The coroner responsible for identifying the victims of one of America’s most notorious serial killers has brought up unsettling questions about the killer’s supposed suicide and some missing pieces of evidence from the case.

Herb Baumeister is thought to have killed around 25 young men during his murderous rampage in Indianapolis in the early 1990s.

By day, the married father-of-three masqueraded as a family man and wealthy owner of several local thrift stores.

During the evenings, he would encounter young men at gay bars in downtown Indianapolis, enticing them back to his expansive 18-acre property, Fox Hollow Farm, where he would murder them, burn their bodies, and distribute their scorched remains across the family land.

As cops closed in on him and searched his home in the summer of 1996, Baumeister fled Indianapolis.

Several days afterward, on July 4, 1996, he was discovered deceased in a Canadian park, with police ruling it a suicide by gunshot to the head, leaving behind unanswered queries about his gruesome crimes. A suicide note was found, though it mentioned nothing about his horrific acts.

However, Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison, who is endeavoring to identify all of the serial killer’s victims among a staggering 10,000 human remains, has expressed skepticism that Baumeister committed suicide.

Instead, Baumeister may have been murdered in order to silence him, Jellison said.

‘I think there’s a missing question about the actual suicide itself – and the suicide note,’ he told the Daily Mail.

Speaking on stage at CrimeCon in Denver on Saturday, Jellison said ‘there’s all sorts of questions’ about Baumeister’s death.

‘Did he take his own life? Or did someone kill him to cover up the bigger picture of the case.’

Steve Ainsworth, retired Boulder County Sheriff’s office detective and cold case investigator, agreed.

‘I think there is a question as to whether he took his own life,’ he said on stage at CrimeCon.

‘A suicide is very easy to stage. But there are some indicators to look at. I think it definitely has to be looked into.’

Ainsworth remarked, ‘In this situation, aside from identifying individuals, it’s like an oyster. The more you delve into it, the more extensive it becomes. There are numerous facets, expanding in every direction.’

Jellison revealed there are other mysteries still surrounding the Fox Hollow Farm murders.

He told the Daily Mail he has learned there is evidence missing from the case – possibly sold by police to case fanatics.

‘I believe that some photographs, originally released by law enforcement during the initial investigation to certain members of the public, never should have been disclosed,’ he stated.

He explained that the current owner of Fox Hollow Farm – a historian on the case – has claimed someone involved in the original 1996 investigation offered to sell him evidence.

While unsure if he bought the items, Jellison said he knows the homeowner is in possession of a box including photos from the criminal case and has shared some of them with his team.

Jellison and Ainsworth also believe Baumeister must have had an accomplice in the murders.

They believe one man alone could not have physically managed to drag dozens of bodies from the pool room in the home – where the victims are said to have been killed – out into the thick woods surrounding the property.

‘How does one man drag them all out into the woods? How does one man kill that many people with no one else?’ Jellison said.

‘There had to be [an accomplice],’ Ainsworth added.

‘No doubt about it… to what extent we don’t know? At the very minimum he’s helping to carry them.’

It’s a belief that Eric Pranger, the cousin of victim Allen Livingston, has previously shared with the Daily Mail.

‘I pick up bodies for a living [working at a funeral home] and there’s no way a man could handle all those bodies by himself,’ Pranger said.

‘I don’t think Baumeister did this alone. I think more people were involved.’

In an ABC News Studios series, airing earlier this year, Ainsworth said that the man who has long been seen as the ‘hero’ of the story knows too much to simply have been a victim.

The net finally closed in on Baumeister after a man named Mark Goodyear told police he had managed to escape a night in the serial killer’s lair.

But Goodyear’s story has changed multiple times over the years and witnesses have suggested his possible involvement.

In 1997, a man named LeRoy Bray came forward to police to claim he was once at Fox Hollow Farm with Goodyear, Baumeister and some other men.

Bray told police he witnessed Baumeister shooting a man dead while Goodyear held the man.

Meanwhile, Baumeister’s lawyer told investigators days after his suicide that the father-of-three had confided in him about a year earlier that he had got involved with a ‘really bad dude’ called Mark Goodyear.

It is claimed in the ABC show that Goodyear was, at one point, a suspect in the murders.

Goodyear denied any involvement in the murders in the series and has never been charged with any crime connected to the Baumeister case.

‘He is still out there,’ Jellison said Saturday.

‘And I’ve been asked many times why he is still out there.’

But for Jellison, the biggest unanswered question in the case is who are the unnamed victims and how many are still out there.

Three decades on, the number of victims and their identities remains unclear.

Back in 1996, only eight victims – Johnny Bayer, Jeff Jones, Richard Hamilton Jr., Steven Hale, Allen Broussard, Roger Goodlet, Mike Keirn, Manuel Resendez – were identified.

With Baumeister dead, the case was shuttered in 1998 and a staggering 10,000 pieces of charred, burned bones and human remains belonging to his victims sat neglected and unidentified on a shelf.

In 2022, Jellison launched an investigation to identify the remaining victims and finally give the families of missing loved ones answers. It is the largest investigation into unidentified human remains in United States history, second only to the World Trade Center.

Speaking on stage at CrimeCon, Jellison revealed he faced pushback from the local sheriff’s department when he decided to launch his probe.

‘When I reopened the investigation, one of the first things I did was call the sheriff’s department to get the case files,’ he said.

‘They were resistant to give them to me. And then, when we got it, it was redacted.’

He said: ‘That was red flag number one.’

Jellison explained: ‘My job is to identify people and they redacted names and addresses… anything that would have helped me identify a person was redacted.’

But he has vowed ‘we will not stop’.

‘For 26 years these bones and bone fragments had sat on a shelf,’ he said.

‘It’s important when we talk about the bone and bone fragments these are people, this is someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father, potentially someone’s husband.

‘So it’s become my goal to get these people off the shelf.’

Since launching the probe, two more victims – Allen Livingston and Daniel Halloran – have been named and their families given answers after so many years.

Three more victims have also been found.

The three DNA profiles were identified among the remains but they do not match any of the DNA samples submitted by families with missing loved ones.

They have now been sent to forensics lab Othram for comparison with profiles in genetic genealogy databases.

While they have not got their names back yet, Jellison told the Daily Mail earlier this year he believed it could only be a matter of months.

An estimated 25 victims are believed to have been found at Fox Hollow Farm – making Baumeister’s reign of terror even worse than the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer.