Decades after investigators unearthed thousands of human bones and bone fragments on a suspected serial killer’s property, a quest is ongoing in laboratories to solve a long-running mystery: Who exactly were they?
A new team working to identify the unknown says the key to their success will be getting relatives of men who vanished between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s to provide samples of their own DNA.
Those samples can then be screened against DNA profiles scientists are extracting from the remains, which were found starting in 1996 on Herbert Baumeister’s sprawling suburban Indianapolis property.
Investigators believed that while his family was away on trips, Baumeister, who frequented gay bars in Indianapolis, lured men to his home, where he killed and buried them.
The original investigators believed that at least 25 people were buried at Baumeister’s 18-acre (7.3-hectare) Fox Hollow Farm estate in Westfield, based on evidence that included 10,000 bones and bone fragments, as well as handcuffs and shotgun shells.
Baumeister, a 49-year-old thrift store owner and married father of three, killed himself in Canada in July 1996 before police could question him, taking with him many secrets, including the names of his presumed victims.
By the late 1990s, authorities had identified eight men using dental records and available DNA technologies. But then those efforts stopped, although the remains of at least 17 people may have still been unidentified.
Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison said the renewed identification effort revealed that county officials at the time decided not to fund additional DNA testing, which “essentially halted further efforts to identify the victims and placed the cost of a homicide investigation on family members of missing people.”
“I can’t speak for those investigators, but it was just game over,” Jellison said.
As decades slipped by, the bones and fragments sat in boxes at the University of Indianapolis’ Human Identification Center, whose staff helped excavate the remains.
That changed after Eric Pranger sent Jellison a Facebook message in late 2022. The Indianapolis man’s family had long believed his older cousin, Allen Livingston, was among Baumeister’s victims.
Livingston was 27 when he vanished in August 1993 after getting into someone else’s car in downtown Indianapolis. After hearing about Baumeister three years later, his mother, Sharon Livingston, and other relatives began suspecting that Allen, who was bisexual, was among the dead.
Jellison was about to take office when Pranger asked if he could help get some answers for his aunt, who had serious health problems.
“How do you say to no to that? That’s our job as coroners by statute, to identify the deceased,” Jellison said.
