During the mid-1990s, numerous young men vanished after leaving gay bars around the Indianapolis area. For years, the investigation made little progress until the son of a wealthy businessman discovered a human skull on their extensive Indiana property, known as Fox Hollow Farm.

Unknown Serial Killer of America explores the investigation into Indiana killer Herb Baumeister, who is suspected of enticing gay men to his lavish estate and subsequently murdering them. In the present day, Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison is seeking public assistance in identifying more victims.

“This case is the second-largest investigation into unidentified human remains in this country, second only to the World Trade Center,” Jellison mentioned to producers in the Season 1 finale.

The 1993 disappearance of Manuel Resendez

Manuel Resendez told his mother, on August 7, 1993, that he planned to have a few drinks with friends at an Indianapolis gay bar. Relatives, including sister Janie Brock, feared the worst when he never returned, prompting Brock and her sister to go to police.

But, because Resendez was over 18 and due to his sexual preferences, his disappearance was not prioritized at a time when it was unsafe to be openly gay. It never made a difference to his relatives, as Brock told Unknown Serial Killers of America in a mix of laughter and tears.

“Manuel was infectious; he was a lot of things to a lot of people … He took care of me,” Brock recalled. “He had jokes for days. None of them made sense, and he thought they were the funniest, and I never got any of them.”

In the weeks after Resendez vanished, Brock recognized a pattern: that other gay men around Indianapolis’s gay scene continued to disappear. It only amped loved ones’ efforts to investigate, but, despite canvassing the bars, they were getting no closer to finding Resendez.

“We were scared,” said Brock. “Some of Manuel’s friends and family went looking in dumpsters and ditches and stuff like that, and I was talking to whoever would talk to me.”

Eventually, the case found its way to Indianapolis Police Detective Mary Wilson, already investigating a handful of missing gay men. Among them, Roger Goodlet, who, in July 1994, left his doting mother to have birthday drinks with friends and never returned.

His mother would post missing persons flyers in hangouts and bars to no avail.

“Sometimes mistakes happen”

There was movement in the case when Mark Goodyear — an acquaintance of Goodlet’s — spotted a man at the bar gazing at Goodlet’s missing persons poster. The man said his name was Brian Smart, and he invited Goodyear back to his rural property to have a swim in his indoor pool.

The pool, in the basement of the mansion-like home, was surrounded by mannequins.

“Mark thought that was weird and became very suspicious, so he didn’t drink the drinks that Brian was pouring,” said journalist Laura Musall of The Noblesville Daily Ledger.

The men reportedly discussed erotic asphyxiation just before Smart attacked his guest, according to Musall.

“Brian put a hose around Mark’s neck and tried to strangle him, and said, ‘You know, sometimes mistakes happen,’” she said.

“Engaging in asphyxiation, at a minimum, this is somebody on the verge who does not care and is essentially willing to take such risks for a momentary pleasure gain,” said psychological criminologist Dr. Bryanna Fox. “Additionally, asphyxiation is about dominance. He is wanting to feel that he is taking life out of somebody else. He wants to feel bigger and better about himself, filling a void that he clearly has.”

Smart later brought Goodyear back to Indianapolis, and Goodyear relayed the harrowing ordeal to Det. Mary Wilson. Wilson used every resource to track the man down but found herself no closer to identifying a suspect.

During a lull in the investigation, about one year later, Goodyear spotted Brian Smart again at the same bar. He asked another to follow Smart and take down his license plate number, and through this line of investigation, authorities learned Brian Smart was really Herb Baumeister.

About Herb Baumeister

Herb and his wife, Juliana “Julie” Baumeister, were a wealthy couple who lived in the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield, Indiana. They owned a chain of Sav-A-Lot second-hand stores and lived in a million-dollar home on Fox Hollow Farm, 18 acres of a one-time horse farm.

“It was hard to believe someone like Herb Baumeister had anything to do with the missing gay men, but he was seen at the bar multiple times and picked up Mark Goodyear where gay men are going missing,” Musall told Unknown Serial Killers of America.

Det. Wilson had her suspicions about Baumeister once he came onto the radar, but there wasn’t anything she could tie to the businessman to officially categorize him as a suspect. Mr. and Mrs. Baumeister, who shared three children, quashed authorities’ requests for a voluntary interview.

According to then-Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney Sonia Leerkamp, the married couple had their struggles behind closed doors.

“Juliana described him as an unusual husband,” said Leerkamp. “He was not very communicative. She described their sex life that was relatively non-existent, other than the fact that they had children.”

By the mid-’90s, Baumeister hit a rut. His thrift store businesses were failing and his wife of 23 years filed for divorce. Herb eventually moved into the family’s lake house and, with the help of a divorce attorney, Julie Baumeister invited authorities to Fox Hollow Farm in June 1996 and shared a disturbing story, as retold by Leerkamp.

“Herb’s son, coming out of the woods, was carrying a skull and showed it to his mother,” Leerkamp said. “Herb’s father had been a physician, and Herb Baumeister said, ‘Well, that’s probably from an old skeleton that I got from my father, which was definitely not real.’”

Herb Baumeister told his family he believed a raccoon entered the garage and carried the fake skeleton away.

But, when the Baumeister children found additional bones on the property some time later, it prompted Julie Baumeister to contact her attorney. It essentially got the ball rolling in the investigation.

On June 24, 1996, bones provided by the children were confirmed to be human.

A search of Fox Hollow Farm

Authorities and crime scene technicians descended on Fox Hollow Farm, joined by esteemed forensic anthropologist Dr. Stephen Nawrocki and his university grad students. Initially, bone fragments discovered on a nearby path confirmed Det. Wilson’s theories.

“Then it metastasized,” Leerkamp said.

Bones and teeth had been scattered throughout the property, and desecration was believed to have been caused by animals. The death toll continued to rise, and several broken hyoid bones proved that some of the victims died by strangulation.

Now-retired Detective Cary Milligan of the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office was assigned to search inside the home, including the indoor pool guarded by male mannequins “dressed … in certain ways.” Milligan recalled the scene “didn’t feel right.”

“We looked around, and I noticed there was a chaise lounge type of couch, laying underneath this open vent in the ceiling where the vent was only connected with one screw, and it was dangling,” Milligan told Unknown Serial Killers of America. “I said, ‘Well, that would be a good place to hide something.’”

Milligan then wondered if Baumeister filmed himself killing his victims in the pool, similar to the 1994 attack on survivor Mark Goodyear.

Mention of a possible video recording prompted Julie Baumeister to lead detectives to her estranged husband’s supposed stash of VHS home videos. But when she looked, they were not there.

Searches continue outdoors

Officials continued to expand their search on the wooded property, and neighbors alerted them to a rural creek and a grisly find.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Milligan said. “There was full ribs, a scapula, a tailbone, there was a vertebra, arm bones, leg bones, mandibles … the whole creek was full of intact bones.”

More would be found along an adjacent hill, and by the creek, an arm bone with hinged handcuffs locked around the wrist.

“It appeared that Herb had skeletons lying out in the woods that had decomposed, and that he had gone and collected them and just threw them across the fence into the weeds, and then they were getting washed down the creek when it would rain,” Milligan said.

According to former Deputy Prosecutor Kathleen Clark, experts found an “unimaginable” 10,000 bone fragments as part of their far-reaching search. On the ground, Dr. Nawrocki estimated a preliminary total of 11 bodies, said Milligan, who cited Baumeister as “the perfect killing machine.”

The identified victims included Manuel Resendez and Roger Goodlet, plus Jeffery Jones, Richard Hamilton, Steven Hale, Alan Broussard, Michael Keirn, and Jerry Williams Comer, according to Unknown Serial Killers of America.

Police find Herb Baumeister

Herb Baumeister fled the state as searches got underway. However, on July 4, 1995, provincial police in Canada found Baumeister sleeping in his car. With him were suitcases and a collection of VHS tapes, and it appeared he was living out of his car. Officers asked him to leave, and he complied.

The next day, Baumeister died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the park.

The tapes were never found.

“I think those tapes Herb was in possession of had evidence on them,” Milligan said. “I think he was videotaping his crimes.”

Baumeister left a three-page suicide note, referencing his pending divorce and failing businesses as reasons why he decided to take his own life. He made no mention of his alleged crimes and would not live to face a court of law.

Today, experts continue to identify Baumeister’s alleged victims.

“We have 9,900 remains yet to test, and we had eight individuals originally identified in the ’90s,” said Coroner Jeff Jellison. “Since then, my team has identified Allen Livingston. We’re sitting on four more DNA profiles that we don’t have names to yet, so we’re at 13 victims, and we’re going to identify many, many more people.”

On August 20, 2024, Jellison and Janie Brock, the sister of victim Manuel Resendez, sat for an emotional sit-down, as filmed by Unknown Serial Killers of America producers. More of Resendez’s remains had just been identified.

Jellison maintains it is “not acceptable” that the murdered men have yet to have a proper burial, vowing to keep on identifying the victims so families can have closure.

If you believe a loved one could be one of Baumeister’s alleged victims, please contact the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office at 1-317-770-4415 and arrange to give a DNA reference sample.

Catch up on the entire first season of Unknown Serial Killers of America, available to watch on Oxygen.