In the summer of 1993, a young man named Richard Douglas Hamilton Jr. vanished from Indianapolis, Indiana. The 20-year-old was last seen on July 31, 1993. At the time of his disappearance, he was working as a telephone marketer. Richard, who was known to frequent gay bars in the city, seemingly disappeared without a trace, leaving his family to wonder what had become of him.
For years, his fate remained a mystery, a painful void in the lives of those who knew him.
The unsettling truth behind Richard's disappearance began to surface in June 1996 with an investigation into a local businessman named Herbert Baumeister. Authorities began searching his sprawling estate, Fox Hollow Farm, in the Westfield suburb of Indianapolis. During the search, a gruesome discovery was made: thousands of charred and crushed bone fragments. It would take years of meticulous forensic work, but in March 1999, some of these remains were positively identified as belonging to Richard Douglas Hamilton Jr. He was one of at least eleven men whose remains were found on the property.
Herbert Baumeister, the owner of Fox Hollow Farm, became the prime suspect in a series of murders of young gay men in the Indianapolis area during the early 1990s. As investigators closed in, and with a warrant issued for his arrest, Baumeister fled to Ontario, Canada. There, in Pinery Provincial Park, he took his own life in July 1996 before he could be brought to trial for the murders. In a suicide note, he cited his failing marriage and business but did not confess to any of the killings.
Law enforcement has also long suspected Baumeister of being the notorious 'I-70 Strangler,' a serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen young men and boys whose bodies were found dumped along Interstate 70 in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1991. The string of I-70 murders appeared to cease around the time Baumeister purchased Fox Hollow Farm, leading investigators to believe he had changed his methods and began disposing of his victims on his own property. Though he was never tried or convicted, the evidence found at his home linked him to a reign of terror that claimed the lives of many, including Richard Douglas Hamilton Jr., whose family finally had a tragic answer to their years of uncertainty. Richard's remains were eventually laid to rest at Floral Park Cemetery in Indianapolis.
