CRIME HUNTER: Serial killer Herb Baumeister ended it in Ontario park

Herb Baumeister put a gun to his head and squeezed the trigger at Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron on July 3, 1996.

The 49-year-old Indiana man’s suicide note cited the usual tangle of human woe: Marital problems, financial difficulties etc.

Baumeister also apologized for spoiling the scenery of the park near Grand Bend, Ont.

Baumeister failed to mention that cops back home had issued a warrant for his arrest as a suspected serial killer responsible for the brutal slayings of scores of young men.

Hoosier detectives realized too late that the mild-mannered convenience store owner was the blood-thirsty monster preying on young gay men.

To this day, more than a dozen of his suspected victims remain unidentified. Their remains were discovered on Baumeister’s property outside Indianapolis in 1996.

“We do know Mr. Baumeister did frequent gay bars and some of the missing people that were identified were tied back to gay bars and nightclubs,” Jeff Jellison, the Hamilton County Coroner, told reporters.

At the time of the discovery, around 10,000 human bones and bone fragments were recovered from the killer’s 18.5-acre rural property that he dubbed Fox Hollow Farm.

”Some of them as small as a fingernail, some of them as large as some leg bones,” Jellison said.

“Most of those remains were crushed before they were discarded, a lot of them were also burnt before they were discarded. Those two things right there create huge hurdles.”

Eleven of Baumeister’s victims were identified and detectives believe the bones are the remains of 25 of the killer’s victims.

”These people were on a shelf for 26 years,” Jellison said. “They were forgotten, they’re no longer forgotten. If you had a relative, a loved one, that was missing from the mid-80s to middle-90s, I need you to come forward and provide us with DNA.”

Baumeister had a relatively normal childhood but by his teens was acting weird, playing with dead animals and urinating on his teacher’s desk. He was later diagnosed as schizophrenic but was reportedly never treated.

He married and established a successful chain of convenience stores in Indy. He married and had three children — few aware of the evil demons raging within his beige exterior.

His wife noted something unusual as well: They were only intimate “five or six times” over the course of their 25-year marriage.

Those monsters were manifesting themselves along the I-70 corridor and on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Young gay men, who were chillingly about the same age, height and weight were disappearing.

It wasn’t until 1992 that one of the city’s gay club denizens told detectives that a man named “Brian Smart” had murdered his buddy. He also tried to kill a man named Tony Harris during an erotic asphyxiation session.

Lucky Tony Harris spotted the man again in his car and grabbed his license plate.

Cops identified him as Herb Baumeister.

But when detectives told Baumeister he was a suspect in the mysterious disappearances and asked to search his house, the serial killer and his wife Julie both refused.

However, by June 1996, she too had become terrified of her husband and filed for divorce. She told cops they could search the property while he was away on holidays. Police discovered the remains of 11 men and were able to identify eight of them.

Cops concluded Baumeister burned the bodies of his victims, pulverized the bones and disposed of most of the remains on parts of his 18-acre farm.

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Knowing police were closing in on him, Baumeister went on the run and slipped across the border into Ontario where he eventually ended his life.

In addition to the bodies found on his property, Baumeister is suspected of murdering at least a dozen other men whose remains were discovered along the I-70 corridor between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

The murders dated to the early 1980s.

He was posthumously identified as the man seen leaving a bar with Michael Riley in 1983. Riley was later found nude and strangled to death floating in an Indiana river.

Years later, private detective Virgil Vandagriff — who had been hired by a number of the victims’ families — noted that despite bland outward appearances, Baumeister had all the traits of a monster.

“He fit all the components of a serial killer,” Vandagriff said.

“Among them was the ability to keep his crimes in control and silent under an everyday nonchalance. He was a business owner whose store many townspeople frequented. My own office was only a mile-and-a-half away from his place. I never met him, but from what I understand he wasn’t the type of guy you’d at first suspect of being a sexual psychopath.”

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun