The 10,000 Bones at Fox Hollow Farm

This episode includes discussions of murder, assault, and suicide.

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Is there a place near you with an especially dark past?

Every time you drive by it, someone always brings up the stories.

Maybe it's an old psychiatric hospital that played host to inhumane experiments, or a section of woods where people tend to vanish into thin air, or a house where a string of gruesome murders took place.

There's a legal term for these kinds of properties.

They're said to be stigmatized or psychologically affected.

And in many states, when they go up for sale, the seller is required to disclose certain details if asked, like suspicious deaths and homicides.

Some states even have specific language around reported hauntings and supernatural activity, all of which can affect the asking price.

It's the reason Robert and Vicki Graves could afford to buy Fox Hollow Farm, an enormous estate in Indiana with an indoor pool, two libraries, and a five-car garage.

The original asking price was $2.8 million in 2004, but the Graves reached a deal a few years later for just shy of $1 million.

All because, about a decade earlier, police searched the property and found human remains.

A bunch of bone fragments scattered about a pocket of woods.

It started with a few, then a few hundred, then a few thousand.

The graves haven't gone out of their way to look for more fragments, but every time they've stumbled on a new one, Robert has brought it to the lab at the University of Indianapolis where they're stored for safekeeping.

The remains are believed to belong to at least 12 victims victims of a suspected serial killer who owned Fox Hollow Farm before the graves and who they believe still haunts the grounds.

Welcome to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

I'm Janice Morgan.

You might recognize me as the voice behind the investigative docuseries Broken and the true crime podcast Fear Thy Neighbor.

I'll be your host for the next few weeks, and I'm thrilled to be here.

To help us tell today's story, we interviewed Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison, the man responsible for the latest investigation to identify the victims at Fox Hollow Farm.

We're so grateful for his time and expertise.

Stay with us.

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Hi, Connor.

Hello.

So let's talk about what drew you into this case.

Yeah, let's talk about it.

You're not from Indiana.

You don't have a personal connection.

Most of these crimes happened before you were even old enough to walk.

So what drew you in?

Well, I've been a writer and producer on serial killers for a while now.

So I have news alerts set up for the types of cases we cover.

And a little while back, I got this notification that a coroner in Indiana had identified more victims in this case that dates back to the 80s.

I was a little surprised that I'd never heard of it before, especially because it had such an enormous scope.

I'm reading about victim numbers in the double digits, a killing spree thought to have lasted more than a decade across two states in five jurisdictions.

But there was also this really small element to it.

Many of the victims disappeared from the same four-block radius, a sliver of a city that was supposed to be a safe haven for them.

And it's actually a type of place I'm very familiar with.

And the more I read, the more it felt like in another world, in another timeline, those victims

could have been me.

I think most of us connect to cases where that's true.

Like Connor said, the scope of this one is really large, partly because it's many different cases.

But we're going to focus in on one of them and start our story with the man responsible for the news notification Connor received.

And have you yourself been to Fox Hollow?

Many times.

In the middle 90s, it was, I believe, an 18-acre estate, beautiful home, horse farm type estate, very sparsely populated area at that time.

That's Jeff Jellison.

He's the coroner for Hamilton County, Indiana, which is where Fox Hollow Farm is located.

Today, a portion of that property has been sold off for lots.

Still beautiful home, still horse farm kind of environment, more densely populated, you know, with homes nearby.

Also a very popular walking trail in this area kind of runs along the complete east side of the property, which is interesting for some folks because they're walking by the home and the site of one of the most prolific serial killers in this country.

It's not that surprising to hear those words come out of Jeff's mouth.

One of the most prolific serial killers in the country.

Pretty much everyone who comes across this case, hears the evidence, the body count, the eyewitness testimony, they all draw the same conclusion.

Herb Baumeister is guilty of serial murder.

For almost 30 years, he's been the primary suspect in countless suspicious deaths and disappearances.

The reason you might not have heard his name before is because he's never been convicted or even charged, which means technically, he's only a suspected serial killer.

That said, let's run through some facts.

Between the years 1980 and 1991, the bodies of 11 gay men were found in rural parts of Indiana and western Ohio.

All of them young.

Most of them had either been dumped over bridges or left in drain pipes, found nude or partially clothed, and strangled to death.

None of the resulting homicide investigations get very far for a whole host of reasons.

Blurred jurisdictional lines, a lack of witnesses, bad relations between the police and the queer community.

But the bodies suddenly stop in 1991, which happens to be the year that Herb Baumeister, along with his wife and three kids, moves into Fox Hollow Farm.

And that's when the disappearances start.

Over the next few years, at least 10 young men in their 20s and 30s go missing from Indianapolis's so-called gay neighborhood.

which at the time isn't very big.

So if you're a member of the tight-knit community, you know about the disappearances.

Posters are hung up looking for the missing.

People are warned to stay vigilant.

And around this time, two important things happen.

First, a man has a harrowing sexual encounter with someone who says his name is Brian Smart.

The encounter happens in an indoor pool area at a massive estate and involves some really scary acts of autoerotic asphyxiation.

The experience leaves the man so shaken that he reports it to the police.

And second, Herb Baumeister's 13-year-old son finds a human skull in their backyard.

When he brings his mother outside to show her, they find even more remains nearby.

Now, believe it or not, this news doesn't immediately reach police.

That's because Herb Baumeister tells his wife that the bones likely belong to a cadaver his father once used in his medical practice.

The explanation makes very little sense given his father was an anesthesiologist, but it's enough to stave off an investigation for the moment.

Eventually though, the man who had that scary sexual encounter with another man who called himself Brian Smart sees Brian driving around Indianapolis.

Hyper-aware of all the disappearances happening, the man writes down the car's license plate, gives it to police, and that's when officials learn that Brian Smart is actually Herb Baumeister.

Soon enough, investigators are knocking on the door to Fox Hollow Farm.

They tell Herb's wife Julie that her husband is a suspect in the disappearance of several gay men in the area, which, as you can imagine, is a lot of information to process all at once.

But once again, Herb has an explanation.

He says none of it is true.

He ties the accusations to an employee at his work who he says has a vendetta against him.

He essentially tells Julie, whatever you do, don't let police on the property.

She listens at first, but after a while she has doubts.

She and Herb stop talking.

Julie files for divorce.

And then, one day while Herb's away, she goes back to the police and invites them to search Fox Hollow Farm once and for all.

And that's when they find thousands of bones.

and bone fragments.

It's a huge break, but it comes with an equally big catch.

Police don't arrest Herb.

They can't, because he never returns home.

Herb's body is found eight days later by some campers in a Canadian park, dead by suicide.

He leaves a note behind that mentions plenty, but there's not a single word about any murders or remains.

The news makes headlines all across Indiana.

Here's Jeff.

The Fox Hollow incident really occurred right at the end of my law enforcement career, so I was somewhat familiar with it.

I was not involved with it at the time.

Jeff gets involved 26 years later.

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My entire law enforcement career was spent working on the street.

I was a canine handler and I was never a detective.

I just

worked the street every day protecting the community that I worked for.

Jeff left law enforcement and started his own private business, which he ran until someone at the coroner's office asked if he'd consider working for them.

My business was successful and going from owning a private successful business to working for county government, you know, I had to give some real thought to that.

But I sold my business, went to work as a deputy here in the office, worked here for 10 years as a deputy, and then I made the decision to run for coroner.

Coroner is an elected official in Indiana.

They can hold office for up to eight years, two four-year terms.

When Connor spoke to him at the end of 2024, Jeff was finishing up the second year of his first term.

Responsibilities for the position vary depending on jurisdiction and state, but they're wide-ranging and include notifying family members of the deceased, interviewing witnesses, testifying in court, collecting evidence, and performing autopsies.

Some of the things we see here at Sabelle, you can't unsee.

There's no day that is the same.

You could start your morning out with a traffic fatality, have a suicide midday, and finish up with a child death in the evening.

But above all else, the coroner has one role.

Our duties are to determine cause, manner, and identification in death investigations.

When did the name Fox Hollow Farm first come across your desk?

I received a phone call from Eric Pranger.

The call comes in 2022, a few months into Jeff's first term.

Eric tells Jeff he's the relative of Alan Livingston, who's been missing since August of 1993.

The Livingstons believe that Alan is among the remains taken from Fox Hollow Farm.

They're looking for someone who can help confirm or deny their suspicions.

The next thing I did is kind of vetted his phone call and everything that Eric was indicating certainly checked out.

And then I started looking at the Fox Hollow case and had no idea what we had at that time.

I knew that the remains were being stored at the University of Indianapolis in their anthropology and archaeology department.

Jeff decides to give the university a call.

He speaks with Krista Latham, a forensic anthropologist and professor there.

She catches Jeff up to speed.

She informed me that we had 10,000 bone and bone fragments that were unidentified.

You know, that's obviously a huge number.

Beginning an investigation would be a monumental undertaking, one that presented many challenges.

It's a challenge that coroners prior to me had apparently chosen not to do.

And the interesting part of that is, by statute, the coroner is responsible to identify the deceased in his county.

For Jeff, step one is to assemble a team.

He says the Indiana State DNA Lab comes on board first, then the FBI, then a private DNA lab called Authram.

Even though it's the only cold case his team has, they know from the start that the investigation will be a long one.

This case is 30 years old, suspect is dead, so we have to assume our position on the priority totem poll

because law enforcement, state police lab, are trying to put bad guys in jail for crimes that are being committed today.

And we understand that and we support that.

An investigation like this can often involve a lot of hurry up and wait.

Even if Fox Hollow wasn't a nearly 30-year-old case, there are plenty of hurdles to cataloging and processing 10,000 remains.

DNA testing is more expensive than you might think.

Cost is certainly probably

one of the the biggest hurdles.

Probably another hurdle is getting people to come forward, biological relatives of missing people.

Again, there's been 30 years go by since these people became missing.

Some of their parents are deceased.

Maybe some of their brothers, sisters, cousins have moved from the Indianapolis area.

I mean, we're chasing family members from Alaska to Louisiana.

Probably the biggest hurdle in this case

is time.

The remains are taken from the University of Indianapolis to DNA labs in batches of about 40 at a time.

Each batch takes about a quarter of a year to process.

Connor sat down with Jeff in November of 2024.

How many of the remains

have gone through lab processing?

I think the last total I got was about 160.

160 out of 10,000.

Yeah.

During the original investigation in the 90s, forensic scientists identified eight individuals from the remains found at Fox Hollow.

All were subjects of the Indianapolis missing person cases we already discussed.

But those eight represented just a fraction of the total number of victims.

Officials believe the remains belonged to as many as 25 people.

Since Jeff's team started their work, they've been able to identify a ninth victim, Alan Livingston.

It's the name that set Jeff's whole investigation into motion in the first place.

When you stop and think, the family that initiated the phone call to me, out of 10,000 remains, the first person identified was their loved one.

That's

a God thing right there, you know?

The reason for that phone call was time.

It was running out for Alan's mother, Sharon, who'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

That lady was struggling for 30 years.

When I sat down and talked to her, I noticed on her table next to her couch that she still had a landline phone.

And I said to her, I said, Sheridan, I don't often see that anymore in people's homes, a landline phone.

And she looked at me and she said, that's the only number that my son has to call me at.

So she had sat for 30 years waiting on that phone to ring.

And

obviously, that's that in and of itself is not healthy.

And she did pass just the other day.

So we were able to locate her son

and bring a little bit of that closure back and return her son's remains to her before she did pass.

So, you know,

to me, we just won the game right there.

Identifying new victims tends to attract the most media attention.

Jeff says it's how a lot of people judge the success of his investigation, but it's only part of what drives him to continue.

I wonder if you could put into words how you measure the success of your investigation.

This investigation is very personal for me because I've sat with the family members and we've held hands, we've cried, we've laughed, we've prayed.

My goal was to get these remains off of the shelf at the University of Indianapolis to a final resting spot.

We can't leave these people there for eternity.

Some of the families have chosen to receive those remains back to their care.

Some have said, no, we do not want the remains returned to us.

And that was another challenge.

So what do we do with these remains?

Why would someone deny the remains of a loved one?

How many victims haven't been identified?

Will this case ever see a criminal conviction?

More after this.

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Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison and his team revived the investigation to identify the victims at Fox Hollow Farm in 2022.

Ever since, they've been working to right some of the wrongs of the past.

You mentioned earlier that

you offered remains to the families of loved ones, and I'm not trying to ask you to speculate on their reasons, but I wonder if you know why they refused their remains.

Yeah,

I do.

I mean, you know, part of the reason goes back to the initial investigation in the 90s.

I don't feel like law enforcement and the coroner at that time did the greatest job with this case in a couple areas.

When they identified these eight individuals, I mean, it was suspects dead.

These are eight gay men from Indianapolis found in very conservative Hamilton County in the 90s, where this lifestyle certainly was not.

very well accepted.

So it was game over.

Abruptly, the investigation ends and people came forward and said, hey, you've got more remains yet to be identified.

And family members came forward and they said, we believe that our loved one is a part of these remains.

And at that time, Hamilton County made the decision not to fund the investigation any longer as far as identifying these remains and to put that burden on family members.

So a family member that came forward that said, hey, I'm willing to give you whatever you need to see if my loved one was recovered in these remains.

The county said, great, you pay for it.

Now, where in this country does law enforcement and the coroner say to victims, families in a homicide case that we're going to make you pay to find out if your loved one was a victim?

You don't do that.

The DNA is expensive now and was very expensive back then.

These people didn't have the money to do that.

So, conservative Hamilton County, we're done.

If anybody wants any more, then you can pay for it.

That's not right.

Jeff says that some of the family members were given their loved ones' remains back in the 90s, just not in the way you might expect.

They were brought into a room and they were handed a paper grocery sack with a raw remain inside of it and said, Here's your loved one.

I mean,

damn it, we can do better.

For 28 years, nobody did anything.

These people, these families were forgotten.

And I don't know if you can see over the top of my shoulder, but there's a piece of artwork back there that says, no longer forgotten.

And as long as I'm coroner in this county, these folks won't be forgotten again.

Jeff hopes his office can take ownership of the past and rebuild trust with families.

He remembers how, on one occasion, a victim's sister refused her brother's remains.

Jeff says she was still so hurt by the actions of officials all those years ago.

She couldn't shake the memory of her mother being handed a paper bag with a raw bone inside of it.

After being told no, Jeff's team worked with the funeral home to have her brother's remains cremated at no charge.

They also worked with the funeral home to donate an urn and a small plot of land in a family cemetery so they could be put to rest.

So I called the lady back and I said, would you please come into my office and talk to me?

And she did and I explained to her what we had done.

And after a very, very long conversation, she agreed to take the remains back.

That was in November of

22.

December of that year, I got a Christmas card here at my office and it was from this lady.

And I opened it up and it simply said,

thank you for the closure I didn't know I needed.

There are others who have stepped forward to support as well.

An organization called He Knows Your Name has built an ossuary and a monument at a local cemetery for any remains that go unclaimed for whatever reason.

The victims' names will be engraved on the monument as they're known.

Meanwhile, the search for additional remains is still underway.

According to Jeff, back in the 90s, the majority were found in three concentrated locations on Fox Hollow.

None of the bones had been buried very deep.

Most were scattered and covered in brush.

Some appeared to have been burned and or smashed.

Jeff doesn't believe there are any common denominators between the three locations.

Reasons why they might have been chosen.

But he suspects that more bones are out there, dispersed even farther by animals.

Jeff's team has been back on site with cadaver dogs, but he says they're not quite ready to perform another excavation.

They have plenty to keep them busy.

Building on the forensic work of the 90s, Jeff and his team have now found 12 unique DNA profiles.

That's 12 victims, three of whom remain unidentified as of this recording.

Jeff says his plea has been the same since day one.

If you're the biological relative of a missing person, please come forward.

If it's unrelated to Fox Hollow Farm, we'll get you pointed towards the right agency or we'll get a swab ourselves from you and we'll get that entered into CODIS because that is the most efficient way in identifying remains like this.

CODIS stands for Combined DNA Index System.

It's a national database of profiles that helps law enforcement identify victims and suspects.

When Jeff and his team got a call from a woman whose brother went missing in the 80s, they took a swab of her DNA and entered it into the system.

It turned up a match on a set of remains discovered in Las Vegas, Nevada.

We had a suspicion that this type of thing would happen, that we would get matches to remains recovered around the state, around the nation, and

good.

You know, good for it,

because

not only are we working very hard to provide closure for the families of the Fox Hollow victims, this investigation will provide closure for families completely unrelated.

How distant of a relative could be useful?

I mean, we're receiving swabs from second cousins.

You know, I mean, certainly

the closer in order in lineage, the better.

But with DNA technology today and the very talented people that work for the Indiana State Police, these people are amazing.

They do amazing work.

So I'll just say this.

If you're a biological relative, call me.

Jeff hopes to serve the maximum eight years as Hamilton County coroner.

But with thousands of remains still waiting to be tested, he says this investigation will likely extend well beyond that.

Who knows how many more victims were killed on Fox Hollow Farm?

And then, of course, there are the dozens of other suspicious death cases believed to have ties to Herb Baumeister.

Those bodies of gay men found dumped in rural areas of Indiana and Ohio in the years before Baumeister moved in.

Like we said, there's never been a criminal conviction in any case with ties to Baumeister.

And that's partly because he was never interviewed or even detained by police, much less charged.

Instead, Baumeister freely drove to Canada and effectively ended all criminal investigations himself.

The circumstantial evidence feels overwhelming.

In addition to everything we already covered, we also know that most, if not all, of the disappearances tied to Baumeister happened while his wife and kids were away from Fox Hollow and he was left home alone.

But to this day, no one has found the smoking gun to definitively tie him to a list of victims that has only gotten longer.

He's as prolific as a lot that we have in this country.

Probably as prolific as Dahmer, Gacy, some of these other folks.

They just didn't have a bad guy to walk into that courtroom in this case.

So it didn't get the attention.

Could a criminal investigation posthumously solve this case?

Do you think that's possible?

It's an open investigation now from my standpoint, but is the potential there for law enforcement to reopen this investigation?

You know, we know that there's at least 12 people that were killed on that property.

And they suspect that many of these people or they suspect all of them were killed inside the home in an indoor pool area.

But Hurt was not a big man.

I think he was six foot something and about 180 pounds.

And I think that's probably really being generous from the photos I've seen.

How does, and I do this for a living, how does someone

take a dead person and transport them 200 yards outside the house into a woods?

That's not an easy job.

We do know that there were handcuffs recovered in the woods.

We do know that there were shotgun shells recovered in the woods.

And there is a statement in the case folder from an individual that says he watched another man hold an individual while Herb Daumeister shot him.

I mean, if you don't think that whoever committed these crimes had help,

then I think you need to look at the case a little bit deeper.

Because I suspect that whoever committed these crimes, whoever killed these people, because Baumeister was never convicted, so I can't say that he did.

But somebody probably had some help along the way.

Without access to those case folders, we can't officially corroborate that witness account, but it's certainly interesting.

While Jeff's investigation is focused on finding those who can help identify the dead, maybe there are also people out there who can bring about another resolution, who saw something that could be useful at Fox Hollow or elsewhere.

Jeff said he hadn't had any contact with the individuals maybe most likely to have seen something, the surviving Baumeisters.

But something strange happened right before Connor sat down with Jeff for an interview.

interview.

One of my deputies just walked into my office and said that Eric Baumeister had contacted him wanting to speak to me.

Eric Baumeister is Herb's son, the same one who found that skull on Fox Hollow when he was 13.

Jeff hadn't had a chance to return Eric's call that day, but Connor followed up later.

Jeff had gotten in touch with Eric and they had spoken a few times.

Jeff said nothing of much substance had come up yet, but who knows what the future has in store?

What memories could still be unlocked that might just make all the unknowns

snap into place.

Thanks for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

We'll be back Monday with another episode.

For more information on the Fox Hollow farm case, we recommend checking out the reporting done by WRTC, the Dayton Daily News, The Advocate, and The New York Times.

Among the many sources we used for this episode, we found them extremely helpful to our research.

If you are the biological relative of a missing person and believe they may be connected to the Fox Hollow case, reach out to the Hamilton County Coroner's Office at 317-770-4415.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson, edited by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Lori Siegel, video edited by Spencer Howard, and sound designed by Alex Button.

I'm Janice Morgan.