Indiana Man Linked to 16 Deaths

Police Say the Man, Who Committed Suicide in ’96, Killed Mainly Gay Men

by Thomas P. Wyman

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 earlier had identified thrift shop owner Herbert Baumeister as the suspect in the slayings of at least seven men.

Their remains were found in the woods behind his 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. “Herb Baumeister is the only suspect we have in any of them,” Hancock County Sheriff James Bradbury said Tuesday.

In February, a witness identified Baumeister through a photograph as the man seen leaving an Indianapolis nightclub with Michael Riley in 1983. Riley’s 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 bodies were found in shallow streams across central Indiana and western Ohio.

Police said the nine slayings, 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. Ted Fleischaker, who publishes a newspaper for the Indianapolis gay community, complained that police don’t have solid evidence linking Baumeister to the nine slayings. “They just decided to take some stuff out of old files, dust it off and say we solved this,” he said. “It’s a neat election-year ploy to get some sheriffs and some people who are incompetent, re-elected.”.