June 19, 2024 • 44 mins
Herb Baumeister lived more than just a “double life."
On this episode of "Body Bags," Joseph Scott Morgan explains how it is possible that Baumeister had over 10,000 remains on his million-dollar estate, and Dave Mack dives into the background of the married, father and businessman who owned two Save-a-lot stores in Indianapolis.
Baumeister, who took his own life in 1996, is suspected of enticing gay men to his home, where he killed them and disposed of their bodies at the rear of his property.
Investigators suspected that Baumeister, a married father of three at the time who frequented gay bars, enticed unsuspecting men to his property to murder them. By 1999, investigators connected him to the disappearance of at least 16 men since 1980.
Some of the victims’ bodies were discovered discarded in shallow streams in rural central Indiana and western Ohio
For 30 years, investigators have been working to identify thousands of human remains, will they ever know the truth about how many people Herb Baumeister murdered?
Transcript Highlights
00:00:13 Introduction of serial killer graveyard
00:04:40 Discuss killer double life, wife claims she didn’t know anything
00:08:28 Talk about trying to identify bone from other items
00:12:26 Discussion of Forensic anthropologists
00:17:35 Discussion of hiding secrets from family
00:20:48 Talk about serial killer obsession with dead animals
00:24:24 Discussion of the depth of depravity
00:28:08 Discussion of skeletonized body on the property
00:31:49 Talk about trying to render body down to ash
00:36:36 Discussion of method of destruction after burning
00:40:22 Discussion of other serial killers
00:44:12 Talk about the size of the property
00:44:34 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Wilton. I believe it or not,
I got a few horror stories. Let me rephrase that,
horror movies that I watch every year, and I think
when Halloween rolls around as dark and di minuted as
(00:23):
as is, I will generally watch The Exorcist, and I
think a lot of it has to do with the
fact that it reminds me of how much evil there
is in the world, because it's truly terrifying. It always
comes back to the fact that you're talking about the
devil here, you know. I don't know is there another one? Well, again, probably,
(00:49):
I don't really get into all the Friday the thirteenth
stuff and things like that. It's always stuff that has
to do with the spiritual realm that really terrifies me
if you're talking about horror movie. But today, there's another
movie that's coming to mind, a movie that came out
(01:11):
a few years ago that was directed by Rob Zombie,
and the title of that movie was actually The House
of a Thousand Corpses. It's kind of a dark, very
dark comedy. But the reason that's coming to mind is
(01:31):
that we're going to talk about a case today where
we are being told that we're looking at ten thousand
human remains at one location in Indiana. I'm Joseph Scott
(01:55):
Morgan and this is Body Bags. Dave of your own
free will. Have you ever subjected yourself to the horror
genre and is there something in particular that you can
reflect upons like? Okay, thinking about horror movies, this is
(02:16):
the one that I always go to. It's the one
that scares me consistently, or it's something I enjoyed just
because of the strange nature of it.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
I saw the first move Halloween movie John Carpenter, Yeah,
in theaters.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah, wow, the original Halloween. I hadn't thought about that,
and that was kind of terrifying because, at least at
that point in time, it seemed plausible. You know, you've
got somebody, uh you know, yeah, I know, from from
a mental institute and they're they're a violent offender. Remember
Donald Pleasance. You know he's saying I tried to get
(02:53):
I tried to get through to Michael Myers for all
of these years, you know, and it you know, a
deck aid or whatever it was. What was he like
eight when he murdered his entire family and he had
no success. So he winds up, you know, ventilating this
this this guy, you know, uh, and the body disappears.
You know, that's the ending shot. I hate to be
(03:15):
a spoiler, but if you hadn't seen Halloween, I don't
know what to tell you've been hiding under a rock.
Yeah so, but you know today, Dave, this case in
particular actually involves somebody that had been under psychiatric treatment
for a let me drop this word on you, for
a plethora of all kinds of psychopathology. Sorry, yeah, there
(03:42):
you go, another movie, another movie reference. It's it's so
expansive that what this individual Bombmeister had the history leading
up to well where we are to day. But boy,
it's a long and crooked path, isn't it with this guy.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It's interesting that her ball Meister, and we're mentioning movie
references and things like that. You know, there's part of
his story, her bomb Eister a serial killer and let
a double life. That's something that we don't usually see
in the real world. That's a I've always thought of
that as some kind of a cinematic trick. You know,
(04:27):
if you if you can't solve this, just make it
a double life. Here, he's got this thing over here,
and this thing over there, and and in reality here
her bomb eister really did have. According to his wife,
she had no idea. Now, if a guy's a serial
killer and you're married to him and you have no idea,
I call that double life success. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Look, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna mention any any
names here. I'll say they're initials though, okay, rex hureman uh.
And so you know you're you're thinking about a double
life and the wife having little or no awareness of it.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
You know, I can't talk about this away from the
show because I don't want any I don't need a
call from a lawyer today, but I do want to
talk to you about Hey.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Look he's he's not a serial killer. But I can
tell you this even all what what is it? Magic
eight ball used to say all signs point to point.
I'm just I'm just kind of laying I'm just kind
of laying that out.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
And when you, buddy Karen Stark uses the magic eight ball.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
No, no, Now, Hey, we had a great time with
her at Crime Con and what a you know the
movie A Beautiful Mind, What a beautiful mind she has.
She is so brilliant. And but that's that's a tale
for another day. We're gonna be dropping an episode the target.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
The crime con. I will tell you it was some
session freak people out I think getting emails about what
you guys said. And yeah, yeah, anyway, but back to
her bomb Meister for just a minute. Yeah, he's married
for twenty five years to this woman and they have
three children. Oddly enough, and this is I'm going to
go do the math on this when we're done. But
they had sex six times according to her in that
(06:13):
twenty five year period and had strokes. So sure shot
bomb Eister, you know, was boom right there on that one,
but he actually her bomb Eister. Serial Killer Deluxe actually
might be two separate serial killers in one, believe it
or not, the I seventy killer and then the gay
(06:34):
club killer. I don't know whether they named him the
Fox Hollow murder guy, you know, yeah, yeah, that they
found the ten thousand body parts body fragmed, bone parts.
I don't know the actual term for this show. I'm
sure you know you got you guys have one when
you have body parts commingled right or bone fragment.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, well we refer to it as the commingling of remains. Yeah,
and that's the trick is is to attempt to identify
of those bones which which which are because you can't
just assume that all of those remains are are in
(07:15):
fact human.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Because you can I didn't think about that.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Well, listen, I've got I've got I've got a great
aside for you here and and it'll give you an
idea as to what forensic anthropologists have to go to.
And by the way, for those that don't know, I'm
a frustrated forensic anthropologist. I'm what's referred to if you
go out to a scene with buried remains. I'm what's
referred to as a shovel leaner, and I sit at
(07:41):
the feet a forensic anthropologist. I've always been fascinated by
the field, and I've done many excavations, but I'm not
the person you go to to identify specific bones and
try to assess whether or not they are human or not.
But a quick aside. Allegedly, and I've heard this from
(08:02):
a couple of different sources. With doctor Bass, who founded
the Body Farm at ut there was an exercise that
he would put his students front through and you'll get
a kick out of this day where he would have
a mass of bones, okay, skeletal remains, and they would
be in a big cardboard box. Okay, the top is closed,
(08:25):
you can't look at them, and there's a hole. There's
a hole on each end of the box. He would
stick his hand in one end of the box, the
student would stick their hand in the other end of
the box, and by feel, they would examine that bone
together and the student would have to identify the skeletal
(08:47):
element anatomically and if possible, identify what species it was.
And that's by touch. Can you imagine the skill level
that's involved in that. And now, if anybody could do it,
it would be doctor Bass again, we sit it his feet.
He's amazing. And how valid that is I don't know,
but I've heard it from two separate people that were
part of the program. And when you're talking about and
(09:12):
again we have to be very clear here, this is
not ten thousand intact human remains. I saw a headline
I think from the post actually that said ten thousand
humor And technically you could say that they are potentially
ten thousand human remains, but they are not intact remains. Okay,
(09:35):
quick trivia question. Dave put you on the spot. When
you compare an infant and an adult. Of those two,
which of those two have the most bones in their body?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You know, I would just think adult, but I guess
I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Infant has two hundred and seventy an adult has two
hundred and six.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Really, that's a lot. That's a big difference.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
That's a huge difference because of the fusion, the fusion
of the bones over period of time. You know, as
child goes through development, bones that were say, are elements
of bones that are non non Let's see, how can
we say this none articulated at that point time, and
(10:28):
that in that period of growth or development, when they
begin to fuse together. You know, we talk about growing
pains and all those sorts of things. When bones begin
to to fuse together over a period of time, they
create a smaller number of bones. Because now you go
from two hundred and seventy to two hundred and six.
(10:51):
And so as people you know, go into development, as
you know, through throughout their early child hood and all
the way up until you know, I don't know, towards
the end prebe vestent, you have this fusion that has
taken place, and so you're gonna have less bones than
an adult than you do in a baby.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Isn't that something I had no idea, Joe. Really, that's
not something that I ever considered. And by the way,
and I said this last week or the week before
when you and I actually had a brief chat about
growing pains that I always thought was a load and
now I feel horrible about it, but I didn't say
anything out loud when my kids, Yeah, it was, oh,
(11:31):
it's growing pains like looking little wives like you real?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Come on, yeah, you've got these various plates that are
in the body where and it and listen, I mean,
anybody can reflect on their on their own personal experience
when you you know what it feels like, you know,
and they're sharp, there's no other pain like a gross pain,
and some people experience them to a really intense degree.
(11:56):
But you know, I'm when you when you come across
these kinds of cases where you have these commingling of
remains and this is nothing new. Under the Sunday the
what forensic anthropologies are faced with at a scene. If
you have a serial perpetrator, they don't deviate much in
(12:19):
their behaviors. They get into a rut. I've often compared
them to carpenters. Carpenter uses a set of tools, they
have methodologies. It's a system that is utilized when building
a house, you know, and if you've got bits that
are say bits of wood, you know, two by fours,
(12:41):
that trust is those sorts of things that have been
had to trim. It goes into a pile, doesn't it. Well,
there's a certain way those piles are organized because of
how they're going to recycle that stuff and utilize it.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Liberated to take a look liberate.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, yeah, well I wouldn't go say that, but it's
it's a matter of it's a matter of getting into
a rut where they feel comfortable. This idea. You were
talking about things that are used in Hollywood where you'll
have a perpetrator that will intentionally go out and try
to recreate the behaviors of another serial killer, and you know,
(13:20):
they think they're going to mask themselves. There's always an
underlying theme, you know, relative to that that would make
that very difficult. That's why a movie would be made
about that, because it would be something that was so rare.
So when you're talking about this, this bombmister fellow, he's
got a wide open area day. This complex that he
(13:42):
lived on was so vast and out in rural, rural Indiana,
which I've been to this area of the country and
absolutely beautiful, rolling hills, green, lush land for farming. And
this is just outside of Indianapolis. But here's the thing.
(14:03):
I don't think that anybody in that little community, anybody
just driving down the road or maybe some family that
was out for a drive in the country leaving Indianapolis,
they look out over that bucolic beauty of those fields,
(14:23):
maybe this lovely home that this guy occupied, and they
couldn't even begin to fathom the horrors that had taken
place at that location. I'm fascinated by comments you made
(14:50):
just a moment ago, Dave, about Bolb Monster and his wife,
that marriage producing three children. She had stated that they
had had sex maybe six times, I think.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
In twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
In twenty five years. Here here's another little tidbit relative
to her. Did you know that she never saw her
husband nude? Yep, I think that that's that's a huge tell.
You know, when you begin to think about the intimacy
with which you you know, you entowel a structure with somebody.
(15:34):
You know you're going to see somebody's rear end sooner
or later, or walk in on them in the bathroom.
You would think, you know, how do you how do
you plan your life out so well, Dave? Because that
that is a purposed task, right, that's a purpose You're
you're attempting to veil yourself. How much can you imagine
(15:59):
how much energy that would take over that long a
period of tom of being you know, joined with this
person and producing three kids, right, but yet you're you're
not going to see them naked over that period of time.
I don't know. It's very odd, dude, very very odd.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
When you look at the whole thing, with her bomb
Eiz or his background, you realize that his psychological well being,
his emotional stability were things questioned by his family. You know,
six months after he was married, six months after he
(16:39):
was married, his father had him committed to a psychiatric institution.
So I don't know what happened during that six months
of marriage, but it had to have been pretty severe
that his father had to step in and say, Herbie,
we're going to get you away from here for a while.
So and again, I don't know what happened. I didn't read,
(17:01):
you know, I don't know they've written a book about
that part. But I kind of I'm very curious as
to what began or what what happened that caused his
dad to lock him down for you know, six months
into his marriage. And once you get married, you're an adult.
You're on your own, supposedly, and that seems like dad
was still heavily involved or his wife said, hey, your
(17:22):
son is really messed up. Can you help me? I'm
going to die, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And you know, his dad was like a very prominent,
wealthy physician.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Right what I'm saying, it's bizarre behavior that like and listen.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
This, this bizarre behavior did did not start at marriage.
And you can't. You can't necessarily control who who your
kids are going to marry. You'd like to, but you know,
they're they're going to go their own way, They're going
to go their own route. And I really wonder if
you know, if the uh, you know, if his wife,
(18:01):
you know, you know, looking back over it, I can't
take the depth and breadth of it relative to what
he had been involved in while she was living under
the same roof with him.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Well, did he getting right down to this, Joe, you're
talking about somebody in looking at her Ballmeister as a
serial killer. You mentioned a little while ago how carpenters
get used to the same tools, the same pattern, the
same extra things that are left over when they're done
with the job, and how those things are planned out
over a period of time. Well, normally within the serial
(18:35):
killer world, there are consistencies in what the suspect does
in the crime, whether it's where they dispose of the body,
the method they used to kill. And yet when this
story is broken down, you actually have two different serial
(18:58):
killers in one. He actually is the I seventy strangler,
a decade almost of killings along Eye seventy where the
bodies where they were the victims were strangled and then
tossed aside. And then we have the headline of the
ten thousand remains found on the farm property, the fox
(19:20):
Hall of farm murders. So you had two separate serial
killings going on. You would think it would be two
separate people. And maybe this goes back to psychological issues.
Maybe he had multiple personality disorder or something.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah, he may have. Here's here's one other thing, you know, many,
many serial killers are beset by what are referred to
as perophilias, which are these yeah, I know, right, they
got a name for everything, dude, paraphalia, Yeah, perophilias. It's
kind of a generalized term, like if somebody has some
(19:56):
particular type of sexual proclivity, all right, or the they
listen more and listen. Not all necessarily all peraphelias are bad,
all right. We have to say that because certain people
like certain things. But when you start to get off
into these things that become path logic. You know. He
he had been identified at an early age as having europhilia,
(20:18):
which he had a fascination with urine, and he had
actually at one point, Tom had urinated on a teacher's desk.
Now you can say that's antisocial behavior. I think that's
not a very firm stretch. Yeah, yeah, But you have
to think about you have to think about, well, what
(20:39):
was the motivation you know behind this? Was it an
undertone of sexual sexual perversion to the point where he
was so obsessed with it. He had also been found
to be playing with dead animals, which we've heard time
and time again relative to development of these folks that
(21:03):
have this predisposition. I don't know if it's a predisposition,
but they they get on this track in life where
they're obsessed with the dead. They find dead animals they dissect.
I'm thinking Jeffrey Dahmer here and his daddy used to
go out and looking for animals to dissect. I'm not
saying that that. Yeah, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
Because if you let's just say, if you have, if
(21:25):
you're a scientist and you have a child and you
want them to try to understand, uh, the anatomy of
a species of bird that you find and you take
it back, you dissect it. You know, Okay, well that's
a that's a learning objective that you know your child
has an interest in the anatomical structures of a bird.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
So glad my boys were more into baseball and football
than they were dead animals, because you know, I know,
I know baseball cards going eight? Did you know that,
Steve Garvey bet you.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Know, yeah, this is a this is a different thing.
And so when and I don't know, if you're in
the middle of it, if you know, necessrely can if
you can make some kind of prediction, But when you
have a child that is early on diagnosed with schizphrenia
and antisocial behavior and all these little elements that come along.
(22:17):
And here's the thing, Dave. You know, like I said,
his father, I think they moved into this just expansive home.
This thing is huge, man.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And all the time I heard bombs dr and his wife.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, well yeah. Well the thing about it is they
had occupied if I remember correctly, this was a family
plot that they had a family family residence. You know,
they found his child, one of these three children that
bomb Maaster had had with his wife, was out playing
(22:54):
in the yard day and the child actually discovered I
can't even can't fathom this a human remain out there,
and all Monster says, oh yeah, well just ignore that
that that's one of my father's anatomical specimens that he had,
you know, buried out there. And I'm thinking, you know,
(23:15):
I don't know too many physicians that still do anatomical
dissections at home. I don't know any of them as
a matter of fact. You know, they practice on things
to learn how to suture and do that sort of thing. Generally,
those are going to be like pigs feet where they'll
make an incision and they'll practice, you know, soutrain and
all that to stay up on technique. But you know,
when you're talking about gross anatomy, that's generally something you
(23:39):
do in medical school, you know, where you have these
cadavers that you dissect to learn, you know, at a
granular level, begin to learn about human anatomy. But dude,
you got you got a body out in the yard
and you're going to say that this belonged to your daddy.
You know, he was going to use this as an
hand tomb and this poor precious child out there. Can
(24:00):
you imagine digging around and all of a sudden you
come across, let's go, mommy, mommy, look what I found.
And it's the most shocking thing in the world. So,
you know, and that's kind of where this kind of
all kicks off relative to you know, placing a remain
in his sphere, something that he would have control over, Dave,
(24:24):
And you can't again, I know I always use the term,
but it's hard to plumb the depths of it, man,
I mean it really, it really really is, brother, Dave.
(24:47):
I got to ask you something, man, the idea of
this case and it's a fascinating case obviously, or we
wouldn't be you know, yapping about it today. But you know,
this is something that went down in the in the nineties.
As a matter of fact, the allegend, we have said,
the alleged perpetrator here, he was never charged, you know,
(25:10):
took his own life up around Ontario. What I think
our listeners need to understand why this case cases I
guess right, why this has all risen back up to
the top it. Why is it made a reappearance here
in twents.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
We were at crime on When we were at crime
con June second, this story popped up in the New
York Post. That's why we're talking about it now. Because
the New York Post had ran a headline, ten thousand
human remains found on serial killers farm and authorities are
still identifying victims. Look, ten thousand human remains found. That
(25:49):
to me screams ten thousand people dead, right, human remains.
That's not it at all. That's a salacious headline. It
gets a lot of people to look at it.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
But it made me look at it. It made me
look at it. Those are battle numbers that you saw
in the Civil War. That's normandy, you know, yeah, yeah, exactly,
It's nuts. Ten thousand and I love the fact that
you use the term salacious because it is provocative and
(26:23):
it got this old death investigator to you know, you're
the one that sent this to me, I did.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
I didn't seek this.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I didn't seek this out on my own.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Because I saw the headline. I'm not tell me what's
wrong with this, But here's the story actually says. For years,
a peaceful million dollar farm in Indiana hit a dark secret.
It was a serial killer's playground. Well not really, it
didn't really sit there dark in secret. They being law enforcement,
(26:55):
they were aware of what was out on the farm.
They didn't know the numbers maybe, and they can't identify everybody,
Which is my question for you, Joe, because when cops
finally rated her bomb eister, back up, her bomb eister
was a suspect in Indiana because there was in Indianapolis
(27:18):
in the gay community, a couple of gay bars there
where a number of gay men went missing. Now we're
talking on the heels of Jeffrey Dahmer being arrested three
years earlier. His crimes were still garnering headlines in ninety four,
and you know his was about gay men and things
like that, and so this was you know, this was
(27:40):
part of that whole story. And they're like, well, what
did this guy do? And you know, you got your
local businessman in Indianapolis. He's got two thrift stores called
Save a Lot and Aarent and he's got a wife
and three kids. They live in a million dollar farm
called Box Hollow. He's got all of the outward trappings
of a success full businessman, and yet his fifteen year
(28:03):
old son, as you mentioned a little while ago, his
fifteen year old son finds almost a full skeletonized body
on the property, buried in a very shallow grave. Someone
was sticking out, Hey, dad, look what I found. What
is this? Oh that's your dad, that's your grandpa. Is
he had that for some kind of studying and that.
But that's where it all began. In a very brief
(28:23):
period of time, her bomb eister becomes suspect Numero uno
in the Gay Men Missing in Indianapolis. And as they
start tracking back, you know, the first thing comes up
in an investigation, who is this person, what do they
do for a living, where have they been? Do they
have a criminal record, do they have a psychological record?
(28:46):
And boom, yeah, he has been in a mental institution
logged down, and so that becomes part of the story
in the investigation. But ten thousand remains, Joe, did they
find ten thousand bodies on Fox Holid Farm.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Absolutely not, that's just not the case. Let's lay waste
to that suppossession right here. Ten thousand remains even if
you tried to do the arithmetic on that, how busy
a serial killer, a singular person would have to be.
That's why I referenced the Civil War earlier, and I
don't think there were any any major Civil War battles
(29:27):
fought just outside of Indianapolis, you know, so we can
check that off the list. When they're talking about it.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yeah, go hitching something a little while ago, and you
were talking about how sifting through an area to find remains,
and you're talking about watching this process take place, and
I'm picturing, you know, Indiana Jones and things like that
that we've seen and things on the History Channel where
that you see an area that has string and people
(29:58):
walking through with what looked like callanders, you know, and
they're sifting through sand and finding little bits and pieces.
And that's what they were doing at Fox Hollow Farm.
They were finding these areas and sifting the dirt.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Correct they were. And here's the thing, David, it's not
like you know what, you use the idea of Indiana Jones.
But if you think about a regular standard anthropological anthropological dig,
we're gonna grid off that area and you work specific grids.
And these grids. First off, you expanded out so you've
(30:34):
got huge grids, and then you narrow it down in
your search, your initial search. But then you go to say,
a space that might be I don't know, for sake
of simplicity, you'll grid it off so that it's essentially
two by two feet, okay, okay, And you work that
individual grid and you have to go down into the substrata.
(30:56):
You know, you go down, down, down as far as
you can until you get a kind of impacted soil.
Everything that's on top of that you're going to take
out and you're going to sift through. And here's here's
the problem with this, Dave. These remains that they're talking
about there, it's not like someone took a saw and
(31:18):
dismembered a long bone and dropped it in a hole
and buried it. I said, what we're talking about here,
we're talking about they literally use the term pulverized. So
now if you think looking for bones that are intact
is difficult, when you start to get out into that
area where you have not just these pulverized bones, but
(31:40):
you've got what we refer to as cremains, which are
the burned bone fragments. See, my thought is that you
burn a body long enough, again, takes time, creates a
visual a visual event, and also creates a smell. How
can you be so ignorant of your surroundings if you're
(32:03):
part and parcel of this family and you don't have
an awareness of it or what Daddy's up to out
in the barn or wherever he is. And so after
the body is burned, and you talk about being purposed,
now you've got to get a heavy object. Let's just
think of something like a small mallet ballpen hammer, maybe
(32:26):
a sledge hammer, and you get out there and you
set the you know, crushing these things. And then you've
got to take those things and gather them up, okay,
and go to a specific area and dump them. Now,
you're not going to get everything, No one, even crematories
don't get everything. You can still see evidence of cremains
(32:49):
from a crematory that where you can identify bone fragment.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
As quick as side Joe with my mother, my mother
passed away very very young, to and her body was
cremated and we did a ceremony out of okre Cook Island,
North Carolina, which is where she was from and loved.
And we're on the beach, and I thought remains were powdery,
(33:15):
maybe like sand, because of what I had seen in
movies and on TV shows where they scattered remains. And
I have warned people ever since, that's not what it is.
You actually can identify certain things as bone as I
don't want to say a tooth, but you can actually
really identify certain aspects of the boy. It's not powder,
(33:36):
it's not sand. And that was shocking to me. It
really hurt because nobody warned me.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
I can't. I can't even begin to imagine the depths
of your sorrow at that point, Tom, It's it's you know,
on top of the grief that you're experiencing, you have
to go through that.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
But and knowing that Joe and that was done the
way it was supposed to be done and that's all
they could do. I'm thinking, well, this guy out on
his farm. He's going to have to have privacy to
pulverize the bones. He's going to have to have time.
That's the other part. He almost at time by himself
and then burning and things. So how did he get
(34:15):
how to a the time? B the time? See the time,
because you're talking not three or four, you're talking ten, twelve,
maybe more bodies creating ten thousand bone fragments.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
It's it's an intense situation where you have because and
we've talked about this before, where you you actually have
to have you have to tend tend the fire, okay,
and the rendering will take a long time because it's
not just dumping gas on the body, striking a match,
(34:51):
you know, like you're in some kind of Western movie
and throwing it on and everything goes up. It doesn't
work like that. You have to feed, You have to
have a fuel source. Generally it's going to mean a
really hot burning wood. You think about Terra grins At
that case that has been in the news for years
and years, and when they burned her body, they had
access to pecan that was in a pecan orchard. I
(35:14):
don't know how familiar folks are, but did you know
Pecan is like a very very dense wood and it
has it gives off the highest number of B to us,
which we measure heat with. It's in the same family
as far as B to use as hickory is. So
it gives you and you have to have that kind
(35:37):
of sustainable fire source. So if you're going to use
you could use pine, which is a very soft wood,
but it's not as sustainable as like this ongoing heat source.
So the more you expose these skeleton remains to heat,
the more degradation you have of the remain degrading. Okay,
(35:59):
and you mentioned teeth just a second of teeth or
that you teeth are not bone. They're more resilient than bone.
And so when you have a cremation that takes place,
sometimes you will find teeth. But with cremation, there's two ways.
The earlier way that they used to do it was
(36:21):
after a body rolls off of a off of the
the fire fireproof conveyor belt as it comes out of
the furnace, you had opposing you had these opposing stone
wheels or marble wheels like this that spun and the
(36:42):
remains would pass through that crushing. Okay, now they have
an auger. It's kind of a screw like this, and
it screws the remains. The cremains passed through that auger
and they're crushed down. Elementally, this guy didn't have access
to this. You know, you're thinking about, well, how could
(37:04):
you facilitate and we're talking about, you know, people, We
had said ten thousand remains, but what we're looking at
here is roughly like eleven remains, and they're still recovering
others as well. So you've got all of these elements
that are being placed together. Now do you dig a
hole and just simply put them there? One thing we
(37:26):
do know evidence through what the child said, Dave, was
that we've got one skeleton that was intact, So that
was not necessarily something that he did. We know every
single time when he's trying to dispose of a remain,
obviously he has burned, he has pulverized, he has crushed.
(37:48):
But then your left, Dave, here's the thing. You're left
with this problem as an investigator, how do you get
these people ideed? You know, you've got fragments that are
so tiny, so very tawny, and you're looking at it
and thinking, well, how in the world do you go
(38:10):
about taking a bone fragment and identifying a human being.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
So that's what we're dealing with, Joe. We have to
get these guys down to the actual victims, people we
know that are missing and possibly tied to bomb eister. Now,
as we look at this case, ten thousand remains parts.
We know that it's not ten thousand people think right, right,
(38:38):
But I'm still a little stuck on a couple of
things here. But going back to the farm and taking
it away, because the I seventies strangler is a different thing,
is it. Do you know other stories where a serial
killer had a method of killing and disposing of bodies
and then changed his methodology, he changed what he was doing.
(39:03):
We actually have some overlap here, overlap of the I
seventy strangler where people were you know, dumped long I
seventy and then the Fox Hollow Farm murders or bodies.
There's a little overlap, right, cases like this.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, Well, most of them are certainly outliers because once
they get practiced in a particular way, they're going to
stick with that. And I'll give you an example and
talk about Midwestern serial killers. You've got kind of succession
here you'd mentioned Dahmer, but you know, predating Dahmer, Uh,
we have John Wayne Gacy and you know that's Chicago.
(39:42):
And then you go to Damer, which started in Ohio
and wound up in Wisconsin. I think many people forget about.
His first kill was at that house that his daddy had,
you know, that they were living in where he killed
that kid when he was a cheenage guy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
I totally forgot about.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
And then we moved forward now with with bomb Meister,
and you know with okay, with Gaysey. Gaysey, he's infamously
you know cross space, you know, underneath the house.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
He's he.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Did dump up up in displays that that river. Uh,
you know famously. And I highly recommend if no one
has seen seen the the Netflix uh documentary about about
John Wayne Gacy, you gotta check this thing out. It
blew my mind. I learned things in there that I
(40:38):
never knew. But you know, he differed in his disposal
relative to those so the fact that he would change
is hard to believe. Particularly you can see like a
one off event. Okay, I'm rushed, I'm gonna get caught.
I've just got to get rid of these remains as
quickly as possible, the getting rid of the remains, and
(41:00):
I'm getting over into my friend Karen Stark's area here.
It's part of the ceremony. Let that sink in just
for a second. That's part of the ceremony. It's not
just about killing. It's about you know, sitting there and
kind of ruminating over how you know, we're going to
to you know, uh, handle the body, get rid of
(41:21):
the body. And there's a you know, we talked about
paraphilia's early on. There there always is in in my
in my opinion, there's always a element of necrophilia in
many of these things where bodies are posed, bodies are
(41:41):
gone back and touched, trophies are taken from the body
as a remembrance, and a lot of these things are
sexually driven. The line's share of them are. And so
there's a wild fantasy element that goes on with this.
So if you're rendering down and where where was he
getting these victims? Dave you mentioned this and not unlike
(42:02):
John Wayne Gacy and also Dahmer, they were cruising. They
were cruising, you know, in gay areas that were targeting
gay men. And I think that probably all three of
these individuals had real issues with their own personal identity
and they're frustrated and so that they would lash out
(42:23):
in anger for whatever reason. And you couple that with
some kind of psychopathology that's going on. But how do
they keep a clear head through this systematically with rendering
down remains? And I'd be fascinated to know, with bomb
Meister's case, if there was an effort at dissection at
(42:43):
all of these remains to try to make them manageable,
because one of the toughest things.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
To do is.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
To try to is to try to by flame destroy
an entire intact body. Day. It's like, please forgive me
for saying this, but it's almost like, Okay, if you
and I went into the forest and we cut down
a tree. Okay, we cut down an oak tree, and
(43:14):
we cut up, say a five foot segment of that
oak tree, and we put it on a burn pile
and try to render that thing down. That's how long
it would take us to do that. It's it's totally
other things. We take that five foot section, cut it
into smaller sections and get out our you know, our
mall or our wedge and sledge hammer and begin to
(43:39):
section it off. Until we've got pieces right, and the
elements will burn more efficiently when they're reduced in size.
So you've got all of these things going on, you know,
with this individual to try to understand what happened. Have
they found everybody? I've seen one estimate for this guy,
and you know people always have estimates, maybe up to
(44:00):
forty five with this guy. In my opinion, Dave, this
will not be coming to a conclusion anytime soon. This
property is vast, The lives that he impacted and ended
(44:24):
are innumerable, I would think, and particularly if this methodology
for disposal remains is the same one that he's stuck
with over and over and over again. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body packs.
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Wilton. I believe it or not,
I got a few horror stories. Let me rephrase that,
horror movies that I watch every year, and I think
when Halloween rolls around as dark and di minuted as
(00:23):
as is, I will generally watch The Exorcist, and I
think a lot of it has to do with the
fact that it reminds me of how much evil there
is in the world, because it's truly terrifying. It always
comes back to the fact that you're talking about the
devil here, you know. I don't know is there another one? Well, again, probably,
(00:49):
I don't really get into all the Friday the thirteenth
stuff and things like that. It's always stuff that has
to do with the spiritual realm that really terrifies me
if you're talking about horror movie. But today, there's another
movie that's coming to mind, a movie that came out
(01:11):
a few years ago that was directed by Rob Zombie,
and the title of that movie was actually The House
of a Thousand Corpses. It's kind of a dark, very
dark comedy. But the reason that's coming to mind is
(01:31):
that we're going to talk about a case today where
we are being told that we're looking at ten thousand
human remains at one location in Indiana. I'm Joseph Scott
(01:55):
Morgan and this is Body Bags. Dave of your own
free will. Have you ever subjected yourself to the horror
genre and is there something in particular that you can
reflect upons like? Okay, thinking about horror movies, this is
(02:16):
the one that I always go to. It's the one
that scares me consistently, or it's something I enjoyed just
because of the strange nature of it.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
I saw the first move Halloween movie John Carpenter, Yeah,
in theaters.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah, wow, the original Halloween. I hadn't thought about that,
and that was kind of terrifying because, at least at
that point in time, it seemed plausible. You know, you've
got somebody, uh you know, yeah, I know, from from
a mental institute and they're they're a violent offender. Remember
Donald Pleasance. You know he's saying I tried to get
(02:53):
I tried to get through to Michael Myers for all
of these years, you know, and it you know, a
deck aid or whatever it was. What was he like
eight when he murdered his entire family and he had
no success. So he winds up, you know, ventilating this
this this guy, you know, uh, and the body disappears.
You know, that's the ending shot. I hate to be
(03:15):
a spoiler, but if you hadn't seen Halloween, I don't
know what to tell you've been hiding under a rock.
Yeah so, but you know today, Dave, this case in
particular actually involves somebody that had been under psychiatric treatment
for a let me drop this word on you, for
a plethora of all kinds of psychopathology. Sorry, yeah, there
(03:42):
you go, another movie, another movie reference. It's it's so
expansive that what this individual Bombmeister had the history leading
up to well where we are to day. But boy,
it's a long and crooked path, isn't it with this guy.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It's interesting that her ball Meister, and we're mentioning movie
references and things like that. You know, there's part of
his story, her bomb Eister a serial killer and let
a double life. That's something that we don't usually see
in the real world. That's a I've always thought of
that as some kind of a cinematic trick. You know,
(04:27):
if you if you can't solve this, just make it
a double life. Here, he's got this thing over here,
and this thing over there, and and in reality here
her bomb eister really did have. According to his wife,
she had no idea. Now, if a guy's a serial
killer and you're married to him and you have no idea,
I call that double life success. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Look, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna mention any any
names here. I'll say they're initials though, okay, rex hureman uh.
And so you know you're you're thinking about a double
life and the wife having little or no awareness of it.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
You know, I can't talk about this away from the
show because I don't want any I don't need a
call from a lawyer today, but I do want to
talk to you about Hey.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Look he's he's not a serial killer. But I can
tell you this even all what what is it? Magic
eight ball used to say all signs point to point.
I'm just I'm just kind of laying I'm just kind
of laying that out.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
And when you, buddy Karen Stark uses the magic eight ball.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
No, no, Now, Hey, we had a great time with
her at Crime Con and what a you know the
movie A Beautiful Mind, What a beautiful mind she has.
She is so brilliant. And but that's that's a tale
for another day. We're gonna be dropping an episode the target.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
The crime con. I will tell you it was some
session freak people out I think getting emails about what
you guys said. And yeah, yeah, anyway, but back to
her bomb Meister for just a minute. Yeah, he's married
for twenty five years to this woman and they have
three children. Oddly enough, and this is I'm going to
go do the math on this when we're done. But
they had sex six times according to her in that
(06:13):
twenty five year period and had strokes. So sure shot
bomb Eister, you know, was boom right there on that one,
but he actually her bomb Eister. Serial Killer Deluxe actually
might be two separate serial killers in one, believe it
or not, the I seventy killer and then the gay
(06:34):
club killer. I don't know whether they named him the
Fox Hollow murder guy, you know, yeah, yeah, that they
found the ten thousand body parts body fragmed, bone parts.
I don't know the actual term for this show. I'm
sure you know you got you guys have one when
you have body parts commingled right or bone fragment.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, well we refer to it as the commingling of remains. Yeah,
and that's the trick is is to attempt to identify
of those bones which which which are because you can't
just assume that all of those remains are are in
(07:15):
fact human.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Because you can I didn't think about that.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Well, listen, I've got I've got I've got a great
aside for you here and and it'll give you an
idea as to what forensic anthropologists have to go to.
And by the way, for those that don't know, I'm
a frustrated forensic anthropologist. I'm what's referred to if you
go out to a scene with buried remains. I'm what's
referred to as a shovel leaner, and I sit at
(07:41):
the feet a forensic anthropologist. I've always been fascinated by
the field, and I've done many excavations, but I'm not
the person you go to to identify specific bones and
try to assess whether or not they are human or not.
But a quick aside. Allegedly, and I've heard this from
(08:02):
a couple of different sources. With doctor Bass, who founded
the Body Farm at ut there was an exercise that
he would put his students front through and you'll get
a kick out of this day where he would have
a mass of bones, okay, skeletal remains, and they would
be in a big cardboard box. Okay, the top is closed,
(08:25):
you can't look at them, and there's a hole. There's
a hole on each end of the box. He would
stick his hand in one end of the box, the
student would stick their hand in the other end of
the box, and by feel, they would examine that bone
together and the student would have to identify the skeletal
(08:47):
element anatomically and if possible, identify what species it was.
And that's by touch. Can you imagine the skill level
that's involved in that. And now, if anybody could do it,
it would be doctor Bass again, we sit it his feet.
He's amazing. And how valid that is I don't know,
but I've heard it from two separate people that were
part of the program. And when you're talking about and
(09:12):
again we have to be very clear here, this is
not ten thousand intact human remains. I saw a headline
I think from the post actually that said ten thousand
humor And technically you could say that they are potentially
ten thousand human remains, but they are not intact remains. Okay,
(09:35):
quick trivia question. Dave put you on the spot. When
you compare an infant and an adult. Of those two,
which of those two have the most bones in their body?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You know, I would just think adult, but I guess
I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Infant has two hundred and seventy an adult has two
hundred and six.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Really, that's a lot. That's a big difference.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
That's a huge difference because of the fusion, the fusion
of the bones over period of time. You know, as
child goes through development, bones that were say, are elements
of bones that are non non Let's see, how can
we say this none articulated at that point time, and
(10:28):
that in that period of growth or development, when they
begin to fuse together. You know, we talk about growing
pains and all those sorts of things. When bones begin
to to fuse together over a period of time, they
create a smaller number of bones. Because now you go
from two hundred and seventy to two hundred and six.
(10:51):
And so as people you know, go into development, as
you know, through throughout their early child hood and all
the way up until you know, I don't know, towards
the end prebe vestent, you have this fusion that has
taken place, and so you're gonna have less bones than
an adult than you do in a baby.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Isn't that something I had no idea, Joe. Really, that's
not something that I ever considered. And by the way,
and I said this last week or the week before
when you and I actually had a brief chat about
growing pains that I always thought was a load and
now I feel horrible about it, but I didn't say
anything out loud when my kids, Yeah, it was, oh,
(11:31):
it's growing pains like looking little wives like you real?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Come on, yeah, you've got these various plates that are
in the body where and it and listen, I mean,
anybody can reflect on their on their own personal experience
when you you know what it feels like, you know,
and they're sharp, there's no other pain like a gross pain,
and some people experience them to a really intense degree.
(11:56):
But you know, I'm when you when you come across
these kinds of cases where you have these commingling of
remains and this is nothing new. Under the Sunday the
what forensic anthropologies are faced with at a scene. If
you have a serial perpetrator, they don't deviate much in
(12:19):
their behaviors. They get into a rut. I've often compared
them to carpenters. Carpenter uses a set of tools, they
have methodologies. It's a system that is utilized when building
a house, you know, and if you've got bits that
are say bits of wood, you know, two by fours,
(12:41):
that trust is those sorts of things that have been
had to trim. It goes into a pile, doesn't it. Well,
there's a certain way those piles are organized because of
how they're going to recycle that stuff and utilize it.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Liberated to take a look liberate.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, yeah, well I wouldn't go say that, but it's
it's a matter of it's a matter of getting into
a rut where they feel comfortable. This idea. You were
talking about things that are used in Hollywood where you'll
have a perpetrator that will intentionally go out and try
to recreate the behaviors of another serial killer, and you know,
(13:20):
they think they're going to mask themselves. There's always an
underlying theme, you know, relative to that that would make
that very difficult. That's why a movie would be made
about that, because it would be something that was so rare.
So when you're talking about this, this bombmister fellow, he's
got a wide open area day. This complex that he
(13:42):
lived on was so vast and out in rural, rural Indiana,
which I've been to this area of the country and
absolutely beautiful, rolling hills, green, lush land for farming. And
this is just outside of Indianapolis. But here's the thing.
(14:03):
I don't think that anybody in that little community, anybody
just driving down the road or maybe some family that
was out for a drive in the country leaving Indianapolis,
they look out over that bucolic beauty of those fields,
(14:23):
maybe this lovely home that this guy occupied, and they
couldn't even begin to fathom the horrors that had taken
place at that location. I'm fascinated by comments you made
(14:50):
just a moment ago, Dave, about Bolb Monster and his wife,
that marriage producing three children. She had stated that they
had had sex maybe six times, I think.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
In twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
In twenty five years. Here here's another little tidbit relative
to her. Did you know that she never saw her
husband nude? Yep, I think that that's that's a huge tell.
You know, when you begin to think about the intimacy
with which you you know, you entowel a structure with somebody.
(15:34):
You know you're going to see somebody's rear end sooner
or later, or walk in on them in the bathroom.
You would think, you know, how do you how do
you plan your life out so well, Dave? Because that
that is a purposed task, right, that's a purpose You're
you're attempting to veil yourself. How much can you imagine
(15:59):
how much energy that would take over that long a
period of tom of being you know, joined with this
person and producing three kids, right, but yet you're you're
not going to see them naked over that period of time.
I don't know. It's very odd, dude, very very odd.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
When you look at the whole thing, with her bomb
Eiz or his background, you realize that his psychological well being,
his emotional stability were things questioned by his family. You know,
six months after he was married, six months after he
(16:39):
was married, his father had him committed to a psychiatric institution.
So I don't know what happened during that six months
of marriage, but it had to have been pretty severe
that his father had to step in and say, Herbie,
we're going to get you away from here for a while.
So and again, I don't know what happened. I didn't read,
(17:01):
you know, I don't know they've written a book about
that part. But I kind of I'm very curious as
to what began or what what happened that caused his
dad to lock him down for you know, six months
into his marriage. And once you get married, you're an adult.
You're on your own, supposedly, and that seems like dad
was still heavily involved or his wife said, hey, your
(17:22):
son is really messed up. Can you help me? I'm
going to die, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And you know, his dad was like a very prominent,
wealthy physician.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Right what I'm saying, it's bizarre behavior that like and listen.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
This, this bizarre behavior did did not start at marriage.
And you can't. You can't necessarily control who who your
kids are going to marry. You'd like to, but you know,
they're they're going to go their own way, They're going
to go their own route. And I really wonder if
you know, if the uh, you know, if his wife,
(18:01):
you know, you know, looking back over it, I can't
take the depth and breadth of it relative to what
he had been involved in while she was living under
the same roof with him.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Well, did he getting right down to this, Joe, you're
talking about somebody in looking at her Ballmeister as a
serial killer. You mentioned a little while ago how carpenters
get used to the same tools, the same pattern, the
same extra things that are left over when they're done
with the job, and how those things are planned out
over a period of time. Well, normally within the serial
(18:35):
killer world, there are consistencies in what the suspect does
in the crime, whether it's where they dispose of the body,
the method they used to kill. And yet when this
story is broken down, you actually have two different serial
(18:58):
killers in one. He actually is the I seventy strangler,
a decade almost of killings along Eye seventy where the
bodies where they were the victims were strangled and then
tossed aside. And then we have the headline of the
ten thousand remains found on the farm property, the fox
(19:20):
Hall of farm murders. So you had two separate serial
killings going on. You would think it would be two
separate people. And maybe this goes back to psychological issues.
Maybe he had multiple personality disorder or something.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah, he may have. Here's here's one other thing, you know, many,
many serial killers are beset by what are referred to
as perophilias, which are these yeah, I know, right, they
got a name for everything, dude, paraphalia, Yeah, perophilias. It's
kind of a generalized term, like if somebody has some
(19:56):
particular type of sexual proclivity, all right, or the they
listen more and listen. Not all necessarily all peraphelias are bad,
all right. We have to say that because certain people
like certain things. But when you start to get off
into these things that become path logic. You know. He
he had been identified at an early age as having europhilia,
(20:18):
which he had a fascination with urine, and he had
actually at one point, Tom had urinated on a teacher's desk.
Now you can say that's antisocial behavior. I think that's
not a very firm stretch. Yeah, yeah, But you have
to think about you have to think about, well, what
(20:39):
was the motivation you know behind this? Was it an
undertone of sexual sexual perversion to the point where he
was so obsessed with it. He had also been found
to be playing with dead animals, which we've heard time
and time again relative to development of these folks that
(21:03):
have this predisposition. I don't know if it's a predisposition,
but they they get on this track in life where
they're obsessed with the dead. They find dead animals they dissect.
I'm thinking Jeffrey Dahmer here and his daddy used to
go out and looking for animals to dissect. I'm not
saying that that. Yeah, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
Because if you let's just say, if you have, if
(21:25):
you're a scientist and you have a child and you
want them to try to understand, uh, the anatomy of
a species of bird that you find and you take
it back, you dissect it. You know, Okay, well that's
a that's a learning objective that you know your child
has an interest in the anatomical structures of a bird.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
So glad my boys were more into baseball and football
than they were dead animals, because you know, I know,
I know baseball cards going eight? Did you know that,
Steve Garvey bet you.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Know, yeah, this is a this is a different thing.
And so when and I don't know, if you're in
the middle of it, if you know, necessrely can if
you can make some kind of prediction, But when you
have a child that is early on diagnosed with schizphrenia
and antisocial behavior and all these little elements that come along.
(22:17):
And here's the thing, Dave. You know, like I said,
his father, I think they moved into this just expansive home.
This thing is huge, man.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And all the time I heard bombs dr and his wife.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, well yeah. Well the thing about it is they
had occupied if I remember correctly, this was a family
plot that they had a family family residence. You know,
they found his child, one of these three children that
bomb Maaster had had with his wife, was out playing
(22:54):
in the yard day and the child actually discovered I
can't even can't fathom this a human remain out there,
and all Monster says, oh yeah, well just ignore that
that that's one of my father's anatomical specimens that he had,
you know, buried out there. And I'm thinking, you know,
(23:15):
I don't know too many physicians that still do anatomical
dissections at home. I don't know any of them as
a matter of fact. You know, they practice on things
to learn how to suture and do that sort of thing. Generally,
those are going to be like pigs feet where they'll
make an incision and they'll practice, you know, soutrain and
all that to stay up on technique. But you know,
when you're talking about gross anatomy, that's generally something you
(23:39):
do in medical school, you know, where you have these
cadavers that you dissect to learn, you know, at a
granular level, begin to learn about human anatomy. But dude,
you got you got a body out in the yard
and you're going to say that this belonged to your daddy.
You know, he was going to use this as an
hand tomb and this poor precious child out there. Can
(24:00):
you imagine digging around and all of a sudden you
come across, let's go, mommy, mommy, look what I found.
And it's the most shocking thing in the world. So,
you know, and that's kind of where this kind of
all kicks off relative to you know, placing a remain
in his sphere, something that he would have control over, Dave,
(24:24):
And you can't again, I know I always use the term,
but it's hard to plumb the depths of it, man,
I mean it really, it really really is, brother, Dave.
(24:47):
I got to ask you something, man, the idea of
this case and it's a fascinating case obviously, or we
wouldn't be you know, yapping about it today. But you know,
this is something that went down in the in the nineties.
As a matter of fact, the allegend, we have said,
the alleged perpetrator here, he was never charged, you know,
(25:10):
took his own life up around Ontario. What I think
our listeners need to understand why this case cases I
guess right, why this has all risen back up to
the top it. Why is it made a reappearance here
in twents.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
We were at crime on When we were at crime
con June second, this story popped up in the New
York Post. That's why we're talking about it now. Because
the New York Post had ran a headline, ten thousand
human remains found on serial killers farm and authorities are
still identifying victims. Look, ten thousand human remains found. That
(25:49):
to me screams ten thousand people dead, right, human remains.
That's not it at all. That's a salacious headline. It
gets a lot of people to look at it.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
But it made me look at it. It made me
look at it. Those are battle numbers that you saw
in the Civil War. That's normandy, you know, yeah, yeah, exactly,
It's nuts. Ten thousand and I love the fact that
you use the term salacious because it is provocative and
(26:23):
it got this old death investigator to you know, you're
the one that sent this to me, I did.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
I didn't seek this.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I didn't seek this out on my own.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Because I saw the headline. I'm not tell me what's
wrong with this, But here's the story actually says. For years,
a peaceful million dollar farm in Indiana hit a dark secret.
It was a serial killer's playground. Well not really, it
didn't really sit there dark in secret. They being law enforcement,
(26:55):
they were aware of what was out on the farm.
They didn't know the numbers maybe, and they can't identify everybody,
Which is my question for you, Joe, because when cops
finally rated her bomb eister, back up, her bomb eister
was a suspect in Indiana because there was in Indianapolis
(27:18):
in the gay community, a couple of gay bars there
where a number of gay men went missing. Now we're
talking on the heels of Jeffrey Dahmer being arrested three
years earlier. His crimes were still garnering headlines in ninety four,
and you know his was about gay men and things
like that, and so this was you know, this was
(27:40):
part of that whole story. And they're like, well, what
did this guy do? And you know, you got your
local businessman in Indianapolis. He's got two thrift stores called
Save a Lot and Aarent and he's got a wife
and three kids. They live in a million dollar farm
called Box Hollow. He's got all of the outward trappings
of a success full businessman, and yet his fifteen year
(28:03):
old son, as you mentioned a little while ago, his
fifteen year old son finds almost a full skeletonized body
on the property, buried in a very shallow grave. Someone
was sticking out, Hey, dad, look what I found. What
is this? Oh that's your dad, that's your grandpa. Is
he had that for some kind of studying and that.
But that's where it all began. In a very brief
(28:23):
period of time, her bomb eister becomes suspect Numero uno
in the Gay Men Missing in Indianapolis. And as they
start tracking back, you know, the first thing comes up
in an investigation, who is this person, what do they
do for a living, where have they been? Do they
have a criminal record, do they have a psychological record?
(28:46):
And boom, yeah, he has been in a mental institution
logged down, and so that becomes part of the story
in the investigation. But ten thousand remains, Joe, did they
find ten thousand bodies on Fox Holid Farm.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Absolutely not, that's just not the case. Let's lay waste
to that suppossession right here. Ten thousand remains even if
you tried to do the arithmetic on that, how busy
a serial killer, a singular person would have to be.
That's why I referenced the Civil War earlier, and I
don't think there were any any major Civil War battles
(29:27):
fought just outside of Indianapolis, you know, so we can
check that off the list. When they're talking about it.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yeah, go hitching something a little while ago, and you
were talking about how sifting through an area to find remains,
and you're talking about watching this process take place, and
I'm picturing, you know, Indiana Jones and things like that
that we've seen and things on the History Channel where
that you see an area that has string and people
(29:58):
walking through with what looked like callanders, you know, and
they're sifting through sand and finding little bits and pieces.
And that's what they were doing at Fox Hollow Farm.
They were finding these areas and sifting the dirt.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Correct they were. And here's the thing, David, it's not
like you know what, you use the idea of Indiana Jones.
But if you think about a regular standard anthropological anthropological dig,
we're gonna grid off that area and you work specific grids.
And these grids. First off, you expanded out so you've
(30:34):
got huge grids, and then you narrow it down in
your search, your initial search. But then you go to say,
a space that might be I don't know, for sake
of simplicity, you'll grid it off so that it's essentially
two by two feet, okay, okay, And you work that
individual grid and you have to go down into the substrata.
(30:56):
You know, you go down, down, down as far as
you can until you get a kind of impacted soil.
Everything that's on top of that you're going to take
out and you're going to sift through. And here's here's
the problem with this, Dave. These remains that they're talking
about there, it's not like someone took a saw and
(31:18):
dismembered a long bone and dropped it in a hole
and buried it. I said, what we're talking about here,
we're talking about they literally use the term pulverized. So
now if you think looking for bones that are intact
is difficult, when you start to get out into that
area where you have not just these pulverized bones, but
(31:40):
you've got what we refer to as cremains, which are
the burned bone fragments. See, my thought is that you
burn a body long enough, again, takes time, creates a
visual a visual event, and also creates a smell. How
can you be so ignorant of your surroundings if you're
(32:03):
part and parcel of this family and you don't have
an awareness of it or what Daddy's up to out
in the barn or wherever he is. And so after
the body is burned, and you talk about being purposed,
now you've got to get a heavy object. Let's just
think of something like a small mallet ballpen hammer, maybe
(32:26):
a sledge hammer, and you get out there and you
set the you know, crushing these things. And then you've
got to take those things and gather them up, okay,
and go to a specific area and dump them. Now,
you're not going to get everything, No one, even crematories
don't get everything. You can still see evidence of cremains
(32:49):
from a crematory that where you can identify bone fragment.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
As quick as side Joe with my mother, my mother
passed away very very young, to and her body was
cremated and we did a ceremony out of okre Cook Island,
North Carolina, which is where she was from and loved.
And we're on the beach, and I thought remains were powdery,
(33:15):
maybe like sand, because of what I had seen in
movies and on TV shows where they scattered remains. And
I have warned people ever since, that's not what it is.
You actually can identify certain things as bone as I
don't want to say a tooth, but you can actually
really identify certain aspects of the boy. It's not powder,
(33:36):
it's not sand. And that was shocking to me. It
really hurt because nobody warned me.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
I can't. I can't even begin to imagine the depths
of your sorrow at that point, Tom, It's it's you know,
on top of the grief that you're experiencing, you have
to go through that.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
But and knowing that Joe and that was done the
way it was supposed to be done and that's all
they could do. I'm thinking, well, this guy out on
his farm. He's going to have to have privacy to
pulverize the bones. He's going to have to have time.
That's the other part. He almost at time by himself
and then burning and things. So how did he get
(34:15):
how to a the time? B the time? See the time,
because you're talking not three or four, you're talking ten, twelve,
maybe more bodies creating ten thousand bone fragments.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
It's it's an intense situation where you have because and
we've talked about this before, where you you actually have
to have you have to tend tend the fire, okay,
and the rendering will take a long time because it's
not just dumping gas on the body, striking a match,
(34:51):
you know, like you're in some kind of Western movie
and throwing it on and everything goes up. It doesn't
work like that. You have to feed, You have to
have a fuel source. Generally it's going to mean a
really hot burning wood. You think about Terra grins At
that case that has been in the news for years
and years, and when they burned her body, they had
access to pecan that was in a pecan orchard. I
(35:14):
don't know how familiar folks are, but did you know
Pecan is like a very very dense wood and it
has it gives off the highest number of B to us,
which we measure heat with. It's in the same family
as far as B to use as hickory is. So
it gives you and you have to have that kind
(35:37):
of sustainable fire source. So if you're going to use
you could use pine, which is a very soft wood,
but it's not as sustainable as like this ongoing heat source.
So the more you expose these skeleton remains to heat,
the more degradation you have of the remain degrading. Okay,
(35:59):
and you mentioned teeth just a second of teeth or
that you teeth are not bone. They're more resilient than bone.
And so when you have a cremation that takes place,
sometimes you will find teeth. But with cremation, there's two ways.
The earlier way that they used to do it was
(36:21):
after a body rolls off of a off of the
the fire fireproof conveyor belt as it comes out of
the furnace, you had opposing you had these opposing stone
wheels or marble wheels like this that spun and the
(36:42):
remains would pass through that crushing. Okay, now they have
an auger. It's kind of a screw like this, and
it screws the remains. The cremains passed through that auger
and they're crushed down. Elementally, this guy didn't have access
to this. You know, you're thinking about, well, how could
(37:04):
you facilitate and we're talking about, you know, people, We
had said ten thousand remains, but what we're looking at
here is roughly like eleven remains, and they're still recovering
others as well. So you've got all of these elements
that are being placed together. Now do you dig a
hole and just simply put them there? One thing we
(37:26):
do know evidence through what the child said, Dave, was
that we've got one skeleton that was intact, So that
was not necessarily something that he did. We know every
single time when he's trying to dispose of a remain,
obviously he has burned, he has pulverized, he has crushed.
(37:48):
But then your left, Dave, here's the thing. You're left
with this problem as an investigator, how do you get
these people ideed? You know, you've got fragments that are
so tiny, so very tawny, and you're looking at it
and thinking, well, how in the world do you go
(38:10):
about taking a bone fragment and identifying a human being.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
So that's what we're dealing with, Joe. We have to
get these guys down to the actual victims, people we
know that are missing and possibly tied to bomb eister. Now,
as we look at this case, ten thousand remains parts.
We know that it's not ten thousand people think right, right,
(38:38):
But I'm still a little stuck on a couple of
things here. But going back to the farm and taking
it away, because the I seventies strangler is a different thing,
is it. Do you know other stories where a serial
killer had a method of killing and disposing of bodies
and then changed his methodology, he changed what he was doing.
(39:03):
We actually have some overlap here, overlap of the I
seventy strangler where people were you know, dumped long I
seventy and then the Fox Hollow Farm murders or bodies.
There's a little overlap, right, cases like this.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, Well, most of them are certainly outliers because once
they get practiced in a particular way, they're going to
stick with that. And I'll give you an example and
talk about Midwestern serial killers. You've got kind of succession
here you'd mentioned Dahmer, but you know, predating Dahmer, Uh,
we have John Wayne Gacy and you know that's Chicago.
(39:42):
And then you go to Damer, which started in Ohio
and wound up in Wisconsin. I think many people forget about.
His first kill was at that house that his daddy had,
you know, that they were living in where he killed
that kid when he was a cheenage guy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
I totally forgot about.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
And then we moved forward now with with bomb Meister,
and you know with okay, with Gaysey. Gaysey, he's infamously
you know cross space, you know, underneath the house.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
He's he.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Did dump up up in displays that that river. Uh,
you know famously. And I highly recommend if no one
has seen seen the the Netflix uh documentary about about
John Wayne Gacy, you gotta check this thing out. It
blew my mind. I learned things in there that I
(40:38):
never knew. But you know, he differed in his disposal
relative to those so the fact that he would change
is hard to believe. Particularly you can see like a
one off event. Okay, I'm rushed, I'm gonna get caught.
I've just got to get rid of these remains as
quickly as possible, the getting rid of the remains, and
(41:00):
I'm getting over into my friend Karen Stark's area here.
It's part of the ceremony. Let that sink in just
for a second. That's part of the ceremony. It's not
just about killing. It's about you know, sitting there and
kind of ruminating over how you know, we're going to
to you know, uh, handle the body, get rid of
(41:21):
the body. And there's a you know, we talked about
paraphilia's early on. There there always is in in my
in my opinion, there's always a element of necrophilia in
many of these things where bodies are posed, bodies are
(41:41):
gone back and touched, trophies are taken from the body
as a remembrance, and a lot of these things are
sexually driven. The line's share of them are. And so
there's a wild fantasy element that goes on with this.
So if you're rendering down and where where was he
getting these victims? Dave you mentioned this and not unlike
(42:02):
John Wayne Gacy and also Dahmer, they were cruising. They
were cruising, you know, in gay areas that were targeting
gay men. And I think that probably all three of
these individuals had real issues with their own personal identity
and they're frustrated and so that they would lash out
(42:23):
in anger for whatever reason. And you couple that with
some kind of psychopathology that's going on. But how do
they keep a clear head through this systematically with rendering
down remains? And I'd be fascinated to know, with bomb
Meister's case, if there was an effort at dissection at
(42:43):
all of these remains to try to make them manageable,
because one of the toughest things.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
To do is.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
To try to is to try to by flame destroy
an entire intact body. Day. It's like, please forgive me
for saying this, but it's almost like, Okay, if you
and I went into the forest and we cut down
a tree. Okay, we cut down an oak tree, and
(43:14):
we cut up, say a five foot segment of that
oak tree, and we put it on a burn pile
and try to render that thing down. That's how long
it would take us to do that. It's it's totally
other things. We take that five foot section, cut it
into smaller sections and get out our you know, our
mall or our wedge and sledge hammer and begin to
(43:39):
section it off. Until we've got pieces right, and the
elements will burn more efficiently when they're reduced in size.
So you've got all of these things going on, you know,
with this individual to try to understand what happened. Have
they found everybody? I've seen one estimate for this guy,
and you know people always have estimates, maybe up to
(44:00):
forty five with this guy. In my opinion, Dave, this
will not be coming to a conclusion anytime soon. This
property is vast, The lives that he impacted and ended
(44:24):
are innumerable, I would think, and particularly if this methodology
for disposal remains is the same one that he's stuck
with over and over and over again. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body packs.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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