For nearly three decades, the murders at Fox Hollow Farm in Westfield, Indiana, have been treated as the work of one man. A new documentary is challenging that assumption, and naming, for the first time, a second figure whose presence in police files predates the discovery of a single bone.

The documentary, Return to Fox Hollow: New Victims, Darker Secrets, set to begin streaming on Hulu July 8, publicly identifies a local man named Thomas Ackerman as a potential accomplice of serial killer Herb Baumeister. Ackerman died in 2024. He was never charged with any crime connected to the case.

The revelation raises a question that Hamilton County authorities apparently stopped asking in 1998: Did Baumeister act alone? The police files suggest the answer was never as simple as investigators made it seem, and the decision to close the case left thousands of human remains unidentified for more than a quarter century.

A name buried in the files

Former journalist Laura Musall, who in 1996 was the first reporter to write about the Baumeister case for the Noblesville Daily Ledger, uncovered Ackerman's name while reviewing police records and investigative documents. As the Daily Mail reported, Musall found Ackerman's name appearing repeatedly throughout the files, dating back years before any remains were found.

"As I was combing through them, I kept seeing the name Thomas Ackerman. And I had never heard that name before."

Musall said she was taken aback. She had covered the case from its earliest days and thought she knew the central figures. She didn't.

"There is more stuff on Thomas Ackerman than there is on Herb Baumeister."

The timeline makes the discovery more striking. Musall noted that files referencing Ackerman go back to the summer of 1993, three full years before investigators focused on Baumeister or found any victims' remains at the property. No body turned up until 1996. Yet Ackerman's name was already threaded through the records.

What specific crimes or connections those files document remains unclear. The documentary apparently presents further details about Ackerman's ties to the case, but the nature of the police records has not been publicly described beyond Musall's account.

The scope of the horror at Fox Hollow Farm

Herb Baumeister was a 49-year-old thrift store owner who lived with his wife and three children on an 18-acre estate valued at roughly $1 million in Westfield, a wealthy community in Hamilton County. Behind that domestic front, he lured men from gay bars in downtown Indianapolis to the property, murdered them, and scattered their remains across the grounds.

When investigators finally searched Fox Hollow Farm in 1996, they recovered approximately 10,000 pieces of human bone. An estimated 25 victims are believed to have been killed there. Eight were identified that year: Johnny Bayer, Jeff Jones, Richard Hamilton Jr., Steven Hale, Allen Broussard, Roger Goodlet, Mike Keirn, and Manuel Resendez.

The disappearances had not gone unnoticed. In the early 1990s, the LGBT community in downtown Indianapolis began raising alarms as young men, gay or bisexual, roughly 18 to 35 years old, vanished after being seen at local bars. At least 10 went missing between the summers of 1993 and 1994 alone. The pattern of serial killings with multiple victims discovered over time has become grimly familiar in American criminal history, but the Fox Hollow Farm case stands apart for what happened after the bodies were found.

Baumeister fled to Canada and died by suspected suicide in 1996. Two years later, Hamilton County law enforcement shuttered the investigation entirely. They stopped working to identify additional victims. They stopped looking for other suspects or accomplices.

Thousands of unidentified remains were placed at the University of Indianapolis, where they sat on a shelf for 26 years.

The coroner who reopened the case

Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison launched a new investigation into the remains in 2022. He has previously described the effort as the largest investigation into unidentified human remains in U.S. history, second only to the World Trade Center.

Since Jellison began his work, two additional victims have been identified: Allen Livingston and Daniel Halloran. That brings the total number of named victims to 10, out of an estimated 25.

Eric Pranger, cousin of victim Allen Livingston, has been vocal about his belief that Baumeister did not act alone. The discovery of remains at a property where accomplice involvement is suspected is not unique to this case, but the scale at Fox Hollow Farm dwarfs most comparable investigations.

"I don't think Baumeister did this alone. I think more people were involved. I believe it's a whole group of men."

That belief did not come from nowhere. It grew from the contradictions surrounding another figure in the case, one who has been drawing suspicion for years.

Mark Goodyear's shifting story

Mark Goodyear has long claimed to be the sole survivor of Herb Baumeister. In 1994, he went to police saying he had been attacked by Baumeister at Fox Hollow Farm and managed to escape. That tip ultimately led investigators to the property and the remains.

But Goodyear's account has changed multiple times over the years. In an Emmy-nominated four-part series, The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer, which aired on ABC, Goodyear gave his first on-camera interview, and admitted he had lied.

He acknowledged he was "never attacked" by Baumeister. Instead, he claimed he had actually drugged the serial killer. He said the two met not just once but "countless times over the next two years right up until Baumeister's suicide." He claimed Baumeister confessed to him to killing 56 victims. He claimed Baumeister showed him a burning pile of bodies in the backyard of the estate. He even claimed he was present at Fox Hollow Farm when authorities arrived.

He did not explain why he lied for years about his relationship with Baumeister.

Retired Boulder County Sheriff's Office Detective Steve Ainsworth, a cold case investigator who did not work the Fox Hollow Farm case, raised pointed doubts about Goodyear in the prior series.

"He gives knowledge that he shouldn't have had, unless he was there."

Pranger was blunter, describing Goodyear as "a really sketchy guy" and adding: "I think he knows more than what he told police back then."

There is also the account of LeRoy Bray, now deceased. In 1997, Bray told police he had been at Fox Hollow Farm with Goodyear, Baumeister, and other men. He claimed he witnessed Baumeister shooting a man dead while Goodyear held the victim. Goodyear denied it, saying he had "certainly never witnessed anything like that." He described Bray as "attention seeking" and said Bray struggled with "mental capacity."

And then there is the account from Baumeister's own lawyer. Days after Baumeister's suicide, the attorney told investigators that Baumeister had confided in him, roughly a year earlier, that he had gotten involved with a "really bad dude" called Mark Goodyear.

Despite all of this, Goodyear has never been charged with any crime connected to the Baumeister case. It was claimed in the prior documentary that Goodyear was at one point a suspect in the murders, but that has not been publicly confirmed by law enforcement.

An investigation that closed too soon

The decision to shutter the Fox Hollow Farm investigation in 1998 looks worse with every passing year. Police stopped trying to identify victims. They stopped pursuing the possibility that Baumeister had help. They left approximately 10,000 bone fragments in storage at a university and moved on.

It took until 2022, and the initiative of a county coroner, not a police department, to reopen the case. Even now, 15 of the estimated 25 victims remain unidentified. The families of those men have waited nearly 30 years without answers. Cases involving human remains found during missing persons investigations often hinge on whether authorities commit the resources to follow through. In Hamilton County, they didn't.

Now a documentary is doing what law enforcement chose not to do, combing through the old files, naming names, and asking whether the official story ever held up.

Thomas Ackerman's name sat in police records for more than 30 years. Musall found it. She was shocked. The public should be asking why it took a former journalist reviewing old files, not a detective, to surface a name that appeared in those records before a single victim was ever found.

The discovery of human remains in unexpected places often forces a reckoning with institutional failures, failures to investigate, failures to follow leads, failures to take missing persons reports seriously when the victims belong to marginalized communities.

What remains unanswered

The documentary may shed light on some of these questions when it streams July 8. But significant gaps remain. No one has publicly explained what specific connections to Fox Hollow Farm the Ackerman files document. No one has said whether Ackerman ever spoke to investigators or denied involvement. And no charges have ever been filed against any accomplice in the case, not Ackerman, not Goodyear, not anyone.

Baumeister is dead. Ackerman is dead. Bray is dead. Goodyear's story has changed repeatedly, and he has admitted to lying about the central facts of his involvement. At least 15 victims remain unnamed. The question of whether multiple individuals bore responsibility for violent deaths is one that law enforcement is supposed to answer, not filmmakers.

Hamilton County closed this case a generation ago. The files they left behind tell a different story than the one they settled on. That should trouble anyone who believes the justice system owes its greatest debt not to convenience, but to the dead.