Nearly three decades after thousands of human remains were discovered scattered on the Indiana farm of suspected serial killer Herb Baumeister, another victim’s name has been recovered.
Daniel Thomas Halloran is the tenth person to be identified, Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison confirmed on Tuesday.
Baumeister, regarded as one of America’s most notorious serial killers, is thought to have murdered at least 25 people between the late 1980s and early 1990s, primarily gay men in the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield, Indiana.
He lured the men to Fox Hollow Farm, an 18-acre property where he killed them and disposed of their bodies on the sprawling grounds. Over 10,000 pieces of burnt bone fragments were discovered, but many of their identities have remained unknown for decades.
Othram, Inc., a Texas-based forensic genealogy lab, used “advanced forensic testing” and genetic genealogy to identify Halloran. He was born in 1972, but Jellison did not know when he died.
“This is a significant development in our ongoing efforts to provide answers to the families of those who went missing,” Mr. Jellison said. “We are grateful for the expertise of Othram and the advances in forensic science that made this possible.”
However, Jellison admitted to 13News that Halloran’s identity caught investigators off guard.
“He was an individual that was not on our radar,” Jellison said. “We didn’t know anything about him.”
Halloran admitted that determining his identity was difficult because he did not have living parents or siblings. However, his mother died of an overdose, and the coroner in Indianapolis had a DNA card for her, so they “were able to do the comparison of the DNA from the remains to the mother’s DNA and lock in that identification,” Jellison said.
“We went through most of the investigation without even knowing he had a daughter,” he told me.
Coral Halloran, 32, was only two years old when her father left, so she never met him, she told 13News.
“I feel kind of like I’m mourning,” Coral said. “All my life, I kind of expected my dad to be around and one day hoping he’d come try to find me.”
She added that her mother once hired a private investigator to try to find Halloran, but the family was aware of Baumeister and suspected he was involved.
“It makes me sick and weary to my stomach, having to know my dad was brutally murdered,” she said. “It is hard. And I stand in solidarity with all of the other victims and their families. I am praying hard for them.”
Baumeister was untraced for more than a decade.
However, when his 15-year-old son discovered charred bone fragments and human skulls in 1994, everything came crashing down.
Two years later, police discovered the remains, which included bone fragments, a skull, and teeth, after searching the property while Baumeister was not present and uncovering the remains of several victims, resulting in an arrest warrant for him.
After police identified Baumeister as a suspect in 1996, he fled to Ontario, Canada, where he killed himself. He was never charged with the murders, and he made no admissions in his suicide note.
More remains were discovered later that year, when police returned to the site.
In 2022, Jellison announced his intention to identify all of the remains. He said there could be up to 25 more people from Fox Hollow Farm.
With Halloran’s identification, ten victims have been named, but at least three remain unidentified.
“We now know we have four more people, with Halloran and three unidentified DNA profiles,” Jellison told the crowd.
“That has all come about in a two-to-three-month time period.”
Jeffrey Allen “Jeff” Jones, Allen Lee Livingston, Manuel Resendez, John Lee “Johnny” Bayer, Richard Douglas Hamilton Jr., Steven Spurlin Hale, Allen Wayne Broussard, Roger Allen Goodlet, and Michael Frederick “Mike” Keirn are the other nine victims identified so far.
Jellison encourages any family member of someone who went missing in the 1980s or 1990s to come forward and provide their DNA for genetic testing.
