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Nearly three decades after thousands of pieces of human remains were found scattered at the Indiana farm of suspected serial killer Herb Baumeister, another victim has his name back.
Daniel Thomas Halloran is the 10th person to be identified, Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison announced on Tuesday.
Baumeister, who is considered one of America’s most notorious serial killers, is believed to have killed at least 25 people between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, hunting mostly gay men in the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield, Indiana.
He lured the men to the 18-acre property known as Fox Hollow Farm, where he killed them and disposed of their remains on the vast grounds. More than 10,000 pieces of burnt bone fragments were recovered, but the identities of many of them have remained a mystery for decades.
Halloran was identified through “advanced forensic testing” and genetic genealogy conducted by Othram, Inc., a forensic genealogy lab in Texas. He was born in 1972, but his date of death is unknown, Jellison said.
“This is a significant development in our ongoing efforts to provide answers to the families of those who went missing,” Jellison said. “We are grateful for the expertise of Othram and the advances in forensic science that made this possible.”
But Jellison admitted to 13News that Halloran’s identity was a shock to investigators.
“He was an individual that was not on our radar,” Jellison said. “We didn't know anything about him.”
Nailing down his identity was complicated, he said, as Halloran had no living parents or siblings. But his mother had died of an overdose and the coroner in Indianapolis had a DNA card for her, which 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 added.
Coral Halloran, 32, was just two years told when her father left, so she never knew 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 even hired a private investigator at one point to try and find Halloran, but the family knew about Baumeister and suspected he may have been responsible.
“It makes me sick and weary to my stomach, having to know my dad was brutally murdered,” Coral said. “It's hard. And for all the other victims out there, their families, I'm with them. I'm praying hard for them.”
Baumeister went untraced for more than a decade.
But when his 15-year-old son discovered some charred bone fragments and the human skulls in 1994, it all came crashing down.
Police found the remains, including bone fragments, a skull and teeth two years later after authorities searched the property while Baumeister wasn’t home, and dug up the remains of several victims, leading to a warrant for his arrest.
After police named Baumeister as a suspect in 1996, he fled to Ontario, Canada, where he fatally shot himself. He was never charged with the murders and he did not admit to any of the crimes in his suicide note.
More remains were discovered later the same year when police returned to the property.
In 2022, Jellison announced his intention to identify all the remains. He said there could be as many as 25 additional people from Fox Hollow Farm.
Now, with the identification of Halloran, 10 victims have been named, but at least three still remain a mystery.
“We now know we have four more people, with Halloran and three unidentified DNA profiles,” Jellison said.
“That has all come about in a two-to-three-month time period.”
The other nine victims who have been identified are 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.
Jellison encourages any family member of a person that went missing in the 1980s or 1990s to come forward and submit their DNA for genetic testing.
English (US) ·