Bear Brook Murders: DNA Names the Allenstown Four and Their Killer

Two Barrels, Fifteen Years Apart

On November 10, 1985, a hunter walking the edge of Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire noticed a 55-gallon steel drum lying in the brush fifty yards off a logging road. Inside, wrapped in plastic, were the remains of a woman in her early twenties and a young girl. Investigators worked the case for the better part of a year, ran the victim profiles through every database available in 1986, and developed nothing. The victims were buried as Jane and Baby Doe in a small cemetery in Allenstown under a single stone.

Fifteen years later, on May 9, 2000, a state park employee conducting an inventory walk in the same section of forest found a second barrel one hundred yards from the location of the first. Inside were two more girls, estimated between two and ten years old. The four bodies were now unambiguously linked, and equally unambiguously unsolved. For three decades they were known as the Allenstown Four.

The Alias Chain

Terry Peder Rasmussen ran a life organized around serial abandonment. He was born in Denver in 1943, served in the Navy, fathered four children with his first wife in Arizona during the 1960s, and disappeared from that life in the early 1970s. From that point forward, he constructed a sequence of stolen and fabricated identities that allowed him to appear in a new state every few years with a new woman and, frequently, children who were not all his own.

In the late 1970s, operating under an alias in Connecticut, Rasmussen became involved with Marlyse Honeychurch, a 24-year-old mother of two. Marlyse and her daughters were last seen at a Thanksgiving dinner at her mother’s house in California in November 1978, having introduced the man they knew as Bob Evans. None of them were seen alive again. Investigators now believe Rasmussen killed all three and drove their bodies across the country to New Hampshire, where he had previously lived and knew the terrain.

The fourth victim in Bear Brook, the middle child identified through genealogy as Rasmussen’s own biological daughter, was killed several years after the Honeychurch family. Her mother has never been identified. Investigators believe she was killed in the early 1980s and deposited in the second barrel at that time, though the drum was not found until 2000.

The Genealogy Match

In 2017, the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit specializing in identification of unidentified remains, partnered with the New Hampshire State Police to run the victim DNA through GEDmatch. Within months, family tree construction identified Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters. The fourth victim’s DNA matched relatives of Terry Rasmussen, a connection that revealed her as his biological daughter and simultaneously identified him as the killer.

Rasmussen had died in a California prison in December 2010, serving a 15-year sentence for the 2002 murder of Eunsoon Jun in Contra Costa County. Investigators have since connected him to the 1981 murder of Denise Beaudin in New Hampshire, whose daughter Lisa was kidnapped and raised by Rasmussen under a series of false identities before being recovered in 1986 and reunited with her biological family decades later. He remains the prime suspect in additional homicides in California, Texas, and Virginia.

The Barrel and the Name

The fourth Bear Brook victim is still unnamed. Her mother’s identity is still unknown. The DNA Doe Project continues to work the case, expanding the database search and reconstructing Rasmussen’s movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s through employment records and witness interviews.

The Bear Brook case sits alongside the Golden State Killer arrest as the proof-of-concept pair for investigative genetic genealogy. Where DeAngelo’s case demonstrated the method could identify a suspect, Bear Brook demonstrated it could identify both victims and killer simultaneously, and reach across decades, jurisdictions, and aliases that had defeated every traditional investigative technique. The broader population of cold cases solved by genetic genealogy has grown past 650 resolved files, and victim identification cases like Bear Brook represent a growing fraction of that total.

The barrels are evidence now. The stone in the Allenstown cemetery has been replaced. Three names are on it. The fourth line is still blank.