Authorities have identified a 13th victim of a serial killer who shot himself to death in 1996.
An Indiana coroner said the identification came amid a renewed effort to identify the victims of Herb Baumeister, who killed himself in Canada as investigators tried to question him about the thousands of charred and crushed bones found on his estate in Indiana, WTTV reported.
Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison said that number could go above 25 victims.
“We know that we have at this point 13 victims found on the Fox Hollow Farm property,” Jellison said last month.
Baumeister was a married father of three who went to gay bars to lure men to his estate in Westfield, about 16 miles north of Indianapolis. Once there, he killed them.
Ten men had previously been identified from the remains found on the sprawling estate, which were put into storage in the 1990s. Jellison launched the new effort to identify the victims in 2022 using new technologies, including genetic genealogies. He asks relatives of young men who disappeared between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s to submit DNA for testing.
“That is the most efficient way that we’ll be able to identify these remains,” he said.
In the past year, three of those men have been identified — Jeffrey A. Jones, 31; Manuel Resendez, 34; and Allen Livingston, 27.
According to WTTV, the investigation began in 1996 when Baumeister’s then-15-year-old son found a human skull about 60 yards from the family home. Baumeister and his wife were in the midst of a divorce at the time, and a day after the skull’s discovery, she was given a protective order to keep him away from the family.
Baumeister reportedly said the skull was part of his late father’s medical practice.
But three days later, firefighters found more remains. And less than two weeks after the discovery, Baumeister shot himself in Toronto after skipping out on a divorce hearing.
Although media largely ignored the story at the time, WXIN later learned of reports connecting him with missing gay men from Indianapolis, WTTV reported.
Baumeister was also named, at one point, the prime suspect in the murders of 11 men found along Interstate 70 between 1980 and 1991,
Because he killed himself, Baumeister was never tried. The 18-acre Fox Hollow Farms property is now subdivided, with the 11,000-acre home located at the far end of a cul-de-sac.
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[Featured image: Herb Baumeister/handout]
