The I-70 Strangler - Part Two [02]

to tell you is real. This is Insomniac. The year was her Baumeister was forty four years old, and he and his wife Julie's small Save a Lot chain of thrift stores was successful enough to allow them to buy a new home, a mansion north of the city. The home the Bowmasters chose was a million dollar eighteen acre

estate in the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield, Indiana. It was called Fox Hollow Farm, and the sprawling property, with a nearly ten thousand square foot house, horse stables, a separate apartment, wooded areas, and even an indoor pool, was the family's dream. It also afforded Herb a lot of privacy, enough to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, without the fear of being discovered. Even more privacy came in the summer months, when Julie and the kids would go to visit Herb's

mother in northern Indiana. Sometimes they were gone for weeks at a time, leaving Herb at home alone to watch over the Save a Lot stores. By the family business was suffering a downturn in fortune. The Save a Lot stores were no longer successful, and Herb himself was in the midst of another personal crisis. Aside from the business failing, he and Julie were no longer getting along due to

his mood swings and erratic behavior. He was arrested for drinking and driving in Rochester, Indiana, and sentenced to three days in jail and one year of probation. To make matters worse, his son Eric found a human skull in the woods surrounding the family home. Eric brought the skull to his mother, who then asked him where he had found it. When they returned to the spot, they found an entire cluster of bones a half buried, full human skeleton.

That evening, Julie confronted her about the bones, but he simply told her not to worry. He claimed it was a medical research skeleton that belonged to his now deceased father, who was an anesthesiologist. Surprisingly, Julie had no more questions about the skeleton in the yard, even after she realized that it had somehow disappeared just a few days later, probably carried away by animals. She thought to herself. Herb's entire life seemed to be in a downward spiral, and

things were only getting worse. His wife, his children, the authorities, and everyone else. Really, we're about to learn the secrets that Herb kept hidden at Foxhall of Farm. Her pad a lot of secrets, but people around him were also aware that he had some problems. Reports from his co workers at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles show that his behavior was more than a little erratic, to say the least. He lacked a sense of propriety, and his

timing and judgment were off. He just didn't quite know what was socially acceptable. He had a strange fascination with dead animals. For instance, when he was young and on the way to school one morning, he picked up a dead crow, pocketed it, and later placed it on his teacher's desk when she wasn't looking. He also had an unusual fascination with urine. Not only did he p on

his teacher's desk and discussed drinking urine. But when he pete on the letter to the Governor of Indiana, well, they answered the question about who had pete on Herb's manager's desk just a month prior. I think all of this is related to Herb's untreated condition, his schizophre an. If you don't know what schizophrenia is, it's a long term mental disorder that can last for years or even a lifetime. There's a breakdown in the relation between thought

and emotion and behavior. This leads to faulty perception, inappropriate feelings, and even actions. Schizophrenics are often drawn into a fantasy or delusional world. There's a broken sense of reality. Things are mentally fragmented. The good news is that there is treatment, but there's also no cure. What I found in my research was that some, but not all, serial killers are schizophrenic.

A lot of them do, however, have a different mental disorder known as antisocial personality disorder or a p D, and personality traits of a psychopath as well, which includes no empathy, the ability to manipulate and intimidate others, but also to do these things with a sort of charm that allows them to get exactly what they want, no matter what it takes. Someone who repeatedly gets away with murder has to be at least somewhat in control of

the situation. They have to be very cold, calculating, and extremely careful about what they do that doesn't match up with the mixed up, confused thoughts and behaviors as someone who is an untreated schizophrenic, someone like her Bowmeister authorities knocked on the door of the Bowmeister residence in November of and asked her for permission to search his estate.

After all, the license plate search of the buick with Ohio plates had pointed directly to Herb, and the police were desperate to make any connection that might bring an end to killings. Herb, of course, refused the search, and since the police didn't have enough evidence for a warrant, they had to leave. Julie also refused the search, believing, as her husband had told her, the request was the

result of a false accusation of theft. They were turned away at the door, but the investigators knew they had an option. They had to get to Julie. She needed to know that her husband was living a secretive double life and he was now suspected of multiple murders. In June, at the age of forty nine, Herb's life was continuing to crumble around him. The authorities were still sniffing around him, and Julie just waiting for the chance to search the property.

Both of his Save a Lot stores had now failed and had closed their doors for good. Julie had filed for divorce, and Herb was so depressed that he threatened to take his own life. But even all of that wasn't the worst thing that happened to her. In late June, while on a visit to his mother in northern Indiana, Julie decided that she had enough. She gave the police permission for a full search of the property while Herb

was away. It didn't take long. After just a few days, investigators had recovered more than five thousand bones, bone fragments, and teeth that they eventually learned had belonged to four separate victims. The remains were pulled from the wooded area of the property, concealed under piles of fallen leaves and trash. A neighbor of Boumeister's prompted a second search the fox hall of farm he had found skeletal remains near a drainage ditch that operated into two properties. Once again, it

didn't take long. M lack of sleep. If it lasts long enough, I can absolutely wreck you. All right. Well, it's two o'clock in the morning on Saturday, early Sunday. I'm just just laying here. I can't seem to shut it down enough of that my thoughts. I can't seem to turn everything off and be able to just get some rest. I started recording myself in these sleepless moments, the log of my thoughts, my anxieties, my nightmares. It's killing me. Um exhausted, but at the same time, can't sleep.

I don't know what I'm gonna do. To some extent, everyone leads a double life, and it's dominia makes me feel like a different person altogether. But I can share this with you. Killers like her Baumeister, the I seventies strangler, couldn't allow anyone to know about their other life, especially not their families. I want to be very careful when approaching this topic, and I want to be very clear when I say that Julie Baumeister is not responsible in

any way for the actions of her husband. But I would like to know the real answer to the question how much did Julie know? And when it's a question I always have regarding the spouses of serial killers, how is it possible that they don't know their partners guilty of murdering people outside and sometimes even inside their own home. Right from the beginning, Julius claimed that the Herb Baumeister we know the serial killer is not the same Herb

Baumeister that she was married to. What she means by that she saw him as a devoted if often absent husband, a good father to their three children, and a successful provider for the family. She knew he was flawed, far from perfect, of course, but definitely not a serial murderer. Even so, it really does make you wonder how she ignored so many signs that Herb was not necessarily the man she thought he was. At one point, Julie admitted that she and her only had sex six times in

their entire twenty five year marriage. The summer weeks she spent away from home didn't help matters either. She wasn't able to see her day to day activities, and it gave him plenty of freedom to use the house and in particular the indoor pool anyway he wanted. This also left him completely for you to cruise the Indianapolis gay nightclubs in the evenings looking for sex partners and potential victims. Julie claims she had no idea that her was interested in men. All of this is really just a tip

of the iceberg. Herbs Double Life held a lot of secrets, But the one point it stands out among the rest, the one bit of information that's the hardest for most people to swallow, is that Julie ignored it when her son handed her a human skull and then led her to a full skeleton, half buried in her yard. Yet she did nothing. It's difficult, but try to imagine yourself in that position. Human remains in your own backyard are

hard to overlook, but that's exactly what Julie did. And soon after, when the authorities were knocking on her door and asking to search the property, she refused because herb told her another lie. All the while, she knew that someone was buried in the woods behind the house. So how much did Julie Baumeister know and when did she know it? Did she really know nothing until the authorities took her aside and told her their husband was the prime suspect in what they called at the time multiple

homosexual homicides. That's what she's always claimed, and that's what we have to believe until we hear otherwise. The authorities were now conducting a second search at fox Halla Farm, this time in a ditch that separated the bow maister's

property from their neighbors. After finding the scattered remains of at least four separate victims, including bones, bone fragments, and teeth, the investigators felt certain that a search of a ditch on the Boma Just property would yield additional grizzly results, and they were right. Authorities immediately found human bones in and around the ditch, lots of them. Intact rib cages and spines were poking out from the muddy ground. Every shovelful of dirt seemed to bring more and more bones

to the surface. Along with the skeletal remains. Investigators on earth handcuffs no Doubt used on the victims, and several cans of Miller Genuine Draft, Herb's favorite drink. By the end of the second search, the serea alone had produced the remains of seven additional victims. In total, box all of farm concealed the bodies of eleven men, get only

eight of them wherever positively identified. In addition to the eleven bodies found in his property, Herb was also suspected in at least nine other killings along the I sevent corridor between Indiana and Ohio, killings that all occurred in Herb's early active years and then abruptly ended when he bought his home and fox Hall a Farm. All had been strangled, all fit the profile of his other kills, and all were dumped on the roadside in bural areas.

According to Julie, Herbert made countless trips to Ohio during those years, supposedly on store business. Do you remember that stack of videotapes the Canadian troopers saw in Herb's back seat the day before he killed himself. Well, based on the location of a semi hidden video camera found during a sweep of the house, those were likely videos of the murders he committed in the pool at fox Halla Farm. We'll never know for sure, of course, because the tapes

were never found. One common theory is that her tossed them in a river or a lake before he pulled the trigger, and because he took his own life, her bow Moister was never arrested for his crimes, never went to trial, and he never confessed to a single murder, not even in the rambling suicide note found near his body. The story of her bow Meister and Fox Hall of Farm is bizarre in so many ways, one that will

forever have some amount of mystery attached. We know plenty about the case, but it's also clear that some of the dirtiest details went to the grave along with her bow Moister. The only witnesses to his brutal and unusual crimes were the mannequins, and they aren't talking. In Upstate New York, a convicted killer was pearled early after his

deem no longer dangerous to society. They were wrong. He was a pathological liar, a pedophile, a manipulator, and a serial killer with the second chance he intended to take next time on Insomniac. Insomniac is a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, written and hosted by Scott Benjamin and produced by Miranda Hawkins, Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Josh Thain. Music composed by Makeup and Vanity, set

and cover art by Trevor Eisler. Follow on Twitter and Facebook at Insomniac Pod, on Instagram at insomniac Podcast, and at our website insomniac podcast dot com. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H