The Bear Brook Murders

Who Was Involved

For most of the years that this case existed, the people at its center had no names at all. They were known by the language of forensics and case files: an adult woman, and three young girls, found in barrels in the woods of Allenstown, New Hampshire. Investigators sometimes called them the Allenstown Four. The work of the next four decades was, in the simplest terms, an effort to give those four people their names back.

Three of them, we now know, were a mother and her two daughters. Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch was a young woman last seen in southern California in the autumn of 1978. With her were her daughters, Marie Elizabeth Vaughn and Sarah Lynn McWaters. The fourth victim, a small child of roughly three, was the last to be identified, in 2025, as Rea Rasmussen.

The people who eventually named them were a mix of the official and the unofficial: New Hampshire State Police investigators and the state’s cold case unit, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the volunteer-driven DNA Doe Project, the pioneering forensic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter, and a Connecticut woman named Becky Heath who searched the case in her own time for years. The man responsible for all four deaths lived for decades behind a string of borrowed names. He was eventually identified as Terry Peder Rasmussen, best known by one of his many aliases, “Bob Evans.”

What Happened

On November 10, 1985, a hunter walking through Bear Brook State Park, near the site of a long-abandoned store, found a fifty-five-gallon metal drum. Inside were the remains of an adult woman and a young girl. Both had died of blunt-force trauma. Their identities were unknown, and decades of conventional investigation would fail to establish them.

Then, in May 2000, investigators returning to the same wooded area made a second discovery only a short distance from the first: another barrel, this one holding the remains of two more young girls. Authorities came to believe all four had been killed at roughly the same time, sometime around 1977 to 1981, which made the gap in the discoveries all the more haunting. The second barrel had been there, unseen, the entire time.

Out of respect for the victims, the specifics of how they died are not dwelt on here. What matters is the human shape of the loss: a mother and her children, and a fourth small child, taken and then hidden so thoroughly that for years no one could even say who was missing.

The Investigation

The early years of the case were defined by what investigators did not have. There were no missing-persons reports that cleanly matched the remains, no names, and no national database capable of connecting a body in New Hampshire to a family searching elsewhere. The victims were studied, reconstructed, and re-examined, but the fundamental question stayed unanswered for decade after decade.

A turning point came not from the victims at first, but from the man connected to them. By 2017, investigators using early genetic methods linked one of the children to a career criminal who had lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the late 1970s under the name Bob Evans. Later that year, Y-DNA testing, drawing on a sample from one of his children from an earlier marriage, established that “Bob Evans” was in fact Terry Peder Rasmussen.

Rasmussen had moved through life under a series of identities. Using one of them, he was convicted in California in connection with the 2002 murder of a woman named Eunsoon Jun. He was sentenced to fifteen years to life and died in prison in 2010, years before his true name, or his full history, was publicly known. Identifying the suspect, however, still did not identify his victims. That breakthrough came from a different direction entirely.

The Breakthrough

In the autumn of 2018, two people arrived at the answer almost simultaneously, working separately. One was Becky Heath, a private citizen who had followed the case for years through online missing-persons research. After listening to a podcast about Bear Brook, she reconnected with relatives who recalled that a woman named Honeychurch had once left with a man named Rasmussen and never returned. Heath submitted her findings to investigators in October 2018.

At nearly the same moment, forensic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter was reaching the same names through genetic genealogy. The technique works by comparing a victim’s DNA profile against the profiles people upload to genealogy databases, then building family trees outward from those matches until they converge on a single identity. The Bear Brook remains posed an unusual obstacle, because investigators had only degraded material to work with. A laboratory developed a method to reassemble usable DNA from that difficult material, which made the genealogical matching possible. State Police confirmed the work over the following months. In June 2019, New Hampshire officials announced that the woman and one girl from the 1985 barrel, and one of the girls from the 2000 barrel, were Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn, and Sarah McWaters.

One victim remained. She was the only one of the four biologically related to Rasmussen, and the hardest to trace because so little record of her existed. Beginning in 2024, the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit partnered with the DNA Doe Project to try again. Volunteers built a family tree of roughly twenty-five thousand people. As DNA Doe Project researcher Matthew Waterfield put it, to find the child they first had to find her mother. After many months, a key DNA match in 2025 led them to a woman named Pepper Reed, and then to a 1976 birth record. Final confirmation came that September. The child was Rea Rasmussen.

Where the Case Stands Today

All four victims now have their names. With Rea Rasmussen’s identification, the question that had defined the case since 1985 was, at last, answered. Because the man responsible died in 2010, there will be no trial, and the legal accountability that families often seek is no longer possible. What remained achievable was identification, and that has now been completed.

The resolution opened a new line of inquiry rather than closing the matter entirely. Rea’s mother, Pepper Reed, has not been seen since the late 1970s, and authorities consider her disappearance an active investigation, with the strong concern that she too was one of Rasmussen’s victims. Investigators have also long sought to account for Denise Beaudin, a young woman last seen with Rasmussen in Manchester in 1981. The naming of the Bear Brook victims, in other words, did not end the work. It clarified how much more there is still to understand about the man and the years he spent moving from name to name.

Why This Case Still Matters

Bear Brook is often cited as a milestone in forensic history, and with reason. It sits among the earliest cases in which investigative genetic genealogy was used to crack an identity that conventional methods could not, helping to establish a technique that has since reshaped how cold cases across the country are approached. The science is real, and its impact has been substantial.

But the more lasting lesson of Bear Brook is quieter. For nearly forty years, four human beings lay in the records as unknowns, their absence unmarked by anyone able to name them. What changed that was a combination of patient public servants, new science, and ordinary people like Becky Heath who refused to let the question go. The case is a reminder that identification is itself a form of justice, that giving the dead their names back is meaningful even when no courtroom remains to enter. Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn, Sarah McWaters, and Rea Rasmussen were unknown for a long time. They are not unknown now.