It is November 10, 1985.
A hunter is moving through the woods on the edge of Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire. The trees are bare. The ground is cold. He is not looking for anything unusual — just following the kind of trail that hunters follow on quiet autumn mornings in New England, listening to the crackle of leaves, watching the pale light filter through the branches.
And then he sees it.
A rusted 55-gallon metal barrel, tipped on its side, half-hidden in the undergrowth. Something about it is wrong. Not dangerous-looking. Not dramatic. Just wrong in the way that an object in the wrong place always feels wrong — the small, quiet alarm that the human brain sends when something does not belong.
He moves closer.
He looks inside.
And the world he walked into these woods with disappears entirely.
Inside that barrel, wrapped in plastic, are the skeletal remains of a woman and a young girl.
Nobody knows who they are.
Nobody will know — fully, completely, finally — for forty years.
The Woods That Held a Secret
Bear Brook State Park covers nearly ten thousand acres of forest in central New Hampshire. In 1985, the surrounding area of Allenstown was quiet — a rural community of a few thousand people, the kind of place where nothing much happened. The park itself was popular with hikers, campers, and hunters. Families came on weekends. People walked trails and fished streams and generally went about their lives without incident.
The barrel was not found inside the park boundaries. It was just outside them, on a wooded private property adjacent to the park. That distinction would matter later.
New Hampshire State Police responded to the hunter’s call. Crime scene investigators arrived, documented the scene, processed what they could find. The contents of the barrel were transported for forensic examination.
The woman was an adult — likely in her twenties or thirties at time of death. The child was young, perhaps between eight and ten years old. Both had been dead for an indeterminate length of time — long enough that identification through physical description was going to be extremely difficult. No jewelry. No documents. No identifying markings that could be easily traced.
The cause of death was ruled homicide. The manner of disposal — stuffed into a barrel, wrapped in plastic, left in the woods — told investigators everything about the character of whoever had done this. This was not a crime of passion. This was not an accident covered up in a panic. This was deliberate, methodical, and cold. Whoever had put these two human beings in that barrel had done so with purpose. With planning. With the intention of making sure they were never found.
Police began their investigation. They canvassed the area. They pursued leads. They created composite sketches, working from the skeletal remains and what forensic reconstruction could provide. They asked for the public’s help.
Nothing came of it.
The woman and the child remained unidentified. The case went cold.
In 1987, the unidentified remains were given a burial. A woman and a child, laid to rest without their names.
But the woods had not given up all of their secrets yet.
A Second Barrel — Three Hundred Feet Away
Fifteen years passed.
Then, in 2000, a New Hampshire state trooper was revisiting the Bear Brook area — whether as part of an active reinvestigation or a routine examination is not entirely clear from the public record, but the result was extraordinary.
Three hundred feet from where the first barrel had been found in 1985, in those same cold New Hampshire woods, the trooper found another barrel.
Three hundred feet.
The length of a football field.
For fifteen years, a second container — with two more human beings inside it — had been sitting in the same woods, in the same general area, completely undetected. Two more children, wrapped and stored and hidden, waiting in the dark.
Inside this second barrel were the remains of two more young girls. Both were small. Both were young. One appeared to be approximately two to four years old. The other, also very young.
Investigators now had four victims. A woman. Three children. All found in barrels in the same stretch of New Hampshire forest. All killed by the same hand, authorities believed. All completely unidentified.
DNA testing on the remains confirmed that the woman found in 1985 was biologically related to two of the three children — the oldest girl and the youngest girl. But the third child — the “middle child,” the small girl from the second barrel — showed no biological relationship to the woman. She was not this woman’s daughter.
She was someone else entirely.
And her identity would prove to be the hardest puzzle of all.
The Names They Were Given Instead
For years, law enforcement and the public referred to these four victims by the designations that the investigation required.
The woman found in 1985: the mother.
The older girl found with her: the oldest daughter.
The two girls from the 2000 barrel: the youngest daughter, and — the one who did not belong to the same biological family — the middle child.
These were not their names. These were placeholders. Clinical labels assigned because the real names were unknown.
But behind each label was a real person. A woman with a history. Children with birthdays and preferences and moments of laughter that someone, somewhere, remembered.
The case drew attention over the years — from law enforcement, from journalists, from the growing community of people fascinated by cold cases and the emerging possibilities of forensic science. The Bear Brook murders became one of New Hampshire’s most haunting unsolved crimes, discussed in true crime circles and revisited by investigators who felt the weight of those four unnamed dead in ways that never fully left them.
Detective Sergeant Christopher Elphick of the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit would later describe the case with striking honesty: “This case has passed through the hands of many investigators, all of whom felt the weight of speaking for those who no longer could.”
Speaking for those who no longer could.
In 2008, New Hampshire State Police turned to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — NCMEC — for help. NCMEC brought resources: DNA testing, analytical support, facial reconstructions, national media outreach. They elevated the profiles of the four victims, putting them in front of a wider audience, hoping that somewhere, someone would recognize a face in a forensic reconstruction or connect a name to a story they had always wondered about.
It would take another decade before the first real break came.
The Man With a Thousand Faces
His name was Terry Peder Rasmussen.
He was born on December 23, 1943. He was, by most accounts, a skilled electrician — competent, employable, the kind of person who could show up in a new place, get a job, and blend into the community without attracting attention. He was also a manipulator. A predator. A man who cycled through identities and relationships with chilling efficiency.
Over the course of his adult life, Terry Rasmussen used at least four known aliases: Bob Evans, Curtis Kimball, Gordon Jensen, and Larry Vanner. He moved constantly — New Hampshire, California, Texas, Arizona, Oregon. He attached himself to women. He integrated himself into their lives, sometimes convincing them that he was trustworthy, sometimes using other methods of control that investigators would come to understand only later.
And then, wherever he was, people vanished.
Not in dramatic, newsworthy ways. In quiet ways. The girlfriend who stopped calling her family. The woman whose neighbors noticed she was no longer around. The children who were here one day and gone the next. The trail went cold every time because Rasmussen was already somewhere else, under a different name, living a different life, starting the cycle again.
Dr. Rachel Toles, a forensic psychologist who studied the case, put it plainly: Rasmussen’s prime motive was not killing. His prime motive was control and sexual abuse. The killing was the consequence — the final act of a man who could not allow his victims to leave, to speak, to exist outside of his power.
He was extremely good at what he did. Detective Elphick, who spent years investigating this man and his crimes, said something that stayed with everyone who heard it: “He was extremely skilled.” He paused, then added — because he felt he had to — “I do not mean this in any way, shape or form as a compliment.”
No compliment intended. But the truth acknowledged. Terry Rasmussen was skilled at being a predator. And for decades, that skill kept him free.
November 1978: The Last Thanksgiving
Here is where the story of the Bear Brook victims truly begins.
Around November 1978 — around the time of Thanksgiving — a California family watched a woman named Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch leave with her new boyfriend and her two young daughters.
Marlyse was in her late twenties. Her daughters were Marie, who was around nine years old, and Sarah, who was just a toddler. The boyfriend was a man Marlyse introduced to her family as Terry Rasmussen. The family remembered him. They remembered watching Marlyse and her daughters get into a vehicle and drive away.
They never saw any of them again.
Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn, and Sarah McWaters — their real names, the names we did not know for over four decades — disappeared from the world that Thanksgiving week and entered the woods of New Hampshire, where they would lie in a barrel for seven years before a hunter found them, and for decades more before anyone spoke their names again.
In 1978 and 1979, Terry Rasmussen — now going by the name “Bob Evans” — was working as an electrician in Manchester, New Hampshire. He was working with a man who owned property in Allenstown.
The same Allenstown where the barrels would be found.
He knew that land.
The Life “Bob Evans” Built on Graves
In Manchester, New Hampshire, “Bob Evans” got on with things.
He found a new girlfriend. Her name was Denise Beaudin. She was 23 years old, described by people who knew her as warm and caring. She and Rasmussen had a daughter together — a little girl named Dawn, born in 1981.
By November 26, 1981, Denise Beaudin, her six-month-old daughter Dawn, and “Bob Evans” had packed up their lives and left New Hampshire.
Denise Beaudin was never seen again.
Dawn — the baby — would eventually resurface years later, abandoned by Rasmussen in California under circumstances that would become their own separate horror story. She would eventually be identified through DNA and reunite with her extended family. But Denise? Denise Beaudin has never been found. Her family never received answers. She is presumed by authorities to be another of Rasmussen’s victims.
But Rasmussen kept moving.
He reinvented himself. He became “Gordon Jensen.” He became “Curtis Kimball.” He had relationships, left trails, and disappeared. In 1986, as “Gordon Jensen,” he abandoned a five-year-old girl — Dawn, now renamed “Lisa” — in California. He was arrested in 1989 as “Gordon Jensen” for child desertion, convicted, and released after about eighteen months.
He moved on.
He became “Larry Vanner.”
He found another girlfriend — a woman named Eunsoon Jun in California.
And in September 2002, Eunsoon Jun’s partially dismembered remains were found buried under a pile of kitty litter in the basement of the home they shared.
Terry Rasmussen — going by “Larry Vanner,” whose fingerprints came back as “Curtis Kimball” — was arrested. He was charged with murder. In June 2003, he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison.
He never told anyone about the barrel in Allenstown. He never told anyone about Marlyse, or Marie, or Sarah. He never told anyone about the little girl — his own daughter — who was stuffed into a second barrel three hundred feet from the first.
He went to prison. He kept his secrets.
On December 28, 2010 — five days after his 67th birthday — Terry Peder Rasmussen died in prison.
As far as anyone knew at the time, the Bear Brook victims remained unidentified. Their killer was dead, but they still had no names. They had not been spoken for.
It seemed, for a moment, like the case might die with him.
It did not.
The Genealogist, the Podcast, and the Volunteer Who Changed Everything
In 2016, DNA testing produced a breakthrough that nobody had anticipated.
Scientists testing the remains from the Bear Brook case confirmed something that changed the nature of the entire investigation: the unidentified “middle child” — the girl from the second barrel whose biological mother was not Marlyse Honeychurch — had been fathered by the same man who was already a suspect in the case.
“Bob Evans” — whose real name investigators were still working to confirm — had fathered this child. One of the victims was his own biological daughter.
In July 2017, genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter achieved something remarkable. Using DNA from the case and the emerging science of investigative genetic genealogy, she identified “Bob Evans” as Terry Peder Rasmussen. The Chameleon Killer had a real name. He was already dead. But now investigators knew who they were dealing with.
In 2018, journalist Jason Moon of New Hampshire Public Radio launched a seven-episode podcast called Bear Brook. He laid out the entire case — the barrels, the unidentified victims, Rasmussen’s history, the emerging science of genetic genealogy — with meticulous care and a storyteller’s instinct for human stakes. The podcast was downloaded eleven million times.
Eleven million people heard the story of four people who still had no names.
One of those eleven million people was a woman named Rebekah Heath.
Heath was an amateur investigator — not a detective, not a scientist, not a professional. She was someone who heard a story, felt the pull of it, and decided she could not let it go. She began digging into the case on her own time, following threads through genealogical databases and public records with the kind of obsessive focus that sometimes cracks cases that professionals have exhausted.
Her work helped provide crucial leads. Together with Barbara Rae-Venter and the investigative community that had gathered around this case, Heath’s contributions helped lead to the 2019 identification of three of the four Bear Brook victims.
On June 6, 2019, New Hampshire Associate Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin stepped in front of cameras and spoke three names for the first time.
Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch.
Marie Elizabeth Vaughn.
Sarah Lynn McWaters.
The woman in the first barrel. The oldest daughter. The youngest daughter.
After more than three decades, they had their names back.
Marlyse’s family — people who had spent over forty years not knowing what had happened to a woman they loved — sat in the front row of that briefing room. They did not speak. A statement was read on their behalf. They had requested privacy. They had been waiting for this their entire adult lives and now that it had arrived, they needed space to feel what it meant.
But one child still had no name.
The middle child. Rasmussen’s daughter. The girl who belonged to a woman nobody had found yet.
The Mystery Inside the Mystery
Here is what made the middle child — Rea Rasmussen, though no one knew that yet — uniquely difficult to identify.
The other three victims had a known connection to each other: Marlyse was their mother. Once DNA confirmed the biological relationship and once investigators began focusing on who Marlyse was, the chain of identification could be followed forward.
But the middle child had no such anchor. She was biologically connected to Terry Rasmussen — her father — but Rasmussen had moved through so many relationships, under so many names, in so many states, that pinpointing which woman he had been with at the right time to produce this specific child was like finding a single thread in a haystack.
The investigators knew roughly when she was born. They knew roughly when she died. They knew she was between two and four years old at the time of her murder. They knew her father was Terry Rasmussen.
They did not know her mother. And without her mother, they could not find her.
Between 2019 and 2024, multiple organizations worked the case. Astrea Forensics performed advanced DNA analysis. A company called Firebird Forensics worked on the genealogy for years. They built family trees. They followed DNA matches through genealogical databases. They chased every lead.
The problem was that Rasmussen’s DNA — the paternal side — led back through his family tree, and while that was useful for confirming identity, it did not help identify the mother. To identify the child, investigators needed to find the maternal line. And the maternal line was invisible.
There was no record. No missing persons report. No family frantically searching. No name attached to any database that pointed toward a woman who had had a child with Terry Rasmussen around 1976.
The mother had simply vanished from the record of the world.
Eighteen Months to Find a Ghost
In 2024, the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit brought in a new partner: the DNA Doe Project.
The DNA Doe Project is a nonprofit volunteer organization dedicated to identifying unknown decedents through genetic genealogy. Their investigators — many of them volunteers — are among the most skilled practitioners of this relatively new science in the country. They build family trees of extraordinary size and complexity, following DNA matches through genealogical databases and public records until a pattern emerges that points toward a name.
For the middle child, they started from scratch. They built a family tree with approximately 25,000 people in it. They followed every branch, every connection, every match in the DNA databases. They were searching for a maternal ancestor — someone whose DNA appeared in both the databases and in the remains of the child — who could lead them back through the generations to a woman who had been alive in the mid-1970s.
It took eighteen months.
But in June 2025, Detective Elphick said, they “got lucky.”
A DNA match led them to a couple born in the 1870s — roughly 150 years ago, their DNA still echoing in the genetic material of a child murdered in New Hampshire sometime between 1978 and 1981. Following that match forward through the generations, the DNA Doe Project team found a 2005 obituary for one of the couple’s great-great-great-granddaughters. A woman who had lived and died and left behind a brief memorial in the public record.
The obituary said she was survived by a daughter named Pepper Reed.
The team searched for Pepper Reed.
They found records of her existence — her birth in 1952 in Houston, Texas, her early life in the South. And then, somewhere in the late 1970s, the records stopped.
Pepper Reed had vanished from history.
No tax records. No marriage records. No address history. No employment records. No social security filings after a certain point. Nothing. As if she had simply ceased to exist.
As if someone had made her cease to exist.
Thirty Minutes
Matthew Waterfield of the DNA Doe Project later described the moment that broke the case with a precision that captures the strange mathematics of a forty-year investigation reaching its conclusion.
“To figure out the identity of our Jane Doe, we first had to find her mother,” he said. “It took us almost 18 months to identify Pepper Reed. But once we knew her name, it led us right to her daughter.”
Thirty minutes.
Eighteen months to find the mother’s name. Thirty minutes to find the child.
Within those thirty minutes of identifying Pepper Reed as the probable mother, a team member found a birth record for a baby girl in Orange County, California, from 1976. The mother’s maiden name on the birth record was Reed.
There were hundreds of girls with the surname Rasmussen born in California in the late 1970s. But the Reed connection narrowed it immediately. A team member drove to Orange County to obtain a physical copy of the birth certificate.
The certificate listed the child’s name as Rea Rasmussen. Her parents: Terry Rasmussen and Pepper Reed.
The team had a name. Now they needed confirmation.
Pepper Reed had one surviving sibling — a brother. He was Rea’s uncle. DNA testing through a laboratory called Bode Technology, funded by NCMEC’s Child Justice Project grant, was conducted using the surviving family member’s DNA.
On Friday, September 5, 2025, the results came back.
Jane Allenstown Doe 2000. The middle child. Rasmussen’s daughter. The little girl who had lain in a barrel in New Hampshire for fifteen years before anyone found her, and then lay unidentified for another twenty-five years after that.
She was Rea Rasmussen.
Born in 1976 in Orange County, California. Between two and four years old when she was murdered by her own father.
She had a name.
September 7, 2025: Forty Years Later
New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella made the announcement on September 7, 2025.
“This case has weighed on New Hampshire and the nation for decades,” he said. “With Rea Rasmussen’s identification, all four victims now have their names back.”
All four victims now have their names back.
Forty years after the first barrel was found. Twenty-five years after the second barrel was found. Eighteen months of intensive DNA genealogy work by the DNA Doe Project. Contributions from NCMEC, Astrea Forensics, Firebird Forensics, Bode Technology, the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit.
And all of it came together in the space of thirty minutes once a team member found a name in a 2005 obituary: Pepper Reed.
Carol Schweitzer, program manager of NCMEC’s Forensic Services Division, said what many people were feeling that day: “For 25 years, Rea’s story has been defined by tragedy, rather than her name. This moment reflects years of persistence, innovation and collaboration across agencies who never gave up hope. Today, we can finally speak Rea’s name and provide long-awaited answers to her family and the community who has loved her.”
Her family.
Rea’s paternal half-siblings — children of other women Rasmussen had been with — were reached by investigators. They released a brief statement. They said they were “navigating a deeply traumatic and personal matter” and asked for privacy.
Pepper Reed’s family released their own statement, read by New Hampshire Office of Victim Assistance staff: “Pepper is deeply loved and missed every single day. Though we did not have an opportunity to meet Rea, she is cherished just as much in our hearts. Our family kindly ask for privacy as we grieve.”
They never met Rea. They never knew she existed. And now they know both her name and the manner of her death — killed by her own father before she was old enough to understand what death was.
Who Was Pepper Reed?
Pepper Reed was born in 1952 in Houston, Texas.
That much is known. The outline of her early life can be reconstructed from public records and family memory: a woman who grew up in the South, who had siblings who loved her, who was — by all accounts — a real person with a real life and real people who noticed when she was gone.
At Christmas 1975, Pepper Reed went home to Texas for the holidays. She was pregnant. She told her family that the father of the child was Terry Rasmussen.
After Christmas, she told them she was moving to California.
They never saw her again. They never met her child.
In 1976, in Orange County, California, Rea Rasmussen was born. Pepper Reed was her mother. Terry Rasmussen was her father.
At some point between Rea’s birth in 1976 and the late 1970s, Pepper Reed disappeared from the record of the world entirely. No more filings. No more records. No more trace. A woman born in 1952 in Houston, Texas, who simply ceased to exist in the official accounts of human lives.
Investigators believe that Pepper Reed is another of Terry Rasmussen’s victims. They believe that at some point in the late 1970s, Rasmussen killed her — the way he killed Marlyse Honeychurch, the way he almost certainly killed Denise Beaudin, the way he killed Eunsoon Jun in 2001, the way he killed his own two-to-four-year-old daughter Rea.
Her body has never been found. The investigation into her disappearance “remains active,” the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office said after Rea’s identification.
That word — active — means something. It means investigators have not given up. It means that somewhere in the records of Terry Rasmussen’s movements between 1974 and 1985, across New Hampshire, California, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, and Virginia, there may still be a thread that leads to Pepper Reed’s remains.
But as of this writing, she has not been found.
The Last Known Photo That Was Never Taken
There is a detail in this case that stops you cold the moment you learn it.
There are no known photographs of Rea Rasmussen.
None.
A child born in 1976 in California, the daughter of two living parents, who spent somewhere between two and four years on this earth — and not a single photograph of her is known to exist in any family collection, any public archive, any discovered document.
This tells you something about the circumstances of Rea’s short life. It tells you about the isolation that Rasmussen imposed on the women and children around him. It tells you about the way he controlled his environment — moving constantly, changing names, keeping no documentation that could later connect him to anything.
For the purpose of identification, NCMEC’s forensic artists created a facial reconstruction of what Rea may have looked like — the careful, painstaking work of building a face from skeletal remains and what science knows about the physical characteristics of children at that age.
That reconstruction is the closest thing to a portrait of Rea Rasmussen that exists in the world. A forensic artist’s interpretation of a face that a camera never captured.
The Chameleon, Deconstructed
What made Terry Rasmussen so difficult to catch — and so dangerous — was not any single skill but a combination of factors that investigators have spent years trying to understand.
He moved. Constantly. He did not stay in one place long enough to accumulate a traceable history. By the time anyone noticed that something was wrong — a woman missing, a child unaccounted for — Rasmussen was already elsewhere, under a different name, with a different woman, beginning again.
He targeted women who were, for various reasons, vulnerable to a man who presented himself as stable, capable, and useful. Marlyse Honeychurch was a single mother with two young daughters. Denise Beaudin was in her early twenties. Eunsoon Jun was in a relationship with a man she did not fully know. Pepper Reed was a young woman far from her Texas family, pregnant, building a new life.
He was skilled at presenting himself as trustworthy. He was an electrician — a practical, grounded trade. He worked. He paid his way. He did not raise obvious red flags in the communities he moved through.
And when he killed, he was methodical. The barrel disposal tells you that. Wrapping the bodies in plastic. Sealing the container. Choosing a location remote enough that discovery might take years, if it came at all. One barrel found in 1985. The second, three hundred feet away, not found until 2000. Whatever else Terry Rasmussen was, he was not careless.
The forensic psychologist’s observation bears repeating: his prime motive was control. The killing was an endpoint — the consequence of control that had run out of options. When a victim threatened to leave, to speak, to disrupt the life he had constructed, the control became lethal.
He did this to Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters.
He did this to Rea Rasmussen, his own two-year-old child.
He almost certainly did this to Pepper Reed.
He almost certainly did this to Denise Beaudin.
He definitely did this to Eunsoon Jun.
How many others?
Detective Elphick said what investigators believe, plainly: “I fear that he continued the pattern of killing.” Rasmussen is known to have been in New Hampshire, California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, and Virginia between 1974 and 1985 — and the investigation into what he was doing during those years, whom he encountered, whom he may have harmed, remains open.
The Chameleon Killer died in prison in 2010 without being identified as the Bear Brook suspect. Without being charged with those murders. Without ever being required to account for the four people he stuffed into barrels and left in a New Hampshire forest, or for the other women whose fates remain unknown.
He took his secrets to his grave.
But DNA science has been methodically reaching into that grave and pulling them back out.
The Science That Changed Everything
The Bear Brook case is, among many things, a landmark in the history of forensic science.
When the first barrel was found in 1985, forensic genealogy did not exist as a discipline. The tools available to investigators were physical: fingerprints, dental records, physical descriptions. Without something to match those identifiers against — a missing persons report, a family member who came forward — identification was nearly impossible.
By 2017, the science had advanced enough that Barbara Rae-Venter could identify Terry Rasmussen through DNA alone. She took his genetic profile, ran it through consumer genealogy databases, built a family tree from the matches, and worked forward through the generations until one living branch of that tree led to a man named Terry Peder Rasmussen.
This was not a technique that had existed even ten years earlier. It required the existence of large public DNA databases — the kind that genealogy services like 23andMe and Ancestry had been quietly building for years as millions of Americans swabbed their cheeks to learn about their heritage. Those databases, built for entirely different purposes, became the most powerful investigative tool in cold case history.
The same technique was used in the Golden State Killer case. The same technique is now used in hundreds of cold cases across the country. The Bear Brook murders were among the first.
But Rea’s case pushed the technique even further. Because her father was already identified — already dead, already named — the challenge was not finding the killer. The challenge was finding the child. And to find the child, investigators had to find the mother. And to find the mother, they had to build a family tree of 25,000 people and search through it for a woman who had vanished from public records in the 1970s.
Eighteen months of work. A 2005 obituary with a daughter’s name in it. Thirty minutes after that.
Matthew Waterfield’s description of those thirty minutes is worth sitting with: “Once we knew her name, it led us right to her daughter.” Forty years of mystery. Eighteen months of intensive genealogical work. And then thirty minutes.
This is what modern forensic science looks like. Patient, painstaking, and sometimes — when the right piece finally falls into place — almost instantaneous.
The Investigation That Remains Open
Every identification in the Bear Brook case has also opened a new question.
Identifying Marlyse Honeychurch in 2019 confirmed that Rasmussen had murdered a mother and her two young daughters. It also raised the question: who else? How many women had Rasmussen attached himself to, used, and discarded? How many people had sat at a Thanksgiving table watching a woman they loved drive away with a man they did not know, and spent the rest of their lives wondering what happened?
Identifying Rea Rasmussen in 2025 confirmed that Rasmussen had murdered his own biological child. It also revealed Pepper Reed — a woman who has been missing for nearly fifty years and whose family is still waiting for answers.
And beyond the Bear Brook case itself, there are the acknowledged unknowns: Denise Beaudin, who disappeared with Rasmussen in 1981 and has never been found. The gaps in Rasmussen’s timeline between 1974 and 1985. The states he moved through. The women who might have encountered him and are now recorded somewhere as unidentified or missing or simply gone.
“It is certainly feasible that we will uncover more information, not only concerning the fates of Pepper Reed and Denise Beaudin, but also regarding additional victims,” said Detective Elphick’s colleague in a statement cited by CNN.
Additional victims.
The investigation into Pepper Reed’s disappearance is active. Investigators are asking anyone with information about Terry Rasmussen’s movements between 1974 and 1985, particularly in New Hampshire, California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, and Virginia, to contact the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit.
The number is 800-525-5555. The email is coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov.
What It Means to Give Back a Name
There is a reason why the identifications in the Bear Brook case have mattered so profoundly — not just to the families directly involved, but to a much wider public.
When four people die without names, without acknowledgment, without the basic dignity of being known as who they were, something fundamental is stolen from them. They are reduced to categories. “The mother.” “The oldest daughter.” “The middle child.” These are not people. They are placeholders. They are the language investigators use when the real language — the names, the histories, the faces — is not available.
Every time a name is restored, something is given back.
Marlyse Honeychurch was a woman who loved her daughters. Marie Vaughn was a nine-year-old girl with a whole life she never got to live. Sarah McWaters was a toddler. Rea Rasmussen was a two-to-four-year-old child who was murdered by her own father — a man who looked at his own biological daughter and made the decision that she could not be allowed to exist.
These are not placeholder categories anymore. These are people.
Carol Schweitzer of NCMEC said it simply: “Today, we can finally speak Rea’s name.”
Speaking a name is an act of recognition. It is the refusal to let someone be erased. Rea Rasmussen was erased — from records, from photographs, from the world — by the man who killed her before she was old enough to understand what was happening. And forty years later, a team of forensic scientists, genealogists, volunteers, and investigators refused to let that erasure stand.
They built a family tree of 25,000 people. They found a 2005 obituary. They drove to Orange County for a birth certificate. They tested a surviving uncle’s DNA.
And they gave a little girl her name back.
The Questions That Still Have No Answers
Where is Pepper Reed?
It is the question at the center of the next chapter of this case — the chapter that has not yet been written.
Investigators believe she was murdered. They believe her body is somewhere — somewhere in the geography of Terry Rasmussen’s movements across the western United States in the late 1970s. A woman born in Houston, Texas in 1952, who was last seen by her family after Christmas 1975, pregnant, heading to California to start a new life with a man who turned out to be a serial killer.
Her brother is alive. He gave his DNA to confirm Rea’s identity. He knows his niece’s fate now. He does not know his sister’s.
Denise Beaudin is also still unaccounted for. A twenty-three-year-old woman who packed up her life with her baby in November 1981 and was never seen by her family again. Her daughter, Dawn, eventually found and raised by relatives after being abandoned by Rasmussen, has had to live with the knowledge that her father was a serial killer and her mother’s body has never been found.
And there may be others. The gaps in Rasmussen’s timeline are significant. The states he moved through are numerous. The aliases he used made tracking his movements extremely difficult. And the investigative technique that finally named him — genetic genealogy — is still being applied to unidentified remains across the country.
It is possible — investigators believe it is probable — that Terry Rasmussen killed more people than the six confirmed and suspected victims currently attached to his name.
The Chameleon Killer is dead. He cannot be prosecuted. He cannot be questioned. He cannot be made to account for what he did. The families of his victims cannot look him in the eye in a courtroom and hear a verdict that means he will never harm anyone again.
What they have instead is this: science that refused to quit. Investigators who kept working. Volunteers who gave thousands of hours to building family trees for people they had never met. A 2005 obituary that mentioned a daughter named Pepper Reed. A birth certificate in Orange County. A DNA test.
And at the end of all of it: a name.
Rea Rasmussen.
Born 1976, Orange County, California.
Murdered by her father before she turned five.
Found in a barrel in New Hampshire, in the cold and the dark of the woods.
Named, finally, in September 2025.
A Word for the Middle Child
Detective Elphick said, at the press conference where Rea’s name was finally spoken aloud: “We never forgot Rea. We never stopped looking.”
He said that without knowing her name — calling her by the name they had now given her, the name that had always been hers, that had just taken forty years to reach the people who needed to hear it.
We never forgot Rea.
There is something in that statement that goes beyond the professional obligation of an investigator to a case. Something personal. Something that speaks to the weight that Elphick and every detective before him had carried — the weight of four people who could not speak for themselves, who needed someone else to speak for them, who needed someone to refuse to let the case close.
“This case has passed through the hands of many investigators, all of whom felt the weight of speaking for those who no longer could,” he said. “Naming her brings a sense of justice — but also reminds us of the unanswered questions that remain.”
Justice and unanswered questions. Both at the same time. Both equally real.
Rea Rasmussen has her name. Her mother, Pepper Reed, is still missing. The investigation is active. The questions remain.
But the middle child — the little girl with no name, no photographs, no record of her own existence beyond a birth certificate in Orange County and the DNA that proved who she was — has something that was taken from her forty years ago.
She has been recognized.
She has been spoken for.
She has, at last, been found.
Rea Rasmussen was born in 1976 in Orange County, California. She was the daughter of Terry Peder Rasmussen and Pepper Reed. She was between two and four years old when she was murdered. Her remains were discovered in 2000 in Allenstown, New Hampshire. Her identity was confirmed on September 5, 2025, by the DNA Doe Project, in partnership with the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit and NCMEC.
Terry Peder Rasmussen, also known as Bob Evans, Curtis Kimball, Gordon Jensen, and Larry Vanner, died in prison on December 28, 2010. He was never charged with the Bear Brook murders.
Pepper Reed, born 1952, was last seen in the late 1970s. She is believed by investigators to be a victim of Terry Rasmussen. Her body has not been found. The investigation into her disappearance remains active.
If you have information about Terry Rasmussen’s movements between 1974 and 1985, or about Pepper Reed, please contact the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit at 800-525-5555 or coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov.
