Attention, serial killers: If you dump corpses on your own property, make sure you bury them deep.

Indianapolis-area residents Herb and Julie Baumeister seemed to be living the American dream. They owned a successful business, had three kids, and resided in Fox Hollow Farms, a la-di-da development in one of the most gentrified sections of the city’s northern suburbs. Their home was a sprawling, Tudor-style behemoth surrounded by acres of forest.

Everything looked perfect. And for Herb, it probably was. The business generated the cash he needed to live a secret double life. The family provided a perfect cover. And the woods on his property were an excellent spot to dump the bodies of his many, many victims.

Because Herb, we know now, had a hobby. To the outside world he was a mild-mannered businessman. Little did anyone realize—until it was too late—that he was also a serial killer.

Born in 1947, he led a life that, until the very end, seemed utterly innocuous. Even his face and physique were forgettable—medium build, medium height, not ugly but not overly handsome. In other words, a police sketch artist’s nightmare. He married his wife, Julie, in 1971, started a family, and opened two thriving thrift stores. They were so successful that they allowed the couple to purchase their Fox Hollow Farms home in 1991.

It was great for a growing brood, and great for other things as well. Every summer Herb packed his wife and kids off to an out-of-state lakeside condo while he stayed behind “to work.” Apparently, from what police can surmise, he was mostly working the local gay bars. He would pick up young men, take them to his house, strangle them, then bury them in his yard—some no more than fifteen feet (4.5 m) from his back door. He became so careless that in 1994 his thirteen-year-old son actually stumbled across a human skull, along with some other bones, and reported it to his mother. In an almost unbelievable display of intestinal fortitude (and gullibility on the part of his wife), Herb fast-talked himself out of trouble by claiming the bones were pieces of an articulated skeleton that had belonged to his father, an anesthesiologist. He said he’d found it a while back while cleaning out the garage, and—as anyone would do if they chanced upon a human skeleton—had simply hauled it out and tossed it into the woods.

The fact that no one challenged this whopper was an incredible stroke of luck. But then Herb seemed to have a talent for explaining things away—and for simply being overlooked. For years, the Indianapolis Police Department had been aware of reports of missing gay men, but their investigations were cursory, to put it mildly. The cops, if they thought about it at all, figured the men had simply lit out on short notice for parts unknown. Certainly the words “serial killer” never came up. In the mid-1990s, an informant came forward to say that he’d visited the Hamilton County home of a man who first attempted to strangle him, then waxed poetic about the joy of erotic asphyxiation (strangling someone during sex to heighten the experience). But the big break was fumbled when the victim, to whom Baumeister gave a fake name, couldn’t remember the location of the house.

But Herb’s skill at going undetected would soon fail him. In the summer of 1995, the same man who made it out of the Baumeister house alive spotted his would-be killer at a gay bar and managed to get the license plate of his vehicle. It belonged to Herb, all right, but the police still didn’t have a reason to arrest him—or to get a search warrant for his home, for that matter.

Not that there weren’t other ways of getting what they wanted.

Initially, both Herb and Julie refused to talk to police or allow them on their property. But Julie became distinctly more pliable once the beans were spilled about her supposedly devoted husband’s nocturnal ramblings. And just as their marriage headed for the rocks, the Baumeisters’ business tanked as well. With foreclosure on his mortgage looming and a disgruntled wife no longer inclined to stonewall the cops, Herb knew it was only a matter of time before forensics experts got the run of the place and started digging up his yardwork.

The dam finally broke in June 1996, when Julie split with Herb, sat down for a police interview, and agreed to allow a search of her home’s grounds. Almost immediately the investigators found bones—bones on the ground, bones in shallow graves, bones in the woods far from the house, and bones almost at the family’s doorstep. After weeks of going over the place with a fine-tooth comb, the cops found seven bodies, only four of which could be identified.

Of course, Herb could have named them all, had he cared to. Instead, as soon as he realized the jig was up, he skipped town and fled to Canada. There, he wrote a suicide note in which he blamed his troubles on his crumbling marriage and business reversals. He said nothing about his other activities. Then he drove to a park area and blew his brains out in his car.

Police combed Herb Baumeister’s property for months to piece together the serial killer’s handiwork.

Even though Herb was dead, the body count kept rising. He’d spent the early 1990s turning the property around his home into a graveyard. But what had he done during the 1980s, when he’d lived a more modest life that didn’t include such wonderful serial killer conveniences as a big, secluded piece of property? Apparently he’d been more creative. In the years following Herb’s demise, police pinned a further nine murders of Indianapolis-area homosexuals on him. The bodies of those victims, all of whom were killed during the pre–Fox Hollow Farm days, had been found in shallow streams across central Indiana and western Ohio. All had been strangled.

Apparently, according to associates, back in those days Herb took regular “business trips.” It wasn’t until years later that people realized what his business really was.