Bear Brook Murders (Allenstown Four)

Case background and investigation

On November 10, 1985, a hunter came across a 55-gallon metal drum near the site of a burned-down store adjacent to Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire. Inside were the bodies of an adult woman and a young girl, wrapped in plastic. Nearly fifteen years later, on May 9, 2000, an investigator found a second drum roughly 300 feet away containing the remains of two more young girls. All four victims had died of blunt force trauma. For decades, none of them could be identified, and the case became known as the Bear Brook murders, its victims sometimes called the Allenstown Four.

The case began to break open through pioneering forensic work. DNA testing in the 2000s and 2010s showed that the adult woman was maternally related to the oldest and youngest girls, while the so-called middle child was not maternally related to the other three. In 2017, investigators pursuing the 1981 disappearance of Manchester woman Denise Beaudin connected her missing-persons case to a man who had lived in New Hampshire under the alias 'Bob Evans.' Genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter helped establish that this man was Terry Peder Rasmussen, born in 1943 in Denver, Colorado — a drifter who used numerous aliases and became known as the 'Chameleon Killer.' Rasmussen had been convicted in 2002 of murdering his companion Eunsoon Jun in California and died in prison in December 2010. He was never charged in the Bear Brook killings, but investigators believe he was responsible, and DNA showed he was the biological father of one of the barrel victims. The case is widely cited as the first major use of investigative genetic genealogy to identify a criminal suspect, preceding the Golden State Killer arrest.

On June 6, 2019, New Hampshire authorities announced that three of the victims were Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, 24, and her daughters Marie Elizabeth Vaughn, about 6, and Sarah Lynn McWaters, about 1. The family was last seen at Thanksgiving 1978 in Southern California, when Honeychurch, then dating Rasmussen, left her mother's home after a dispute. The identifications drew on a tip submitted in October 2018 by citizen researcher Rebekah Heath, who had traced an online post from a woman searching for her half-sister, and on independent genetic genealogy work by Rae-Venter using DNA extracted from degraded hair samples.

The fourth victim remained nameless until September 2025. In 2024, the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit partnered with the DNA Doe Project, whose volunteers built a family tree of roughly 25,000 people. In June 2025, a DNA match and a 2005 obituary led researchers to Pepper Reed, born in 1952 in Texas, and within about 30 minutes investigators located a birth certificate for her daughter. The child was identified as Rea Rasmussen, born in 1976 in Orange County, California, the biological daughter of Terry Rasmussen and Pepper Reed; the identification was confirmed on September 5, 2025. Attorney General John Formella said that with the announcement, 'all four victims now have their names back.' The investigation remains open: Pepper Reed has not been seen since the late 1970s, Denise Beaudin remains missing, and authorities continue to examine Rasmussen's movements between 1974 and 1985 across New Hampshire, California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, and Virginia.