Bear Brook murders

On November 10, 1985, a hunter found a metal 55-gallon drum near a burned-down store at Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire, containing the remains of an adult woman and a young girl, wrapped in plastic. Autopsies found both had died of blunt-force trauma, and the pair were buried in an Allenstown cemetery under a headstone that did not name them. On May 9, 2000, the remains of two more young girls, also killed by blunt-force trauma, were found in a second metal drum near the first site. Investigators believe all four were killed within roughly the same period, though the second drum went undiscovered for fifteen years because it lay outside the area originally searched as the crime scene.

Forensic examination estimated the woman's age at death at 23 to 33 and found extensive dental work, including several fillings and three extractions. The three girls were estimated at ages 5 to 11, 2 to 4, and 1 to 3 respectively, and shared a distinctive gap between their front teeth. Because skin tone and eye color could not be determined, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children issued black-and-white facial reconstructions incorporating dental detail in June 2013, followed by an updated set unveiled in November 2015 at a New Hampshire Attorney General's office news conference.

Mitochondrial DNA testing in 2014, refined in 2015, established that the woman was the biological mother of the oldest and youngest girls; the second-youngest child was unrelated to the other three. In January 2017, investigators announced that the 1981 disappearance of Denise Beaudin from Manchester, New Hampshire, was connected to the Bear Brook case; authorities believe she was also killed by her then-boyfriend, using the alias 'Robert Evans.' A 2016 finding, credited in part to San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office detective Peter Headley, identified a girl Evans had abandoned in California in 1986 as Beaudin's daughter. Police released a recorded interview with Evans in June 2017, and two months later Y-DNA testing confirmed him as Terry Peder Rasmussen (1943–2010) of Denver, Colorado — the first major U.S. case in which genetic genealogy identified a suspect. DNA also confirmed Rasmussen as the biological father of the second-youngest Bear Brook victim. He had already been convicted in 2002, under the alias Curtis Kimball, of murdering and dismembering his then-wife Eunsoon Jun in California, and died in prison in December 2010; authorities believe he was responsible for the four Bear Brook killings.

On June 6, 2019, New Hampshire investigators publicly identified three of the four victims: Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch (b. 1954) and her daughters Marie Elizabeth Vaughn (b. 1971) and Sarah Lynn McWaters (b. 1977), all last seen around Thanksgiving 1978 after going missing from La Puente, California, while Honeychurch was dating Rasmussen. The break came from a tip traced through a 1999 online post by Sarah's half-brother, eventually shared with detective Headley. Honeychurch and Vaughn received a new headstone bearing their names at a funeral in Allenstown in November 2019; McWaters was buried separately in Connecticut. The fourth victim, previously known only as the 'middle child,' underwent years of further isotopic and genealogical analysis, including an updated facial rendering and DNA results released in February 2020 and research tracing maternal relatives to Mississippi, before New Hampshire police positively identified her in September 2025 as Rea Rasmussen, born in 1976, Terry Rasmussen's own daughter.

No one has been charged or convicted specifically for the Bear Brook killings: Rasmussen, the person authorities identified as most likely responsible, had already died in 2010, more than seven years before his identity as 'Robert Evans' was confirmed.