonged to a car registered to Baumeister, Wilson discovered, and in November of 1995, police came to Fox Hollow Farm and asked to search it. Herb and Julie refused.
But on June 24, 1996, Julie had a change of heart and told police they could search the estate. Investigators found human remains the same day, and an arrest warrant was issued for Baumeister. But he was in the wind, fleeing to Ontario before shooting himself in a park near Lake Huron on July 3. He left a rambling, three-page note that expressed regrets about the state of his marriage and that he would leave a mess at the park. He did not mention his alleged double life or any of the crimes he was suspected of committing.
At this point, perhaps, you’re wishing I’d tell you more about Baumeister. His double life, his pathology. The other crimes—some along I-70, others in remote spots in Ohio—that police believe he also committed in the 1980s. That’s not what we’re here to do today, but you’re not alone: In 1996, everyone interested in crime coverage was awash in details of Baumeister’s life. In the checkout line, people shopping for holiday groceries were confronted with “While Julie Was Away,” an in-depth portrait of the Baumeister family that ran in People magazine’s December 23 issue. A Star story headlined “Businessman puzzled people in life and death” characterized Baumeister as “devoted to his family.” A swiftly penned paperback with photos of Herb and Julie on the cover promised “the true story of Herb Baumeister, Indiana’s worst serial killer.”
For a brief moment, Baumeister was the latest Big Bad, the subtextual punishment for anyone who dared leave a bar with a stranger. The news that investigators were able to identify eight people buried at the home using dental records and the DNA technologies of the time was almost a postscript.
Speaking with the Associated Press, Sheriff James Bradbury said then that he considered the case closed. “If somebody has any information, we don’t care who it is, we’d be happy to look at it,’’ he said. “But Herb Baumeister is the only suspect we have in any of them.’’ So, after that initial flurry of attention, investigators—and the world—moved on.
“I’m telling you what, if it had been eight blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls from Carmel or Fishers, we’d still be out there today,” Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison says with just a touch of anger in his voice. He’d just been elected to the position in 2022 when he got a call from Eric Pranger, who said he believed his cousin, who’d been missing for nearly 30 years, “was a victim at Fox Hollow Farm and was hoping that [the authorities] might be able to provide the mother with some closure.”
Photos By Jay Goldz
Jellison only had a general idea of the case, so he called Dr. Krista Latham to find out more. Latham is the director of the University of Indianapolis Human Identification Center, which is the only forensic anthropology lab in the state. That means unidentified human remains from anywhere in Indiana end up in her care.
Jellison asked Latham if there were any remains from Fox Hollow Farm that had yet to be identified, “and she said about 10,000 bones and bone fragments. I just remember sitting back in my chair going, ‘You know, wow, that’s a lot.’”
“It essentially represents what we would call a mass disaster situation,” Latham says of the scene at the estate. She took over the forensics lab in 2016 and says the gigantic task of identifying the massive number of remains “has always been on the radar.” DNA testing is expensive and time consuming even in the simplest of cases, but at Fox Hollow Farm, bodies were dumped in piles, and others were burned—both situations that considerably complicate identifications.
“We’ve been looking at this case for a while,” Latham says, “but there just wasn’t a way to start, especially without resources. That’s where Jeff comes in.”
When Jellison looked into why his office had left so many victims unidentified, he learned that in 1996, “the coroner, and the county attorney, and the county council met and decided that if family members want to know if their loved one was [one of the victims], they could pay for the DNA testing.
“They put the financial burden to determine who was a murder victim on the family. You don’t do that. Nowhere in this country have I ever heard of that,” Jellison says.
“It’s my opinion that the attitude of those involved in the investigation in the ’90s was, ‘This is eight gay men from Indianapolis. What do we care?’”
So Jellison issued the press release announcing the renewal of efforts to identify all the remains. “I was telling folks that if they had a missing person in their family from that time frame to please come forward. And the media did a fantastic job of putting my plea out there,” he says.
The publicity also attracted help from the Indiana State Police and the FBI. Grants and funding for the testing soon followed, ensuring the long-ago burden placed on the families would be lifted.
The media also descended on Vale and Fleischaker, as well as family members of some victims. In the frenzy, some news coverage published photos of men slain by Chicago-area serial killer John Wayne Gacy, confusing them with people identified from the Fox Hollow site.
“It’s like some of them don’t even care,” Jellison says of the true crime content machine. “That’s what these families see when they read that story. That all victims are alike. That their loss doesn’t matter.”
Latham has also been approached by production companies and says they seem disappointed when she tells them the work to identify the bone fragments—some as small as your thumbnail—will take years.
“We try to stay away from those outlets that we know are going to be a little more exploiting of the situation,” Latham says. “It’s so easy to retraumatize a family or create a situation where it turns families away from wanting to participate in this process.
“We want to create an environment where the families see that our goal is to provide respect to their loved ones that was taken away from them at Fox Hollow Farm,” Latham says.
Using DNA provided by Pranger and other family members, the remains of Allen Lee Livingston—missing since 1993—finally came home. “When I went and talked with Allen’s mother to let her know that we have identified her son’s remains, I noticed on an end table next to the couch a landline telephone. I said, ‘You don’t see that very often anymore,’” Jellison says.
“And she said, ‘Well, it’s the only number Allen has to call me at.’ So for 30 years she’d been sitting beside that phone waiting for her son to call. That’s the closure I’m talking about.
“This is the second largest investigation of unidentified human remains in this country, second only to the World Trade Center,” Jellison says. Coroners can only serve two terms, so if he is reelected, he’ll be out of office in six years. “It will be that coroner’s decision then whether he wants to continue to carry this torch or not. I hope he or she does.”
It’s a torch Latham also hopes she can continue to carry. “We have to judge ourselves based on how we treat our most vulnerable in our populations. And most of these individuals were our most vulnerable and our most marginalized,” she says.
“They were mistreated in life. My obligation to them is to make sure that they get that name, that they get the respect, that they get what they deserve to have been given in life in death.”
When I repeat Latham’s statement to Shepherd, he goes quiet. “I hope that whoever makes the big TV series about this feels the same way,” he finally says. “For years, the arc of this story was incomplete because nobody cared enough to fill in the arc. If someone comes in and tells this story to the world without the care and respect those guys deserve, it’ll just break everyone’s hearts.”
Hamilton County coroner Jeff Jellison urges anyone with a family connection to a missing person to contact his office via email or phone at 317-770-4415.
“I’ll come to you to get a DNA swab,” he says. “It only takes a minute and can bring a grieving family a lot of peace.”
