Review: ‘The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer,’ starring Jeff Jellison, Chris Schmidt, Shannon Doughty, Debbie Falls, Rob Garvey and Mark Goodyear

November 2, 2025

by Carla Hay

“The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer”

Directed by Alex Jablonski

Culture Representation: The four-episode docuseries “The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer” features an all-white group of people who discuss their connections to the cases of missing or murdered men who are widely believed to be victims of Westfield, Indiana-based suspected serial killer Herb Baumeister, who committed suicide in 1996, at the age of 49, without being arrested for his suspected crimes.

Culture Clash: Baumeister, a thrift-store entrepreneur who was married to a woman and had children with her, lived a double life of having male lovers whom he would meet in his local gay bar scene, and many of those men were found dead on Baumeister’s farm property.

Culture Audience: “The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about murders and missing persons cases that are still unsolved.

“The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer” can be both fascinating and frustrating in how it presents the bizarre, disturbing and complicated mystery of at least 10 men who were found murdered on an 18-acre property called Fox Hollow Farm in Westfield, Indiana, in 1996. Unidentified bones indicate that a lot more men were probably murdered but have not yet been identified. These cases have remained legally unsolved. This four-episode true crime docuseries is uneven but compelling. It has the first on-camera, non-disguised media interview with Mark Goodyear, the ex-lover of suspected serial killer Herb Baumeister. Goodyear’s interview will infuriate many viewers.

Directed by Alex Jablonski, “The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer” also has interviews with several law enforcement officials; family members and friends of some of missing or murdered men who were linked to Baumeister; a journalist who’s covered this mystery for years; a former employee of Baumeister’s; the current owner of Fox Hollow Farm; and filmmakers Jane Gerlach and Russ Walker, whose documentary work on this case is included in much of “The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer.” The docuseries is not a biography of Baumeister but is an examination of the theories and investigations that have kept much of this mystery unsolved. By the end of the documentary, many viewers will get the feeling that Baumeister did not act alone.

Episode 1, titled “The Lost Boys,” features information on some of the missing or murdered men who are believed to be victims of Baumeister. Episode 2, titled “A House With Good Bones,” has details about Fox Hollow Farm, including footage filmed on the property for the documentary. Episode 3, titled “Answer the Riddle,” is about a riddle that Goodyear has posed to investigators that strongly hints that Goodyear knows more than he’s telling. Episode 4, titled “No Longer Forgotten,” mainly consists of the on-camera interview with Goodyear, whose stories have changed over the years, but he continues to insist that he never murdered anyone and doesn’t know where the missing people are.

Baumeister was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on April 7, 1947. His father (who had the same name) was an anesthesiologist. His mother was a homemaker/socialite. Baumeister was the oldest of four children. Baumeister’s troubled youth is briefly mentioned in the documentary. According to several reports, he had an obsession with urine and dead animals. At school, he would urinate on teachers’ desks or put dead animals on teachers’ desks. Since his youth, Baumeister showed signs of urophilia, which is getting sexually aroused by urine.

He was diagnosed with having paranoid schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder, but Baumeister did not receive significant psychiatric treatment until shortly after he married Juliana “Julie” Saiter in November 1971. About six months after the marriage, Baumeister was sent to a psychiatric facility for about two months. That’s the last known time he reportedly received intensive mental health treatment.

Baumeister bounced around from job to job and eventually founded the Sav-A-Lot thrift store chain in Indianapolis in 1988, the same year that he purchased Fox Hollow Farm. Baumeister and his wife had three children. The children’s names will not be mentioned in this review to protect their privacy. No one in Baumeister’s family is interviewed in this documentary. However, it’s widely known public information that Baumeister’s wife is the person who contacted authorities in June 1996, after she and Baumeister had separated, and she had filed for divorce.

In 1994, one of the Baumeister children had actually found a partial human skeleton buried on the property, but Baumeister explained that it was a scientific skeleton that was used by Baumeister’s doctor father. By 1994, authorities had heard rumors that Baumeister was linked to missing gay men in the area, with at least one witness identifying Baumeister as the likely suspect, but the Baumeister spouses refused permission for law enforcement to search their property. However, by June 1996, with Baumeister’s marriage ending, and his estranged wife feeling that she could be in danger, she finally allowed police to search the property.

An extensive search revealed about 10,000 human bones at Fox Hollow Farm. A warrant went out for Baumeister’s arrest, but he escaped to the Canadian province of Ontario. He committed suicide on July 3, 1996, by shooting himself in the head at Pinery Provincial Park in Grand Bend, Ontario. Baumeister left a three-page suicide note with an apology to his family but no admission or information about the missing and murdered men he was suspected of killing.

A shocking statistic mentioned in the documentary is that until the 9/11 tragedy at New York City’s World Trade Center in 2001, the Fox Hollow Farm property held the record for the most bones of murdered people at a single location in the United States. It’s widely believed that the murder victims were killed at Fox Hollow Farm when Baumeister’s wife and children were away. There’s been speculation that Baumeister could have been the unidentified serial killer nicknamed the I-70 Strangler, who murdered numerous gay men (who were usually last seen at gay bars in Indianapolis) and whose bodies were dumped near Interstate 70, from 1980 to 1991. Baumeister was officially named a suspect in those murders.

Jeff Jellison, a coroner for Indiana’s Hamilton County, has been leading the investigation to identify all the people whose bones were found at Fox Hollow Farm. One of the criticisms against law enforcement in this case was how Baumeister was able to get away so easily, when other murder suspects would have been under heavy surveillance before being arrested. Many people believe that Baumeister’s status and image as an upper-middle-class member of the community gave him privileges and lenience that other people wouldn’t have had.

Jellison, who was never responsible for arresting Baumeister, comments on why he thinks Baumeister was never arrested: “Having a serial killer in this county, I think really caught people off guard.” He describes the county as a “bedroom community” that is very Republican, affluent and very conservative, with a low murder rate. (Obviously, the murder rate wasn’t that low if 10,000 bones were found at Fox Hollow Farm.) He says in the 1990s, this part of Indiana was much more conservative than it is now.

The documentary interviews two openly gay men who were part of the gay nightclub scene in Indianapolis in the 1990s. Steve Warman (who was a bartender) and Mark Lee (a photographer) both say that homophobia is why these murder cases were treated as low priorities by local law enforcement. Lee says, “We [gay men] were targeted by the police and everyone in the community. The gay bars were the one place where we felt safe.”

Warman comments that the gay clubs in the area had to be hidden at the time. He adds that when gay men went missing in the area, many people assumed that that it had to do with dying from AIDS. Mary Wilson, a detective with the Indianapolis Police Department, says that many of the missing gay men were estranged from their families, so the men weren’t reported missing for a while. Laura Musall, a former journalist for the Noblesville Daily Ledger in Indiana, says that Hamilton County law enforcment botched the case against Baumeister but commends Hamilton County for reviving the investigation to identify as many of the murder victims as possible.

The documentary admirably gives some loved ones of the victims a chance to talk about their loved ones who had this tragic end. Allen Livingston went missing on August 6, 1993, when he was 27. His remains were found at Fox Hollow Farm, but his remains were not identified until 2023. His mother Sharon Livingston, his sister Sharon Doughty and his cousin Eric Pranger all describe Allen as a people-loving individual who had a “goofy” side to him.

Also interviewed is Debbie Falls, the sister of Richard Hamilton Jr., a Fox Hollow Farm murder victim who disappeared in July 2023, when he was 20. Hamilton’s remains were identified in 1996. She describes him as someone who had a zest for life who was probably lured to his death by someone whom he thought he could trust. Another interviewee is Adam Williams, son of missing person Jerry Williams-Comer, who was 34 when Williams-Comer went missing on August 8, 1995. Police have since linked Baumeister to the disappearance of Williams-Comer, whose remains have not been found or identified.

Dixie Prichard, who used to work at Sav-A-Lot, says that Baumeister was a very weird boss. According to Prichard, Baumeister liked to keep rotting food in a file cabinet. She also remembers that he kept an overabundance of mannequins in his office. When police searched the Baumeister home in 1996, they found several mannequins in the house, with many of the mannequins posed around the swimming pool and in a lounge area with a pool table.

Rob Garvey, the current owner of Fox Hollow who is interviewed in this documentary, is a contradictory and very eccentric person. He seems proud about owning a place where numerous murdered people were buried. He’s written a non-fiction book about it. In the documentary, Garvey shows off much of his collection of Baumeister personal memorabilia and Baumeister scrapbooks in the documentary. And yet, he says it’s tacky when people are obsessed with serial killers and profit off of serial killers.

Garvey says, “I didn’t have any interest in serial killers until I bought a house possibly owned by a serial killer.” Garvey then makes this disgusting “pun” joke: “The house didn’t do anything. It had ‘good bones,’ if you will.” Garvey also says he had a Catholic priest and an Indian shaman bless the house after he purchased Fox Hollow Farm. He also says he believes the ghost of Baumeister haunts the house, but as long as the ghost leaves Garvey and his family alone, Garvey is okay with it.

Even more peculiar is the interview with Goodyear, who is hyper, fidgety and wildly inappropriate in how he often laughs about his role in this case. Goodyear is also seen doing a walkthrough of Fox Hollow, where he says he gets the chills being back there, but he gives the impression that he’s probably enjoying the visit back to Fox Hollow. In parts of the interview, his face is not shown on camera. But at some point, Goodyear changed his mind and agreed to do his first on-camera interview showing his face. Fox Hollow homeowner Garvey greets Goodyear like a family friend.

In June 1996, Goodyear went to local authorities to say that Baumeister tried to kill him shortly after he met Baumeister in 1994, at the 501 Club, a gay bar in Indianapolis. Goodyear also claimed that Baumeister told Goodyear that Baumeister murdered 56 people. The documentary includes some archival video footage of Goodyear’s 1996 interview with police. Goodyear’s stories have changed over the years, but one thing he’s been consistent about is saying that he and Baumeister were on-again/off-again lovers who were part of the gay bar scene in the Indianapolis area.

In his June 1996 witness statement, Goodyear told police that in 1994, Baumeister, whom he knew at the time as Brian, took Goodyear back to Fox Hollow Farm, where they had sex, and Brian tried to get Goodyear to reciprocate the erotic asphyxiation that Brian was doing to Goodyear. Goodyear also claimed that Brian gave him a glass of liquor, but he poured out the contents of the glass because he didn’t trust Brian enough to drink it. Goodyear’s witness statement and other people’s witness statements were enough to name Baumeister as the prime suspect in cases of missing and murdered gay/queer men in the area.

In later years, Goodyear has given interviews where he says he knew Baumeister a lot longer than he originally claimed. The documentary mentions a man named LeRoy Bray, who gave a witness statement to the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office in 1997 about how he was at Fox Hollow Farm for a small party when he witnessed the murder of a man named Rick “Dog” Rigney, who went missing that year. Bray said that he saw Goodyear hold down Rigney, while Baumeister shot Rigney to death. The whereabouts of Bray are currently unknown.

When confronted with this information, Goodyear doesn’t immediately deny it but instead asks if Bray said what year this murder took place. Goodyear denies in this documentary interview and in other interviews that he ever killed anyone or knows anything about what happened to the missing people who were linked to Baumeister, whom Goodyear describes as a cocaine abuser. It’s pointed out in the documentary that Baumeister was not a strong or tall man, and it’s very unlikely that Baumeister would be able to carry and bury all of those bodies by himself. Did he have an accomplice?

The documentary mentions that on July 5, 1996, two days after Baumeister committed suicide, his attorney John Engloff came forward and told an investigator named Todd Urick that in November 1995, Baumeister gave a warning about Goodyear (who is very tall) and said that Goodyear was very dangerous. No further details about Engloff’s statement were given in the documentary. Goodyear has this to say about Baumeister in the documentary interview: “He was trying to take me down with him. But guess what? He’s fucking dead, ain’t he?”

In the documentary interview, Goodyear also says he not only lied to police about Baumeister trying to murder him, but he also lied about the part of the story where he suspected that Baumeister tried to drug Goodyear. In his changed story, Goodyear now says that he was the one who drugged Baumeister. Goodyear also claims that on another occasion, Baumeister showed Goodyear some burning bodies in the backyard of Fox Hollow Farm. Goodyear says that in June 1996, he and Baumeister watched news reports about the search of Fox Hollow Farm.

Goodyear has never been named as a suspect by police and has not been charged with any crimes related to this mystery. In the documentary, Gerlach says that Goodyear once wrote her a letter with this riddle, where he admitted that Baumeister never tried to kill him. In the letter, Goodyear wrote: “I was never attacked. I am not a murderer. Exactly what am I? Tell me what I am. Not an accomplice, not a victim, never attacked. What am I?”

In the documentary, Goodyear says he and Baumeister had a twisted relationship where they stalked each other. Goodyear also claims that on multiple occasions, when he would be at a gay bar with Baumeister, Goodyear would yell out to anyone listening that Baumeister was a serial killer and no one should leave the bar with Baumeister. Goodyear claims that Baumeister’s reaction was to laugh and act like it was a joke. There is no corroboration of this story. Goodyear admits that he lied in the past about certain things about this case, so his credibility is very questionable.

Dr. Chris Schmidt, a forensic anthropologist who is an expert in solving cold cases, says in the documentary that if Baumeister had been such a prolific serial killer, it’s very unlikely that Baumeister acted alone because of the physical strength required to bury all of those bodies. Unless there is DNA evidence or a confession that can be proven, it’s unlikely that these murders will officially be solved. However, investigators are still working on identifying all the people whose bones were found at Fox Hollow Farm.

Other people interviewed in the documentary include people who’ve been directly involved in the investigation, such as Hamilton County coroner Jared Privett; David Allender of the Indianapolis Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit; Kathleen Clark, former Hamilton County deputy prosecutor; Sonia Leerkamp, former Hamilton County prosecutor; and cadaver dog handlers Erica Blackburn and Chelsea Gill. The documentary credits Hamilton County coroner Jellison with being one of the biggest heroes in this mystery, because he has tirelessly kept the investigation going to identify as many of the murder victims as possible.

“The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer” is the type of docuseries that probably should have been three episodes instead of four episodes because there’s some redundancy that could have been cut from the series. The movie’s editing also could have been assembled better, because there’s a lot of back-and-forth timeline jumping in the documentary’s narrative. The killer or killers these murder victims might not be brought to justice. However, this documentary brings more public awareness that the investigation is ongoing, and it’s still possible for loved ones of the missing and murdered people to get more uncovered information about what happened to their loved ones.

Hulu premiered “The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer” on February 18, 2025.