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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowFor Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison, the road to identifying the skeletal remains of a single victim long after a murder has been committed is long and arduous; you can’t put a timeline on it.
Now, he’s facing his most overwhelming task yet, identifying the thousands of bone fragments found in the woods on the property of a Westfield serial killer decades after the murders occurred.
But Jellison said he’s determined to see it through to bring closure to potential victims’ families who have been waiting for answers for decades.
“There’s a sign right there on my wall that says, ‘No Longer Forgotten.’ And that’s there for a reason. It’s because every morning when I walk in, I make sure I remind myself that these people are not forgotten any longer,” Jellison said.
Suspected serial killer Herb Baumeister, a thrift store owner and married father of three, left many questions unanswered when he committed suicide in Canada in 1996.
Investigators believe he killed as many as 25 people, many of them men he picked up at Indianapolis gay bars.
By the late 1990s, several men had been identified as likely victims of Baumeister at his Fox Hollow Farm. After that, identification efforts came to a standstill.
But now a new team of investigators is trying to finish the task, fueled by Jellison’s desire to bring some kind of closure to the case.
‘No longer forgotten’
Jellison was a police officer before he joined the coroner’s office but said he had left law enforcement by the time the crimes took place.
It wasn’t until 2022, when Jellison took a phone call from a potential victim’s cousin, that he began to take on the task of trying to identify more of the victims.
That year, a man called Jellison and identified himself as the cousin of Allen Livingston, a man who had gone missing in 1993.
He believed his cousin was one of Baumeister’s victims. He said Livingston’s mother was terminally ill and he wanted to know if Jellison could help his family identify Livingston’s remains before she passed.
“That’s how it started. We were able to identify Allen Livingston, and he was our first identification out of 10,000 remains,” Jellison said.
Fast forward and investigators have now found other unique DNA profiles among the other remains but haven’t been able to positively identify them.
Previously, a lack of funding for an ongoing effort to identify the victims has stopped progress.
By the late 1990s, Hamilton County officials proposed that if family members wanted to find out if their loved one was a Baumeister victims, they’d need to fund the DNA testing themselves. But running DNA work on a single sample can cost thousands of dollars.
“I think in their [investigators’] head, they’re thinking ‘suspect dead, game over’. But yet, the game wasn’t over,” Jellison said.
To restart the identification process, Jellison has found ways to fund it without using local tax dollars. One way he’s accomplished that is through the use of federal grants.
Like any case involving several victims, the investigation will take some time. But this case offers additional challenges: the 10,000 bone fragments were subjected to the elements for years before they were recovered, so DNA, which is found in bone, could be sparse.
Methods and challenges
DNA technology has come a long way since the case first broke. Researchers are working carefully with the remains they’ve collected to determine which are now viable for testing and which should be left untouched in the hopes that future technology could solve the puzzle, said Dr. Krista Latham, a forensic anthropologist and professor at the University of Indianapolis.
“What if all we have left of one person is one tiny bone fragment, and that happens to be one that we destroy trying to get a DNA profile out of it, and it’s not ready yet?…We may never get the chance to identify that person,” she said.
Latham said numerous factors play into determining what remains are viable for extracting DNA. Before the remains were securely stored, they were likely exposed to elements like water, ultraviolent radiation, and oxygen. Some of the bones had also been burned, she said. All of these factors can destroy DNA.
The remains have been separated into two categories: those with the least amount of damage and therefore the most likely candidates for successful DNA extraction, and those with evidence of more severe trauma, Latham said. So far, investigators are primarily focused on pulling DNA from fragments in the first category.
“[Extracting] DNA from bone is a destructive process, and we don’t want to damage any remains that we don’t think are going to be successful,” she said. “We want to wait until the technology catches up with some of those more challenging cases before we even attempt that.”
The remains are then sent to Indiana State Police for testing. Investigators are relying heavily on relatives submitting DNA samples to help identify the remains. Without a direct DNA match, investigators pivot to another method to try to identify victims: genealogy.
Forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG, is a relatively new technology that was first widely seen in the investigation to uncover the Golden State Killer in 2018, according to forensic investigative genetics genealogist JJ Beck. Using the FIGG method, investigators can attempt to find familial matches through family trees.
Using the FIGG method, researchers like Beck reanalyze DNA samples to create a separate profile that can be uploaded to one of three genetic databases accessible to law enforcement. Through the database, investigators identify the top DNA matches for the unknown DNA profile and build family trees going back generations using traditional genealogical research.
Beck was first called to develop a match in the Fox Hollow case last August. Ultimately, the DNA profile Beck was given found its match through a separate DNA sample provided by family.
But she said that while FIGG is helpful to investigators if family doesn’t come forward, the method is often timely and expensive.
“You’re probably going to build 10 different trees and maybe 1,000 people in each tree. So I think that’s the most challenging [part], it’s trying to work quickly and make sure you’re accurate,” she said.
Investigators cannot pinpoint exactly when they will match all remains to a victim. Right now, Jellison and his team are asking for anyone who believes they have a missing loved one to come forward and submit a DNA sample.
Since the Hulu documentary on the case was released in February, Jellison has received several hundred messages from the public wanting to help. He spends many evenings responding to the messages.
Jellison was approached by numerous companies around the world who wanted to make a documentary on the case. He decided to choose the company he thought would tell the story best and would ultimately give victims’ family members the chance to tell their stories, too.
“Telling their stories is a part of healing, and they’ve sat in this, kind of, cloud of grief for the last 30 years, so when they can tell their story, that’s a step forward in the healing process for them,” he said.•
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