Bear Brook Murders Revisited: The Search To Identify A Killer’s Victims
Spruce Pond in Bear Brook State Park
Investigators in Pearl River County, Mississippi, are hoping someone will recognize the little girl in the picture. She’s a toddler with a cute half-smile and brown hair. They know she was once a resident. They know she was a probable descendant of either Thomas “Deadhorse” Mitchell (born in 1836) and William Livings (born in 1826). They know she travelled to Manchester, New Hampshire with her father, his girlfriend and the girlfriend’s two daughters, one older, one a little younger than she. They also know the identity of the man who killed her and hid her body inside a blue 55-gallon drum out in the New Hampshire woods.
It was her father.
What they don’t know is her name.
If investigators are able to discover who she was—able to give her back her name—not only may they bring some peace to her family, but they will have the final piece of a puzzle that must have seemed insoluble all those years ago when investigators first started pulling bodies out of barrels in those New Hampshire woods.
Bear Brook State Park, New Hampshire’s largest developed state park, is about half an hour’s drive north and east from Manchester. The 10,000 acre preserve—primarily in Allenstown, of which it takes up more than half—welcomes campers, fishers, swimmers and hikers every summer and cross country skiers and snowshoers in the winter.
It’s an idyllic place. There’s a small sandy beach with a pond to swim in, acres of verdant New Hampshire woodland, plenty of family-friendly activities, and water to paddle in.
For years, however, Bear Brook State park held a secret, one which investigators hope will be finally answered in Pearl River County, Mississippi.
In 1985, Jesse Morgan, who lived in a neighborhood surrounded by the park and was then eleven years old, and his friends made a grizzly discovery during a game of hide-and-seek: A blue 55-gallon drum. They struggled to open it, but when they did, the stench of what was inside pushed them away. After they had knocked it over, they got on Jesse’s four-wheeler and sped off.
They didn’t tell anybody what was inside the drum because none of them could get close enough to look. All they knew was that it smelled awful.
The barrel went undisturbed for another four months.
When it was discovered again, the man who found it did get a look inside. He was ghostly pale when the cops showed up. He’d seen human remains.
Our Jane Doe was not in that barrel, however. Here they found the remains of a woman in her early twenties and a girl aged between eight and ten, both wrapped in plastic.
Their bodies were interred in an Allenstown cemetery, and the stone read: “Here lies the mortal remains known only to God of a woman aged 23-33 and a girl child aged 8-10. Their slain bodies were found on November 10th, 1985, in Bear Brook State Park. May their souls find peace in God’s loving care.”
Jane Doe’s poster, from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
The case went cold and stayed that way for fifteen years until in 2000, not 100 yards from where the first barrel was found, a second barrel was discovered. Inside were two little girls.
The bodies found in 1985 were exhumed for DNA testing and it was discovered that, while the eight to ten year old and the younger of the second pair—she was two or three when she died—had different fathers, they shared a mother; and their mother had shared their fate: beaten to death and stuffed into a barrel. Some of them had been dismembered.
The woman in her twenties was their mother.
The fourth body was our Jane Doe.
She wasn’t related to any of them.
Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch was 24 in 1978. She is remembered as an enjoyable person to be around, fun loving and quirky. Her Thanksgiving that year was eventful and, by all accounts, unpleasant. She brought with her two daughters, Marie Vaughn, 7, and Sarah McWaters, an infant. More controversially, she also brought her new boyfriend, a man twelve years her senior named Terry Rasmussen. That day an argument ensued between Marlyse and her mother about Rasmussen.
Her mother thought he was too old for her.
Marlyse left La Puente, California, with her two daughters and Terry Rasmussen and was never seen by her family again.
Elizabeth Evans appeared in 1980 as the wife of a man named Bob. He had bounced a check at the end of the previous year.
In 1980 Bob Evans would be twice arrested for charges related to the illegal siphoning of electricity he had not paid for.
By October, Elizabeth was no longer listed as his wife, and she disappeared permanently from the public record.
Was Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch the woman who called herself Elizabeth Evans?
This is certainly plausible, but investigators have subsequently established that Bob Evans was Terry Rasmussen.
In 1981, Armand Beaudin had his 23 year old daughter, Denise, and her six month old daughter, Dawn, over for Thanksgiving Dinner. Denise brought with her her new boyfriend, Bob Evans, and the trio spent the day at Beaudin’s home. Bob was fifteen years older than Denise and until recently the Head Electrician at Waumbec Mills, on the other side of the Merrimack River which divides the highly French Canadian West Side from the rest of Manchester.
When Armand Beaudin stopped by the West Side apartment Bob and Denise shared a week or so later to invite the couple to Christmas dinner, they were gone. They had packed up and disappeared.
Denise has never been seen since.
Believing her disappearance to be due to financial difficulties, her family did not report her missing at the time.
In May of 1985 Curtis Mayo Kimball, who worked as an electrician in Los Alamitos, California, was arrested for Driving Under the Influence.
Curtis Mayo Kimball was Bob Evans
A little girl called Lisa, probably four or five in 1986, was living in the Holiday Host RV Park in Scotts Valley, California with her father, Gordon Jenson, who was also employed by the trailer park.
Jensen arranged a two week trial adoption with a couple called Decker, wherein they could take her for two weeks down to Southern California and then, if they chose, adopt her. The Deckers came to believe that Lisa had been abused and discovered, when they returned to Scotts Valley, that Jensen had disappeared in the meantime.
Without Jensen, the Deckers planned adoption of Lisa fell through and she was placed in foster care.
Three months after abandoning Lisa, police had, through fingerprint matching, confirmed that Gordon Jenson was Curtis Mayo Kimball.
Gordon Jensen was arrested and convicted of child abandonment. He was granted parole in October of 1990 and absconded.
Eunsoon Jun’s friends and family hadn’t seen her for some time and her common law husband, Larry Vanner, was being evasive. His explanations and excuses for her unavailability had strained credulity. She was a chemist in her early to mid 40s; he was a greedy boor, closer to fifty. He was a glutton and a chain smoker. They had last seen Jun alive in June, 2002.
Eventually the sheriff’s department was called. When they searched Vanner’s home they found a pile of kitty litter covering almost five feet of crawl-space floor and piled nearly three feet high. Leaning next to the pile was an axe.
2002 mugshot of Terry Peder Rasmussen following the arrest for the murder of Eunsoon Jun. Roxane Gruenheid/Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office
When the kitty litter was searched they found a human foot, mummified and still wearing a flip-flop.
The foot belonged to Eunsoon Jun.
Larry Vanner was arrested and pleaded no contest in 2003. He was sentenced to fifteen years to life for Jun’s murder. His plea came as a surprise to prosecutors, who had matched Vanner’s fingerprints to those of Kimball and Jensen and believed that Vanner decided not to contest the charges after overhearing prosecutors discuss having Vanner take a paternity test, to see if he was related to Lisa, abandoned all those years ago.
Larry Vanner died of natural causes in prison in 2010.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was born on the 23rd of December 1943. He served in the Navy until 1967 and then married. They shared four children. He worked as an electrician in Southern California and Arizona, and the family moved several times.
He was arrested for aggravated assault twice, in 1973 and 1975.
After the second arrest, his wife took the children and left him. He showed up briefly with an unidentified woman in ‘75 or ‘76, and thereafter was never seen by the family again.
Rasmussen drifted across the country, residing in at least ten different states and working electrical jobs.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was Larry Vanner, Gordon Jensen, Curtis Mayo Kimball and Bob Evans.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was a serial killer.
Investigators believe Denise Beaudin, her daughter Dawn and Rasmussen made it as far as California after leaving New Hampshire and that he most likely killed her there.
Subsequent paternity tests indicated that Rasmussen was not Lisa’s biological father.
When Lisa was asked in 1986 if she had any brothers or sisters, she said that she had, but that they had died after eating “grass mushrooms”, leading investigators to believe that Rasmussen had killed more children than his current, grisly tally.
In 2003, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department opened a case hoping to discover Lisa’s parentage. Researchers were eventually able to establish that she is the granddaughter of Armand Beaudin.
Graphic of the Bear Brook Murder victims by Carl Koppelman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
In June of 2019, investigators announced that the bodies in the first barrel, the one found in 1985, were those of Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch and her eldest daughter, Marie Vaughn. With our Jane Doe in the second barrel was Sarah McWaters.
Honychurch and Vaughn were reburied in their Allenstown plot with a new headstone bearing their names.
Sarah McWaters was reburied in Connecticut, near paternal relatives.
Jane Doe is as yet unidentified. Nothing is known about her mother, other than that she has or had connections to Pearl River County, Mississippi.
Terry Pedar Rasmussen’s modus operandi of forming relationships with women, separating them from friends and family and ultimately killing and dismembering them and their children would seem straight-forward enough, in its sick, twisted way, but the fact that these relationships, in the case of Honeychurch and Jun, lasted years before he murdered them is perplexing. Was he a so-called organized serial killer, planning and playing the long game until he killed? Or rather, was he the disorganized type; that is, were these earnest relationships that ended in a fit of rage? He exhibits characteristics of both. There are many questions that will go unanswered about this case.
One question that may be answered, however, is the identity of Jane Doe. Given that investigators have associated her with a fairly specific location, it is likely that oxygen and strontium isotope analysis was performed on her teeth. While this still has investigators looking for a needle in a haystack, it at least gives them a significantly smaller hay stack to search.
Over the last twenty-one years, researchers have used DNA evidence, DNA registries, online genealogy message boards and countless other tools unimagined in 1985 to return to women and children their names, and with every discovery the haystack investigators are searching becomes smaller and smaller, and the needle they hope still exists, closer and closer to discovery.
Let’s hope, for little Jane Doe’s sake, that they find that needle.
Though no longer current, New Hampshire Public Radio produced an excellent and highly recommended podcast series on the investigation.
Anyone having information regarding the identity of Jane Doe should call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1 (800) 843-5678.
Anyone having information regarding Terry Peder Rasmussen and his murders should call the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit at 1 (603) 223-3856.
