The I-70 Strangler: Herbert Baumeister and Fox Hollow Farm

The I-70 Strangler was Herbert R. Baumeister, an Indianapolis businessman identified by investigators in 1998 as the man who strangled at least eleven gay men whose bodies were found in streams across central and western Ohio between 1980 and 1991. The murders took their name from the Interstate 70 corridor where the victims were discovered. Baumeister was also linked to a much larger set of killings on his Westfield, Indiana, estate, Fox Hollow Farm, where more than 10,000 bone fragments were recovered beginning in 1996. He died by suicide that same year, before any arrest, and the full count of his victims has never been settled.¹

The Ohio Murders

Between 1980 and 1991, eleven gay men were found strangled and dumped, often partially nude, in streams along the I-70 corridor through central and western Ohio. The killer was known for years only by the nickname the geography gave him. In 1998, investigators concluded that Baumeister was responsible.¹

The connection was circumstantial. Investigators established that Baumeister had been in western Ohio during the period of the killings. One victim, Michael Riley, was last seen at the Vogue Theater in Broad Ripple, Indiana, before disappearing in 1983, a venue Baumeister was known to frequent. A witness identified Baumeister from a photograph as the man Riley left with that night.¹

Several of the Ohio victims, along with other missing gay men in Indianapolis, were patrons of Our Place, a downtown LGBTQ+ bar that developed a reputation as a dangerous location during the 1980s and 1990s. One victim’s car was found in its parking lot. The bar’s patrons faced regular muggings, vandalism, and assaults, and the business eventually hired off-duty police officers for weekend security.²

Who Herbert Baumeister Was

Baumeister was born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1947, the son of a physician. He married Juliana Saiter in November 1971, and the couple had three children. He worked at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, rising to program director before being terminated in 1985, and later opened a thrift store called Sav-A-Lot with $4,000 borrowed from his mother. The business was successful enough that in 1991 the family bought an 18-acre property in Westfield they named Fox Hollow Farm.¹

To neighbors he appeared eccentric but suburban and professional. During the 1990s, he preyed on gay men he met at LGBTQ+ bars in downtown Indianapolis.³ Investigators believe he lured victims back to Fox Hollow Farm and killed them in the pool area of the house, often under the pretext of autoerotic asphyxiation, when his wife and children were away.¹

Fox Hollow Farm

When forensic investigators began excavating the 18-acre Westfield property in June 1996, they uncovered a scene of staggering scale. More than 10,000 bones and bone fragments were recovered.⁴ Many remains had been burned and crushed before disposal, creating severe obstacles for identification.⁵ Early estimates suggested the remains of as many as 25 people were on the property.⁶ The site has been described as the second-largest collection of unidentified human remains in the United States.⁷

How the Case Broke

For years, the disappearances of gay men in Indianapolis drew little sustained attention from police. In 1994, families of missing men hired Virgil Vandagriff, a retired Marion County sheriff’s detective working as a private investigator, after feeling that law enforcement was not pursuing the cases. He was specifically retained by the families of Allen Wayne Broussard, 28, and Roger Allen Goodlet, 33, both of whom had vanished that summer.⁸

Vandagriff’s investigators distributed missing persons flyers in Indianapolis-area gay bars. He soon concluded that nearly a dozen men had gone missing in the region and that a serial killer was responsible. He developed a profile of the suspect as a white male in his late thirties or early forties, married with a family.⁹

The investigation led to Mark Anthony Goodyear, who said he had survived an encounter with Baumeister. In August 1994, Goodyear met a man calling himself “Brian” at a downtown Indianapolis gay bar. The man drove him to a large home in the northern suburbs with a long driveway and a pool, decorated with mannequins posed in lifelike positions. During a sexual encounter in the pool area, the man tried to strangle Goodyear with a pool hose. Goodyear fought back, and the man relented. He later told investigators he believed he would not have survived if he had been severely intoxicated.⁷

Vandagriff connected Goodyear with Indianapolis Police Detective Mary Wilson. For months they drove the northern suburbs looking for the house without success. Baumeister called Goodyear’s home frequently, but the calls could not be traced.¹⁰ The break came in July 1995, when Goodyear spotted Baumeister at a bar and had friends follow him outside and record the license plate of his truck. Wilson ran the plate through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and identified Herbert Baumeister of Westfield. In August 1995 she visited Fox Hollow Farm and confirmed it matched Goodyear’s description.

Even then, Hamilton County judges expressed concerns about the informant’s credibility, and investigators could not obtain a search warrant.⁸ The impasse lasted until June 1996, when Julie Baumeister gave police permission to search the property. She had been unaware of her husband’s secret life; when detectives first approached her, she reportedly asked them to explain what “homosexual homicide” meant.³

Baumeister’s Suicide

Days after his wife allowed police onto the property, Baumeister fled to Canada. On July 3, 1996, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, near Grand Bend, Ontario. He left a three-page suicide note apologizing for his failing marriage, his crumbling businesses, and for “spoiling the scenery” of the park. The note said nothing about the missing men or the remains on his property.⁴

Baumeister was never arrested, charged, or convicted of any murder. His death ended any possibility of prosecution and left investigators without a confession or any direct accounting of who or how many his victims were.

Identified Victims

By 1999, the remains of eight men found at Fox Hollow Farm had been identified.⁸ Advances in DNA technology have added more names in the decades since. As of April 2025, ten victims have been positively identified:¹¹

Roger Alan Goodlet, 33
Michael Frederick Keirn, 50
Steven Spurlin Hale, 28
Manuel M. Resendez, 31
Jeffrey Allan Jones, 37, reported missing in August 1993 and identified in May 2024
Richard Douglas Hamilton Jr., 23, reported missing on July 31, 1993
Johnny Bayer, 26, reported missing on July 6, 1993
Allen Wayne Broussard, 32
Allen Livingston, 27, reported missing in August 1993 and identified in October 2023
Daniel Thomas Halloran, approximately 30, identified in April 2025 through genealogical DNA matching¹²

Scientists have extracted at least 13 unique DNA profiles from the recovered remains, meaning at least three victims have yet to be named.¹² Many fragments were too badly burned or crushed for current testing and are being preserved for future analysis.¹³ The eleven Ohio I-70 victims are a separate count from the Fox Hollow remains, and the file does not treat them as the same people.

Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison has led the renewed identification effort, partnering with the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification and the private lab Othram Inc., which uses advanced genome sequencing on degraded materials.¹⁴ A search as recent as December 2022 confirmed that human remains were still being recovered from the Fox Hollow site.⁴ Jellison has asked families of men who went missing in the Indianapolis area in the early to mid-1990s to submit DNA samples, and has said the work is expected to continue for years.¹⁵

Why He Went Undetected

Several things kept Baumeister clear of suspicion. He carried out his crimes when his wife and children were away, and he explained away physical evidence to his own household: when his son found a human skull on the property in 1994, Baumeister told the boy it was part of his father’s medical skeleton collection.¹

Law enforcement also struggled to make connections. An early tip in 1992 linked him to Roger Goodlet’s disappearance but could not be verified until the license plate identification in 1995. Vandagriff later said that police were “reluctant to investigate” cases within the gay community.⁹ It took a private detective hired by grieving families, a survivor willing to come forward, and a license plate recorded outside a bar to turn the I-70 Strangler from a nickname into a name.

1
Indianapolis Encyclopedia. Herbert Baumeister
2
Indianapolis Encyclopedia. Greg’s Our Place
3
People. Who Was Herb Baumeister
4
WRTV. Here’s What We Know About Notorious Indiana Serial Killer Herbert Baumeister
5
Toronto Sun. Serial Killer Herb Baumeister Ended It in Ontario Park
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Fox 59. DNA Reveals Another Victim of Suspected Serial Killer Herb Baumeister
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ABC News. New DNA Technology and Witness Revelations Expose Dark Secrets
8
WRTV. This Private Investigator Cracked the Case of Notorious Serial Killer Herbert Baumeister
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WTHR. Private Investigator Virgil Vandagriff Cracked Herb Baumeister Case Investigation
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WRTV. Herb Baumeister’s Killing Field and the New Effort to Identify His Victims
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Newsweek. Fox Hollow Murders Hulu Documentary Additional Victim Update
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IndyStar. Fox Hollow Farms Victims Identified
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Associated Press. 30 Years After Discovery of Remains, DNA Could Identify All of a Serial Killer’s Victims
14
DNASolves. Daniel Halloran Indiana
15
ABC 11. Fox Hollow Farm Indiana Daniel Thomas Halloran Identified