Their remains were found decades ago. A new push could ID serial killer's victims.
Decades after investigators unearthed thousands of human bones and bone fragments on a suspected Indiana serial killer’s property, a renewed quest is playing out in laboratories to solve a long-running mystery: Who were they?
WESTFIELD, Ind. — Decades after investigators unearthed thousands of human bones and bone fragments on a suspected Indiana serial killer’s property, a renewed quest is playing out in laboratories to solve a long-running mystery: Who were they?
A new team working to identify the unknown dead says the key to their success will be getting relatives of men who vanished between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s to provide samples of their own DNA.
Those samples can then be screened against DNA profiles scientists are extracting from the remains, which were found starting in 1996 on Herbert Baumeister’s sprawling suburban Indianapolis property.
The original investigators believed that at least 25 people were buried at Baumeister’s 18-acre Fox Hollow Farm estate in Westfield, based on evidence that included 10,000 bones and bone fragments, as well as handcuffs and shotgun shells.
Baumeister, a 49-year-old thrift store owner and married father of three, killed himself in Canada in July 1996 before police could question him, taking with him many secrets, including the names of his presumed victims.
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