The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer (2025) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[interviewee 1]
[interviewee 2]
[interviewee 3] It's almost 30 years
and it still hurts to this day.
I just wanna find a why.
What goes on in somebody's head
that can do that is horrific.
I do believe in evil.
I seen it at Fox Hollow Farm.
[reporter 1]
Indianapolis police confirmed today
that they approached the owner of
the Fox Hollow Farm.
[interviewee 4]
He may have been in the company
of one of the missing people
we're investigating.
[interviewee 5] We're working on the
assumption of three bodies. Maybe more.
It was just bones everywhere.
[reporter 2] And it has drawn interest
from police agencies
from across the state and the country.
This killer is not listed among
the most prolific serial killers.
Yet Fox Hollow is like Gacy's basement.
He's the Dahmer you've never heard of.
[interviewee 6] He didn't get the
attention of Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer
because we were never able
to walk him into a courtroom.
[interviewee 7] He did have a double life.
[interviewee 8]
[interviewee 9] There were mannequins.
It was just surreal.
You know, something out of a movie.
[interviewee 10] He held plenty back.
There's so much of this stuff
that I'm hearing for the first time.
[interviewee 11] Is he telling the truth?
Did that shit really happen?
There had to have been red flags.
[interviewee 11]
Did he really do all that? The fuck.
How does someone like that
get away with things for so long?
[interviewee 12] I think the fact
that the killings involved
homosexual men made police uncomfortable
and it made the community uncomfortable.
The attitude of the police officers
was that if you were gay
then you probably deserved
whatever you got.
It's as simple as that.
[interviewee 6] We've been able to
identify 13 victims from Fox Hollow Farms.
So, we know 13
and we've got 9,900 more bones.
We gave up with this investigation.
Crimes of the past cast
a long shadow on the present.
We need to go back.
[phone ringing]
[stammering] Oh, you're very welcome.
You're very welcome.
And, um,
I'll be here in the office all week.
And then, uh, I will keep you comprised of
what I find out
in the next 24 to 48 hours. Okay?
[interviewee 6]
So, did you get the mother notified?
[coroner] Yeah, she's gonna be calling.
And if she doesn't come up here
to identify her daughter,
- I've got DNA swabs.
- Yeah, we're not gonna identify.
- You don't wanna identify--
- Not a visual. He's got a
[coroner 2]
He's got a bullet hole in his head.
- Big ol' one right there.
- The way I looked at the picture,
- I thought it was in the back.
- That's the exit.
Oh. Okay.
If they wanna see him,
then we can make that happen.
- [Jared Privett] Yes, we could.
- But we
I would strongly recommend against it.
- Good?
- Yep.
- Thank you.
- [Privett] Yep.
[Jeff Jellison] I come to work every day
and deal with death.
Or grieving people.
It is not easy to do.
What we see here
and smell can't be unseen.
You just don't lay in bed
and not think about that.
The fact of having
a serial killer in this county,
I really think caught people off guard.
Hamilton County is predominately
a Republican county.
Very conservative.
Murder rate is very low.
We may only work two or three, um,
murders a year. Homicides.
You know, we're a bedroom community
for the most part
to people that work in Indianapolis.
The average incomes are,
you know, at the top of the scale.
So this is the, uh, entrance
into Fox Hollow Farms.
[Jellison] When you look at the initial
investigation back in the '90s,
when the search warrant was served,
I don't think we were prepared
to really handle
an investigation like that.
[interviewee 13] Indianapolis in the '90s
was an entirely different city
than it is now.
It was much more conservative.
Basically, at the end of the day
at 5 o'clock, downtown closed down.
Well, there were no nightclubs downtown
except for gay nightclubs.
And, of course,
those weren't talked about much.
Gay bars were kind of hidden away
and not known unless you were gay.
I worked in three different bars
through the years.
The bar I'm at now is now called Greg's.
It was Our Place in those days.
Our Place began as a one-room bar
and it quickly grew into a safe haven
for the gay communities.
You would see gay men
of all different types.
It was a very mixed type of bar
by that time.
The dance floor would be packed
and so it became more
of a mainstream gay bar.
Back at the time, the gay bars
were pretty much the center
of the gay community.
But outside of the bars, the reality
that we were living with as a community,
there were still a lot of people
who weren't happy
about there being gay people
in Indianapolis.
In the early '80s,
policemen would arrest people
for loitering on the Circle or,
you know, for male prostitution.
Something along those lines.
We were targeted by the police
and everyone else in the community.
[clamoring]
[street interviewer]
Why is everybody so upset?
'Cause we don't want them around here.
Tell the queers to go home.
So, the gay bars were the one place
in the city where we felt safe.
You want to blame everything on AIDS.
I'll tell you how to stop AIDS.
Stop being a homosexual,
that's how you stop AIDS.
[Mark Lee] By the mid-'80s to early-'90s,
the AIDS crisis came into Indianapolis,
and it was quite terrifying
for most people.
It was really scary. You had no idea
what was safe, what wasn't safe.
By the time I was 31,
I lost my entire core group of friends
to HIV and AIDS.
That was the type of thing
that we were facing on a daily basis.
People are dying from this disease.
Wake up America. Do something now.
[Steve Warman] We would see people come in
one week that looked just fine
and within a couple of weeks,
they were sick.
So, when gay men started going missing,
we thought maybe that was
what had happened to them.
[interviewee 14] It's summer, 1993.
I contacted
a homicide investigator I knew.
Handled abductions
and he called me back and said,
"We don't have any abduction cases."
[Warman] We began to get relatives
or friends coming in with posters
with "Have you seen this person?"
[David Allender]
There's a lot of missing persons' cases,
but most are gonna be people that return.
And then we began to realize
that these people hadn't died of AIDS.
That they just disappeared.
The volume of cases makes it
very difficult to investigate all of them.
[interviewee 15]
I was browsing Craigslist,
and I seen a job post
for a mortuary transport.
I was pretty skeptical at first.
There's a lot of scammers out there.
So, I thought it was honestly a scam post,
and I was just gonna mess
with the scammer.
But the dude replied.
And we actually showed up to a scene
where there's police, coroners.
And I'm like,
"Okay, this is the real deal." [chuckles]
I had to help put the body
into a body bag.
And, um, it was really creepy.
The coroner deputy asked me
to grab his arm and roll him
help roll him over to his side.
And I was like, "You want me to do what?"
[chuckles]
But after that,
um, just a normal job to me.
One night, I was hanging out
with some of the coroner deputies
just talking about cold case files.
And I brought up that my cousin,
Allen Livingston, went missing in 1993.
He was possibly seen getting
into a vehicle, downtown Indianapolis.
But the family never had answers.
I remember asking my mother,
"What happened to my cousin, Allen?"
And she told me that she has always had
that gut feeling that he was killed.
He was comical, and he was loving.
[interviewee 16] Yeah.
- Always happy. Mm-hmm.
- And caring.
And he was supposed to come visit that
Sunday and he didn't.
And he didn't call.
My mom knew
that something was wrong pretty quickly
because he called every weekend.
Because back then,
we didn't have cell phones.
So, we knew that something wasn't right.
Allen was just al He's just goofy.
He was just a simple free soul.
Always happy. Loved to be around people.
And he was pretty gay.
Who wears big earrings and tie-dye shirts.
My mom's gay.
So, I mean, that's how I grew up.
But in the '90s, obviously, you knew
there was people
that didn't care for it too much.
When he came up missing,
she did call the police,
and she made a missing police report.
The police were like,
"Oh, well, you'll hear from us
in the, you know, the next few months."
Didn't hear anything again.
It kind of got pushed aside
and was forgotten about.
[Sharon Livingston] It was August of '93.
I've always thought that if they're gay,
they just put it aside.
I really think that.
It's just another gay person.
That's how I feel.
[Shannon Doughty] My mother
has never gotten rid of her landline.
Phone number's still been the same
because she was hoping
that Allen would call her one day.
Christmases go by. Birthdays go by.
I don't think any of us gave up hope.
Because there's nothing there, you could
always just pretend that it's not true.
After a while, more
and more people disappeared from sight.
This was an ongoing event, if you will.
There's some rumblings probably in the
community that, "Hey, this is happening."
Like, "Okay, these guys
really are missing."
We needed to drill down
to find out what was going on.
In 1993, Johnny Bayer,
Jeffrey Allen Jones,
Richard Douglas Hamilton Junior,
Manuel Resendez,
and Allen Livingston went missing.
In 1994, three more men went missing.
Steven Hale,
Allen Broussard, and Roger Goodlet.
In 1995, Michael Keirn went missing.
In August 1995,
Jerry Williams-Comer went missing.
Mary Wilson
was a missing persons detective.
And she was asking people if they
knew anything about these cases
because she had started to see a pattern.
It's hard to know, in the beginning,
whether to look at it
as a just an individual situation
or that, possibly,
these things are linked.
[Allender]
These men were all about the same age.
All about the same size.
The last place anybody
could put most of them
was in a number of openly gay bars.
Concentrating in
about a two mile-square area.
[Warman] Things were getting so bad
that a lot of bars started announcing,
"If you're leaving with somebody
that you don't know,
let your friends know
who you're leaving with.
Let somebody know where you're going to
be, because there are people missing."
A lot of the guys that went missing
were kind of on the fringe of society.
Their families had disowned them
because they found out they were gay.
And that was one of the things.
A lot of these people weren't
reported missing for a long time
after they went missing
because there was nobody to report it.
[Allender] In today's world,
you would get on their Facebook page
and see what you could find.
Check their phone record.
Those things didn't exist.
[Warman]
I think the police in the beginning
thought some of these people
had just run away
and, uh, weren't missing.
I don't think they were
that interested in it.
It took years before they really started
to get involved in it.
[Jellison]
I was not in the shoes of the detectives
that worked this case originally.
I think anyone that looks at this case,
through law enforcement eyes,
will have questions.
The perception, the societal attitudes,
these are gay men from Indianapolis.
And that just didn't fit
that Hamilton County mold.
And I-I believe that because of that,
law enforcement may have looked
at that like,
"We got out own county to worry about.
We got our own people to worry about."
And as the investigation continued,
you kind of seen that attitude play out.
[interviewee 9] A lot of people
didn't want to talk to police.
I believe there was a sense
amongst the gay community.
They were skeptical of the police,
and you know.
"Are the police doing their job
because of who we are?"
Yeah, we assured them.
Like said, "Hey, you know,
I don't care
what they do in their off time.
Or in their spare time, or whatever.
That's none of my business.
But we wanna make sure that
they're delivered back to their families."
In 1994, some families of the missing men
hired a private investigator.
A lead came forward to him
that broke the case open. Mark Goodyear.
Okay.
[Milligan] Mark Goodyear stated
that he'd met a guy named Brian
at a gay bar downtown Indianapolis.
Brian convinced Mark
to accompany him back to his home,
where he had a pool
and and a bar and things like that,
and they could continue the party there.
They went down to the basement
where the pool area was.
And there were, uh
mannequins around the pool.
Mannequins behind the bar.
Almost like it was like a like a club.
[Goodyear]
[Milligan] They went swimming
and engaged in consensual sex.
And then autoerotic asphyxiation.
What that activity entails
is the deprivation of air
to a sexual partner that brings them
into a euphoric state
prior to going unconscious.
[Goodyear]
Goodyear's story is that he stopped
the activity and then spent the night.
And then, Brian took him back
to Indianapolis the next day.
[Goodyear]
[interrogator] Mm-hmm.
[Goodyear]
[Milligan]
More and more gay men are going missing.
And as more and more
and more information came out,
I think it was
a a step-by-step-by-step realization.
It's a serial killer case.
[interviewee 7] I don't believe early on
in the Indianapolis missing men cases
the police had any leads or suspects.
That was part of the frustration
with the investigation.
I think Mark Goodyear
coming forward with his information
was instrumental in
at least getting things going.
[Allender]
Goodyear has the encounter in 1994,
but Goodyear could not lead
Mary Wilson back to the house.
We tried to find this place.
I know we went at least three times,
and we just simply
couldn't find this location.
Now this guy did not identify himself
by his right name.
So, for a period of time there, we didn't
know who he had this encounter with,
and we didn't know exactly
where it happened.
[Allender]
Nothing really jumped up to really happen
as far as the identification was concerned
till a year later.
Goodyear was able to communicate with
people to watch out for this individual.
And eventually, one of his friends
saw a person that they equated
with what Goodyear was saying.
And got his plate number.
[Milligan]
With the license plate number in hand,
Mary Wilson started background
investigation and a BMV run
of who owned that vehicle
which returned to Herb Baumeister.
Herb Baumeister was not
on any radar of law enforcement
as far as I know, at that point in time.
[Kathleen Clark]
Herb Baumeister and his wife Julie
lived with their three children
in Westfield, Indiana at Fox Hollow Farms.
From everything, uh, outward anyways,
he was a decent father.
I believe they went to church.
Did kind of family things.
[interviewee 17] You know,
we didn't have candlelight dinners,
and we didn't run off on,
you know, romantic weekends together.
We were much more family love.
[Clark] Uh, there wasn't too much
out of the ordinary.
[Milligan] He owned a Sav-A-Lot store
in Indianapolis,
which were secondhand stores.
Kind of like a Goodwill.
And so, Mary Wilson visited Baumeister
at one of his Save a Lot stores
inquiring into these missing persons.
[phone ringing]
[Wilson]
My first impression of Mr. Baumeister
when I first saw him at the store
was this is a very strange man.
But just He was so very nervous.
I felt like we kind of pushed him
to the edge just-just approaching him.
He just, like, looked like
he was about ready to fall apart.
I guess that's understandable.
He has a wife and three children,
and he said nobody in his family knew
the fact that he-he goes into gay bars.
The picture began to develop
that he did have a double life.
He could go to church with his family
and present that way.
And then was cruising gay bars
and picking up young men, sex workers.
And we know that he took them
back to his home.
We didn't know the extent
of what was going on,
but he definitely had a different face.
[Warman] He was in our bar many times.
I never knew his name.
It was fairly common at the time
to use an alias.
If you were out and gay,
sometimes you'd lose your job
or your family would find out.
If you weren't out to people,
you didn't want them to know.
So, an alias was fairly common.
My very first boyfriend
gave me an alias when I met him.
And it took me months
to find out that wasn't really his name.
So But-But it was a fairly common thing
for people.
Every so often, Baumeister would show up.
He didn't socialize. He would just kind
of stand off to the side.
And once in a while,
he'd go up and talk to somebody.
I would watch him sometimes,
and I just thought this man hated himself.
He hated what he was.
But it didn't occur to me until later
when all this came out,
that I would see him regularly,
only because when his wife was out
of town, or something, he would show up.
We started looking at a timelines, and the
wife is gone all summer and he's there.
Herb had free reign of the property
while his family was out of town
during the summer.
It would be within the realm
of possibility that Herb was involved
with these missing men.
At this point, it was hard to say.
Absolutely worth looking into though.
Once they identified Herb Baumeister
as a suspect,
they did attempt to get permission
to come onto the property to search
because there wasn't enough evidence
to get a search warrant for it.
But Baumeister's wife, Julie, had become
deeply suspicious of her husband.
She had started, uh, divorce proceedings.
And Herb was no longer on the property.
[interviewee 17] Now that she was
contemplating getting a divorce from him,
she shared some of the things
she had observed
during her marriage
to Herb Baumeister with her attorney,
and he thought they were concerning enough
to bring them to our attention.
I was able to meet with Julie.
She talked with me about some incidents
that she was concerned about.
This was something that happened
two years before, in 1994.
[actress as Julie] I was downstairs,
and Eric came charging through the woods
with a friend carrying this thing
on a stick
and came and knocked on a window
down there. And he said, "Look at this."
[Milligan]
Her son and a friend were playing
in the woods behind
the Baumeister property.
They discovered a skull.
And had brought the skull
to the house to show Mrs. Baumeister.
[interviewer 1] You might have discovered
something unusual?
[Campbell] I found a skull.
We, like, moved it over with a stick
and put the stick underneath it
and carried it up to the house.
[interviewer 1] Okay.
[Campbell] And we showed it to his mom and
his mom didn't make a big deal out of it.
[actress as Julie] When Herb came home,
I said, "Herb, this looks like a person.
I think you've got to call the police."
He said, "Don't call the police."
[Campbell] Did they give you
the skull that we found?
- [interviewer 1] No.
- [Campbell] So that's still missing then?
[interviewer 1] Yes.
[Campbell] It's kind of odd
that she didn't report it at first.
And then she reported it now.
That's kind of weird.
Mr. Baumeister said
that this was probably from a skeleton
that his father had given him.
[actress as Julie] And his dad,
being a doctor, did have things.
He said that these were the ones
that his dad had in medical school.
We have raccoons that live in the garage.
He said that some animal had drug it
out of the garage out there.
[Sonia Leerkamp] That was the explanation
that he gave his wife.
I mean, this was all a horrible experience
for her too.
Just to even try to think that her husband
might be a person
that could have killed one person,
let alone, multiple persons.
[Milligan]
I don't think Julie Baumeister knew much.
She might have been suspicious, especially
with the skeleton and the skull.
Or was, you know, living in denial.
She just didn't wanna believe it.
I don't think she was involved whatsoever.
[Leerkamp] Julie understood it needed
to be handled by the authorities.
That's when we got Julie's permission
to search the premises.
[reporter 3] Juliana Baumeister contacted
police through her attorney last Monday
and took them
to a section of her property,
where in December of 1994,
she had observed possible human remains.
Still, it's only speculation that any
of this is pointing to a major crime.
[Milligan] Our office went out there.
Cursory search was done around that area.
And we did observe
what looked like burnt bone fragments.
They appeared to be human bones.
And so, we needed
to get someone more sophisticated
in the identification
in human remains involved.
And Dr. Nawrocki was contacted.
[Dr. Nawrocki] Have it right there.
[Leerkamp]
He was a forensic anthropologist
who worked
for a university in Indianapolis.
And Dr. Nawrocki brought a team out and
that's when the search began in earnest.
That's me talking
to the other investigators.
This is the initial search location, where
they'd located the burnt bone fragments.
And Dr. Nawrocki's setting up
his grid pattern.
[digger]
[Dr. Nawrocki]
[Milligan] They would number the grids.
And then they would go
grid by grid by grid.
We did a walk-through of the woods
and as I was walking through,
I looked down and saw what appeared
to be an articulated foot.
The bones of a foot were on the ground.
[digger]
- Did you look, Doctor?
- [Dr. Nawrocki]
[Milligan] If someone found something
suspicious, they would put a flag.
There were a sea of flags.
There was some shotgun shells found.
Oh, there's the hinged handcuffs.
At first, it looked like some funky root
or something.
It didn't click with me immediately.
And then the Then the bulb went off.
I said, "Holy shit. Those are handcuffs."
An arm bone
was sticking through the handcuff.
It was just surreal.
You know, something out of the movies.
I asked Todd, I said,
"Are these hinged handcuffs?"
And he holds them up and he gives a smile.
Like, "Look what the fuck we found."
[reporter 4] Fox Hollow estates has become
a residence in waiting.
The woods have yielded
more bones and more bodies.
This latest discovery
only deepens the mystery
about the identity of the victims.
[reporter 5] Many of the searchers left
about 4:30 this afternoon.
They will return on Monday
to continue to look for bones.
[interviewee 18]
The search lasted about two weeks.
Thousands of remains were recovered.
We had three concentrations of bones.
One was right behind the house,
just into the woods
that we called area one.
The bones in area one were mostly burned.
Burning a body doesn't bring it to ash.
But it does fragment the bones.
Now some distance to the west of that,
we did have another concentration,
roughly in this area.
Those were burned as well.
And then, off to the west side
of the property was area three,
and that produced remains
that were not burned.
[Clark] Collecting the evidence
in this case was enormous.
Great efforts were taken
to destroy these bodies.
But to my knowledge,
there weren't any skulls found,
um, which was very, very odd.
[Milligan] We were concluding that search,
and these two young men come from,
uh, the property adjacent to the west
of Baumeister's property.
One said, "Hey, there's
Looks like there might be evidence
you guys might be interested in
in this creek that runs adjacent
to Baumeister's property."
So I climbed the fence.
Went over and these two young men
showed me this creek bed.
I'd never seen that many skeletal remains
in one place ever. There was thousands.
Human remains scattered the-the length
of the creek bed.
Looked like it was a graveyard
that had been opened up by water.
It was just bones everywhere.
Ribs sticking out of the banks.
Vertebra, tail bones.
Hip bones, leg bones, arm bones,
you-you name it.
Skeletons had just been disarticulated
and thrown onto the bank.
There's these jaw bones. It's a lower jaw
with teeth laying there on the ground.
And it's full bones.
You don't have to sift sand for these,
you just dig them out of the bank.
Pick them up off the ground.
We were flabbergasted.
You know, how many victims are out here?
How many bodies do we have out here?
We had a major issue.
It's like, "Oh, man, there's
We're nowhere near done.
There's more victims here.
There's a lot more victims here."
We were finding all this evidence.
Evidence of potential homicides.
And Herb had taken his son
to their lake cabin up on Wawasee.
I became extremely concerned that
of-of Herb's stability.
And absolutely frantic
that our son was with him.
She wanted him brought home.
[Milligan] A court order was obtained
and got Eric away from Baumeister
and brought him back
to be with his mother.
And then Herb was on his own.
[interviewer 2]
Um [stammers]
The p The prosecutor's office didn't
think there was enough evidence yet.
We really didn't have much information
to go ahead and try to, uh, detain
Herbert Baumeister
or question him at length.
So, since we were still developing
so many lines of investigation,
we had not actually asked for a warrant.
[interviewee 12] Why did they
not consider him a serious suspect
the minute they heard
there were human remains?
I'm pretty sure if human remains
were found in my backyard
that I would not be able to just
go wherever I wanted to go the next day.
[Milligan] There was a lot
of sour apples about that.
You've got several dead bodies
on a guy's property.
It was a lot of finger pointing.
Why didn't You know,
why wasn't he arrested?
You know, due to manpower issues
with the search at the farm and all that.
Hard to keep surveillance on him.
Um, you know? He didn't seem
They didn't feel that he seemed
like he was gonna run.
Um, I don't think he decided to run
until after Eric was retrieved.
[Leerkamp]
As we started to realize the scope
of what had happened
and his potential link
to the bodies that we were finding,
um, we could no longer locate him.
[Julie] I kept asking them where is he?
Where's Herb? And no one knew.
They didn't know. And I didn't know.
[Leerkamp] I just remember thinking,
"Do whatever it takes."
We have to try and find
where this man is at.
We have to find him.
[reporter 6] Over a one-week period,
scientists and sheriff's deputies
excavated more than 150 bones,
including skull fragments, leg bones,
and a jawbone with the teeth still intact.
At this point,
the guess is anywhere from three to five.
Or it could be that we have
two more bodies that have washed down.
My thought, during this part
of the investigation was,
"We have to find Herb." You know,
do whatever it takes.
He was our only suspect.
[street interviewee] It really worries me
for a lot of the people around here
that don't see the crime every day
and it's pretty upsetting to 'em.
And it's hitting close to home.
[Clark] We had all
the law enforcement agencies out there.
Like, "Okay, now where is he?"
[phone ringing]
[Milligan]
It was in the middle of the night.
I was at home
[phone rings]
and I get a phone call.
And it was the Sheriff's Department.
[handset picked up]
And they told me that Baumeister
had killed himself in Canada.
It was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I said, "I hope he left a confession."
[phone ringing]
[Clark] I got a call very early
on the Fourth of July, saying
"You should go to Canada."
I was like, "Great. Here goes
my Fourth of July holiday."
But that's the way
crimes happen all the time.
By then, Herb was in the morgue,
and the autopsy was scheduled
for the next day.
We met the Canadian authorities
and they told us that the day before,
they had stopped Herb
because he was in his car sleeping.
And they'd saw videotapes
in the seat of the car.
Once we learned that,
we were champing at the bit,
thinking maybe he recorded his crimes.
But all of that,
anything they had seen in the car,
was gone by the time we got to it.
I don't remember verbatim
the suicide note.
But I do know that
he talked about business troubles.
I think he talked about
a peanut butter sandwich.
It was like some weird stuff,
but never admitted to anything
at-at all related to missing people
or his activities,
or apologize for anything like that.
Didn't even have the decency
in his suicide letter
to even apologize to one victim.
It was all poor Herb.
I knew that this was going to end up
being a situation where there would be
so many unanswered questions.
[Clark]
Herb Baumeister took his secrets with him.
You-You just There's so much more
that you can do when you're going to
or you are motivated to do,
when you have someone
you're actually going to prosecute.
It's not that we stopped still trying
to find answers,
but it just limited knowing that
it wasn't going to be a prosecution.
[Jellison] I think the police were
convinced that Herb Baumeister did this.
Now he's dead.
Game over.
[Livingston]
What'd you do with that newspaper?
- It's a long article.
- It is. It's a huge article about it.
I've never seen it until now.
This is an actual news report
from November 24th, 1996.
And it's got my brother's picture.
And then five other people.
When they came out and said
that they found bodies at Fox Hollow,
I don't know if we immediately
thought anything about it.
But the news announced
that there was a link
between Allen's disappearance
and several other people.
It says, "Police believe that
these six men may have crossed paths
with Herbert R. Baumeister.
Pool of a center of activity.
When the Baumeister's lived there
the swimming area
was boarded by mannequins,
most of which were male."
Like you didn't know your husband
was weird with that?
It's frustrating.
Several people are still missing.
But they just didn't want
to spend the funding
due to the fact that they were all gay.
Uh, this has certainly been
a tremendous surprise and shock to them.
If anyone If anyone at this stage
of the game is a victim,
I think it would
be his wife and his family.
[Doughty] The case just hit a standstill.
We were like, "Oh, we know Allen's there,
but we couldn't prove it."
[Livingston] It's like, okay.
I knew that that man had had gotten him.
I knew where he was.
I knew in my heart.
My Aunt Sharon's just had a missing piece
of her family for 30 years.
Two years ago, Aunt Sharon, uh,
was diagnosed with, uh, cancer.
They found a-a spot on her brain.
So, I really wanted to get her son home,
uh, anyway possible before she passed.
So, that's when I decided to contact
the Hamilton County coroner's office.
I told them that my cousin
is a potential victim
and I wanted answers, no matter what.
[Jellison] When you work in a coroner's
office, you get all kinds of phone calls.
We're attentive to all of them.
But for some reason,
this phone call really struck me.
Eric told me of what he had heard about
the victims of Fox Hollow and his cousin.
He was just chasing an avenue.
Just, you know, trying to do anything
to get some closure for his aunt.
At that time, I had no idea
what was about to unfold.
I think I was like most
of Hamilton County.
You know, I knew that it happened.
Didn't have a good grasp on the extent
of what had happened there.
I called Eric back and agreed to help.
I knew I had to start someplace
so let's track down the remains.
One of my first phone calls
was to a former coroner.
And he informed me that the remains were
housed at the University of Indianapolis.
They have a lab to preserve those remains.
So, I called
the University of Indianapolis.
I said, "What do we have here down there?"
And she said,
"We have 10,000 bone and bone fragments."
And I said 1,000?
She said, "No. 10,000."
Well, to put it into perspective,
this is the second largest number
of unidentified human remains
in this country.
Second only to the World Trade Center.
And you know, in my mind, I said,
"What the hell have I gotten into?"
[reporter 7] Authorities
in Hamilton County are renewing efforts
to identify the remains
of more than a dozen people found
on the former property
of a notorious serial killer.
[Jellison] So I stepped up.
I made this big plea going public
with this investigation
and attempting to identify the remains.
If you have someone missing,
please let us know.
We'll get a DNA swab from you.
We'll get that entered into
the missing person database.
Shortly after I announced
this investigation,
I was contacted
by a former county councilman
that was a councilman during
the initial investigation.
The text message read,
"Jeff, just saw
the story about your interest
in reopening the Baumeister case.
What has happened to create such
an enormous expense for the county
and take away manpower resources
from so many law enforcement agencies?"
After Baumeister committed suicide,
the decision was made
not to fund any additional testing.
And that if the family members
or the loved ones of missing people
wanted to know if their loved one
was a victim of a homicide,
they could foot the bill.
I-I've got a big problem with that.
These remains are people.
These victims were forgotten.
We have a-a moral and ethical obligation.
I'm not gonna let them
be forgotten any longer.
When I was notified by the
Indiana State Police that we had a match,
I said, "Who is it?"
They said, "Allen Livingston."
Eric Pranger's cousin.
I said,
"You're joking with me. There's no way."
[Pranger] His remains were in a bag on
a shelf in a classroom in a college campus
for 30 years.
What's ironic is, I made the phone call,
and out of 10,000 remains,
Allen was the first identified.
[interviewer 2]
It's like Allen saying thank you.
[chuckles]
99% of the people I cremate
I do not know them.
But I cremated Allen.
But it felt good that I was doing it
to bring him home.
[Livingston]
Eric brought him in and gave him to me
and I-I had my son.
It's a part of him,
but to me, it's all of him
because I know he's he's there.
[Jellison]
Identifying these victims is important.
That person is gonna tell a story.
Every victim adds another piece
to the puzzle.
[Pranger]
Since the moment that we got confirmation,
one of my thoughts in my head
was what I do for a living.
I know how heavy a dead body is.
And for him to handle
that amount of bodies on his own,
just crazy to me.
[Jellison]
How does he take a deceased individual,
drag that person from his indoor pool,
a couple hundred yards back
into a very, very dense woods?
It is not easy to do.
[Clark] I don't know how thoroughly
law enforcement looked into
other suspects or potential accomplices.
[Leerkamp] It makes you wonder,
"Did we find all of his victims?"
And was there anybody else ever involved?
[interviewee 10] There's over 10,000
remains from the grounds of Fox Hollow.
[interviewee 19] You just have to wonder
how did this one man do all of this?
[Jellison] Something's not right.
If he did what law enforcement alleges
that he did,
I think it would have been difficult
for him to do it alone.
I'm not buying the story.