The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground Of A Serial Killer, now streaming on Hulu and directed by Alex Jablonski, is a four-part docuseries that examines the quest of Jeff Jellison, the coroner of Hamilton County, Indiana, to identify the victims of Herb Baumeister, who was thought to have killed over a dozen men and scattered their remains in the woods behind his house at the Fox Hollow Farm estates.
Opening Shot: A shot of trees, and a voice saying, “I’ve already asked for death from the devil. There is no resolution.”
The Gist: In 1996, close to 10,000 human bones and bone fragments were found in the woods behind Herb Baumeister’s home in the Fox Hollow Farm Estates in the Indianapolis suburbs. The search began after a tip from a man named Mark Anthony Goodyear led Indianapolis police and other law enforcement to Baumeister’s property. But Baumeister committed suicide in Canada before the investigation got the point where charges could be filed.
The first episode starts in 1993 and describes the gay club scene in Indianapolis at the time, when the city was much more conservative and intolerant. The scene revolved around a handful of bars and clubs, and when some of the regulars of those nightspots started disappearing, at first the thought was that they had been a victim of the AIDS epidemic. But when the number of men who went missing became too much of a coincidence, the family members went to the city’s police, who didn’t make finding these men a high priority.
A private investigator hired by the families of some of the missing men spoke to Goodyear, who described a bizarre encounter with Baumeister, who by day was a married businessman with a family but by night cruised Indy’s gay bars. One part of the encounter involved being brought to Baumeister’s basement pool and seeing a number of mannequins arranged as if they were having a party. He was into autoerotic asphyxiation, and the pool played a big part in that.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Fox Hollow Murders is similar to other ABC News Studios true-crime docuseries, the most recent of which is Wicked Game: Devil In The Desert.
Our Take: What’s interesting about The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground Of A Serial Killer is that the series is less about Baumeister or the killings themselves but how, starting in 2023, Jellison leveraged new DNA-identifying technology to start identifying Baumeister’s victims.
While we meet Jellison at the beginning of the first episode, we hear more from him closer to the end of it. He was contacted by Eric Pranger, cousin of Allen Livingston, one of the men who disappeared back in the ’90s. He wanted closure for his aunt Sharon, who had terminal cancer, about her son. According to Jellison and some of the people who worked on the case back in the ’90s that were interviewed, the county and state decided to not devote resources to the case after Baumeister committed suicide.
It’s telling how little energy law enforcement gave to the case once Baumeister was out of the picture; they didn’t push to identify the remains they found or investigate to see if Baumeister had any help. There is also some speculation was that, because the victims were gay men, pushing further on the case was not a high priority. But, as Jellison says, these are people with families who want to know what happened to them.
So, while the docuseries seems to start out as a pretty straightforward story about how law enforcement found a serial killer — albeit one that wasn’t as splashed all over the news media as others in the past were — it starts to turn at the end of the first episode into a discussion about how law enforcement attitudes three decades ago affected the investigation. Yes, we’ve seen stories like this before, but it’s always fascinating to go back and reexamine just how those attitudes gave law enforcement blind spots that feel obvious now.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: “I’m not buying the story,” Jellison says about the idea that Baumeister killed these men then dragged them out to the woods by himself.
Sleeper Star: The story of how Eric Pranger got Jellison to advocate for identifying the victims, simply to give his dying aunt Sharon closure, was the most interesting part of the episode, especially given that Allen Livingston was the first victim that was identified.
Most Pilot-y Line: Some of the reenactments of what the pool looked like were creepy as hell.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We liked The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground Of A Serial Killer because it’s not a standard “search for a serial killer” docuseries. It concentrates more on the killer’s victims, which is always preferable than glorifying the killers themselves.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
