Herb Baumeister
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Herbert Richard "Herb" Baumeister (April 7, 1947 - July 3, 1996) was an alleged American serial killer from suburban Westfield, Indiana outside of Indianapolis. He was the founder of the successful thrift store chain Sav-a-Lot in Indiana.
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[edit] Early life
The oldest of four children, Baumeister's childhood was evidently normal. By the onset of adolescence, however, he began exhibiting antisocial behavior; aquaintances later recalled the young Baumeister playing with dead animals and urinating on a teacher's desk. As a teenager, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but did not receive further psychiatric treatment. As an adult, he drifted through a series of jobs, marked by a strong work ethic, but also by more and increasingly bizarre behavior.
He married in 1971, a union that produced three children. He founded the Sav-a-Lot chain in 1988, and quickly became an affluent, well-liked member of the community.
[edit] Murders
A closeted homosexual, Baumeister secretly frequented gay bars in Indianapolis. He allegedly brought men back to his $1 million Westfield estate, known as Fox Hollow Farm, and murdered them by strangulation. The bones of seven of these men were found unburied in the woods behind his home. In their backyard, Baumeister's young son even found a human skeleton which Baumeister denied knowing anything about.
[edit] Investigation
Vergil Vandagriff and Mary Wilson, two detectives from the Indianapolis Sheriff's Department, began investigating the disappearances of gay men in the area in the early 1990s, both convinced the crimes were related. In 1993, they were contacted by a man claiming that a gay bar patron calling himself "Brian Stewart" had killed a friend of his, and had attempted to kill him. The detectives told him to contact them in case he ever saw the man again. In November 1995, he called them and supplied the man's license plate; after checking the license registry, Vandagriff and Wilson discovered that "Brian Stewart" was actually Herb Baumeister.
Wilson approached Baumeister, told him he was a suspect in the disappearances, and asked to search his house. When Baumeister refused, she confronted his wife, Julie, who also forbade police to search the house. By June 1996, however, she had become sufficiently frightened by her husband's mood swings and erratic behavior that, after filing for divorce, she consented to a search. The search, conducted while Baumeister was on vacation, yielded the remains of 11 men; only four were ever identified.
Panicked, Baumeister escaped to Toronto, where he committed suicide. In his suicide note, he described his failing marriage and business as his reason for suicide. He did not confess to the murders of the seven men found in his backyard.
In addition to the murders at his estate, Baumeister is also strongly suspected of killing nine more men, the bodies of whom were found in rural areas along the corridor of Interstate 70 in Indiana and Ohio between Indianapolis and Columbus. Julie Baumeister told authorities that her husband made as many as one hundred business trips to Ohio, on what he said was store business.
[edit] In popular culture
The A&E Network television series The Secret Life of a Serial Killer aired an episode about Baumeister in 1997.
