'What are the odds': Remains identified of homosexual who went missing over 30 years ago on suspected serial killer's farm

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Law enforcement and members of the coroner’s office in Hamilton
County, Indiana scoured the 18-acre Fox Hollow Farm in the 1990s
searching for human remains. Inset: Herbert Baumeister. (YouTube
screengrab/WTHR)

More than 30 years after her son Allen went missing, Sharon
Livingston said her mother’s intuition convinced her beyond a
shadow of doubt that the remains of her long-missing son would
be found on the property of suspected serial killer Herbert
Baumeister. This week, that gut feeling was confirmed.

Coroner Jeff Jellison of Hamilton County, Indiana, announced
Tuesday that bone fragments belonging to Allen Livingston — a
queer man who was just 27 years old when reported missing in
1993 — were among those newly identified out of the some 10,000
human remains investigators have collected over the years from
an 18-acre farm in Westfield known as Fox Hollow.

Baumeister killed himself in 1996 shortly after a warrant for
his arrest was issued and Indianapolis police had begun
questioning him about a string of gay men who went missing from
the area during the 1980s and 1990s.

Related Coverage:
Key to the case was an informant identified as Tony Harris, who
claimed that he had met Baumeister at an area gay bar in 1994
and spent a horrifying evening with him at his home. Harris’
friend, Roger Goodlet, had gone missing around that same time
and Harris suspected Baumeister may have been responsible.
According to an A&E documentary on the case entitled “The Secret
Life of Serial Killers,” Harris would later tell police that
when he approached Baumeister, Baumeister introduced himself as
“Brian Smart” and had spent a good chunk of the evening staring
at Goodlet’s missing poster hanging in the bar.
When Baumeister — posing as Smart — invited Harris back to his
place for a swim and a late night cocktail, Harris accepted and
the men went to Fox Hollow together. Harris said they began to
have sex and in the middle of it, the man he thought was Smart
tried to strangle him to death with a pool hose as part of
autoerotic asphyxiation foreplay. Harris said he only managed to
escape with his life after pretending to pass out.

Harris went to authorities, but locating the farm to match his
description proved difficult for police and it wasn’t until more
than a year later that Harris would cross paths with “Brian
Smart” again — and be able to give police a critical tip.

Virgil Vandagriff, a now-retired Marion County detective who had
years earlier opened an investigation into missing queer men in
the region, including Goodlet, told local NBC affiliate WTHR
that when the informant spotted “Smart” that second time, Harris
deftly managed to record “Smart’s” license plate number. This
ended up being instrumental in helping to identify “Brian
Smart” as Herbert Baumeister.

By this time, Baumeister’s marriage of more than 20 years to his
wife Julie had all but fallen apart.

The couple had three children, including a 15-year-old son who
made a grisly find in the woods behind their Fox Hollow home
almost two full years before the couple divorced in 1996.
According to local ABC affiliate WRTV, in 1994 — around the same
exact time that Indianapolis police first started searching for
a serial killer targeting gay men — Baumeister’s son discovered
a human skull on the property.

Detectives said Julie Baumeister made her son leave it the woods
until his father returned home. When she confronted him about it
later, Herbert Baumeister told his wife it must have been left
over from his father’s physician’s practice. She left it at that
for two years, but changed her mind upon filing for divorce.
Police reported that an initial attempt to search the
Baumeisters’ property had been rebuffed by both husband and
wife, but on a later attempt, once Herbert wasn’t home, Julie
had police search the property.

They found a skull, teeth and other bone fragments.

Law enforcement and members of the coroner’s office in Hamilton
County, Indiana scoured the 18-acre Fox Hollow Farm in the 1990s
searching for human remains. They located more than 10,000 bone
fragments or pieces belonging to victims they suspect were
killed by Hebert Baumeister. YouTube screengrab courtesy of WTHR.

By this time, however, Baumeister, 49, was already on the run to
Ontario, Canada. Once there, police say he killed himself. WRTV
reported that he left a suicide note at the scene but made no
mention of his victims, only grieved his failing thrift store
business and marriage.

While poring over Fox Hollow farm grounds in the mid to late
1990s, police found 11 human DNA samples along with bone
fragments, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. Of those,
eight young men were identified and matched with the samples.

The confirmation and match of Livingston’s DNA to some of the
remains announced just this week makes nine.

The staggering 10,000 charred bones or bone fragments found at
the farm, the county coroner suspects, represent at least 25
individuals killed. By 1999, police had already connected
Baumeister to at least 16 men who went missing over the previous
decade and whose bodies were found in streams in rural Indiana
as well as parts of western Ohio.

It was last November when Jellison, the coroner, announced a
partnership with the University of Indianapolis’ forensic
laboratory and Indiana State police to redouble DNA extraction
efforts for the 10,000 remains found at Fox Hollow, CBS News
reported.

The victims’ families had gone more than a quarter century
without answers, Jellison said, and he was determined to bring
them closure. In fact, it was victim Allen Livingston’s cousin
who approached Jellison last year and expressly urged him to
expedite the identification process.

Livingston’s mother Sharon, already in her mid-70s and long
holding onto hope for information about her son, had been
stricken with two forms of terminal cancer, the cousin said.

Sharon Livingston told WTHR last year that she kept a landline
in her home for more than 30 years because it was the only
number her son knew at the time he vanished since cell phones
weren’t part of the equation yet.

She said she waited just a few days without hearing from him
before she reported him missing.

“I know that man got him, I just know,” Livingston said of
Baumeister in an interview last year with WTHR. “I’m pretty sure
they are going to find him. I just know they are.”

Jellison expressed amazement this week after positively
confirming Allen Livingston’s remains. A positive ID had not
been made since the 1990s.

“What are the odds, out of 10,000 remains? Out of 10,000, we
selected 44 and the first identification is a person from the
family that initiated this whole thing,” he said. “Where does
that come from?”

Jellison said his office’s first reaction was to celebrate the
success of identifying Livingston, but it was quickly tempered
by the realization that yet another murder victim was turned up.

For now, authorities reported that there are four other DNA
profiles investigators have created based on the bone and
fragments located at the farm. They are comparing those profiles
to DNA samples that relatives of other missing men have given to
police after Jellison’s investigation reopened in 2022. The
current owner of Fox Hollow has continually turned up fragments
and submits them to authorities, WTHR reported.

Indiana Police and the Hampton County Coroner’s Office continue
to urge people who know someone missing from that time period to
reach out to the coroner’s office.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/what-are-the-odds-remains-
identified-of-man-who-went-missing-over-30-years-ago-on-
suspected-serial-killer-s-farm/ar-AA1isx3y