Seven Skeletons, and a Suburb in Shock

Fox Hollow Farm is a million-dollar estate in this exclusive Indianapolis bedroom community, a peaceful place where the sun sets over rolling green hills.

But last summer the police found hundreds of human bones on the estate, the remains of seven people. That discovery has roiled the gay community of Indianapolis and shocked residents of the expensive neighborhood, where Herbert R. Baumeister lived on the estate with his wife and three children.

Four of the seven sets of bones that have been found are those of young men who disappeared after frequenting gay bars in Indianapolis, and Sheriff L. Joe Cook of Hamilton County said investigators had found that Mr. Baumeister had visited some of the same gay bars when his wife was out of town.

Nine days after the human remains were found on the 18-acre estate, Mr. Baumeister, 49, killed himself in a swampy park in Ontario. He left no word in his suicide note about whether he was responsible, said Sgt. Kenneth C. Whisman, the sheriff's lead investigator.

The grisly discoveries here have so far revealed few clues to what happened in an area considered so safe that children leave their bicycles unlocked even outside the county jailhouse. Investigators have turned up no living witnesses to the deaths, and even among the bones they have found few clues to how or when the victims died.

''This is the golden ghetto,'' said William E. Wendling Jr., the lawyer for Mr. Baumeister's widow, Juliana F. Baumeister, who was suing her husband for divorce at the time the remains were discovered. ''It is not supposed to happen up in this neck of the woods.''

The sheriff's office has no suspects in the deaths of the seven whose bones were found here. But Sgt. Whisman said that Mr. Baumeister, who with his wife owned two thrift stores, was the prime suspect in the disappearances of the young men, some of whom had been missing for more than three years. The bones appear to represent one of the most gruesome acts of serial murder that Indiana has ever seen.

The discovery of the bones was particularly shocking because the Baumeister family was well known and lived in such a wealthy neighborhood, and because Mr. Baumeister apparently kept his secret forays into the gay community separate from his family life. Through her lawyer, Mrs. Baumeister declined to comment. She and her children have moved and are trying to sell Fox Hollow Farm, which now stands vacant, its wooden gates chained shut.

The discoveries have shocked the close-knit gay community in nearby Indianapolis. ''The community is now suddenly waking up to the fact that this can happen in Indianapolis,'' said Ted B. Fleischaker, publisher of The Word, an Indianapolis-based newspaper that caters to gay readers across the state as well as in Kentucky and Ohio.

Although only four of the seven sets of bones found have been identified, Mr. Fleischaker and many of his friends believe that the remaining three are those of other gay men who have disappeared from gay bars in Indianapolis in the last three years. Sgt. Whisman said three of the men whose bones had been identified had been arrested on charges of male prostitution.

Many gay men like Mr. Fleischaker are frustrated because when the men began disappearing, they and the Indianapolis police put the word on the street quickly. Mr. Fleischaker's newspaper published articles about the disappearances and about the imminent danger of going home with strangers in Indianapolis. Gay bars there posted fliers about the missing men.

As a result, many gay people in Indianapolis have mixed feelings about the discoveries. ''One set of the community is saying, 'See, they got what they had coming,' and the other is saying, 'but for the grace of God go I,' '' Mr. Fleischaker said.

Although the men began disappearing three years ago, sheriff's department officials did not find any bones until last summer. Their search began in late June after Mrs. Baumeister asked her divorce lawyer to get in touch with the sheriff's office. She learned during the divorce proceedings that the Indianapolis police suspected her husband in the disappearances of several gay men, Mr. Wendling said. Mr. Baumeister had refused to cooperate with earlier police requests to search the property, Sheriff Cook and Mr. Wendling said.

Mrs. Baumeister told investigators in June about a skeleton their teen-age son had found on the property more than a year before, Mr. Wendling said. She had grown suspicious of her husband's claim at the time that the skeleton was that of a cadaver used for practice by Mr. Baumeister's father, an anesthesiologist, Mr. Wendling said.

After hearing the tale, the police searched the grounds. The first bone they found turned out to be a wrist, Sheriff Cook said. Then, combing through the underbrush, officers discovered jawbones, thighbones, fingers, ribs and some vertebrae. ''There were enough bones to come up with seven bodies,'' he said. One of his officers stumbled over a foot while searching the grounds.

The bones and bone fragments were found scattered across two sites in dense woods near the house. None had flesh attached, apparently because the bones had been picked clean over time by animals or by the elements, Sheriff Cook said. Some had also been partly burned, Mr. Wendling said.

The bones do not bear signs of how the victims died. ''There were no obvious bullet holes or anything like that,'' Sgt. Whisman said.

Indiana lacks explicit civil rights protections for homosexuals, Mr. Fleischaker said. He said that if the state kept better records of hate crimes committed against gay people, the police would have had a better chance of quickly solving the disappearances, perhaps saving the lives of men in Indianapolis.

''If somebody sets fire or desecrates a synagogue in Lafayette and the same thing happens in Terre Haute, that's going to be tied together,'' said Mr. Fleischaker, who is Jewish. ''You can have a dozen homosexuals vanish in Indiana before somebody wakes up.''

The Hamilton County Sheriff's Office is frustrated, too. So far, officers there have filled three maroon binders, each four inches thick, with notes from their investigation. ''I think about this thing 24 hours a day, seven days a week,'' said Sgt. Whisman, the lead investigator.

''I am very optimistic that I am going to find a solution,'' he said. ''It is just frustrating.''