Coroner Accuses Fox Hollow Farm Suspect of Lying About Bones

Nearly thirty years have passed since thousands of human bones were pulled from the ground at Fox Hollow Farm. This sprawling estate belonged to Herb Baumeister, a man suspected of being a serial killer. Now, fresh questions are swirling about what actually happened there. The coroner leading this new probe says someone important has not been fully honest with investigators.

Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison spoke directly to Fox News Digital about the issue. He mentioned speaking with Mark Goodyear several times already. "The first question I would ask him is, 'Are you ready to be honest with me?'" Jellison stated. "Because in the conversations we've had, he's not been honest."

Jellison explained his frustration clearly. "I've asked him questions that I knew the answer to, and he didn't pass that test." He insisted on truthfulness moving forward. "So for me to sit down with Mark Goodyear, he's going to have to be willing to be honest in this conversation. I don't have time to sit down with somebody that tells lies, untruths."

Jellison appears in a new ABC News Studios documentary titled "Return to Fox Hollow: New Victims, Darker Secrets." The film explores theories about accomplices and overlooked evidence. It also looks at witness accounts from the case of Baumeister. Authorities believe he murdered numerous men in Indiana. This project follows up on the 2025 docuseries called "The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer."

Jellison wants to know if Goodyear holds information that could help identify remaining victims. He also needs clues about how those people died. "If we move forward in that conversation, certainly I want to know any information I can gather to help identify these remains," Jellison said. "Were you familiar with anybody? Things that would focus more around identification and how these people died."

Goodyear has never faced charges related to the case. He repeatedly denied any involvement in the disappearances. "Mark Goodyear knows a lot about this case," Jellison noted. The coroner added that Goodyear knew many people through gay nightclubs. This knowledge could help investigators sort through the remains.

Goodyear participated in the first documentary series. There, he described himself as Baumeister's only known survivor. The film detailed how investigators thought Baumeister filmed his victims with a secret camera hidden in an air vent in his basement. Goodyear said he was forced to watch some of those tapes back in 1994. He claimed the video was so "bad" it made him scream.

"It was like having a camera right up against something," Goodyear told the film crew. "You're not going to be able to tell what's going on, but the minute you got a flash of what was going on, it made you scream." The previous documentary examined how Goodyear's story has changed over the years. At that time, Jellison told Fox News Digital it was unlikely those tapes would ever be recovered if they exist at all.

Fox News Digital reached out to Goodyear for comment but received no response. The film reports that Goodyear initially agreed to another interview for the follow-up documentary but did not show up for the scheduled meeting.

About 10,000 burned and broken human bones were recovered from the 18-acre estate. This land once belonged to Baumeister. Before investigators could arrest him in 1996, Baumeister was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Ontario, Canada. The mystery remains deep despite these grim facts.

The victim was 49 years old. Investigators believe Baumeister hung around gay bars in Indianapolis, tricked men into coming to his home while his family was out of town, then killed them on site and dumped their remains across the property. His son found a human skull in the woods at Fox Hollow Farm back in 1994, yet reports say authorities did not search the land until June 1996.

Goodyear told police he first met Baumeister at an Indianapolis gay bar in 1994. The man introduced himself as "Brian." Goodyear later explained to investigators that he went home with Baumeister and described what he said was a disturbing sexual encounter. That account eventually pushed the investigation forward. After meeting Baumeister again the next year, Goodyear helped officials get information that led them to identify the killer.

While Jellison has questioned Goodyear's story, he made it clear in the documentary that Goodyear was not a suspect. "There are very strong indications there is another suspect, and it wasn't Mark Goodyear," Jellison said in the film. More than 9,000 bones and bone fragments remain to be examined, according to WRTV. Investigators think at least 25 people died under Baumeister's hand.

The sheer number of remains and where they were found has raised another question for Jellison: could one man have done all this alone? "I was always convinced that there was more than one," Jellison said. "There were a lot of people that lost their lives in this incident, and just the placement of the evidence alone." He asked how one person moves deceased bodies from his residence to potentially 200 yards through very dense woods. He thinks it would have been a very difficult task for a single man.

Jellison is determined to put names to the unidentified victims. He suspects some families may still not know that a loved one vanished or that their remains ended up at Fox Hollow Farm. Some of these folks did not have close family connections, and they were somewhat marginalized. So there may be families out there not even knowing that their loved one went missing, much less consider that person was a victim at Fox Hollow.

Thirty years have passed since these remains have been recovered. So potentially, mom and dad could be deceased now, and maybe they had no brother or sister. We are reaching out further down the lineage to cousins. And a cousin may not even know that they had a family member that even went missing. Jellison said identifying the Fox Hollow victims presents a unique challenge.

He contrasted this case with the recovery effort at the World Trade Center, where records and missing-person reports gave investigators a clearer idea of who they were looking for. At Fox Hollow, investigators started with remains but few clues about their identities. "I really believe that this investigation is more complicated in some ways than the World Trade Center," he said. "With Fox Hollow, we've recovered these remains, but we have no idea who it is that we're looking for."

Jellison is urging anyone who believes a missing loved one could be connected to the case to contact his office. After the original documentary aired, his office received approximately 500 emails, phone calls, text messages and social media messages. "Come forward," he said. "If you don't know what to do or you don't know who to call, call me. I'll get you going in the right direction.