Herb Baumeister: the Hoosier serial killer you’ve probably never heard of.
This is a special five-part true crime series for the month of October. Subscribe with your email and get every chapter sent straight to your inbox.
Written by Sarah Murrell
Part 2: Routine Maintenance
For people not used to seeing dead bodies, the brain does an extraordinary job of circumventing that particular reality. Everyone from rookie cops to photojournalists describes the experience of seeing a human corpse as surreal. It’s a mannequin, the brain insists. It’s a Halloween decoration. Only when the scent of putrefied flesh wafts up through the nose does the horrific knowledge set in.
But bones have almost no smell, especially bones long stripped of their flesh. Unless plucked from the mushy remnants of a human corpse, it’s unlikely that any evidence of a prior life will stick. The bones in the Baumeister yard had been picked clean and evenly stained, like a yellowed old poster hung by a window.
When confronted about the skull Erich Baumeister had unburied, Herb laughed it off. He said it was an anatomical skeleton from his father’s medical practice. He’d found it among some old boxes in the move and decided to bury it. After all, it was a real human skeleton. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Herb said the skeleton was likely a donation, maybe as old as the 1800s, but he was unaware of its origin or “owner.”
Maybe that’s why Julie Baumeister was quick to accept Herb’s explanation. After all, she shared some of his eccentricities. She had taken him back when he was involuntarily hospitalized for “severe depression” the same year as their wedding. “He was hurting,” she told a People magazine reporter.
“He needed rest.”
Julie taught herself to have patience with his outbursts, maybe as a tradeoff for the stress of running a successful business. She accepted some of his stranger tendencies, like when he scattered a few fully-dressed mannequins around the backyard wet bar, so it always looked like he was having a party.
They were small concessions to make for a man who had been nothing but loving and attentive to their three children. Herb did the Christmas shopping, he made their lunches, and though he occasionally struggled with private depression, he was the perfect father and husband. She banished the skull to the mental scrap heap and went about her business, never thinking twice about the person once scaffolded by the bones in her woods.
Far up on the Northside, the Baumeister’s quiet, even cloistered existence carried on. She took the kids to the lake in the summer, and Herb watched the stores. And gay men across Indianapolis watched as familiar face after familiar face showed up on the walls of the Metro, under the text “MISSING.”
Ted Fleischaker’s heart was breaking. Week after week, he was publishing more missing person ads in The Word, an Indy-based newspaper covering the gay community in the Midwest and Kentucky. It was the early 90s, a few years after the AIDS crisis claimed the lives of gay men all over the country. Indiana was no different, and appeals back then for compassion frequently fell on deaf ears. 80-lb bodies of adult men lay unclaimed in the Wishard morgue as sons were merely erased, never mourned, by their conservative families.
Now Fleischaker had a whole different kind of killer on his hands, and he was running out of avenues to raise awareness. Indianapolis police had pursued a thorough investigation, distributed numerous fliers in every gay bar in the city, and still came up short.
Between the summer of 1993 and 1994, at least ten men had been reported missing. All were young, between 18 and 35, and they’d all last been seen in bars where the clean-cut, preppy look was popular.
Sometime after the posters went up, an anonymous caller contacted police, sure that he had spent time with the killer. He’d struck up a conversation with a man in a bar who he’d noticed was looking at a missing poster of Roger Goodlet. The man introduced himself as Brian Smart, and though was easy to chat with otherwise, he became evasive when asked if he knew the missing man.
Despite his inability to explain his transfixion with Goodlet, Smart was charming and funny. He had invited the man back to his house for a swim in the indoor pool, claiming to be a landscaper living in the home temporarily while the family was away. The man described the interior of the home as cluttered with boxes and furniture, and the pool and wet bar area as decorated with mannequins in vacationwear.
Producing a length of rubber hose, Smart asked the man to choke him while he masturbated. When it was time for Smart to do the choking, he pulled sharply on the hose, holding tight even as the caller frantically tapped his hands. The man pretended to pass out, at which point Smart let go of the hose.
When the man opened his eyes, Smart seemed rattled, overly snapped to attention, and he hurried the man to get dressed. Brian Smart drove the man back to Indianapolis in near-silence, and never made contact again.
The man was put in contact with Detective Mary Wilson, who worked in the Missing Persons Division of IMPD. Wilson thought there was merit to the man’s story, and picked him up for a drive around Hamilton County. The man remembered little about the house or the property. Smart had driven him there at night, and the headlights of the car only illuminated the word “Farm” or “Farms” and a split-rail fence — certainly not enough to narrow it down.
Police were frustrated. They’d hit a dead end, despite knowing that these men were likely missing and murdered by the same person. They’d looked for Brian Smarts in the BMV database, in prior police records, and knew that it was a fake name. They were looking for a clean-cut white guy in a sea of clean-cut white guys, at a time when it wasn’t uncommon for gay bar patrons to socialize under an assumed identity in a world relentlessly hostile toward gay men.
It took an entire year for Brian Smart to show up again. This time, the man followed Smart to the parking lot, scribbling down his license plate number. The following Monday, he called Wilson, who ran the plate against the BMV database.
Brian Smart didn’t own that make and model, but Herb Baumeister did.
