169. Brian Smart - The Murdering Mannequins
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Hey everybody, welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Morland. And I'm Garrett Morland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. I just had a moment of like weird as I was saying that intro. Why? Thinking back to the very first episode we recorded on the floor.

In the middle of COVID, our iPhone, our Apple mics, headphones, using our mics, we sat like 10 feet away from each other because we both felt so awkward and uncomfortable. We didn't really want to look at each other. And then we deleted it. Oh my gosh, that was weird. It was rough.

Dude, but now, who would have thought? We had no idea what we were doing. No idea. Didn't you use, you used Apple headphones and then I didn't have headphones, so I talked into my iPhone, right? Oh, yeah. But we deleted the episode, obviously. Do you know where it is? Do you have that episode somewhere? I think it's on an old computer. How was I supposed to know that so many people would eventually want to hear that first episode? Oh, there's no way I could listen to it. Oh, yeah.

Oh, you guys, it was so bad. Even our first couple, like, not couple, like, our first good chunk are a little...

Yeah, you're just learning. We had no idea what we were doing. I think it's, I mean, there's still a problem. We still don't know what we're doing. It's crazy. I don't know. Just thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you for being here. That was a really just cool feeling for me for just a moment there. Also, if anyone is a new listener, hi, welcome to our corner of the internet and the podcast world. We're so happy to have you here, and we're going to jump into 10 seconds. But first, I wanted to remind you that

Garrett really knows nothing about these episodes before we get into it. He comes in here completely blind, just as the listener does. And also, he really does hate true crime. Okay, Garrett, go ahead for your 10 seconds. I got some new golf clubs. Excited. Hopefully spending money on golf clubs makes me better somehow.

So I did get some new golf clubs. Payne's pretty excited about that too. I don't care. No, it was fun. I went the other day and I really liked them. So that was really cool. I'm going to try to go at least twice a week. Yeah. And we'll see what happens. Maybe you'll see me in the PGA one day. Oh my gosh. You never know. You never know. Anything's possible. Look at the podcast. In front of our house, we had a car that had been sitting there. It was our car for like two

three weeks because it broke. So just been sitting there and I finally got everything together, called it to a truck, got it called to service. So kind of excited to get our car back. Yeah. Productive week. Yeah, it actually was. We cleaned the house yesterday. We did a lot. I mean, I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but there was a lot in between all that. Yeah. And last but not least, I'm not wearing a hat today. So if you were watching on YouTube, I'm not wearing a hat. Thought I'd throw that out there because I...

I'd probably say that in 93% of our episodes have a hat on. Probably. So when I don't and I look in the camera, it's kind of strange. All right, let's get into our case. Our sources are Where the Bodies Are Buried, Murderpedia, Wikipedia, WTHR.com, Ancestry.com. What happens to a person when that person becomes a missing person?

People go missing for a variety of reasons, but for the missing who are never found, we mostly don't know what those reasons are. Some of these are people whose fates are a total mystery, where even the circumstances around their disappearances are unknown. They could be runaways, homicide victims, suicide victims, car accident victims whose wreckage and bodies was never found, maybe submerged underwater, or people who've fallen down abandoned mine shafts. The

The list of possibilities is bigger than you might think, but for a lot of those missing, their fates were the ugliest imaginable. A lot of them were homicide victims, and their bodies could be anywhere, maybe even buried on private property, in which case their bones may remain undiscovered indefinitely.

In today's story, we begin with a missing person case, and we'll see how a collaborative investigation effort between law enforcement, a private detective, and citizen sleuths led to a discovery that may otherwise have remained off the radar. When Virgil Vandegrift was in his early 20s, he was like many young men his age in the 1960s. He was trying to find himself.

As the culture in the United States was rapidly changing from the Kennedy assassination through the beginning of the Vietnam War, Virgil tried his hand at numerous careers, including working as an auto mechanic at a gas station and going door-to-door selling Fuller Brush. Holy, what did you even say? And going door-to-door selling products. Then in 1965, when he was 22, Virgil decided to become a law enforcement officer.

He was hired as a sheriff's deputy for Marion County, Indiana, quickly rising the ranks to become a detective and eventually a sergeant.

During his decades-long career with the Marion County Sheriff's Department, Virgil was a natural leader. He single-handedly brought the practice of forensic hypnosis to the department in 1976, becoming known around the area as the mind detective. By the time he retired in the late 1980s, he had used hypnosis in over 3,000 cases. And when he retired, he wasn't about to rest on his laurels.

He had a successful private investigation firm he'd founded in the late 1970s, Virgil L. Vandergriff & Associates. It was based in Indianapolis, operating out of a converted brick house down by the airport.

Now in his 50s, with a head of white hair and a bushy white mustache, Virgil was like many private investigators, in that much of his caseload was tracking down bail jumpers, sussing out embezzlers and drug users in workplaces, and locating missing children. But every now and again, a more challenging case would land on his desk, like in the summer of 1994.

When a woman named Mary Beasley opened the Yellow Pages looking for a private detective, her finger landed on Virgil Vandergriff's office. Mary met with the private detective and told him her story, the story of the disappearance of her 28-year-old son, Alan Broussard, who had been missing since early June.

I'm not sure what my thoughts are exactly on hypnosis and all of that, especially because it makes me think of the case we did where the guy had a dream. Oh, yeah. And he had a dream that...

Who the killer was, correct? He dreamt the murder. He dreamt the murder. Yep. That's what it was. So I don't know. It's like I want to say that this stuff isn't real, but then you have these cases like that. I'm just like, what? Yeah. Anyways, let us know if you are 100% for hypnosis. Have you ever been hypnotized? No, never. Have you? I feel like we've talked about this. We have. We've talked about it before. I think we talked about it in that episode. Okay.

Okay. Because, I mean, he saw a murder and I was just like, what? Yeah. But I'm not knocking anything. I'm open to it all. Okay. So Alan was last seen coming out of a gay bar in downtown Indianapolis and no one had heard from him since. Alan worked as a nurse's assistant at an AIDS hospital. This was at a time in the early to mid 90s when the AIDS epidemic was taking its heaviest toll.

The drugs that have made it possible for HIV-positive people to live a normal lifespan wouldn't be introduced until 1996, after which point the number of AIDS-related deaths annually began steeply declining.

But in 1994, people in the gay community were watching their friends drop like flies, and it hit the survivors hard. People like Alan, whose life was reckless and manic. But Alan still always found time to call his mother. So when the calls stopped coming, and she found out that none of his friends had heard from him either, she feared the worst. She contacted the Indianapolis police, but it felt to her like they had bigger fish and gave Mary Beasley the cold shoulder.

Out of frustration, she consulted a psychic and then hired another private detective before finally landing at Virgil van der Gryff. She explained to Virgil that she had already lost another of her three sons just earlier that same year in a car accident, and she just couldn't stand any more tragedy and heartache in her life.

Now, Virgil had worked in law enforcement and investigations for nearly 30 years by this point in his life. He had good intuition and was skilled at picking up on nuances and unspoken information. And he sensed that there was a lot Mary wasn't sharing about her son.

Like, she seemed uncomfortable talking about Alan's alcoholism, about his two drunk driving arrests. And there were corners of Alan's life that Virgil sensed Mary just didn't want to venture into. So he respected this, and he didn't press. After all, he figured he could just obtain that information from Alan's social circle, which had more direct access to these parts of Alan's life than his mother did anyway.

For the time being, Virgil agreed to print up missing person posters with Alan's picture on them and distribute them around town.

But they didn't generate any leads. And Virgil and his associates weren't able to glean much useful information from the men they talked to at the gay clubs Alan frequented. Only that Alan had worked as a bartender at one and had been fired for over-drinking on the job. It's weird that the mom wouldn't want to go into any details, assuming she wants to help find her son. She probably just wants to protect his secrets and the parts of his life that maybe even he himself wasn't willing to share.

So one afternoon that summer, one of Virgil's associates picked up a copy of the local LGBT magazine, the Indiana Word, and happened to notice an article inside about another young gay man who had gone missing. A 31-year-old guy named Jeff Jones, who was last seen outside an Indianapolis alcohol detox center the previous summer. Jeff looked so much like Alan that they could pass for brothers. This is what Virgil thought.

He continued contacting people in Alan's social network. He learned from one of his colleagues at the AIDS hospital that in the six months before his disappearance, Alan had been having sex for money. He had been working for a catering company that was actually a front for a prostitution ring, and the men who ran it were dangerous men.

His friend described Allen as a party boy who had moved to the big city after growing up in a small rural town with no support system or community for LGBT people. So when he moved out, he overindulged in all the new experiences he didn't have access to back home.

But he also had limited means and was still naive, so when an escort service lured him in with the promise of making two grand a night, he was all in. But it turned out to be a bait and switch. It was too good to be true. This escort service's clients were not the wealthy older men the escort operator had promised, and Alan was making only a fraction of the money he was guaranteed.

He'd get one date per week, maybe two if he was lucky, and they wouldn't pay more than a few hundred a pop. And Alan had learned the previous summer that he was HIV positive, but he was at least morally responsible about this, always informing potential partners of his HIV status before they did anything together. At the time he disappeared, Alan was still healthy and seemed newly committed to getting his life together before he turned 30.

Virgil learned all he could about the missing Allen. And then the case dead ended. Because for one, the missing man's mother had already hired another private detective. So there were two private detectives mining the same trail. I feel like that's something I would do. Yeah.

Well, the issue with this is some of the people Virgil talked to had already spoken to the other private detective. Some of Virgil's team members, the other detectives at his agency, weren't all that comfortable visiting gay bars or bathhouses. But little did Virgil know, his work on the case was far from done. Sometime later, Virgil was contacted by a friend of his sister's, a woman named Catherine.

Catherine's son, a 28-year-old man named Roger Goodlett, hadn't been seen or heard from since mid to late July. The story sounded eerily similar to Alan Broussard's and Jeff Jones's. A young, gay, alcoholic man with a risky lifestyle and an arrest record. Virgil began to suspect that these three men may have crossed paths with a serial killer.

Virgil began developing a profile of the theoretical killer. Theoretical because there weren't any bodies. These people were only missing persons. Though based on the circumstances, it was very likely that these missing men were dead. Virgil believed that whoever was likely killing these men would probably be a white male in his 30s or 40s and married with a family. So what happened to the police with these cases? Did it just die off?

Was it not in the works? It's probably a combination of things. If it was my guess, they maybe followed a couple leads here and there. It died off. But there's also the same reason that Virgil's detectives felt uncomfortable. I mean, in the 90s, and we already know that minorities' cases are a little bit more overlooked than other people's, and being a gay man who went missing was definitely a minority. And how old is Allegan?

He's about to turn 30. Okay, so yeah, so they're both adults as well. There's three missing now. Technically, correct, yeah. So all three of them are adults, and technically, I mean, they have a right to not be found. So he believed the killer would probably be someone living a double life and ashamed of his own sexuality to the point of projecting it outward onto the men he victimized.

Virgil posted flyers of Goodlet around town and talked to people at the bars he was known to visit, but he wasn't generating any useful leads. This friend of Roger's named Jeff Wynn called the office frequently to check if there was any progress with the investigation, to the degree that Virgil almost wanted to tell Jeff, hey, don't call us, we'll call you. So now he's working on the next missing person case, and the friend kind of just keeps calling to check in on Goodlet. But then one...

Then one day, Jeff Wynn, the friend, called in with a tip of his own. A friend of his named Tony may have gone home with the guy Roger Goodlett was last seen with. But when Tony contacted the agency, he expressed hesitation about coming in. I don't want anybody to know who I am, he told Virgil's assistant. If this guy finds out I contacted you, he'll probably kill me.

So one of the friends goes out with a guy that Robert was last seen with and this guy seemed dangerous to him. So now he's hesitant to come forward and turn him in. Just seems interesting because if that was the last guy that he had been seen with, you think that he'd be investigated more? Probably, but. I mean, maybe there was just nothing found. I don't think they even knew that was who he was last seen with until. He came forward. He came forward. Yeah. Got it.

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So Virgil's assistant tried to put him at ease, told him that anything he told them would be confidential and no one would even have to know he came in. He said he'd think about it and follow up the next day. But it took Tony several days before finally making his way down to Virgil's agency. When he walked in, the young man was visibly nervous and uneasy.

The assistant tried to make Tony feel at home. She brought him coffee and an ashtray so he could smoke while he waited for Virgil. Once he was in front of the detective, the detective asked if he minded if the conversation were recorded. Tony made it clear that he didn't care so long the man he had information about didn't find out. He's a psycho, Tony said. He'll kill me. Virgil turned on the tape recorder and Tony began telling his story. The man he'd encountered was named Brian.

Brian Smart, or at least that's what he said his name was.

He'd seen him around at other bars at least four or five times before his own scary encounter with him. He'd also seen him in the company of Roger Goodlett, one of the missing men, around the time he disappeared. And then just a week earlier, it was on a rainy night that Tony had gone to a bar called 501 Tavern. And it was there that he spotted the man sitting at the bar staring at a missing person poster of Roger Goodlett. Tony walked up to him and asked him if he'd seen the missing man.

The man turned around and introduced himself as Brian, just completely ignoring the question and proceeding to strike up a conversation with Tony. He said he was 28 years old, though Tony thought he looked much older, perhaps closer to 48. The man explained that he was a landscaper from Dayton, Ohio. He was in town, house sitting at a mansion in Carmel, he said. That's a suburb that's just outside of Indianapolis.

Normally, he lived with his parents, the man explained, but he had access for a whole week to this mansion with an indoor swimming pool. Okay. Yeah. The owner hadn't yet moved in and he had the place all to himself. I bet you've got a wife and kids stashed away somewhere, Tony told the man, who shrugged and took another sip of his beer. He then invited Tony back to the mansion he'd just described. Let's have a cocktail and swim, the man said.

And at first, the man who was calling himself Brian seemed harmless. Tony was comfortable enough with him to agree without hesitation. As they walked into the parking lot, Brian suggested they take Tony's car, but Tony wasn't comfortable with that.

In his mind, because he was leaving the bar with a stranger, even though the stranger seemed benign enough, he wanted to leave his car behind to signify that he had been at the bar and planned to return there. This made him feel safer leaving with Brian, who then whisked him away from the bar in a gray Buick, making the 30-minute drive up to Carmel. It seems like any time you have second thoughts on, I'm going to do this just in case I get kidnapped. Just. Don't do it. Just don't do it. Yeah.

During the drive, Brian took a sip from a flask and then handed it to Tony, who waved it away with a no thanks.

Tony, again, was very safety-minded and didn't feel comfortable drinking something offered to him by a strange man he'd recently seen in the company of a missing person. Again, this just seems weird to me that Tony's telling this to the detective when he agreed to even get in the car and go to the house with the strange man. You know what I mean? A lot of this stuff, like, oh, he said he was 28, but he looked like he was 48. And that wasn't red flag, you know? Instantly, I'd be like, whoa, what?

I'm not trying to like blame Tony. No, not at all. I'm just saying it's funny how the stories do get a little skewed. For sure. Brian looked slightly irked that Tony wasn't going along with exactly everything he wanted, that he wouldn't get in the car, like that he wouldn't take Tony's car and then he wouldn't drink the drink. And for the remainder of the drive, Brian Smart was silent as they headed into a neighborhood that looked to Tony like rich people territory, not the kind of place he would typically find himself.

Eventually, after exiting the highway and winding down a series of quiet residential streets, they pulled into a large driveway beneath a sign that said, something farm. He couldn't make out the words, just farm. And towering over the driveway was a sprawling stone mansion. As they got out of the car, a pack of stray dogs and cats ran up to them, wanting food and shelter from the rain. Brian told Tony not to pet them or give them any attention because the owners didn't want them around.

He pushed the animals aside with his leg and led Tony into the garage through an unlocked side door. And when they entered, the garage was a mess. It was occupied by an antique car and stuffed with furniture and overflowing boxes. The inside of the house was even worse, with cobwebs all over the place and boxes cluttering every room. Brian explained that the top of the house didn't have any electricity, so he couldn't turn on the lights. But there was power down in the basement.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

What was really creepy to Tony, however, was the presence of three or more mannequins placed around the pool, each of them posed. That is so creepy. Imagine going into this basement with a guy that's kind of already given you the heebie-jeebs, and then you get down and there's just mannequins posed around the pool.

One looked like the thinker position with his chin resting in his hand and another was placed on his stomach with his fingers reaching up to touch a decorative plastic shell. The mannequins were male and they were nude. Tony asked Brian, what's the deal with these mannequins?

And Brian explained that he gets lonely out here all alone. Oh my God. And the mannequins keep him company. That's the worst thing he could have said. I thought he was going to say, oh, you know, it's just rich people art. Yes. Like make something up. Cause I'd have been like, oh yeah, of course you're probably right. Of course. Yeah. But instead he goes, oh,

These are my friends. Yes. I see things. Yeah. Like what? I talk to dead people. Yeah. What is that? It was weird to Tony that this guy claimed he was only watching the house for a week, yet he'd gotten lonely enough to bring a bunch of mannequins out there to keep him company.

Brian then changed the subject and asked Tony if he wanted to do some coke. Tony declined and instead took out a marijuana joint and lit it. He took a puff and then passed it to Brian. Brian then went behind the bar, which was already staffed, it seemed, by another mannequin that was wearing a wig. Brian began fixing drinks, all the while inviting Tony to take a shower if he felt like it. He pointed toward the bathroom on the other side of the rec room.

Brian handed him a drink. Tony didn't know what it was. It looked like maybe vodka. It was clear like vodka, but he didn't want to drink it. So Tony excused himself to use the restroom, and while he was inside, he spilled out the drink into the bathroom sink, rinsed the glass carefully, and filled it with water. When he returned and eventually finished the water, Brian offered him another drink. Tony declined. Brian insisted. "'Come on,' he said. "'Let's party. Have another drink.'"

Tony again refused, and Brian's tone became sharp before he left the room. Several minutes later, he returned in a chipper mood. Tony assumed he'd gone and done some coke because suddenly Brian was bouncing all over the place and couldn't seem to shut up. He then invited Tony into the pool, but Tony wasn't sure. I mean, who would want to swim in the mannequin pool? Not me. Oh, I don't know how he's still there. I know. The temperature, well, he didn't bring his car.

Oh, I'm running. The temperature is nice and warm, Brian said. Tony could hear the rain outside, could hear it pouring down on the windows as he looked at the pool and saw steam rising up from it. A dip in a warm pool sounded especially inviting, so he decided to just take off his clothes and dive in. Brian stayed on the side, watching as Tony swam around. It was during all of this at some point that...

Brian got behind Tony at the edge of the pool and slipped a pool hose around his neck. At this point, Tony freaked out, yanked Brian into the pool with him, but not in a playful way. He punched him in the face and called him a pervert. Whoa. I mean, he's probably not wrong. And this is when he confronted him with the suspicions of him being a killer. You sick psychopath, he yelled. You killed Alan. You strangled him, didn't you?

He then squeezed his hands around Brian's neck. Brian was much smaller than him, it's worth noting, and choked him as Brian slowly lost consciousness and then limply slid underwater. Finally, Brian popped back up, coughing water out of his lungs. Despite all of this, Tony still doesn't leave at this point. So we have to keep in mind that this is the story that Tony's telling police. Yeah. Um...

So, like, I personally think if you just confronted someone with being a killer, you would probably then get up and leave the house. But they don't. At some point, so Tony stays. They keep hanging out. And then at some point, Brian ends up passing out.

Tony took the opportunity to creep up to Brian and fill around for his wallet, hoping he could find his driver's license, because at this point, he believed the name Brian wasn't even this guy's real name. But just as he slipped the wallet out of the sleeping man's pocket, Brian began to move, and Tony immediately let it go and dropped it onto the floor. But Brian's eyes remained closed. He was sleeping, but maybe not as soundly as Tony thought.

Tony tiptoed up the stairs and quietly searched the house for a phone until he found one and called his sister. He told her he was up in some creepy house in Carmel with a guy who was trying to strangle him. He wanted her to come rescue him. It's a mansion off 31, he told her. The guy is scary. He's not right. But they both realized these directions weren't specific enough for her to even find him.

So Tony stayed. Early the next morning, just after dawn, Brian woke up and climbed back into his rumpled clothing from the night before, telling Tony he had some errands to run but feel free to go back to sleep or make himself at home. Brian eventually returned from running errands and offered to drive Tony back to his car at the 501 Tavern.

The drive back was tense as Brian remained sullen and completely silent. But as they approached the bar, Brian thanked Tony for being a good sport and gave him his telephone number. Virgil eventually put Tony in touch with Detective Mary Wilson of the Indianapolis Police Department, and he shared the same story with her. He spoke to her for hours, also letting her know how the police and FBI had ignored him when he first came to them.

He made a drawing of the property, the layout of the house, to the best of his recollection and gave it to her. And over the next few months, the investigation stalled and Detective Wilson and Virgil Vandegrift moved on with other cases.

And then it was late August 1995 when Tony joined three of his friends for a night out at the Varsity Bar. While they were drinking, Tony noticed a familiar face enter the bar. It was Brian. A surge of adrenaline shot through Tony's veins as he knocked back a shot of liquid courage and turned to one of his friends, pointing out Brian as the man he believed killed Roger Goodlett.

He told his friend to get a piece of paper and a pencil from the bartender, go outside, and write down his license number. His friend asked, how do I know which car is his? Tony told the friend to wait until Brian leaves and watch what car he gets into. Tony explained he had a plan to make sure he left the bar sooner rather than later. So the friend went outside, and that's when Tony up and made an announcement inside the bar.

"'Hey, guys,' he shouted. "'Lookie who it is. "'Come shake the hand of a serial killer. "'This is the guy who's strangling and killing men.' "'He slapped Brian on the back and said, "'Come on, Brian, old sport. "'Show him the choking trick you showed me.'

Oh, man.

Wow.

Wow. The next day, they phoned Detective Mary Wilson, who had been the only investigator with the Indianapolis police to really give these missing persons cases any serious attention. Well, something's obviously off because why walk around the block and do all that weird stuff? Right. And

It's safe to say Mary was, like, impressed with their sleuthing. I mean, like, he caused a distraction. He got him outside. They took the license number and learned the truck was registered to a man named Herbert Baumeister. Herbert Baumeister was a 48-year-old married father of three and a businessman who founded a chain of successful Indianapolis area thrift stores called Savalot, which made him very wealthy.

Okay.

Baumeister didn't have much of a criminal record aside from a charge for conspiracy to commit theft back in 1986, and he was acquitted of that case. So Detective Wilson is looking at these data polls on Baumeister, and the address to which Baumeister's truck was registered was an Indianapolis address of 5356 East 72nd Street.

And it was the same address that was on every official document that Detective Wilson pulled up from Savalot business documents to other financials. And this address was nowhere near the mansion Tony claimed to have been taken to.

But then Detective Wilson found a shoplifting report from one of the Savalot stores filed in 1994, a report that had been filled out not by Baumeister, but by his employees. And the address they put down for Baumeister was 111 East 156th Street, right in the same neighborhood that Tony had described.

Yeah.

When the detectives noticed a young man watching from the upstairs window, she called out, sorry, wrong address, and they pulled away, not wanting to create any suspicion. Wait, someone was there? Was it someone or was it a mannequin?

After gathering additional information on Baumeister from some of his colleagues, past and present, a picture began to emerge of an arrogant eccentric who would lie through his teeth and sooner be condemned to die than admit wrongdoing. Hola. ¿Cómo está? Hola, ¿cómo estamos? Want to learn a new language? Well, the best way is to uproot your entire life, move to Spain, and live there for the rest of your...

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Detective Wilson met with Tony and showed him pictures of Baumeister asking if he was the man who had called himself Brian Smart. He thought it might be, but he couldn't be 100% sure, he said. She then showed his photo around at bars and nearly all the bartenders told her they'd seen him around. Yeah, that's Brian or that's Mike or that's Bill.

So he was an on and off again regular, she learned, who used various aliases. It was becoming more and more likely that Baumeister was the man Tony had spent that scary night with and was the man responsible for the disappearance of gay men around Indianapolis over the past two years. How do you prove that, though? I mean, there's no bodies. There's no DNA anywhere. I just don't know how you prove that. I mean, obviously, it seems obvious or...

I don't even know if it seems obvious, but it seems likely that it was him. Yeah. But there's zero evidence. You'd have to get a confession. Yeah, there's nothing. There's nothing.

So the detectives entered a Savalot store one afternoon and requested to speak with Herb, the owner. And a few minutes later, he appeared and after they introduced themselves and explained they were investigating a missing persons case, Baumeister told them he'd be happy to cooperate. But at the moment, he was a little busy. He asked if they could come back later that afternoon. His voice quivered and his smile was forced. To these seasoned detectives, it looked like Herb was spooked, which

Which, to them, seemed extremely guilty. But not wanting to let on that he was the suspect, she told him, no problem, and she and her partner went to lunch. When they returned to the store, Herb sat behind the desk and listened as the detectives explained they were investigating the disappearances of several men from Indianapolis bars and they believed he may know something about it.

Herb Baumeister seemed offended when he told them he'd never been to a gay bar in his life. I'm not gay, so I don't really know why you've come to me, he said. Detective Wilson then let him know she meant business and wasn't there to play games. Herb, she said, wouldn't.

we know you've been in the bars. We've got your license plate number from your car when it was parked outside of one. Which instantly read flags all over the place. Right. Herb tried to act casual, but the detectives could both see his face turning red and his breathing quietly heavy. Finally, he sighed and admitted, okay, fine. He'd been to the bars, but that his family doesn't know and he wanted to keep it that way.

Detective Wilson told him she understood and would respect that, but she'd really like an opportunity to search his property at Fox Hollow. Would that be okay? Herb told her he'd like to cooperate, but it would be best if they talked to his attorney, at which point the detectives left. And also at that point, you tell the family everything. Yeah, at this point, Detective Wilson decided to try approaching Herb Baumeister's wife, Julie. So she went back to the Savalot store and found his wife working there, appearing overworked and stressed out.

She explained that she was investigating a missing persons case and wanted to search her Carmel property. Julie Baumaster appeared shocked by this. And although Herb had warned her that a disgruntled ex-employee had filed a theft complaint against them, it was a made-up story to give false context to police interaction that he suspected was inevitable.

But he had already advised his wife to refuse consenting to a property search if they asked, so she declined, explaining that this was all a misunderstanding and that an enemy was making false allegations about her husband. Detective Wilson made it clear...

that's not the case. That's not what's happening here. We're investigating the disappearance of several men from gay bars in downtown Indianapolis and her husband frequented these bars. And this information was even more stunning to Julie who chose not to believe what they were telling her and asked them to leave the store. Which is so weird. If the cops came and told you something about me, would you believe them or no? Well, if they first came in and said, hey, we're investigating

a serial killer that we think is murdering gay men and picking them up from gay bars, I would be like, well, I don't think my husband's gay. So I think you have the wrong person. I just feel like if the police come to you, they always know what they're talking about. Right. Usually. Right. I mean, but what evidence can they show her? Yeah, it's true. At this point, Julie goes to her attorney and it's like, hey, they're talking about Herb, but there's a part of me that wonders, you know,

If maybe this is true and the attorney decides to give Detective Mary Wilson a call about his conversation with Julie. He says, I wouldn't give up on this lead if I were you. The attorney then shared a bombshell piece of information.

Oh my gosh.

That's insane.

By the end of the search, investigators had recovered the remains of at least 11 people, most of whom would later be identified by DNA as men who had gone missing between May 1993 and March 1995. Among those men were missing Jeff Jones, Alan Broussard, and Roger Goodlett.

Also identified were 20-year-old Johnny Bayer, 20-year-old Richard Hamilton Jr., 31-year-old Manuel Resendez, 28-year-old Stephen Hill, and 45-year-old Mike Kern. Just like that? Just like that. What? Two additional men who also went missing from Indianapolis gay bars around this period were 27-year-old Alan Lee Livingston and 34-year-old Jerry Williams Comer, but they weren't found. I wonder why he didn't try to kill Tony.

Maybe it's because Tony was just way stronger than him. And I think that he was drugging them, but Tony dumped the drink. Oh, that's right. Okay. Yeah. So Herb Baumeister didn't wait around to be arrested. As the arrest warrant was being filed, Baumeister suddenly disappeared. His whereabouts would remain unknown until two days later on July 3rd, 1996, when his body was found on the shores of Lake Huron in Pinery Provincial. No way.

Yeah, in Ontario, Canada. Herb Baumeister had written a suicide note and left it in his parked car before walking down to the beach and firing a bullet into his head, ending his life. His suicide note admitted nothing and made no reference at all to the investigation or the dead bodies found on the property. Oh my gosh. Like one of the biggest cop-outs ever. I can't, that happens so much too. A serial killer, someone will go and kill a bunch of people. They then go and take their life.

But in the suicide notes, they go, I don't know what you were talking about. Yeah, I'm innocent. Okay. Yeah, obviously.

So one thing that authorities searched for after this was a massive collection of videotapes that his wife had told the search team he had kept in a closet. She's like, you need to look into these. She didn't know what was on them. But when she led police to the closet where she claimed they were kept, the shelves were all empty. Herbert seemed to have taken those tapes before he left. But what he did to them, no one was ever able to determine. Those tapes were never found.

And no one knows quite how many victims Herb Baumeister had really claimed. Many believe he was also the unidentified serial killer known as the I-70 Strangler, who was believed responsible for the murders of at least a dozen men raging in age from 14 all the way up to 42. Men who, like many of the victims, recovered from Baumeister's property were known to frequent gay bars and or live vulnerable lifestyles.

The I-70 Stranglers victims were all found dumped nude, many of them in streams or ditches. And those bodies stopped turning up in 1991, the same year that Herb Baumeister bought the Fox Hollow property and started burying his victims in the backyard. All of those victims were strangled to death. And that is the story of Brian Smart or Herb Baumeister. Well, that's like zero to 100. It was like backstory. He just got caught so fast. Good.

Good on the wife. I'm glad the wife called the attorney and they were able to figure that out. Well, and also good on the attorney to be like, I'm going to save my client, the wife, and I'm going to completely throw the husband underneath the bus. I would hope so, yeah. It's an interesting theory to think that maybe he was the I-70 strangler and then once he bought that property and actually had somewhere to bury them, he started burying them on his property instead because all the I-70 stranglings stopped. 100%.

Oh, yeah. It probably was him. All right, you guys. That is our case for this week. And we will see you next time with another episode. I love it. And I hate it. Goodbye.