Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Return to Fox Hollow: New Victims, Darker Secrets
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: So I want to start today by having you picture
- 0:04a very specific kind of American estate. Go, I'm picturing
- 0:07it right. So it is a sprawling eighteen acre property
- 0:11sitting in Westfield, Indiana.
- 0:13Speaker 2: Oh wow, eighteen acres, yeah, massive?
- 0:16Speaker 1: And Westfield is this wealthy, quiet, highly sought after suburb
- 0:21just north of Indianapolis.
- 0:23Speaker 2: Right, very upscale exactly.
- 0:25Speaker 1: So if you were to drive past it, you would
- 0:27see this grand, imposing Tudor style.
- 0:30Speaker 2: Mansion, the kind of place that just screams money completely.
- 0:33Speaker 1: It is surrounded by thick old growth woods, vast stretches
- 0:37of open ground, maybe a stray horse or two in
- 0:39the distance.
- 0:40Speaker 2: Sounds idyllic, honestly it does.
- 0:42Speaker 1: It is the kind of place that projects safety, stability,
- 0:44and generational wealth. But now I want you to imagine
- 0:47walking into those thick woods behind the manicured lawn. Okay,
- 0:50you brush aside the heavy autumn leaf litter and that
- 0:52dark Indiana soil, and you find bone fragments. Oh and
- 0:57not just a few straight pieces, ten thousand of them,
- 1:00staggering ten thousand human bone fragments, crushed, burned, and scattered
- 1:04like discarded refuse, across the backyard of a family home.
- 1:09Speaker 2: It really is a genuinely staggering image to try and
- 1:12hold in your mind.
- 1:13Speaker 1: I mean, how do you even process that number?
- 1:15Speaker 2: You really can't at first. And to put that number,
- 1:17that sheer volume, into its proper historical and forensic perspective,
- 1:22you have to look at national data. Right that amount
- 1:25of unidentified human remains, those ten thousand fragments represents a
- 1:28recovery effort second in the United States only to the
- 1:31aftermath of the September eleventh attacks in New.
- 1:34Speaker 1: York, Wait, really second only to nine to eleven.
- 1:36Speaker 2: Yes, we are talking about a mass casualty event localized
- 1:40entirely within the property lines of a single suburban home.
- 1:44Speaker 1: When I first read that statistic in our source material
- 1:47for today, it completely stopped me in my tracks.
- 1:50Speaker 2: It's hard to wrap your head around.
- 1:51Speaker 1: It totally recontextualizes everything you think you know about suburban safety.
- 1:55We are, of course talking about Fox Hall.
- 1:57Speaker 2: Of Farm, Yes, a very infamous location.
- 2:00Speaker 1: And today for you listening, we are going on a
- 2:02deep dive into the sprawling thirty year arc of a
- 2:05case that is, somehow, against all conventional logic, still an
- 2:10active breathing investigation today.
- 2:12Speaker 2: Which is wild for a case from the nineties, It
- 2:14really is.
- 2:15Speaker 1: We are pulling our insights from a mountain of new research,
- 2:18specifically anchored by the July eighth, twenty twenty six documentary
- 2:22release from ABC News Studios and Hulu.
- 2:25Speaker 2: Right the new one.
- 2:26Speaker 1: Yeah, it's titled Return to Fox Hollow, New Victims, Darker Secrets.
- 2:31Speaker 2: It's a fantastic, really thorough piece of journalism.
- 2:34Speaker 1: It really is. So our mission today is to look
- 2:37at this case not as some dusty closed chapter from
- 2:40a nineteen nineties true crime paperback, but as a living,
- 2:43evolving puzzle.
- 2:44Speaker 2: And it is very much evolving right now.
- 2:46Speaker 1: Right, It is a puzzle that forensic scientists, journalists, and
- 2:50a surprisingly tenacious local corner are actively trying to solve
- 2:54right this very minute.
- 2:55Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very much an active investigation. And to understand
- 2:58where we are in twenty twenty six, we have to
- 2:59lay out the blueprint. We have to understand the foundation
- 3:02of the case.
- 3:02Speaker 1: First, which means looking at the man himself exactly.
- 3:06Speaker 2: We will be tracing the deeply unsettling double life of
- 3:09the man who owned Fox Hollow Farm, Herbert Baumeister.
- 3:12Speaker 1: The ultimate Jekyl and Hide, truly.
- 3:15Speaker 2: But we aren't stopping at the nineteen nineties narrative. We
- 3:18are going to dive deep into the modern forensic crusade
- 3:21to identify the.
- 3:23Speaker 1: Victims, and the science there is just mind blowing it is.
- 3:26Speaker 2: We will explore exactly how the science of twenty twenty
- 3:29six is breathing life back into thirty year old ash,
- 3:32and perhaps most importantly, we are going to examine the
- 3:35deeply unsettling new evidence.
- 3:37Speaker 1: This is the part that really got me right.
- 3:39Speaker 2: The newly unearthed police files that suggest Baumeister might not
- 3:43have been the isolated lone wolf that history and law
- 3:46enforcement made him out to be.
- 3:47Speaker 1: Okay, So to understand how an eighteen acre mass grave
- 3:50goes unnoticed while kids are literally playing in the front yard,
- 3:53we have to start with the facade of.
- 3:55Speaker 2: Fox Hollow, The perfect suburban cover.
- 3:57Speaker 1: Exactly introduces to Herbert Richard baumi So.
- 4:00Speaker 2: He was born in nineteen forty seven. He marries a
- 4:02woman named Julie Satter in nineteen seventy one, and they
- 4:05have three kids.
- 4:07Speaker 1: Very conventional setup.
- 4:08Speaker 2: Very he presents as this highly successful Midwestern businessman. In
- 4:14the late nineteen eighties, he actually founds a chain of
- 4:17thrift stores in the Indianapolis area called Sabalot.
- 4:21Speaker 1: You know, the choice of profession is actually a fascinating
- 4:24psychological detail when you consider how he was perceived by
- 4:28the community. Oh, absolutely, Like he's an entrepreneur, yes, but
- 4:31he's dealing in the business of discarded.
- 4:33Speaker 2: Things, right, that's a great point.
- 4:35Speaker 1: He buys what others have thrown away, organizes it, and
- 4:38resells it. But more than that, he is deeply embedded
- 4:41in the public sphere.
- 4:42Speaker 2: He is. He's married with a family, living in this
- 4:45massive Tudor style mansion.
- 4:47Speaker 1: Right to his neighbors, to his business associates, to the
- 4:50parents of his kids' friends. He is the absolute picture
- 4:54of conventional upper middle class stability.
- 4:56Speaker 2: He is a community pillar, or at least he played
- 4:58one very well.
- 4:59Speaker 1: But while he is playing the role of the quirky,
- 5:01successful thrist store king of the suburbs by day, by night,
- 5:04he is operating in the gay bars of Indianapolis under
- 5:07a completely different.
- 5:08Speaker 2: Identity, a totally separate life.
- 5:10Speaker 1: Yeah, he is introducing himself to people as Brian Smart
- 5:14Ran Smart. Yeah. It is this classic Doctor Jekyl in
- 5:18Mister Hyde scenario, but playing out in real life in
- 5:21the American Midwest.
- 5:23Speaker 2: And he is specifically targeting vulnerable men. Yes, he's bringing
- 5:27them back to Fox Hollow Farm, murdering them and disposing
- 5:31of their bodies just hundreds of yards from where his
- 5:33wife and children are sleeping.
- 5:35Speaker 1: I mean, the sheer audacity of that compartmentalization is what
- 5:39forensic psychologists often point to when discussing Baumeister. Right.
- 5:42Speaker 2: Oh, definitely, the psychological walls he had to build to
- 5:46maintain this dual existence are almost incomprehensible.
- 5:50Speaker 1: Is terrifying.
- 5:51Speaker 2: He is bringing this incredibly dark, violent reality back to
- 5:55his sanctuary. Most predators of this scale attempt to create
- 5:59geogo graphic distance between their crimes and their family life.
- 6:02Speaker 1: Right, you'd think he would have a secondary.
- 6:04Speaker 2: Location exactly, but Bawmeister essentially merged them.
- 6:07Speaker 1: And that merging is exactly what leads to the unraveling
- 6:10of the whole thing.
- 6:11Speaker 2: It was bound to happen eventually.
- 6:12Speaker 1: The way this starts to fall apart honestly reads like
- 6:15a scene cut from a horror movie because it was
- 6:18deemed too unbelievable.
- 6:19Speaker 2: It really does so.
- 6:20Speaker 1: It is the mid nineteen nineties. Bowmeister's teenage son is
- 6:25out playing in the woods on the property, exploring the
- 6:28estate and He looks down and finds a human.
- 6:31Speaker 2: Skull just sitting right there and.
- 6:33Speaker 1: Some scattered bones, and he actually brings this up to
- 6:36his parents.
- 6:36Speaker 2: He does. He brings it to them, and Baumeister's response
- 6:40is a terrifying masterclass in deflection and cognitive dissonance.
- 6:44Speaker 1: Oh totally.
- 6:45Speaker 2: He tells his wife and son, Oh, those are just
- 6:47from medical skeleton.
- 6:48Speaker 1: A medical skeleton. Unbelievable, right.
- 6:51Speaker 2: He explains that his own father had been a physician,
- 6:53which was true, and he claims this is just an
- 6:56old anatomical.
- 6:57Speaker 1: Prop, like a teaching skeleton.
- 6:59Speaker 2: Yeah, teaching skeleton that somehow got left out in the
- 7:02yard or buried in the dirt years ago.
- 7:04Speaker 1: Okay, wait, hold on, Yeah, a teenage boy finds an
- 7:07actual human skull in the dirt of a wealthy suburban
- 7:11backyard and the explanation is, oh, that is just grandpa's
- 7:14old medical skeleton. That was the excuse, and they just
- 7:17go back to eating dinner. How does anyone accept that explanation.
- 7:20Speaker 2: I know it sounds crazy now, but you have to
- 7:22view it through the lens of normalcy bias.
- 7:24Speaker 1: Normalcy bias.
- 7:25Speaker 2: Right in the mid nineteen nineties, before the explosion of
- 7:28twenty four to seven true crime media before everyone had
- 7:31a smartphone with access to a million documentaries. Your brain
- 7:35simply does not jump to my husband is a serial
- 7:38killer operating a mass grave in the backyard.
- 7:41Speaker 1: I guess that's fair. You don't want to believe that.
- 7:42Speaker 2: Right, Your brain scrambles for the most rational, least world
- 7:46shattering explanation available.
- 7:48Speaker 1: So his father was a doctor.
- 7:49Speaker 2: Exactly doctors have skeletons. Therefore the skeleton must be a
- 7:54medical prop It is a defense mechanism by the family
- 7:57as much as it is a manipulation by bounty.
- 8:00Speaker 1: That makes a chilling kind of sense. Yeah, you want
- 8:02to believe the lie because the truth destroys your entire life, precisely,
- 8:06But the marriage was already buckling under the weight of
- 8:08his erratic behavior anyway. By nineteen ninety six, Julie Baummeister
- 8:13has had enough. She files for.
- 8:15Speaker 2: Divorce, a huge turning point.
- 8:17Speaker 1: Yeah, and crucially, while Herbert is away on a trip,
- 8:20she allows the police to come onto the estate and
- 8:21conduct a search of the property.
- 8:23Speaker 2: And that search is the true inflection point of this
- 8:26entire saga, because once law enforcement and subsequently forensic anthropologists
- 8:31step onto that eighteen acre property in nineteen ninety six
- 8:34and begins systematically turning over the soil. The true scale
- 8:38of the horror becomes impossible to ignore.
- 8:41Speaker 1: You can't explain it away with a medical prop excuse anymore.
- 8:44Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. They spend weeks metigulously recovering these charred,
- 8:50fragmented bones from the woods.
- 8:52Speaker 1: It really is like that moment where you pull a
- 8:54loose thread on a heavy, expensive winter coat expecting just
- 8:57a tiny snack.
- 8:58Speaker 2: Great analogy, yeah, But instead.
- 9:00Speaker 1: The entire garment just rapidly unrawls and falls apart right
- 9:03in front of you. The facade didn't just crack, it
- 9:05completely vaporized. It did, But the physical reality of the
- 9:09crime scene is what really gets me. How do you
- 9:11hide a mass grave ten thousand bone fragments at a
- 9:14family home without the neighbors smelling something or the kids
- 9:17stumbling upon it much earlier.
- 9:19Speaker 2: Well, it speaks heavily to the extreme isolation of the property.
- 9:22Eighteen acres of dense woods provides a.
- 9:24Speaker 1: Lot of covert true, that is a lot of land.
- 9:26Speaker 2: But it also speaks directly to his disposal methods. These
- 9:30were not whole intact remains buried in shallow graves right.
- 9:34Speaker 1: As the sources meticulously entail, these fragments were heavily burned,
- 9:38they were mechanically crushed, and they were widely scattered across
- 9:42a large area.
- 9:43Speaker 2: So he was actively trying to destroy the evidence, actively.
- 9:46Speaker 1: And aggressively trying to destroy the biological evidence. And the
- 9:49moment he realizes the police are closing in in July
- 9:52of nineteen ninety six, Bombmeister makes a run for it.
- 9:55He bolt, he flees across the border into Ontario, Canada,
- 9:59and he dies by suicide in a local park before
- 10:01he can ever be arrested, questioned, or put on trial.
- 10:04Speaker 2: He takes the absolute coward's way out. He really did,
- 10:08essentially taking his darkest secrets to the grave and leaving
- 10:11his family, the victims' families, and law enforcement holding the bag.
- 10:16Speaker 1: And because he died, the justice system's typical mechanism for
- 10:19finding the truth a trial of vanish right.
- 10:21Speaker 2: There's no courtroom drama to lay out the facts exactly.
- 10:24Speaker 1: Which leaves us with the science. And we really need
- 10:26to emphasize the severe limitations of nineteen ninety six forensic technology.
- 10:31Speaker 2: Oh for sure, if you look at the history of
- 10:33forensic science, nineteen ninety six is practically the dark Ages
- 10:36compared to the capabilities we have today in twenty twenty six.
- 10:39It really is. Law enforcement in Hamilton County was suddenly
- 10:42presented with a scene that resembled a localized mass disaster
- 10:46like a plane crash, a commercial plane crash essentially, but
- 10:49in a backyard. The condition of the remains, calcified by
- 10:53extreme heat and shattered made comprehensive identification extraordinarily difficult.
- 10:59Speaker 1: So what could they actually do back then?
- 11:01Speaker 2: With the rudimentary technology of the nineteen nineties, They managed
- 11:04to make a handful of initial identifications, but it was
- 11:07a monumental struggle.
- 11:09Speaker 1: Yeah, the sources list these early named victims, and I'll
- 11:11want to make sure we pause and say their names
- 11:14for you listening, because these were real men with families, absolutely,
- 11:17Roger Allen Goodlett, Alan Wayne Rossard, Steven Sperlin Hale, Michael
- 11:22Frederick Kern, John Lee, Johnny Bayer, Jeffrey Allen Jones, Richard Douglas,
- 11:30Hamilton Junior, and Manuel Rezendez.
- 11:33Speaker 2: Those initial eight identifications were made primarily through traditional dental
- 11:37records and the very early rudimentary DNA technology that was
- 11:40available at the time.
- 11:41Speaker 1: Just eight out of an estimated twenty five.
- 11:43Speaker 2: Right after that initial push, the criminal investigation effectively hit
- 11:47a massive brick wall because the killer was dead. Yes,
- 11:51the perpetrator was dead, so there was no prosecutor demanding
- 11:54evidence for a trial, right, and the remaining thousands of
- 11:57bone fragments were simply too small, too degraded, and two
- 12:01burned for nineteen nineties science to extract any viable data from.
- 12:05Speaker 1: So what do they do with them?
- 12:06Speaker 2: They were cataloged, placed into cardboard boxes, and sent to
- 12:10long term evidence storage.
- 12:11Speaker 1: Where they sat on shells, collecting dust for twenty five years.
- 12:15Speaker 2: Just sitting there.
- 12:16Speaker 1: Yeah, which brings up a really painful but necessary systemic question.
- 12:21It does to understand how someone could murder people on
- 12:25this scale authorities estimate up to twenty five men over
- 12:28several years and accumulate ten thousand bone fragments in his
- 12:33backyard without triggering a massive, coordinated citywide panic.
- 12:38Speaker 2: We have to look at the era, right.
- 12:39Speaker 1: We have to look at exactly who he was targeting
- 12:42and the specific era he was operating in.
- 12:44Speaker 2: This is crucial context. The target profile Baumeister honed in
- 12:47on was highly specific, young gay man. Yes, he was
- 12:50hunting young men, the vast majority of them gay in
- 12:53the late nineteen eighties and early to mid nineteen nineties,
- 12:56And importantly, many of these men were already living on
- 12:59the margins of society.
- 13:01Speaker 1: Yeah, the sources make a point to note that these
- 13:03were guys who were often struggling with severe housing instability.
- 13:07Speaker 2: Many were yes, some.
- 13:08Speaker 1: Had substance abuse issues. Many were completely estranged from their
- 13:11biological families because they had come out, and this was
- 13:14an era where that often meant being entirely cut off
- 13:17from your support system.
- 13:18Speaker 2: Exactly. You have to contextualize this within the systemic blind
- 13:21spots of the era. Right, this is pre widespread Internet.
- 13:25There are no cell phones pinging cell towers to leave
- 13:28a digital.
- 13:28Speaker 1: Footprint, no GPS tracking.
- 13:30Speaker 2: No expansive DNA databases. But more fundamentally, this was during
- 13:34a time when the LGBTQ plus community in places like
- 13:38the Midwest faced intense structural marginalization.
- 13:42Speaker 1: The AIDS epidemic was a huge factor too.
- 13:44Speaker 2: The AIDS epidemic was still a dominant stigmatizing force when
- 13:47these men vanished. Their disappearances simply didn't generate the kind
- 13:51of coordinated, multi agency law enforcement response we might expect
- 13:55today for a missing person.
- 13:57Speaker 1: I hear that, but I have to stop you there
- 13:59and ask them be how of our listeners?
- 14:00Speaker 2: Sure? Go ahead?
- 14:01Speaker 1: Twenty five men, up to two dozen men vanishing from
- 14:05the exact same social circles, the exact same handful of
- 14:08gay bars in Indianapolis.
- 14:10Speaker 2: I know, it sounds impossible.
- 14:12Speaker 1: Even without cell phones. How is it mathematically possible that
- 14:15non enforcement does not form a massive task force. How
- 14:18does that not trigger alarms in every police precinct in
- 14:21the state.
- 14:22Speaker 2: The tragedy is that it did trigger massive alarms, but
- 14:25only within the community itself.
- 14:27Speaker 1: Right the community mew friends.
- 14:28Speaker 2: Noticed the empty barstools, partners noticed the absences. Families who
- 14:33were still in contact did file missing person.
- 14:35Speaker 1: Reports, so the police knew they were missing.
- 14:38Speaker 2: The failure wasn't that no one noticed. The failure was
- 14:40how the system processed the information. Police often investigated these
- 14:44missing persons as isolated individual.
- 14:47Speaker 1: Cases, like they were just unrelated runaways.
- 14:49Speaker 2: Exactly. They'd classified them as runaways or assumed they had
- 14:52just moved to another city, which was common in transient communities. Wow,
- 14:55they failed to connect the dots to see the overarching
- 14:58pattern of a single highly organized predator. Predators like Bowmeister
- 15:04are deeply opportunistic.
- 15:06Speaker 1: They know who to target.
- 15:07Speaker 2: Yes, they specifically weaponize society's apathy toward marginalized groups. He
- 15:13operated with impunity because he calculated correctly that the systemic
- 15:16response to missing gay men in the early nineties would
- 15:19be slow, fragmented, and largely indifferent.
- 15:23Speaker 1: And what makes it so infuriating is that it wasn't
- 15:26like there were zero warnings to law enforcement.
- 15:28Speaker 2: Oh, there were warnings.
- 15:29Speaker 1: There was a massive neon flashing early tip from a
- 15:33man named Tony Harris.
- 15:34Speaker 2: Yes, the Tony Harris tip is heartbreaking in hindsight.
- 15:37Speaker 1: The sources detail how Harris actually goes to the authorities
- 15:41and reports that a man calling himself Brian Smart had
- 15:44nearly strangled him to death with a pool hose during
- 15:47a sexual encounter, a horrifying ordeal. Harris survives this. He
- 15:51does his own sleuthing, and he eventually identifies the license
- 15:54plate of Brian Smart, leading him to realize this guy
- 15:57is actually Herbert.
- 15:59Speaker 2: Bellmeister and gives this to the police.
- 16:01Speaker 1: He hands this to them. He basically hands them the
- 16:04killer on a silver platter.
- 16:05Speaker 2: He did, and yet investigators at the time determined they
- 16:09lacked sufficient legal grounds to obtain a search warrant for
- 16:13the Fox Hollow property based on that identification, Alan, are
- 16:17you kidding me? When you combine the strict legal threshold
- 16:20for probable cause with the underlying lack of institutional urgency
- 16:24given the demographic of the victims, the result is paralysis.
- 16:28Speaker 1: System just froze.
- 16:29Speaker 2: The investigation stalled completely. Baumeister remained free to kill until
- 16:34his own wife inadvertently opened the door for police years later.
- 16:38Speaker 1: It is a profound institutional failure.
- 16:41Speaker 2: Absolutely.
- 16:41Speaker 1: Society essentially failed these men in life and then failed
- 16:45them again in depth by putting them in cardboard boxes
- 16:47for a quarter of a century.
- 16:48Speaker 2: Which brings us to the modern era.
- 16:50Speaker 1: Right, Because what makes this deep dive so compelling, which
- 16:54shifts this from a purely tragic history lesson into a
- 16:58story of incredible modern Reziliacellians, is that a localized crusade
- 17:02in the twenty twenties is finally attempting to write those
- 17:05historical wrongs using cutting edge science.
- 17:08Speaker 2: And that crusade is led by one very specific.
- 17:11Speaker 1: Person entered Jeff Jellison.
- 17:13Speaker 2: Yes, Jess Jellison enters the narrative in a maybe way
- 17:16when he is elected as the Hamilton County Corner in
- 17:19twenty twenty two, so just recently right now. Typically, an
- 17:22incoming corner inherits the current case load and manages the
- 17:26day to day operations of the.
- 17:27Speaker 1: County, like recent accidents and homicides exactly.
- 17:30Speaker 2: But Jellison makes a monumental, highly unusual decision. Instead of
- 17:35letting sleeping dogs lie, he decides to look backward.
- 17:38Speaker 1: He literally unboxes a thirty year old cold case.
- 17:41Speaker 2: He physically goes into the county storage facility. He locates
- 17:44these dusty boxes of bones that have been sitting in
- 17:46the dark since nineteen ninety six, and he officially reopens
- 17:50the identification effort for Fox Hollow Farm.
- 17:52Speaker 1: He's a local county corner, right like. He doesn't have
- 17:55a massive federal budget, not at all, so he doesn't
- 17:57do it alone. The methodological stratum employees is this incredible,
- 18:03massive collaborative effort.
- 18:05Speaker 2: It had to be collaborative.
- 18:06Speaker 1: He starts reaching out and partnering with the Indiana State
- 18:08Police Laboratory, the University of Indianapolis Human Identification Center, the
- 18:13University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.
- 18:16Speaker 2: UNT is a major player in.
- 18:18Speaker 1: This and a private forensic lab out of Texas called
- 18:20Athrum that specializes in degraded DNA. He even brings in
- 18:25the FBI.
- 18:26Speaker 2: It's a masterclass and interagency cooperation. Jellison realized quickly that
- 18:31the scale of the degradation required the absolute bleeding edge
- 18:34of forensic science.
- 18:35Speaker 1: The stuff they're doing now is just wild.
- 18:38Speaker 2: The techniques they are applying today are light years ahead
- 18:40of what was possible in nineteen ninety six. We are
- 18:44talking about advanced str analysis, which is shorthandem repeat analysis,
- 18:48mitochondrial DNA testing, and highly complex forensic genetic genealogy.
- 18:53Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack those terms because it sounds like science fiction.
- 18:56But this is the actual physical labor being done on
- 18:58these francs. Yes, let's break it down for you listening
- 19:01trying to graft the sheer physical difficulty of what these
- 19:04scientists are attempting to do. I want to expand on
- 19:07an analogy. Go for imagine someone hands you a ten
- 19:10thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Okay, but before they gave it
- 19:14to you, they put the pieces through an industrial blender,
- 19:17tearing them into jagged shards.
- 19:19Speaker 2: A nightmare puzzle, right.
- 19:21Speaker 1: And then they set those shards on fire, turning half
- 19:24of them to ash. And to top it off, they
- 19:26threw away the box, so you don't even have the
- 19:28picture on the front to guide you. That is the
- 19:30physical reality of these bone fragments.
- 19:33Speaker 2: That analogy perfectly captures the mechanical challenge here.
- 19:36Speaker 1: It's just so daunting.
- 19:37Speaker 2: Let's look at the biology of why. That is our
- 19:40genetic blueprint. Our nuclear DNA is housed inside the nucleus
- 19:44of ourselves. It's what makes you you. Okay, But nuclear
- 19:47DNA is surprisingly fragile when exposed to extreme environmental.
- 19:51Speaker 1: Stress, like being burned in a fire pit.
- 19:53Speaker 2: Exactly when bone is subjected to massive sustained heat, the
- 19:58heat physically shatters the strands. So when scientists try to
- 20:02perform str analysis, which relies on reading specific repeating patterns
- 20:06in long strands of nuclear DNA, they often find nothing but.
- 20:10Speaker 1: Static because the strands are too broken to read exactly.
- 20:13So if the main DNA is destroyed by the fire,
- 20:16how are they getting any matches at all today?
- 20:19Speaker 2: That is where the brilliance of mitochondrial DNA testing comes in.
- 20:22Speaker 1: Oh okay, think of the.
- 20:23Speaker 2: Cell's nucleus like the main power grid of a building.
- 20:26The fire destroyed the power grid, but floating around outside
- 20:30the nucleus in the fluid of the cell are mitochondria,
- 20:33the energy factories.
- 20:34Speaker 1: Of the cell, right the powerhouse of the cell.
- 20:36Speaker 2: Exactly, they have their own tiny loop of DNA. Think
- 20:39of them as thousands of little backup generators. Even if
- 20:42the main power grid is completely destroyed, there are so
- 20:45many of these backup generators that a few of them
- 20:47might survive the fire.
- 20:48Speaker 1: That is incredible.
- 20:50Speaker 2: Scientists can extract that mitochondrial DNA the catches. Mitochondrial DNA
- 20:55is only inherited from the mother, so it doesn't identify
- 20:57the exact individual, but it firmly I do identifies the
- 21:00maternal family line.
- 21:02Speaker 1: Which gives them a foothold, a huge foothold. And they
- 21:05take that foothold and combine it with genetic genealogy, mapping
- 21:08out sprawling family trees to narrow down who this person
- 21:12could possibly be. It's painstaking work, but against all odds,
- 21:17this agonizingly slow process is actually working.
- 21:20Speaker 2: It is yielding results.
- 21:22Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, they successfully identified Allan Lee Livingstone,
- 21:26a young man who had been missing since nineteen ninety three.
- 21:29That was the first major breakthrough of Jellison's renewed.
- 21:32Speaker 2: Effort a huge victory for his family, and then.
- 21:35Speaker 1: Just recently, in twenty twenty five, they identified Daniel Thomas Hallerin.
- 21:39Speaker 2: The identification of Daniel Hallerin is a particularly poignant moment
- 21:42in the source material.
- 21:43Speaker 1: It really stuck with me.
- 21:44Speaker 2: It highlights the generational trauma caused by Baumeister. Hallerin had
- 21:48never been formally reported missing in a way that cross
- 21:51referenced with the Fox Hollow investigation back in the nineties,
- 21:54So he just vanished. He essentially fell through the bureaucratic cracks.
- 21:57Speaker 1: Entirely, yes, and the documentary spends time highlighting the story
- 22:02of his daughter, Coral Hallerin.
- 22:04Speaker 2: Oh Her story is devastating.
- 22:06Speaker 1: She was just a young girl when he vanished. She
- 22:09grew up with absolutely zero answers, just a void where
- 22:13her father should.
- 22:13Speaker 2: Have been thirty two years of waiting.
- 22:16Speaker 1: She talks about how she intentionally kept her maiden name
- 22:20Hallarin for thirty two years. She'd never changed it when
- 22:24she got older, holding onto this quiet, desperate hope that
- 22:27one day her father would get his life together try
- 22:30to find her, and he'd need to know what name
- 22:32to look for in the phone book.
- 22:33Speaker 2: It humanizes the collateral damage of these crimes so powerfully.
- 22:37Speaker 1: It really does.
- 22:38Speaker 2: The documentary team captures the raw, unfiltered moment she finally
- 22:42receives the news that her father's remains were among those
- 22:45in the boxes.
- 22:45Speaker 1: Such an intense moment.
- 22:47Speaker 2: She says, and I quote, I waited thirty two years
- 22:49for this. Unfortunately, this is how I have to get
- 22:51him back.
- 22:52Speaker 1: Wow.
- 22:52Speaker 2: He was born in nineteen sixty two, meaning he would
- 22:54have been only about thirty years old at the time
- 22:56of his murder.
- 22:57Speaker 1: That quote, this is how I have to get him back.
- 23:00It just sits heavy in your chest.
- 23:02Speaker 2: It really grounds the whole investigation.
- 23:04Speaker 1: It strips away the clinical nature of bone fragments and
- 23:07DNA extraction and brings the agonizing human reality right back
- 23:11to the forefront.
- 23:12Speaker 2: We can't lose sight of that.
- 23:13Speaker 1: But as much as we celebrate these incredible identifications by
- 23:17the coroner's office, Jealoson gives this very sobering, very grounded
- 23:22reality check in the documentary.
- 23:24Speaker 2: He has to manage expectations.
- 23:26Speaker 1: He emphasizes that, out of the ten thousand fragments currently
- 23:29sitting in his custody, they have only been able to
- 23:32successfully test about two hundred.
- 23:33Speaker 2: Of them so far, two hundred out of ten thousand.
- 23:36Speaker 1: That is barely a dent.
- 23:37Speaker 2: Which means there are thousands upon thousands of fragments left.
- 23:41The work is painstakingly slow, incredibly expensive, and fraught with
- 23:46technical failures.
- 23:47Speaker 1: But Jellison's crusade didn't just yield DNA matches and bring
- 23:50closure to a few families, did it.
- 23:52Speaker 2: No, it sparks something much bigger.
- 23:54Speaker 1: It yielded massive global media attention, and those headlines, those
- 23:59docs documentaries acted as a catalyst that shook loose an
- 24:03avalanche of new, deeply unsettling information.
- 24:06Speaker 2: Which brings us to the docuseary's effect.
- 24:08Speaker 1: Let's transition into how media is literally shaping this investigation.
- 24:12You have to talk about that effect.
- 24:13Speaker 2: It's a huge part of the story now.
- 24:14Speaker 1: In twenty twenty five, Hulu releases a series called The
- 24:17Fox Hollow Murders Playground of a serial killer, and it
- 24:21absolutely explodes, massive hit. It becomes ABC News Studio's most
- 24:26watched Hulu documentary of the entire year based on ours streamed.
- 24:30It earns an Emmy nomination. It puts the case in
- 24:32front of millions of eyeballs.
- 24:34Speaker 2: But more than the viewership. It was the response right.
- 24:37Speaker 1: Most importantly for the investigation, it generates over five hundred
- 24:41new tips, emails, and direct messages to the Coroner's office
- 24:44and to local law enforcement.
- 24:46Speaker 2: And this represents a massive fundamental shift in how we
- 24:49understand the role of true crime media today. Totally ten
- 24:52years ago, documentaries were largely passive retellings of historical events.
- 24:56They summarized what had already been adjudicated.
- 24:59Speaker 1: They just told you what happened.
- 25:00Speaker 2: Today, productions like the Hulu series are active participants in
- 25:03ongoing investigations. Those five hundred tips helped bridge a crucial
- 25:08glaring gap between the raw forensic science the bones Jealouson
- 25:12is working with and the criminal investigation, which is the
- 25:15narrative of what actually happened on that property, who was there,
- 25:19and how it was done.
- 25:20Speaker 1: And the sheer volume of that new information leads directly
- 25:24to the July twenty twenty six follow up special that
- 25:28is the core of our deep dive today, Return to
- 25:30Fox Hollow, New Victims, Darker Secrets, directed by Alex.
- 25:35Speaker 2: Dublonski, Such a crucial follow up.
- 25:37Speaker 1: And the central, highly controversial theory of this new documentary
- 25:41is right there in the title The Darker Secrets, the
- 25:43big uncomfortable question that is suddenly being asked out loud.
- 25:47Did Herbert Baumeister act alone?
- 25:49Speaker 2: It is a question that Corner Jeff Jellison himself has
- 25:52begun to raise.
- 25:53Speaker 1: Publicly, which is saying something when you look at.
- 25:55Speaker 2: The evidence, objectively stripped of the preconceived narrative. He points
- 25:59to the sh the sheer volume of the remains, He
- 26:02looks at the brutal logistics of the disposal process, and
- 26:05he legitimately questions how one man, operating entirely in secret
- 26:09could manage the physical execution of that scale of destruction alone.
- 26:13Speaker 1: I have to say, I think is brilliant that they
- 26:15are finally asking this.
- 26:16Speaker 2: It's long overdue because.
- 26:18Speaker 1: The whole lone Wolf serial killer myth needs to be dismantled.
- 26:24We are so deeply conditioned by pop culture, by Hollywood
- 26:27thrillers and paperback novels, to view these killers as these isolated,
- 26:32omnipotent evil geniuses who operate entirely in a vacuum.
- 26:36Speaker 2: The media loves the evil genius.
- 26:38Speaker 1: Trope, but step back and think about the physical logistics
- 26:41at Fox Hollow, ten thousand, burned, crushed, fragments. The physical
- 26:45labor required to achieve that is staggering.
- 26:48Speaker 2: It really is.
- 26:48Speaker 1: You have to murder a grown man, then you have
- 26:50to move a dead weight, then you have to dig
- 26:52a massive pit.
- 26:52Speaker 2: And then you have to generate heat. Burning a human
- 26:55body to the point of calcification requires an immense amount
- 26:59of sustained extreme heat. We are talking thousands of degrees
- 27:04for hours on end.
- 27:05Speaker 1: You have to chop cords of wood, keep a massive
- 27:08fire stoked for hours, perhaps use chemical accelerants.
- 27:12Speaker 2: Its industrial level work, and.
- 27:13Speaker 1: Then once it's burned, you have to physically smash the
- 27:17remaining bones and scatter them across acres of land. Right
- 27:20doing that repeatedly up to two dozen times over several years,
- 27:24without drawing the suspicion of neighbors or your wife or
- 27:28your children who might return home unexpectedly.
- 27:30Speaker 2: It's almost impossible to picture.
- 27:32Speaker 1: It completely strains credulity that there wasn't a supply chain
- 27:35of horror here. It seems impossible there wasn't at least
- 27:38some level of complicity or another person who knew something
- 27:41or helped with something.
- 27:42Speaker 2: It is a profound logistical argument. The physical evidence points
- 27:46toward a workload that suggests assistance exactly. And what makes
- 27:50this new documentary so explosive is that the skepticism isn't
- 27:54just internet sleuth speculating on message boards.
- 27:56Speaker 1: No, they have receipts.
- 27:57Speaker 2: The documentary roots this accomplice theory in very specific names,
- 28:01eyewitness accounts and long buried police files. This isn't just theory,
- 28:07there's a messy, complicated paper trail.
- 28:09Speaker 1: Okay, let's dive into those specific names. The documentary introduces,
- 28:13or in some cases, reintroduces some highly polarizing figures who
- 28:18challenge the accepted history.
- 28:19Speaker 2: Mark Goodyear is a big one.
- 28:21Speaker 1: First is Mark Goodyear. He was a central figure in
- 28:24the twenty twenty five series and remains a key focus
- 28:27in twenty twenty six. Goodyear claims to have survived an
- 28:31encounter with Baumeister.
- 28:32Speaker 2: Which is incredible in itself, but more.
- 28:34Speaker 1: Chillingly for this new theory. He describes having first hand
- 28:38knowledge of the body disposal process. He claims to have
- 28:41actually seen bodies being burned in a pit on the
- 28:43Fox Hollow property.
- 28:44Speaker 2: Now, the documentary team treats Goodyear carefully, as they must,
- 28:48they explicitly frame him as a polarizing figure whose claims
- 28:51require intense scrutiny.
- 28:53Speaker 1: Why is that? Why not just take a survivor at
- 28:55their word.
- 28:55Speaker 2: Because of the fragility of memory and trauma When you
- 28:58are dealing with thirty year old memories from a highly traumatizing,
- 29:02life threatening event, cognitive science tells us that memory is
- 29:06inherently malleable.
- 29:07Speaker 1: That makes sense.
- 29:08Speaker 2: Over three decades, memories can combine, shift, or be influenced
- 29:13by media coverage. Investigators and journalists have to treat him
- 29:16as a potential key witness, yes, but they know they
- 29:20desperately need corroborating physical or documentary evidence to back up
- 29:24his specific claims about witnessing the disposal.
- 29:27Speaker 1: But that's the twist. There is corroborating paper evidence regarding accomplices.
- 29:32Speaker 2: There is surprisingly, maybe.
- 29:33Speaker 1: Not directly linking to Goodyear's specific night at the fire pit,
- 29:37but firmly linking to the idea that Baumeister was not operating.
- 29:40Speaker 2: In a vacuum right the IPD files.
- 29:42Speaker 1: The documentary unerks a name from the old original Indianapolis
- 29:45Police Department files from the nineteen nineties, Thomas Ackerman.
- 29:49Speaker 2: Yes, the Thomas Ackerman connection is where the lone wolf
- 29:51theory really starts to fracture under its own weight.
- 29:54Speaker 1: It really does.
- 29:55Speaker 2: According to these IPD files, which were meticulously reviewed by
- 29:58the documentary team, Ackerman's name appears repeatedly in direct association
- 30:03with more than one of the specific men who are
- 30:05later identified among the dead at Fox Hollow Farm.
- 30:08Speaker 1: The specifics of the Ackerman connection are mind blowing to me.
- 30:12Speaker 2: It's hard to ignore.
- 30:13Speaker 1: The police records show that Thomas Afferman actually bailed Steven
- 30:17spurl and Hale out of jail. Hale is one of
- 30:20the confirmed victims whose remains were found burned on Ballmeister's.
- 30:24Speaker 2: Estate, direct contact prior to the murder, and it.
- 30:28Speaker 1: Doesn't stop there. Ackerman's name is also directly connected in
- 30:32police files to the missing person report for Richard Douglas
- 30:35Hamilton Junior, who is another confirmed Fox Hollow victim.
- 30:39Speaker 2: The sheer volume of material on Ackerman in these historical
- 30:42police files is notable. It isn't a passing mention. It
- 30:45is a documented intersection with multiple victims prior to their.
- 30:49Speaker 1: Deaths, which is a huge red flag.
- 30:51Speaker 2: And this raises the most glaring, uncomfortable question of the
- 30:54entire deep dive. If this paper trail existed in the
- 30:57IPD files, before the bones were even found in a
- 31:00ninety six. Why wasn't it fully pursued?
- 31:03Speaker 1: That is exactly what I was yelling at my screen.
- 31:05Speaker 2: It's frustrating.
- 31:06Speaker 1: We have good years, thirty year old memories over here,
- 31:10standing right next to Ackerman's actual ink on paper trail
- 31:13and official police files. Why was a paper trail that
- 31:16points to a wider network seemingly just ignored or shoved
- 31:20in a drawer.
- 31:21Speaker 2: It's a complex failure, and it comes down to a
- 31:24mix of bureaucratic inertia, the legal mechanics of cold cases,
- 31:29and frankly institutional embarrassment.
- 31:32Speaker 1: Embarrassment.
- 31:32Speaker 2: Sure, when Herbert Baumeister fled to Canada and committed suicide,
- 31:37the immediate intense pressure on the investigation essentially evaporated overnight.
- 31:42In many jurisdictions, when the primary offender dies, the case
- 31:45is prematurely designated as closed.
- 31:47Speaker 1: So just because the main guy is dead, they just
- 31:50pack it up like case closed, we got them, let's
- 31:52go home.
- 31:53Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, the budget is immediately cut, the task forces disbanded,
- 31:57the manpower is reassigned to fresh active home homicides. Wow,
- 32:01potential accomplices are left completely unchecked because there is no
- 32:04longer an impending trial to prepare for. The prosecutor doesn't
- 32:08need to build a flawless.
- 32:09Speaker 1: Narrative anymore, so they just stopped looking.
- 32:12Speaker 2: Furthermore, pursuing accomplices might have required the police to publicly
- 32:15admit they had missed massive clues like the Tony Harris
- 32:18tip or the Ackerman connections years earlier. Closing the book
- 32:23with Baumeister suicide was the path of least institutional resistance.
- 32:27Speaker 1: It is the ultimate cover up by apathy. Unfortunately, Yes,
- 32:31and we also have to consider the investigative gaps from
- 32:34nineteen ninety six that the documentary highlights. We are talking
- 32:37about missing physical evidence that is seemingly vanished from locup.
- 32:42Speaker 2: Missing evidence is a huge problem.
- 32:44Speaker 1: We are talking about massive gaps in the chain of
- 32:46custody for certain items recovered from the estate. There are
- 32:49different accounts from officers in the mid nineties regarding what
- 32:53was actually observed on the property during the initial search.
- 32:57Speaker 2: The current owner of the property, Rob Graves, and a
- 33:00former local reporter who covered the case extensively, Laura Musil,
- 33:03are both featured prominently in the special.
- 33:05Speaker 1: They bring up so many.
- 33:06Speaker 2: Good points and they point out very clearly using original
- 33:09documentation that not all the evidence collected in nineteen ninety
- 33:12six has been fully accounted for. Today items are missing.
- 33:16Speaker 1: Which puts corner Jeff Jellison in an incredibly delicate, almost
- 33:19impossible position. He is the one on earthing all this,
- 33:23but he's not.
- 33:23Speaker 2: A detective exactly. He has had to establish a very strict,
- 33:28legally defined boundary for.
- 33:30Speaker 1: His offers because he can investigate.
- 33:31Speaker 2: Crimes right his mandate, his legal job description as the
- 33:35county coroner is strictly the identification of the dead. He
- 33:39is trying to put names to bone fragments. That's his
- 33:42whole job, criminal charges, investigating the historical footprint of Thomas
- 33:46Ackerman or interrogating Mark Goodyear's claims. That is entirely the
- 33:50province of law enforcement agencies like the police and the
- 33:53prosecutor's office. Jellison gathers the tips, he forwards them to
- 33:57the police, but he has to constantly force himself to say,
- 34:00focused on the bones in front of him.
- 34:02Speaker 1: It is a massive burden for one office to carry.
- 34:04Speaker 2: It is a heavy load.
- 34:05Speaker 1: And while the search for accomplices is inherently looking backward,
- 34:08digging into dusty police files, interviewing aging witnesses about things
- 34:13they saw in the nineties. The search to identify the
- 34:15remaining victims is looking squarely into the future of forensic technology.
- 34:20Speaker 2: The science is where the hope is.
- 34:22Speaker 1: Let's talk about the danting road ahead for Jellison in
- 34:24his team.
- 34:25Speaker 2: The backlog they are facing is almost insurmountable. Thousands of
- 34:29fragments remain completely untested.
- 34:32Speaker 1: Because of the cost and time.
- 34:34Speaker 2: And as we discussed, it's not just a simple matter
- 34:36of putting a bone in a machine and waiting for
- 34:38a ding. It is a matter of severe funding constraints.
- 34:42Corner's offices are not budgeted for multi million dollar genealogical
- 34:46deep dives. There are massive laboratory backlogs at places like
- 34:51Offram and unt and the highly degraded calcified condition of
- 34:55the bones themselves means many extraction attempts yield zero results.
- 35:00This investigation is going to be measured in years, possibly decades,
- 35:04not months.
- 35:04Speaker 1: And what blew my mind is that the physical search
- 35:06of the property isn't even over.
- 35:08Speaker 2: No, it's still ongoing.
- 35:09Speaker 1: You'd think after nineteen ninety six they got everything, but
- 35:11in twenty twenty five investigators actually brought certified, highly trained
- 35:15cadaver dogs back on to portions of the Fox Hollow
- 35:18property and the dogs alerted.
- 35:20Speaker 2: Duel alerts from multiple certified dogs and specific areas of
- 35:23the woods that is wild. Now, it's important to be
- 35:26precise that specific targeted excavation in twenty twenty five following
- 35:31the dog alerts did not yield additional human remains in
- 35:35that particular spot.
- 35:36Speaker 1: Okay, so they didn't find new bones right then, But the.
- 35:39Speaker 2: Fact that dogs are alerting to volatile organic compounds associated
- 35:42with human decomposition thirty years later absolutely underscores the point
- 35:46that the site is still viewed as a highly active,
- 35:49contaminated examination zone. The earth there still holds secrets.
- 35:53Speaker 1: But even when the science works perfectly, even when they
- 35:56pull off a miracle, it can still hit a brick wall.
- 35:58And this is the part of the source material that
- 36:00absolutely fascinated me. The phenotyping puzzle.
- 36:03Speaker 2: Right this is where we see the incredible promise and
- 36:06the devastating limitations of modern forensics.
- 36:09Speaker 1: It's a bittersweet.
- 36:10Speaker 2: Advanced technology was able to extract just enough viable DNA
- 36:14from one single unidentified profile to create an estimate of
- 36:18the victim's physical appearance. This is called DNA phenotyping.
- 36:22Speaker 1: They literally reverse engineered a face from a shattered bone. Essentially, yes,
- 36:26they figured out this specific victim had pale skin, brown
- 36:32to dark auburn hair, and hazel brown eyes, and then,
- 36:36using extensive forensic genetic genealogy, they take that profile and
- 36:40trace his family lineage back centuries.
- 36:43Speaker 2: It's unbelievable the.
- 36:44Speaker 1: Source of state they identified a deceased father for this
- 36:48victim through lineage tracing that goes all the way back
- 36:51to the fourteenth century.
- 36:52Speaker 2: It is a modern miracle of biological science and computational mapping.
- 36:57To pull a fourteenth century ancestral line from a piece
- 37:00of bone that was set on fire in nineteen ninety
- 37:02three is astounding, it really is. But and this is
- 37:05the heartbreaking caveat that Jellysin has to live with. Despite
- 37:08tracing the family tree back to the Middle Ages, they
- 37:10still do not know the victim's actual name or his
- 37:13mother's name.
- 37:13Speaker 1: They hit a dead end.
- 37:14Speaker 2: They know what he looked like, they know where his
- 37:16ancestors came from, but they don't know who.
- 37:18Speaker 1: He was, which is where I have to ask a
- 37:20deeply philosophical question about all this. Are we relying too
- 37:23heavily on the magic of science when what we really
- 37:26need is raw human memory. It is mind blowing that
- 37:30we can trace a bone fragment to a fourteenth century
- 37:32peasant in Europe, but we can't figure out the name
- 37:35of a guy who went missing in Indiana thirty years ago.
- 37:39Why is that gap so unbridgable.
- 37:41Speaker 2: It is a highly valid point, and it perfectly illustrates
- 37:44the absolute limit of current technology when historical comparative data
- 37:48is absent. Think of science as the bridge builder. Science
- 37:52can build the bridge. It can tell you the hair color,
- 37:55the eye color, the deep ancestral roots. But a bridge
- 37:59needs an anchor on both sides to be useful.
- 38:01Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense.
- 38:02Speaker 2: In this case, the family reference sample a DNA swab
- 38:05from a living relative is the anchor. In the present day.
- 38:08Without a direct comparison to a missing person's parent, sibling,
- 38:12or child, that highly advanced, incredibly expensive bridge of science
- 38:15just ends in bit air. It doesn't connect to a name.
- 38:18Speaker 1: Which explains exactly why Jellison is practically pleading with the
- 38:21public in these documentaries.
- 38:23Speaker 2: He really is begging for help.
- 38:25Speaker 1: He is actively begging families anywhere in the Midwest who
- 38:29had a male relative go missing between the mid nineteen
- 38:31eighties and the mid nineteen nineties to come forward and
- 38:35submit a simple cheek swab for a DNA sample.
- 38:38Speaker 2: And he emphasizes that even distant relatives can help build
- 38:41these reference profiles. It's an urgent call to action so important.
- 38:45The documentaries we discuss have generated more identifications and leads
- 38:48in three years than the preceding quarter century achieved. But
- 38:52it fundamentally requires that human element, the brave families willing
- 38:56to step forward, to cross the finish line and put
- 38:58a name to the remains.
- 39:00Speaker 1: So as we wrap up this massive deep dive, let's
- 39:02summarize exactly where we stand today. Okay, Foxhall of Farm
- 39:05is not a closed chapter from a nineteen nineties true
- 39:08crime book. It is a raw, active, breathing forensic investigation.
- 39:13Speaker 2: Very much alive.
- 39:14Speaker 1: Cutting edge DNA matches are finally restoring names to the dead.
- 39:17Families like Coral Hallarins are finally getting a measure of resolution,
- 39:21even if it comes thirty years too late.
- 39:23Speaker 2: And simultaneously, fresh tips from the public and newly re
- 39:26examined police files are completely complicating the long accepted historical narrative.
- 39:31Speaker 1: The lone wolf theory is crumbling.
- 39:33Speaker 2: The idea of Herbert Baumeister as a singular, brilliant Loane
- 39:37Keller operating in a vacuum is being seriously and perhaps
- 39:41permanently challenged by documentary evidence that suggests he may have
- 39:45had logistical help, or at least that others were involved
- 39:48in the periphery of these horrific crimes.
- 39:51Speaker 1: The thick woods of Fox Hollow don't hide the exact
- 39:54same secrets they used to in nineteen ninety six. But
- 39:57the full, unvarnished accounting of who who died there, exactly
- 40:01how many men there were, and whether Baumeister had accomplices
- 40:05walking free, well, it means glaringly incomplete.
- 40:08Speaker 2: It does. There is still so much work to do, and.
- 40:10Speaker 1: As we close out today, I want to leave you
- 40:13the listener with a chilling thought to mull over next
- 40:16time you're driving through a quiet neighborhood. If an eighteen
- 40:19acre estate in a wealthy, seemingly perfectly safe suburb could
- 40:23hold ten thousand pieces of human evidence completely undetected for years, yeah,
- 40:27and if a case that law enforcement effectively wrapped up
- 40:30and put a bow on thirty years ago is suddenly
- 40:32yielding secret accomplices, ignored police files, and brand new victims
- 40:36just because one coroner decided to look closer.
- 40:39Speaker 2: It makes you wonder.
- 40:40Speaker 1: What others solved historical crimes in our own backyards are
- 40:43just waiting for someone brave enough to pick up a
- 40:46shovel and start digging again.
- 40:47Speaker 2: It's a profound question and one that demands we constantly
- 40:51keep questioning the tidy narratives we think we know.
- 40:54Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
- 40:56the ongoing mysteries of the Fox Hollow Farm case. Keep
- 41:00your eyes open, stay curious, and we'll see you next time.