away at his mother’s lakeside condominium, he took young men back for a “cocktail and a swim” to their $1-million Westfield estate, known as Fox Hollow Farm.
In May 1993 gay men began disappearing in Indianapolis. Ten went missing over two years, but the killer left no clues. Then in the autumn of 1994, a man told the police that he had been picked up by a man who called himself Brian Smart. They had gone to Smart’s sprawling estate and engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation. Smart was a devotee and admitted that, sometimes, there had been accidents. A year later the man spotted Brian again and, aware of the disappearances, took down his licence-plate number. The car belonged to Baumeister.
Although the police lacked the necessary evidence to obtain a search warrant, in November 1994, they turned up at Fox Hollow Farm and ask for permission to search the grounds. When Baumeister refused, they petitioned his wife Julie. They told her that her husband cruised gay bars and that they suspected him of being a serial killer. He was a devoted husband of 20 years standing and she refused to believe them.
“The police came to me and said, ‘We are investigating your husband in relation to homosexual homicide,’” she recalled. “I remember saying to them, ‘Can you tell me what homosexual homicide is?’”
It was only when their 13-year-old son found parts of a skeleton in the woods that she gave her permission. Then, when her husband was away in June 1996, the police began their search. The remains of seven men were found. They had been strangled. All the victims used the same bars that Baumeister did and disappeared at times when his wife and kids were away. Meanwhile, 49-year-old Baumeister disappeared. On 3 July 1996, campers discovered his body lying beside his car in Ontario’s Pinery Provincial Park. He had a bullet hole in his forehead and a .357 Magnum in his hand.
An FBI profiler said that Baumeister’s cavalier manner of openly dumping his victims’ corpses in his back yard indicated that he had killed many times before. Baumeister insinuated to a potential victim that he had killed 50 to 60 people. He was known to have travelled on the I–70 from Indiana to Ohio around the time of the highway killings, which stopped in 1990, around the time that Baumeister bought Fox Hollow Farm.
In 1998, investigators concluded that Baumeister probably killed 16 men in all after linking him to nine other men whose bodies were found dumped along rural roads in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1990. Baumeister’s wife provided credit card receipts, phone call records, and even gave the police the use of the car that her husband had used on those business trips.
Baumeister’s photo matched the police sketch drawn from descriptions provided by witnesses who thought they had seen the I–70 Killer. One eyewitness identified Baumeister’s picture as the same man who had given his friend Michael Riley a lift home from a bar one evening in 1988. Riley was found dead the next morning.
“We’ll never know for sure, of course, if he was indeed the same man,” said Virgil Vandagriff, a private investigator employed to look into the disappearance of some of the missing men. “Everything points to him—even the fact that the roadside killings ended at the same time he bought his house and now had a place with plenty of room to dump his bodies with a lot less hassle.”
However, Vandagriff complained that, as a private detective, he did not always have the freedom or the money to follow his suspicions to the limit.
“I would have taken the Baumeister case a lot further than I feel the police did,” he said. “While there were many fine moments in the investigation… I think there were certain loose ends that should have been tied up.”
For example, while Baumeister was active in Fox Hollow Farm, his older brother in Texas was found dead in his pool.
However the killings along I–70 did not stop with the death of Baumeister. On 4 May 2006, the body of 24- year-old Dusty Shuck was found by a motorist on I–70 near a truck stop in Frederick County, Maryland. Last seen in New Mexico on 24 April, she had died from a combination of blunt force trauma to the head and a slit throat. Her head was wrapped in blood-soaked cloth and, although fully dressed, she had no shoes.
The I–70/I–35 Shootist
During a 29-day killing spree running from 8 April to 7 May 1992, a man in his mid-to-late-twenties or early thirties killed five women and one man along the I–70, which runs from Utah to St Louis, and I–35 which branches off at Kansas City and heads south through Wichita, Oklahoma City and Dallas to Laredo on the Mexican border. The victims were shop assistants in stores within two miles of the two Interstates. The one male victim had long hair and an earring and the authorities believe that the killer mistook him for a woman. The killer also robbed his victims, but seemingly as an afterthought.
The perpetrator was five foot seven inches tall and thin. He had sandy blond hair with a reddish tint and designer stubble. After a month, his killing spree stopped, leading the police to believe that he was in jail for some other offence. Then in 1993 he started killing again in Texas, where he shot three more women using the same .22 automatic pistol.
Kansas City’s Independence Avenue Killer
A serial killer has been killing women from Kansas City’s red light district around Independence Avenue and dumping them in the Missouri River, earning him the name the “Independence Avenue Killer” or the “Missouri River Killer”.
The hunt began on 10 October 1996 when the body of 21-year-old Christy Fugate, aged 21, was pulled from the waters of the Missouri River near Dover in Lafayette County, Missouri, some 50 miles downriver from Kansas City. She had gone missing the previous month. Since then, nine more bodies of Kansas City women have been found downstream.
On 29 March 1997, the body of Sherri Livingston was spotted in the river near where Christy Fugate had been found. She had been reporting missing in February. Three weeks later, on 22 April 1997, Connie Wallace- Byas’s body was recovered. She had been reported missing the previous October. The following day, the body of Linda Custer was found near Dover. She had gone missing in February. Two weeks after that, on 7 May, the body of Chandra Helsel was found 80 miles further on near Booneville. She had been missing since 17 April. On 31 July 1997, Wilmalee Manning’s body was recovered from the river. Then on 31 August, Lana Alvarez’s body was found. In March 1998, Maria Woods’ body was found in the river. On 2 April 1998, the mutilated body of Tammy Smith was found in the river near Sibly, just 25 miles downstream from Kansas City.
All the victims were thought to be prostitutes working in the Independence Avenue area of Kansas City, Missouri. For once the police were quick to admit that a serial killer was at work as all the women were of approximately the same height and weight. They issued a warning that a serial killer was on the prowl, but few heeded it.
Four more missing women are thought to have been the victims of the mysterious Missouri River Killer. They are 18-year-old Jennifer Conroy, who was last seen on 14 December 1993; 41-year-old Jamie Pankey, last seen 30 July 1996; 33-year-old Connie Williams, last seen 16 October 1996; and 20-year-old Cheresa Lordi, last seen 14 February 1997.
The La Crosse Drownings
At the end of September 1997, 28-year-old Chuck Blatz, a student at the University of Wisconsin’s Platteville campus, travelled from his home in Kiel, Wisconsin, to La Crosse for the annual Oktoberfest. He was five foot ten inches tall, weighed 130 pounds and had recently been honourably discharged from the military. On the night of Saturday, 27 September 1997 he was at Sneakers, a popular downtown bar and left some time after midnight. Five days later his body was pulled from the Mississippi River, that flows through La Crosse, by a fisherman. One of his socks was missing along with one of his black sneakers. Blatz was known to be a strong swimmer and a keen scuba diver. He was an unlikely victim of drowning.
