Nigel Cawthorne - The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

On 31 October—Halloween—the body of a woman, naked except for a pair of orange socks, was found near Georgetown in a culvert under the I–35. She had been strangled and has never been identified. Henry Lee Lucas confessed to her murder but work records and a cheque he cashed indicated that Lucas was somewhere else and Texas Attorney General Dan Morales concluded that it was “highly unlikely” that Lucas was guilty in the “orange socks” case.

On 23 June 1980, the body of Rodney Massey was found in a field near Temple, Texas, 60 miles north of Austin. He had been shot four times. Then on 9 July, the body of an unidentified Hispanic woman was discovered near Pflugerville, 13 miles north of Austin. Although her pants had been pulled down, there was no evidence of sexual assault. She had been stabbed 27 times with a screwdriver. In May 1981, the body of another unidentified female was found near New Braunfels, 25 miles outside San Antonio. She had been shot in the head six times with a .25-caliber pistol.

It was now clear that a serial killer was at work and the authorities involved met in Austin on 30 October 1981. They decided to pool their resources but even there they could come up with no solid suspects.

In 1983, the prolific serial killers Henry Lucas and Ottis Toole confessed to most of the I–35 murders and Lucas was convicted and sentenced to death in the “orange socks” case. But it was later demonstrated that Lucas was working as a roofer in Florida in October 1979. Work records and cheque-cashing evidence show that he could not have done it. Subsequently it has been shown that Lucas and Toole were not guilty in many of the 350 murders they confessed to. It seems that the police were merely trying to clear their books of troublesome cases. The “orange socks” case and the other I–35 returned to the “unsolved” list. Many believe that the I–35 killer is still at large.

The I–70 has been the killing ground of so many serial killers that it has become known as “America’s Sewer Pipe”. One killer who used the stretch between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio in the 1980s and has never been caught became known simply as the “I–70 Killer”. The killer dumped the bodies of nine gay men within a few miles of the highway. No suspect has ever been apprehended, despite the widespread publicity the murders have generated, including their being featured several times on the television show America’s Most Wanted .

In October 1998, authorities announced that they strongly suspected that Indianapolis businessman and serial killer Herb Baumeister could have been the I–70 Killer. Baumeister was a closet homosexual. A married man with three children, he secretly frequented gay bars in Indianapolis. In the summer, when his wife and kids were away at his mother’s lakeside condominium, he took young men back for a “cocktail and a swim” to their $1-million Westfield estate, known as Fox Hollow Farm.

In May 1993 gay men began disappearing in Indianapolis. Ten went missing over two years, but the killer left no clues. Then in the autumn of 1994, a man told the police that he had been picked up by a man who called himself Brian Smart. They had gone to Smart’s sprawling estate and engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation. Smart was a devotee and admitted that, sometimes, there had been accidents. A year later the man spotted Brian again and, aware of the disappearances, took down his licence-plate number. The car belonged to Baumeister.

Although the police lacked the necessary evidence to obtain a search warrant, in November 1994, they turned up at Fox Hollow Farm and ask for permission to search the grounds. When Baumeister refused, they petitioned his wife Julie. They told her that her husband cruised gay bars and that they suspected him of being a serial killer. He was a devoted husband of 20 years standing and she refused to believe them.

“The police came to me and said, ‘We are investigating your husband in relation to homosexual homicide,’” she recalled. “I remember saying to them, ‘Can you tell me what homosexual homicide is?’”

It was only when their 13-year-old son found parts of a skeleton in the woods that she gave her permission. Then, when her husband was away in June 1996, the police began their search. The remains of seven men were found. They had been strangled. All the victims used the same bars that Baumeister did and disappeared at times when his wife and kids were away. Meanwhile, 49-year-old Baumeister disappeared. On 3 July 1996, campers discovered his body lying beside his car in Ontario’s Pinery Provincial Park. He had a bullet hole in his forehead and a .357 Magnum in his hand.

An FBI profiler said that Baumeister’s cavalier manner of openly dumping his victims’ corpses in his back yard indicated that he had killed many times before. Baumeister insinuated to a potential victim that he had killed 50 to 60 people. He was known to have travelled on the I–70 from Indiana to Ohio around the time of the highway killings, which stopped in 1990, around the time that Baumeister bought Fox Hollow Farm.

In 1998, investigators concluded that Baumeister probably killed 16 men in all after linking him to nine other men whose bodies were found dumped along rural roads in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1990. Baumeister’s wife provided credit card receipts, phone call records, and even gave the police the use of the car that her husband had used on those business trips.

Baumeister’s photo matched the police sketch drawn from descriptions provided by witnesses who thought they had seen the I–70 Killer. One eyewitness identified Baumeister’s picture as the same man who had given his friend Michael Riley a lift home from a bar one evening in 1988. Riley was found dead the next morning.

“We’ll never know for sure, of course, if he was indeed the same man,” said Virgil Vandagriff, a private investigator employed to look into the disappearance of some of the missing men. “Everything points to him—even the fact that the roadside killings ended at the same time he bought his house and now had a place with plenty of room to dump his bodies with a lot less hassle.”

However, Vandagriff complained that, as a private detective, he did not always have the freedom or the money to follow his suspicions to the limit.

“I would have taken the Baumeister case a lot further than I feel the police did,” he said. “While there were many fine moments in the investigation… I think there were certain loose ends that should have been tied up.”

For example, while Baumeister was active in Fox Hollow Farm, his older brother in Texas was found dead in his pool.

However the killings along I–70 did not stop with the death of Baumeister. On 4 May 2006, the body of 24-year-old Dusty Shuck was found by a motorist on I–70 near a truck stop in Frederick County, Maryland. Last seen in New Mexico on 24 April, she had died from a combination of blunt force trauma to the head and a slit throat. Her head was wrapped in blood-soaked cloth and, although fully dressed, she had no shoes.

During a 29-day killing spree running from 8 April to 7 May 1992, a man in his mid-to-late-twenties or early thirties killed five women and one man along the I–70, which runs from Utah to St Louis, and I–35 which branches off at Kansas City and heads south through Wichita, Oklahoma City and Dallas to Laredo on the Mexican border. The victims were shop assistants in stores within two miles of the two Interstates. The one male victim had long hair and an earring and the authorities believe that the killer mistook him for a woman. The killer also robbed his victims, but seemingly as an afterthought.