Dead Businessman Tied to Gay Slayings

by Indianapolis (AP)

A businessman who committed suicide two years ago as investigators were digging up human bones at his rural home killed 16 men in all, most of them gay, investigators say. The businessman had led a double life: a family man who also frequented gay bars. Police had already identified thrift shop owner Herbert Baumeister as the suspect in the slayings of at least seven men whose remains were found in the woods behind his suburban Indianapolis home. Now investigators have concluded Baumeister probably killed nine other men whose bodies were found dumped along rural roads in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1990. Police consider the cases closed.

“If somebody has any information, we don’t care who it is, we’d be happy to look at it,” Hancock County Sheriff James Bradbury said yesterday. “But Herb Baumeister is the only suspect we have in any of them.” In February, a witness identified Baumeister through a photograph as the man seen leaving an Indianapolis nightclub with Michael Riley in 1983. Riley’s partially nude body was later found in a stream outside Indianapolis.

That information led investigators to conclude that Baumeister was behind the killing of Riley and eight other men whose nude or partially nude bodies were found in shallow streams across central Indiana and western Ohio. Police committed between 1980 and 1990, have striking similarities: All the victims were partially unclothed, found near water and most had been strangled. The victims were all from Indianapolis. Baumeister, who was married and had three children, frequented gay bars in Indianapolis and met many of his victims there, police said.

His wife, Juliana, has said she was unaware of her husband’s double life and stunned to learn he was under investigation in a string of killings. Baumeister shot himself to death in Canada in 1996. He was 49. Wally Paynter, president of Justice Inc., an Indiana gay rights group, says police shrug off crimes committed against homosexuals, especially those who abandon families and hometowns to seek anonymity in larger cities.