Robert "Rex" Baumgartner

1939 - 2025

News story
By Mike Sigov
Blade staff writer

Robert "Rex" Baumgartner, an accomplished Toledo police detective sergeant who in retirement was an investigator with the Lucas County prosecutor's senior-protection unit, died Sept. 21 at ProMedica Flower Hospital. He was 86.

He died after suffering congestive heart failure following a bout with what appeared to be a pulmonary disease, his daughter, Debbie Katich, said.

"He was always a hard worker, and he took it upon himself to make sure that the younger officers learned how to do things the right way, always there to answer questions," said Lucas County Sheriff Mike Navarre, formerly the Toledo police chief and the Oregon police chief.

A longtime detective sergeant, Mr. Baumgartner retired from the Toledo Police Department in 2008 after 43 years, at least 40 of which were with the burglary unit. Prior to that, he was a patrolman for a couple of years after joining the department in 1964.

In retirement, he investigated crimes against elderly persons.

Part of Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates' senior protection unit, he did it for about 15 years until retiring permanently in 2022 at age 83.

"He was just a tremendous, tremendous asset to my office," Ms. Bates said. "He saved so many people from fraud and abuse."

While with the prosecutor's office, he handled over 800 cases, he wrote in his own obituary.

"He was just an amazing man, an extraordinary man, patient and kind, but wise and compassionate, and he just had a way with these elderly people," Ms. Bates said. "He would tell them, 'This is how you need to deal with this, this is what we need to do.'"

As a sergeant with the burglary unit, he helped recover millions of dollars of stolen goods, supervised sting operations that brought hundreds of thieves and drug dealers to justice, and nearly cracked a murder case that had baffled detectives for decades.

Some of those sting operations were conducted jointly with the FBI.

Mr. Baumgartner was the mastermind behind all the sting operations TPD conducted, Sheriff Navarre said.

"He was the leader," he said. "He was the one that was the command officer in charge of those operations. And there were a lot of them."

Sheriff Navarre said those were all risky undercover operations, in which he often worked with young officers who went on to be leaders after Mr. Baumgartner left.

At the time he retired from the police department at age 68, Mr. Baumgartner said he felt most proud of passing his knowledge to the detectives who worked with him through the years.

A special exemption allowed him to keep working until the age of 68 after he had passed the union-mandated retirement age of 65. He said he would have rather stayed with the department even longer but was ordered to retire by September.

"It's hard, because I still enjoy the job," he said at the time. "If I was behind a desk, I'd have been gone a long time ago."

From 1978 to 1993, he led a sting operation in which Toledo police officers opened stores offering to purchase stolen goods. Officers would build business relationships with thieves, use them to find other people selling stolen goods, and ultimately bust all the thieves at once.

Mr. Baumgartner told The Blade in 2008 that he got great satisfaction from helping recover stolen property. Toledo police recovered $14 million in stolen property during the 15-year operation.

In the mid-1980s, he headed a drug sting in Toledo-area high schools. Police sent officers into Waite High School, Central Catholic High School, St. Francis de Sales School, and others to investigate the distribution of drugs within the schools.

Officers caught more than 150 drug dealers and distributors in that sting.

Around 1987, he started investigating the 1963 murders of 17-year-old Mary Caldwell and 19-year-old Edward Mitchell, who had been found in a burned-out car in Springfield Township.

Mr. Baumgartner told The Blade that the crime had fascinated him when he first joined the police in 1964, but it had never been solved. A man whom he met during a sting operation led him to the killers, but the key witness in the case killed his wife and then himself before being brought to Toledo for testimony.

Ms. Katich said her father was a very conscientious man.

"My dad's biggest thing, his biggest concern was whether his life made a difference," she said. "He wanted to make sure that his life made a difference."

Born July 27, 1939, in East Toledo to Betty and Robert Baumgartner, he graduated from Waite High School in 1957 and shortly thereafter joined the Air Force.

While serving four years with the Air Force, he was at different times an air police officer and a sentry dog handler in Kansas, Alaska, Africa, and Spain before getting honorably discharged from service.

Upon his return to the Toledo area in the early 1960s, he was a manager at the former Don's Drive-In restaurant in Sylvania for a time before joining the police department.

While working at the restaurant, he met the former Linda Rathbun. They married on his birthday in 1963. They raised four children together. She survives.

In his free time, he coached youth sports and attended his children's and then his grandchildren's sporting and social events.

Mr. Baumgartner also enjoyed traveling and camping, especially on Halloween weekends.

He was a member of Memorial United Church of Christ.

Along with his wife of 62 years, Linda Baumgartner, surviving are his son, Robert Baumgartner; daughters Debbie Katich, Patti Baumgartner-Novak, and Julie Haskin; brother Jim Baumgartner; sisters Betsy Sendi, Charmaine Vargo, and Janice Knittel; 13 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

Visitation will be from noon to 6 p.m. Sunday at Eggleston Meinert and Pavley Funeral Home, 440 S. Coy Rd., Oregon, where a celebration of life ceremony will begin at 11 a.m. Monday.

The family suggests tributes to the Robert Baumgartner Legacy of Criminal Justice Fund, a scholarship program with Washington Local Schools for students pursuing careers in criminal justice.