At popular LGBT newspaper The Word, there was only one terrifying story in town: young gay men vanishing without a trace. 

Edition after edition, it was always the same narrative. The men were gay or bisexual, aged around 18 to 35 and had disappeared after visiting gay bars in downtown Indianapolis.

Often it was in these bars that they were last seen alive, before leaving with a mystery man or getting into a suspicious vehicle.

It was the early 1990s, and fears were growing that these disappearances were all connected. Was a serial killer at large preying on the gay community?

Missing persons posters were plastered across the walls of popular haunts such as Our Place, Metro and The Unicorn Club along Massachusetts Avenue.

Ted Fleischaker, a well-known figure in the LGBT community and the founder, owner and publisher of The Word, was using his newspaper to warn people about the dangers of leaving bars and clubs with strangers.

But not everyone could be saved. 

In August 1995, one of Fleischaker’s own friends became the latest suspected victim to vanish.

Herb Baumeister’s Fox Hollow Farm property (pictured) where he lured his victims, killed them and scattered their remains around the estate

Jerry Williams-Comer vanished from Indianapolis in August 1995. He is still listed as a missing person but is widely presumed to be a victim of serial killer Herb Baumeister

Jerry Williams-Comer, 34, ran rival publication The Sarj Guide – focused on happenings, events and bars in the LGBT community – with his long-term partner Ray Comer.

‘He was a competitor and a friend,’ Fleischaker tells the Daily Mail. ‘I would see him out often. And there was a bit of friendly competition between our publications.’

Williams-Comer, who had a son from a previous marriage, was last seen alive in downtown Indianapolis on August 8, 1995.

‘Jerry and Ray had an open relationship so the situation was that Jerry went home with people quite frequently from bars,’ Fleischaker recalls. ‘Then he went missing.’

Comer filed a missing persons report to police.

Not long later, Williams-Comer’s vehicle was found abandoned in the parking lot of the Castleton Square Mall. But there was no sign of him.

‘He wasn’t the kind of person to just vanish,’ Fleischaker says.

Three decades later, no one has seen or heard from him since.

Law enforcement find human bones on the Fox Hollow Farm estate belonging to wealthy businessman and married father-of-three Herb Baumeister in June 1996

Comer continued publishing The Sarj Guide after Williams-Comer’s disappearance. He died in 2013, never learning the truth about what happened to his partner.

Fleischaker, now 74, says friends reported seeing Williams-Comer leaving a bar with a man who they would later come to learn was notorious serial killer Herb Baumeister.

‘He was seen leaving Metro with Mr. Baumeister, so they said,’ he recalls. ‘I mean gossip is gossip, but he was supposedly seen leaving with him and then was never seen again.’

Williams-Comer is still listed as a missing person by the Indiana State Police and the FBI. 

But he is widely presumed to be among Baumeister’s victims.

The serial killer had spent years masquerading in the community as a family man and successful business owner, with two local Sav-A-Lot thrift stores.

But when his wife and children were out of town, he would frequent Indianapolis gay bars and lure victims back to his 18-acre Fox Hollow Farm in the elite suburb of Westfield. There, he would murder them and dispose of their burned remains around the vast estate.

His chilling secrets came to light in the summer of 1996, when a search of Fox Hollow Farm uncovered a huge graveyard of human bones and charred remains, along with chilling tools including handcuffs and shotgun shells.

While Baumeister escaped justice by fleeing to Ontario where he died by suicide, authorities were able to identify eight victims among the remains – Williams-Comer was not among them. 

But, as a young gay man, he fit the profile.

Ted Fleischaker (pictured) was a well-known figure in the LGBT community and founder, owner and publisher of The Word

The circumstances of his disappearance also matched those of Baumeister’s confirmed victims, who were last seen leaving a bar in the heart of Indianapolis’s queer nightlife scene.

The mall where his car was found is located around halfway along the driving route between the Metro bar and Fox Hollow Farm in the suburbs.

But 30 years later, Williams-Comer’s remains have yet to be found.

In 1998, the conservative enclave of Hamilton County stopped investigating the case or working to identify any more victims – leaving 10,000 still-unidentified human bones and bone fragments to sit on a shelf at the University of Indianapolis.

A new investigation launched by Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison in 2022 has now taken on the mammoth task of identifying the rest of the remains and naming all of Baumeister’s victims.

A ninth victim – Allen Livingston – was identified in 2023. Jellison tells the Daily Mail that two other DNA profiles have been found, meaning two more victims should soon have names.

It is unclear how many more victims are yet to be identified among the thousands of bones and bone fragments – or if all of the remains were even found in the ’90s. 

Fleischaker is doubtful that the full extent of Baumeister’s killing spree will ever be truly known.

‘We’re never going to know one thing: We’re never going to know how many people were killed,’ he says. 

‘We don’t really have any idea how many people died. We just don’t know.’

Allen Livingston, 27, and Manuel Resendez, 34, both went missing in 1993. Their remains have since been found on Fox Hollow Farm

When young men first began disappearing in the early ’90s, the LGBT community was already in the grips of another crisis.

It was the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US, so it wasn’t uncommon for friends and community members to lose their lives.

‘I was going to three or four funerals a week at the time,’ Fleischaker says.

But soon it became obvious within the community that someone was preying on its members.

Between the summers of 1993 and 1994, at least 10 young men were reported missing after they were last seen in downtown bars.

‘Lots of men disappeared without a trace… there would be people you’d see all the time – and then, one day, you didn’t see them at all anymore,’ Fleischaker recalls.

‘And when we would ask questions and ask around, which a lot of us did, we would find out that they had just vanished.’

With a killer on the loose, the community worked together to try to keep each other safe.

Herb Baumeister fooled the local community into thinking he was a family man when in reality he was harboring a dark secret

A lab technician with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department examines human bones in the woods around Fox Hallow Farm during the original 1996 investigation

People would search for their friends and fellow community members.

Bars would put up missing person posters.

Local LGBT papers and publications like The Word tried to spread awareness and encourage people to stay safe on nights out.

‘Our goal was to say, “You don’t want to leave a bar with someone you don’t know and don’t want to get into a sexual situation with someone you don’t know,”‘ Fleischaker remembers.

‘People were told to double their guard and to take care and go out together, so if you were going to go out on Saturday night, rather than go by yourself, take a friend or at the very least you’d tell your roommate or somebody, “Hey, I’m going to Metro.” So if you didn’t come back, they would go to look for you.’

When people did go missing, the community rallied together to search for them.

But for a long time, Fleischaker says, the queer community was very much on its own.

Beyond the LGBT press, news of a serial killer on the loose didn’t reach the rest of Indianapolis. Mainstream TV channels and newspapers barely reported on the string of suspicious disappearances.

A pool room is seen inside the Fox Hollow Farm estate in the new ABC News Studios docuseries. Baumeister is believed to have killed his victims in the room 

Pictured: Fox Hollow Farm. With a killer on the loose, the LGBT community worked together to try to keep each other safe

Fleischaker claims law enforcement also failed to take the situation seriously.

While the LGBT community ‘figured it out along the way’ that there was a serial killer in their midst, Fleischaker says the ‘police were very late to the table.’

At that time, same-sex sexual activity was still a crime in some US states and same-sex marriage was banned across the country. 

As a Republican-led, conservative state, Indiana was not considered progressive.

‘It wasn’t an accident that nobody paid attention to what was going on,’ he adds.

‘Indiana is extremely right wing and extremely conservative and a lot of these men were basically non-people to the majority of folks and to the police.

‘Who really cares about a bunch of gay guys?’

But there was one investigator, detective Mary Wilson of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, who did care and was working with the LGBT community, including Fleischaker, to solve the case.

‘She was one of the only ones who would pay attention and cared about what was happening,’ he says.

The hunt for missing men was also complicated by the fact that many of those who disappeared were estranged from their families because of their sexuality or they had not told their loved ones where they had gone, which meant they didn’t even know to look.

‘A lot of kids vanished. These were young people who came to Indianapolis from small towns out in the state of Indiana. They would party their butts off every night, then after that they might go home with someone,’ Fleischaker says.

‘Some of these were people who nobody knew where they were… his mom and dad probably didn’t know where they went. So if they disappeared, no one would really question where they were or where they had gone.’

‘And Baumeister knew that – he was a smarter guy than he was given credit for,’ he adds.

Mark Goodyear (pictured in the 1990s around the time of Herb Baumeister’s killing spree) claimed he survived a night with Baumeister and helped lead cops to the killer

Mark Goodyear (seen now in a new ABC News Studios docuseries) has changed his story about what happened that night

It’s a chilling thought that the missing person reports may only represent a fraction of the young men who disappeared and met a horrific end at Baumeister’s hands.

Jerry Williams-Comer (pictured) has never been found

The nine confirmed victims – Johnny Bayer, Jeff Jones, Richard Hamilton Jr., Allen Livingston, Steven Hale, Allen Broussard, Roger Goodlet, Mike Keirn and Manuel Resendez – were identified by family members submitting their own DNA samples for comparison.

But some victims may never have even been reported missing – or, at least, not in Indianapolis.

Williams-Comer’s disappearance was one that did set off alarm bells in the community at the time.

Fleischaker says it was out of character for the 34-year-old to vanish.

He had a long-term partner, he was a doting father and he was a prominent member of the LGBT community.

Williams-Comer’s son, Adam Williams, said in the ABC News Studios docuseries, The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer, that his family instantly knew something bad must have happened.

‘It was very unusual for my dad to disappear mysteriously,’ he said.

‘So the distinct possibility he was murdered was there from the get-go.’

Adam recalled the last moments he had with his dad on his birthday in 1995.

He said both he and his mom were ‘mad’ because Williams-Comer had been working that day so he couldn’t spend time with his birthday-boy son. He said his mom took him to see Williams-Comer later in the day.

‘I gave him a hug and he gave me 20 bucks and said, “I’ll see you next weekend,”‘ he recalled.

That was the last time he saw his father.

Law enforcement search Fox Hollow Farm in June 1996. Fleischaker believes law enforcement didn’t take the disappearances of young gay men seriously at the time

The 1996 search of Fox Hollow Farm. Ted Fleischaker fears that the extent of Herb Baumeister’s crimes will never be truly known

Fleischaker doesn’t remember ever personally coming face-to-face with Baumeister.

But after he was unmasked as a serial killer prowling the community, many of his friends realized they had.

‘Several of my friends had interactions with him,’ he says. ‘He used to sit at the bar at Metro and hang out.

It was fairly common for people to leave the bar with someone they didn’t necessarily know, he adds. 

‘Back then you didn’t have cellphones to call people or track them or Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or post about it.’

Ultimately, it was the queer community that led police to their own killer.

A man named Mark Goodyear told Detective Wilson he met a man in a bar in August 1994 who took him out to a huge farm in the suburbs and tried to strangle him.

Around two years later, Goodyear spotted the man again in a bar and his friend took down his license plate, according to a 1996 police interview transcript. 

Police traced the car to Baumeister – culminating in the summer 1996 search of Fox Hollow Farm. Goodyear, meanwhile, has changed his story several times since and claimed in the ABC docuseries that he had not been attacked.

Fleischaker feels that even once Baumeister’s depraved crimes finally came to light, there was still a the lack of interest in the case from authorities.

In 1998 – two years after Baumeister’s killing field was uncovered – the case was effectively closed with thousands of human remains still unidentified.

In a bombshell press conference, investigators from several local counties got together to announce they believed Baumeister was also responsible for a series of other unsolved murders of gay men – which effectively ended all active investigations into those cases, too.

Between 1980 and 1991, multiple young men and boys were strangled and their bodies dumped along Interstate 70 between Indiana and Ohio. Many of them had also been known to frequent Indianapolis’ gay bars.

The killer became known as the I-70 Strangler, but victims mysteriously stopped appearing along the interstate around the time Baumeister bought Fox Hollow Farm in 1991, presumably finding a new dumping ground. 

After Baumeister’s dark secrets came to light in 1996, an eyewitness told police that he was the man he saw leave an Indianapolis nightclub with victim Michael Riley on the night Riley was last seen alive. 

Riley was found in a ditch days later.

An air vent where Baumeister is believed to have kept a hidden camera above a couch in the basement to record his victims

But there was no concrete evidence tying Baumeister to these killings.

At the time of the 1998 press conference, Fleischaker publicly slammed authorities for quickly concluding Baumeister was the I-70 Strangler, rather than being open to the possibility that there could be more than one murderer targeting the LGBT community.

He stands by that criticism today and still firmly believes the highway-side strangling is the work of a different killer.

‘Some [of the murders] happened at too much the same time and, no matter how miraculous you are, you can’t be in two places at once,’ Fleischaker said. ‘You can’t be at Fox Hollow Farm and also Dayton, Ohio, at the same time.

‘And the MO was very different: Baumeister was known to be very careful and had it all situated at his place Fox Hollow Farm, whereas the I-70 murderer was throwing bodies out along the highway.’

This all came at a time when there was a series of other serial killers targeting LGBT communities across the US, from Jeffrey Dahmer to John Wayne Gacy.

And in Indiana specifically, another notorious serial killer was on the loose.

Investigators are seen searching Herb Baumeister’s sprawling estate for human remains in 1996

The infamous ‘Highway Killer’ Larry Eyler picked up men at bars, male sex workers and hitchhikers from Indiana and other Midwestern states in the 1980s, killing them and dumping their bodies along highways and rural stretches.

Eyler was convicted of kidnapping and murdering a 16-year-old boy and has been tied to at least 21 murders.

He was sentenced to death, but died while awaiting execution. Eyler has also long been eyed as the I-70 Strangler.

Fleischaker believes authorities at the time just wanted to be able to shut down both cases in one fell swoop.

‘What I always got from the county sheriff’s offices was that they wanted to close the cases and that it was a nuisance to them to have a bunch of gay guys missing and it was a nuisance to them to have a bunch of unsolved murders of gay guys,’ he says.

‘No one wanted to deal with it.’

The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office told Daily Mail that authorities have not definitively concluded that Baumeister was the I-70 Strangler. However, neither Hamilton County nor any other jurisdiction where he struck are actively investigating the case.

Jellison, the Hamilton County coroner, agrees with Fleischaker that authorities wanted to simply shut the door on the murders of gay men.

Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison is now working to identify all the remains from Fox Hollow Farm

‘In the original investigation, they had identified eight men. They knew all eight of these men were gay,’ he says.

‘They were from Indianapolis and this is Hamilton County, it is a very conservative county. So basically the suspect was dead, they had eight gay men from Indianapolis, they weren’t going to look for more.’

Jellison explained that the coroner at the time decided to stop funding any efforts to identify the found remains. 

‘They put that burden on the families,’ he explained. ‘They said, “We’re not going to do it for you so if you want to identify your family member from the remains, then you pay for DNA testing and do it yourself.”‘

It was only in 2022 that the case got renewed attention – when Eric Pranger, the cousin of victim Allen Livingston, reached out and asked Jellison to help him find the truth about what happened.

Livingston was last seen alive in August 1993 getting into an unknown individual’s vehicle in Indianapolis. He was reported missing by his family at the time.

He – like Williams-Comer – wasn’t among those identified on Baumeister’s estate in the ’90s.

When Jellison launched a new investigation to identify all the remains, Livingston was the first victim to finally get a name.

Pranger tells the Daily Mail that his aunt, Sharon Livingston, had always known her son must have been a victim of the heinous serial killer. She had begged for closure before her death from terminal cancer in November 2024.

Sharon Livingston finally learned that her son was a victim of Herb Baumeister just before her death 

He says ‘it meant the world to her’ to finally be able to find her son and bring his ashes home to her.

‘Thirty years is a really long time to not have her kid home and for her to always wonder if he was still alive or was somewhere else. She no longer had to wonder about that anymore,’ he says.

Jellison is committed to getting answers for other families and friends whose loved ones vanished all those years ago.

But Fleischaker isn’t hopeful that the LGBT community will ever get true closure from the depraved serial killer’s reign of terror.

‘There’s so many names out there that disappeared,’ he says.

‘But the thing is with this, it’s 30 years later. It’s getting so old that so many people involved in this story in the first place are now dead.

‘To me it’s an old expression and a bad expression, but lots of stuff just fell through the cracks and I don’t think it’s going to ever come out of the cracks.’