True Crime Vault: The Chameleon
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This is Deborah Roberts. Welcome to the 2020 True Crime Vault. Each week, we reach back into our archives and bring you a story we found unforgettable. Only a true psychopath could do this. A pool of blood coming from his head. Somebody had been paid to kill me. Why would you want your husband killed? Take a listen. Coming up... There's something so wicked going on right now in this small town. There's a barrel of...

up in the woods. And I think there's some bones in there. This is not good. A mother and a young child. Who are you? Where did you come from? This is just the tip of the iceberg. Fast forward 15 years. Two more victims. So what was an adult female and a little girl is now an adult female and three little children. Somebody was dumping their victims.

You're not gonna believe this. We're dealing with a serial killer. I was like, "Oh my God, this is it. This is it." We knew that this man went by four different names. The Chameleon. My father, he's a serial killer. That's the first time I've said that.

I'm John Quinones. It's a mystery that has played out for some 40 years, two stories intertwining, each slow to reveal its dark secrets. First, a drifter moving from place to place, picking up new names and new women along the way, again and again vanishing into thin air. Then the bodies of a woman and three young girls discovered in the woods of New England.

their identities unknown, and police haunted by the thought that someone somewhere was looking for them. As we first reported in 2020, it would take decades for DNA and genealogy to unravel the connection between the victims and the man authorities call the chameleon. That connection would reveal shocking family ties and bring this story back to where it all began. - Test, test, check, check, check.

In the middle of New Hampshire, there's this state park, Bear Brook State Park. It's huge. It's covered in thick forests. It's full of nooks and crannies to get lost in. It's the type of place where you can find some of the last remaining rattlesnakes in New England, where kids play hide-and-seek on four-wheelers, and where, in 1985, a horrible discovery was made.

10,000 acres means we do have over 40 miles of trails. It's a very large park and there's parts of the park that people did not explore or get out to. I would think that anyone without a familiarity with the park wouldn't want to go wandering very far into the woods. There's just a lot of undeveloped area out there. There's just nothing but woods. If someone wanted to hide a body, that would unfortunately be the place to do it.

If you tried to write this as a fictional story, I think people would say it's too unbelievable. What began as one story for me turned into like four that spanned the country, spanned 30 or 40 years, and all connected in a way that couldn't be believed at first.

I grew up in Bear Brook Gardens in Allentown, New Hampshire. It's a small trailer park of maybe a hundred trailers, which is surrounded by Bear Brook State Park. When we were kids, we created a game that was basically hide and seek with a four-wheeler. You would just ride the four-wheeler around looking for the kids that were hiding in the woods. We did it pretty much all summer long.

Once I was approached by one of the kids in the group that he had come upon a barrel out in the middle of the woods, which was off the trail. We drove up that trail, off the trail a little bit,

We found a barrel standing up. It was just odd that the barrel was out there. It was a slightly rusted, dark blue barrel. It's a blue 55-gallon steel drum. It's just kind of sitting out in the woods. The brother that found the barrel went over to it and tried to lift the top of the barrel. And when he did that, we were hit with a smell that was absolutely putrid.

One of the brothers just pushed the barrel over and we watched the barrel fall on its side. I do recall seeing a little bit of like gray, whitish fluid ooze out of the bottom of the barrel, which I thought at the time at 11 years old was rotting milk. The guys jumped on my four-wheeler and we booted out of there and that was the last time that we saw the barrel.

Several months after the kids have kicked it over, a police officer gets a call about a hunter. I was working the day shift. It was overcast, cold, and I received a call from dispatch to meet a hunter in the Bear Brook Gardens mobile home park. He was very, very white, very pale, and he said to me, there's a barrel up in the woods, and I think there's some bones in there.

So I told him to stay by my patrol car. And he heads into the woods, pretty skeptical that there is anything amiss. And I walked approximately 300 yards. I could see the barrel. It was laying on its side. And as I got closer, I saw that something had fallen out of the barrel. It looked like a plastic rug, and it was all rolled up. I kneeled down, and I opened up the plastic.

As I opened the bag, the faces looking right at me. I said to myself, this is not good. I said to dispatch 5-1, be advised I have a 10-50. And she said, could you repeat that? They alerted the state authorities, the attorney general's office, state police, and it sort of set in motion an investigation.

The bodies were found not far from this sandpit just behind the Bear Brook Gardens mobile home park. Two decomposed bodies were found inside what appeared to be an adult female and then a younger female child. They have been able to determine that both victims were female, one an adult in her early 20s to early 30s, the other a young girl between the ages of 8 and 10. There's no identification, there's no purse, there's nothing inside the barrel.

And the victims had been wrapped in material, principally garbage bags, and there was some electrical wire that had been wrapped around the remains. Both of those victims died from a blunt object striking their heads and crushing their skulls.

It usually means that the killer is up close and right next to the victims. If I knew who the victim was, because everybody knew everybody in town, I could start connecting the dots. When you don't know who the person is, when you don't know who the victim is, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to solve the crime.

In New Hampshire, we have very few murders that involve complete strangers. Most of the murders occur amongst people who know each other. A close family member, maybe a friend, maybe a coworker. The next day I cold-canvassed the town. I went to approximately 200 residences asking, "Notice anything different? Anybody missing?"

maybe a mother, child, nobody knew nothing. And that was odd because population was 5,000 and everybody knew everything in that town.

Right from the start, we really were in the dark in this case. We had very little physical evidence, we had no witnesses, and we couldn't tell who our victims were, so we couldn't go back through their history to try to find the killer or connection that would lead us to the killer. The hope was that there would be a missing persons case from somewhere that matched the description of a family unit. It is going to take a great deal of time for them to be identified. We have run them through all of the computers, both at the state level and from Washington, D.C., and they are simply not in that computer.

Who are these victims? And are they local people or are they from a distance away? Maybe a truck driver from Canada came down and was looking for a spot to dump his victims. Or is it somebody who was passing through, a tourist, something like that? Somewhere, somehow, somebody must know, you know, who these people are. We have a mother and a young child. It's like, just didn't disappear off the face of the earth without a name or an identity. ♪

Two years after the burial was discovered, authorities released the remains so that they could be buried. These victims deserve the dignity of having a proper burial.

and we're going to give them a proper burial. Chief Connor arranged for the church to give him a plot in the cemetery. A local gravestone company donated a headstone. The headstone did not have the names. There's an inscription to the fact that they were found in 1985. It reads,

Here lies the mortal remains, known only to God, of a woman aged 23 to 33 and a girl child aged 8 to 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.

And with the burial of the two victims, that was kind of it. The case was pretty well cold, and it would stay that way for almost 15 years. When I would patrol, I would go into the cemetery, I would stop and look at the gravestone, and I would just say to myself, "Who are you? Where did you come from?"

Police say the hunter discovered the bodies wrapped in plastic in a barrel. The mystery bothers residents today. Who are the victims? Law enforcement investigators were working so hard to try to get a name and nothing was working because you can't connect the dots unless you know who the victims are. So while the investigation in New Hampshire is going cold, little did anyone know that across the country,

a five-year-old girl could be the key to cracking this case. So it's 1986 at an RV park in Scotts Valley, California. A guy by the name of Gordon Jensen was staying at the Holiday Host RV park with his daughter, Lisa. She was about five years old.

He was living as the kind of fix-it-up guy, handyman guy at this park, and he had a camper on a pickup truck that he was living in with Lisa. She was little, so she was like always running around the campground, playing with other kids, you know, bike riding.

He ends up befriending a couple, Catherine and Richard Decker. The Deckers are there sort of temporarily for a few months. They begin to talk to Gordon Jensen a little bit more, get to know him a bit more. And he starts to sort of confide in him. He says that he's having a really hard time raising Lisa on his own. The Deckers sensed something was wrong. They heard Lisa crying at night. Her clothes weren't in the best shape.

She looks a little thin. She looks a little dirty. He tells various stories about what happened to her mother. I think maybe she died of cancer, he said. Another story was they were in a restaurant. It was robbed. She panicked, ran out in the street and got run over in traffic. He actually broke down and cried. And he was incredibly convincing about his grief and about him wanting Lisa to have a better life.

And Mrs. Decker told him, "You're so lucky. She's so beautiful and cutie pie." And the couple starts thinking, "Well, we have a daughter who has wanted a little girl for a really long time. Maybe something could happen." Gordon Jensen eventually presented the idea

of them taking Lisa on a trial adoption basis. - And so they take Lisa with them down to Southern California where their daughter lives and have a sort of two week trial period. - An attorney basically told them, "Have him sign here, here and here, have that notarized and we'll file it in the court and then she could be yours, you know what I mean? Your daughter can adopt her."

Once the Deckers take Lisa with them down to Southern California, she starts to show signs that she's been a victim of abuse. And the Deckers contacted the authorities and she was interviewed. She was just an innocent child. She was just an innocent child. It breaks your heart to see a child like that be traumatized by an adult.

And they reach out to try to contact Gordon Jensen back at this RV park, presumably in the hopes that they could get this adoption legalized so that they could keep her away from him. But when they call back to the RV park, he is gone. He's vanished. When they went back up to have him sign the papers, he'd quit his job and left, was gone. He was nowhere to be found.

The next day, I started meeting folks at the mobile home park, trying to find out where he was. There's no Gordon Jensen. You know, there's nothing. We just knew that we had a guy, and he abandoned the kid. That's all we had.

The San Bernardino detectives talked to the owner, proprietor of the business, and actually asked him, "Is there anything in here that only that guy touched?" And he goes, "Yeah, he went out to the store, I gave him money, and he bought that, the, you know, VCR surveillance system for the campground." We went in the game room, and he said he installed all this stuff in here. I said, "I wonder if he's got some prints in that."

We took the first plate off, and sure enough, it was wiped clean. You could see where he had taken a cloth and wiped on the inside. We took the second plate off, and lo and behold, on the inside of that second plate, there were eight fingers. We hit the jackpot. Once he got those fingerprints back, it came back to another name. Curtis Kimball. Curtis Kimball. Curtis Kimball. Gordon Jensen is Curtis Kimball.

It turned out that he had been in a drunk driving accident with Lisa in the car in Orange County in the mid-80s. Once he made bail, he immediately absconded.

And then two years after he flees the RV park, Curtis Kimball is pulled over driving a stolen vehicle. When he's arrested, he gives the name Gerald Mockerman, along with a matching social security number and date of birth. Fingerprinting confirms that he is

The same guy, Curtis Kimball, Gerald Mockerman, Gordon Jensen. And at that point, he's taken into custody for the charges of child abandonment. He served a year and a half in prison and was released on parole. The day he was released on parole, he fled and became a fugitive. And it's going to be almost 10 years before police see him again. And because her father

had absconded and purportedly the mother was deceased, the Deckers couldn't keep her and so she went into Child Protective Services. It was heartbreaking for the Deckers. She'd really become a part of their family. They'd become close, very close.

I think it must have been hard for the Deckers to rescue Lisa from this horrible situation, only to then have to turn around and give her away again. I went to her home, picked the child up, and took her into protective custody. No one realizes it yet, but the story of Lisa is going to be the beginning of so many things. It's going to be the beginning of forensic genealogy as a technique.

It's going to be the beginning of how the Bear Brook murders get solved. This case is kind of the beginning of a whole new era of criminal investigation.

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You can start the story in New Hampshire, you can start the story in California. It is a sprawling, interconnected web of anecdotes that sort of unbelievably connect. Police say the hunter discovered the bodies wrapped in plastic in a barrel. If you tried to write this as a fictional story, I think people would say it's too unbelievable. But it's the way it happened.

Police were 15 years into the case and still very much at step one. Police had a few initial theories, but they really didn't pan out. No one in the community seemed to know anything about who these people might have been. No one seemed to be missing. Who are you? Who are the victims? And who's responsible for this?

Tips would come in or people would have ideas. You'd exploit those until they just simply ended and then the case would essentially go back on the shelf again. No one has been able to identify the bodies. A mystery bothers residents today. It's cold. This is the definition of a cold case. That changes in the year 2000. A state trooper by the name of John Cody is sort of informally assigned the Allentown case to look into.

The first thing that I did was actually go to the evidence repository to see exactly what the barrel looked like. The barrel was dark in color on the inside and rusted on the outside. It was very surreal that a mother and daughter were actually inside the barrel itself, disposed of like common trash. And those things don't happen in New Hampshire.

I made the decision to go out and try to locate the actual area that this barrel was found in Bearbrick State Park. You're torn between the beauty that you're seeing as you're walking and the knowledge that this area is actually where two victims were disposed of. In 1985, this is the area that the hunter found the barrel. As I came back out,

I noticed just a terrain difference here off to the left and it kind of drew my attention so I started to walk out towards that area. I was just about to wrap it up for the day and there was like a hump in the terrain. It wasn't something that was natural. As I'm walking towards it, you're trying to talk yourself out of that it's probably nothing. I saw the black plastic and that's when my heart started to race a little bit.

I peeled back a little of the plastic and there was a bright white substance inside. I lit it up with my flashlight and I remember distinctly seeing the outline of a bone. I started to think this doesn't look good. And then when I peeled back the plastic a little more and illuminated it with my flashlight, it was very evident that this was a human bone. There was a million things going through my mind. Was this an area that somebody was dumping their victims? Did we have a serial killer?

So what John Cody finds in this second barrel are two more victims. Two more children were found in another barrel. All were victims of homicide. Two little girls, one estimated to be between the ages of one and three, the other between the ages of two and four. Like the other victims, they were killed with blunt force trauma to the head and stuffed in these barrels and wrapped in plastic.

So what was an adult female and a little girl is now an adult female and three little children. And the obvious place that that takes investigators is to imagine that this was a family. It certainly was a big turning point in the case. There had to be a missing persons report out there somewhere. Unfortunately, they quickly ran out of leads and somewhat surprisingly, we're not finding any missing persons case that matched. How can you have a mother and three daughters, a whole family, just disappear

Who out there is looking for them and where are they? There is a neighbor, there's a sibling, there is an aunt, there's a pediatrician. Somebody knows who these kids are. If this could happen to these people, it could happen to somebody else around here. There's something so wicked going on right now in this small town. To understand how this case is going to get solved, we have to go back to California.

There, a woman named Eun-sun Jun is introducing her new boyfriend to her family. Eun-sun is probably the closest friend I've maybe ever had. We met in a ceramics class at a community center in Richmond, California. Eun-sun was in her mid-40s. She worked as a chemist. She was an immigrant from Korea.

Unsun was a free spirit. We always said she was like a bohemian. She loved to explore religions, explore people, different cultures. This woman went around the whole world by herself. But she was like full of almost opposite contrasts. She was real uneasy about trying to meet guys. She was lonely.

She didn't find the love of her life. And I think that opened her up to be vulnerable to people who would take advantage of her. When there was this new boyfriend, a guy by the name of Larry Vanner, she wants to introduce him to the family, but right away it doesn't go well. I opened the door and saw his face.

I had a chill run down my back that I've never in my life ever had before. And he stuck out his hand to shake my hand and I saw the long dirty fingernails that just, just creeped me out. Larry would just grab and gobble up everything on the table and belch and eat more and then he'd go sit on the couch and I'd just shake my head.

Just a few months later, Unson was becoming more and more estranged from her family and also her friends. Rose would call the house and Larry would make a different excuse each time for why Unson wasn't there. He would say, "Well, she's busy taking care of her mother," or "She was going to get some therapeutic help." He would say, "She decided she didn't like me anymore and didn't want me in her life." Who could believe him for one second?

Rose ultimately grew quite suspicious of that, that she issued an ultimatum to Larry. I want Unsoon, not you. I want Unsoon to tell me that she's done with our relationship or I'm going to get the sheriff involved. Ultimately what she did was call the police. What the detectives don't realize is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. All right, Larry.

Unsoon June, a chemist living in California, has a new man in her life. Friends and family say she's become more distant since meeting Larry Vanner. Now one friend says Unsoon isn't taking any of her calls. And that friend is about to take action. In May of 2002, Unsoon's friend Renee Rose kept calling. Each time, Larry Vanner's explanation for why she couldn't talk to Unsoon was different.

Finally, after several weeks, Rose gave Vanner an ultimatum. She was leaving on vacation for 10 days, and she said she wanted to hear Eun-Seon's voice on her answering machine when she got back. If she didn't, she would call the police. And in the end, that's what she did. Roxanne Grunheide. She is working in Contra Costa County when this call about a missing person comes in. And I was a homicide detective for the Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff.

Someone who earlier in her career was told by superiors that her reports were too detailed. Occasionally I did write a little bit too much. I think just loves a mystery. Who really thrives on searching for the smallest details that can unlock the biggest mysteries. The case originally came in as a missing persons report. Where is Eun-sun Joon?

The obvious first place to start is with the live-in boyfriend, Larry Vanner. So police bring Larry Vanner in for questioning. Now, I haven't talked anymore about Pansoon's problems or my problems because frankly, you're not my priest.

And you're not my doctor. I watched from this special room where the video link is. He was polite and soft-spoken and very smart. And with his twinkly blue eyes, he could, you know, get somebody to maybe to trust him. I've always tried to live by the model that there's no defense against the truth.

But sometimes it's hard to find out what the truth is. All we were really trying to do was to determine where Ansoon was and if she was okay. And he wasn't being cooperative with that at all. When that southern fire was roaring last month,

I don't know if you've ever lived in a rural area before, but most people are signed up for the firefighting crew. He's just telling stories. He's just trying to bide his time and not anything about, like, Ansoon and where she is and what's, why you're here in this police station. You know, gossip has its place in society sometimes, but I'm just not going to say any more about Ansoon or myself right now.

Larry is offering a whole slew of different reasons for why Unsoon is unavailable. At first he said she was up in Oregon. Taking care of one of my properties. And then at some point he changed the story into that she had had some sort of a nervous breakdown. If she were to get a call from authorities, that might trigger an anxiety attack. And when somebody's story keeps changing, it means that they're either made something up,

Can't remember what they told you the first time or that they're lying to you. They decide they want to fingerprint Larry Vanner to learn more about him, and he agrees. He walked into the Records Bureau and allowed us to fingerprint him. We very quickly got a phone call from the Records Bureau that they had identified him as a parolee at large by the name of Curtis Mayo Kimball.

Curtis Kimball. Curtis Kimball? He's a man who had been convicted of child abandonment. So what's the deal?

"Who really are you?" And more importantly, "Where is Unsoon?" - Right away, he's under arrest. - He was read his Miranda rights and he declined to make any additional statements. - What the detectives don't realize is how much of a monster this guy is. - So Roxanne and a colleague go over to the house to try to find Unsoon to see where she is. - As myself and my partner approached the front door, we didn't know what we were walking into.

I mean, you always hope that the person is okay and that they're alive and well. It was kind of dirty and just messy, but not anything particular that was out of place. There's no obvious sense of foul play, of struggle of any kind. We did note that there was an apparent lack of women's clothing, property, like there were no purses, there were no women's shoes. There was only his stuff in the house. It was odd.

One of the interesting things I noted was that there were actually some photographs of Ansoon on the refrigerator. She was smiling and she looked like she was happy. And they work their way around the house and around to the garage and they open up the garage door from the outside. It was packed with stuff. Ansoon was a avid potter and she had pottery in various stages of being fired and glazed.

And then my partner walked into a smallish door at the very back and he said something to the effect like, "You're not gonna believe this. Like, you gotta come see this." Roxanne takes a few steps down into the crawlspace and what she sees is an enormous pile of cat litter. Big, like four or five feet around, probably two or three feet high. And I stood there for just a few seconds

There was no odor. I remember seeing an ax leaned up there. There was a lot of blood spatter in the room. They bring in the crime scene investigators, look into that pile, and they start brushing it away. First thing that was revealed was a human foot. And it's wearing a flip-flop. But it was completely mummified. Ultimately, the body was positively identified as Ahn Soon-Joon.

The cause of death was a blunt force trauma to the head. It seemed obvious that she was either killed there or he was trying to dismember her there and then just bought the kitty litter to buy himself some time until he could dispose of her. So that night, I don't think I slept a wink and it was like the world had turned dark and gray. When I got up in the morning, I pulled my shades back. There was clouds and a beautiful blue sky.

And there was seagulls circling in the sky. They were beautiful. And I went, "This can't be." I closed the blinds back up. How could it be bright and sunny when Unsoon's dead?

Within the couple of weeks after discovery of the body, Larry Vanner, aka Curtis Mayo Kimball, was charged with the murder of Eun-Soon Joon. Investigators have not yet proven that any of the tools found at the residence were used by Vanner to kill Eun-Soon. The prosecutor in the case, he wanted to find some piece of evidence that somehow tied Larry Vanner to the act of murdering Eun-Soon Joon.

Ultimately, the cat litter was the key. Hi all, Kate Gibson here of The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson. This week we talked to Whoopi Goldberg about lots of things. But one of the things we talked to her about is how as a science fiction and graphic novel fan, she never saw herself on those screens or on those pages growing up. I mean, I didn't realize that part of me until I watched Star Trek. And I saw it because I love sci-fi.

And for some reason, it never occurred to me that I was missing until I was present. You're not going to want to miss this episode of The Bookcase from ABC News. The prosecutor in the case, he wanted to find some piece of evidence, you know, a murder weapon, a print that somehow tied Larry Vanner to the act of murdering Eun-Soon Jin. What they came up with was the cat litter. There was a huge pile of kitty litter on top of Eun-Soon's body.

10 bags worth of kitty litter. If we can find out where he bought all this cat litter, there might be a store employee who actually remembers it. It'd be like a needle in a haystack to try to locate the store where he bought the cat litter. There's just so many pet stores, it would be nearly impossible.

And so Roxanne sort of takes on that challenge and spots a detail. I had been notified by the bank that there was some video of him at an ATM using Unsoon's credit card.

I remembered that where that bank was, in that little shopping center, there was this really cool little pet store. And based on nothing more than that, she takes a ride out to the pet store. I walked in and I said, "Did this happen maybe?" That somebody came in and bought a significant quantity of cat litter out of the blue? And he goes,

Yeah, there was this guy that came in and he bought 10 of them. And they described him to a T. Older guy, gray hair, mustache, beard, scruffy beard, bright blue eyes, you know, and he goes in, he paid cash. Ultimately, the cat litter was the key. The pretrial hearings for Larry's murder trial begin. And he pleads guilty. He doesn't fight it at all. He just says, I'm done. Send me to jail. I don't want to talk about anything anymore.

It was a huge shock to everyone, the judge, the prosecutor, Vanner's own lawyer. Roxanne has a hunch that Larry Vanner is hiding something. That he had this little girl that he said was his daughter and he gave her away. Like, what was his charge of abandoning a child about?

I think he believed if he pled guilty, I would stop investigating that aspect of his past. He goes to jail thinking it's done, but the case haunts Roxanne, and she keeps digging and keeps digging. I'm like, this isn't adding up. Something's just not right about all of this. So over the next months, I just absorbed everything that I could about his previous crime.

I was really centered on the little girl, on Lisa. There were like little fingerprint cards, like with these little tiny little hands and little, they had their little footprints on the back of them and little tiny fingerprints and it just made me angry and curious. Like, was this really his daughter? If it's not his daughter, where did he get her? Who did he get her from? I put in a request to do a definitive paternity test.

She got the blood sample from Vanner, who is now in prison, and she tested it against the sample they took from five-year-old Lisa. He was not biologically related to Lisa. Larry Vanner is not Lisa's father. Curtis Kimball was not Lisa's father. Gordon Jensen, Gerald Mockerman, that wasn't her father. Maybe Lisa's not Lisa.

Once Roxanne saw the results of the paternity test, she called the San Bernardino Sheriff's Office. They had handled Lisa's case 17 years ago.

And she was about to drop shocking news on them. Here I am, years and years later, showing up and going, "Hey, you have found Jane Doe, I believe." Initially, they were like, "We don't have a case like that." And I'm like, "Yeah, you do." Roxanne basically tells them, "You have a missing person, an unidentified victim, who is alive, who still has a family out there to meet."

It just made me determined to do everything that I could possibly do to try to find out who she was. In 2003, when the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department opened a new investigation aimed at finding her true identity, Lisa was 22 years old. I called Lisa and talked to her. She really wanted to know who she was.

By this time, Lisa's an adult. She had grown up. So this rocks her world even more. Lisa learns that her father is not her father. She still has no idea where her mother is. She didn't even know what her given birth name may have been. With the realization that he was not Lisa's father, we started investigating who she was, where he took her from. So then the mystery becomes, whose daughter is she, and who's her mother, and where is her mother?

because we know this guy kills people. We might be dealing not just with someone that killed one person, but we're dealing with a serial killer. That was the genesis of the investigation that would ultimately lead back to New Hampshire and to Bearbrick State Park. Police have still not identified the bodies of one woman and three young girls found in 1985 and 2000 in metal drums.

In my Judeo-Christian heritage, there's this sentiment around murder that the blood of the innocent will call out from the ground to God. And it's going to find justice because its DNA is going to point at perpetrators. And how amazing is it that it was blood of the innocent, it was blood of little Lisa, that would go on to solve this mystery. It's been more than 30 years since the discovery of the first barrel in Allentown, New Hampshire.

State police begin to work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to revive the case. And they come up with new composite images of the victims, more high-tech reconstructions of what the victims might have looked like in life. This is the skull, the CT scan brought into our software of the oldest child. You can see the blunt force trauma, the fracture lines here. You can sculpt the muscles back on the skull.

and then slowly start to work on each individual feature to come up with a final rendering of the face. Investigators revealed the new images of the woman and three children whose identities remain a mystery. They gave some measure of humanity to the victims and just helped to remind everybody that these were real people.

So in addition to constructing facial recognition of the victims, they also did DNA testing to determine are they possibly related. Forensics show the woman is related to two of the children, most likely a mother and two daughters, but one girl is from a different family. So who is the middle child became even more of a question.

The goal was to not only report what we found, but to engender interest in the case because it was constant discussion about the fact how can an entire family be wiped out and no one come forward. We hoped that maybe somebody would remember something out there and make a phone call, but that didn't happen. So as the New Hampshire investigators are falling flat in their case, Lisa in California is still trying to figure out her identity.

Around 2015, more than a decade after Lisa found out that the guy that had abandoned her wasn't her real father, she comes up with an idea. She hears that there are people using DNA websites to find long-lost relatives. Why couldn't that work for her? The databases had grown tremendously. So we signed Lisa up on Ancestry initially, and we started getting some distant cousin hits.

They are fourth cousins and fifth cousins, and it's not simple to find out someone's identity based on the identity of a relative who's that distantly related. I emailed DNA Adoption and I asked if the techniques they use for finding the biofamilies of adoptees could also work for Lisa. It was Dr. Barbara Rae Venter that responded.

So genealogy itself is doing family history research. Genetic genealogy is when you then couple that with DNA. The Lisa case was actually kind of difficult because normally when you're working with adoptees, you have some information.

You know where they're born, you have a birth date. In Elisa's case, we had no idea where she was from. All we had was her DNA. We had from her dental development when she was first recovered back in 1986. It had been estimated that she was probably born in about 1981. At the time that I started working on this case, Elisa was about 35 years old. So when Barbara got involved, she started a Lisa Project site on family tree DNA.

and started correlating all the matches there. As people were contacted, they contacted their relatives also, encouraging them to test and share their DNA. - Barbara spends thousands and thousands of hours trying to figure out who Lisa is related to. And she builds a family tree. And ultimately it leads to a man in New Hampshire who is Lisa's grandfather. - I was contacted one day by my nephew

And he was working with the Sheriff's Department out in California. And they requested for me to do a DNA. And they discovered that I was the actual grandfather. And Barbara Aventer learns from him that he had a daughter named Denise Bowden. And Denise is Lisa's mother. I called Lisa up to let her know that we knew who she was. She got very quiet.

I asked her, "Do you want to know your name?" And then she just very quietly said yes. It turns out that in fact Lisa's birth name had been Dawn Bodin. Dawn was born in 1981. She was only five months old when they left Manchester. The last night Lisa's grandfather had seen Lisa and her mother was in 1981 around Thanksgiving in Manchester, New Hampshire with the mother's boyfriend, a guy by the name of Bob Evans.

Bob Evans had apparently told family members at Thanksgiving that they were going to be leaving town, that they owed people money and so they would be leaving. A week later on the first of December, I went over there to invite them here for Christmas and found out that they were already gone. Their neighbors told me that they had packed up and just left and then I never saw her ever since after that.

We had no idea what to do or where to go or which way to turn. The presumption was that they were just going off to make a new start elsewhere. So when they left the area, her family did not file any type of missing persons report and no real inquiries or follow-ups or communications beyond that were had with her family. One of the first questions for investigators is, "Who is this Bob Evans guy?" He's a guy who was a plumber, electrician. He would do trade work.

So here you have the last person who's seen with Lisa in New Hampshire, Bob Evans. The next time we see her is in California with Gordon Jensen. Maybe it's the same person.

I sent Manchester PD pictures of the guy we knew as Curtis Kimball and Gordon Jensen. Authorities go to Lisa's grandfather, they bring a mugshot of Gordon Jensen, the guy that had abandoned Lisa in California, and they show it to him. And right away, he recognizes him and confirms what investigators had feared, that Gordon Jensen was also Bob Evans.

Detective Peter Headley called Bob Evans an incredibly good con man. New Hampshire prosecutor Jeff Strailsen had another name for him, the chameleon. He clearly had the ability to ingratiate himself to other people, to mold himself to the situation, to get what he wanted. By this point, investigators had connected three of the four mysteries with each other. Eun-Soon Joon's murder, the identity of Lisa, and the disappearance and presumed murder of Denise Bowden.

After 30 years, in 2016, police opened a missing persons case on Denise Bowden. She had not been reported missing before then. Then a case manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children looked at a map. Manchester, where Denise Bowden was last seen, was only about 25 minutes from Bear Brook State Park. Denise went missing in 1981. The first barrel was discovered in 1985.

We started to look at the timeframe and the proximity and we're like, "Wow, there is a potential that these two cases could be related." So investigators wondered, is Denise the adult victim from the first barrel? It's been more than 30 years since Denise Bowden was last seen by her family and that launches a new investigation as to what happened to her. Where is she?

Circumstantially, we were able to connect the man that abandoned Lisa that left with Denise also had connections to the crime scene up in Allentown where the four bodies were found.

As far as investigators can tell, Bob Evans showed up in New Hampshire in the late '70s. He found work as an electrician, as a handyman. We knew that Bob Evans actually spent a good amount of time on that property where the barrels were found because he used to fix up and do some electrical work at a camp store that was right there on the property.

We started trying to look for any kind of linkage that we could between him and the Allenstown case, because it was clear he was associated with Denise Bowden's disappearance. The detectives are wondering, is Denise Bowden the woman found in the barrel? The victims from the first barrel that was discovered in 1985 were buried, and eventually they were exhumed, meaning dug up again, so that we could try to do additional DNA testing on them. They take Lisa's DNA sample, Denise's daughter, and test it against that victim to see if it's her mother.

She's not the adult victim. It's a big letdown. This is a big setback for the police. They thought that this mystery was going to finally be over, and it was just beginning. It certainly seems highly likely that Denise Bowden was murdered by Bob Evans. I think the questions are when, where, and how was she murdered between New Hampshire and California? That doesn't really narrow it down. I don't think they're ever going to find her. There's always that hope, but nothing's definite.

We knew that Bob Evans was the same man that abandoned Lisa. We wanted to see how, if at all, may he be related to the four Allentown victims. Remember, they know Bob Evans is Gordon Jensen slash Larry Vanner. They have his DNA. So they test the DNA from the bodies in the barrels in New Hampshire against the DNA that he left in California. And what they got back from that result was something nobody expected. It turned out that

the middle child victim, the child who was not related to the other three victims. She was actually the daughter of Bob Evans.

This now ties Bob Evans to the crime scene in Bear Brook State Park. A man with multiple aliases who was known as Robert Bob Evans during his time in New Hampshire. They say DNA shows one of the girl victims was Evans' daughter. And there was just a moment of, "Wow, we got it. This is definitely him." And we got a lot of work to do from here to try to figure out who this guy is and what the rest of the story is. It conjures up all sorts of questions as to who is the mother?

Is she alive? Is she dead? Because let's face it, there's a lot of dead people in this case tied to Evans. And we do fear that his daughter's mother is probably another victim somewhere. It's extremely rare to know who the killer is, but not know who the victims are. Usually when that happens, that's serial killer territory. The whole idea that he actually would kill and dismember

His own child, I think, is beyond comprehensive. But the important thing to understand with serial killers is they have no empathy or feeling or caring about anyone. So now we knew that this man went by four different names, but we still didn't know what his true identity was.

Several months after we learn about Bob Evans' connection to the Bear Brook murders, Barbara Ray Venter, the genealogist who had identified Lisa, is called upon to do the same thing. The law enforcement suspected that there were probably other victims, and so they really wanted to know who this guy was and where he was from. And so she begins to build out a family tree of this mystery killer.

And then using exactly the same technique that I used to identify Lisa's parents, I determined that he in fact was Terry Rasmussen from Colorado. Finally, investigators have this guy's actual identity, and that's Terry Rasmussen. Finding out his real name, Terry Rasmussen, now we had something to go on to track him further back.

and try to find more victims. Breaking news this noon, investigators have just released new details about the suspect in the murder of four people found in barrels in Allentown. During his time here in New Hampshire, he was known as Bob Evans, but his true identity is Terry Peter Rasmussen. He crossed the country under many different names, and while his ties to certain people and places have been confirmed, there's a lot investigators don't know.

His original identity was thought to be Curtis Kimball because that's what his identity was when he was arrested back in 1985. Then in 1986, we had Gordon Jensen. He would either commit a crime or had committed a murder and he'd change his name and off he'd go again. In putting together a timeline and a life story of who Terry Rasmussen was, we learned that he was a husband at one point and a father of four children.

He actually got married, he'd had children, but unlike these victims from Bear Brook, he hadn't killed them. A family now coming to terms with the fact that the man they've been looking for for decades is a convicted killer. My name is Diane Klupfer and Terry Rasmussen is my father. My father's real full name is Terry Peter Rasmussen and he was born December 23rd of 1943.

One of Terry's children, Diane, gets a call with this news from New Hampshire State Police. Just imagine that state police from a different state give you a call and say they want to talk to you about something that pertains to your father. Remember, the last time they saw him was decades ago. His children were very young when he left. I'm at work plugging away, and I see these two people from the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit come into the lobby.

They laid this story out for me that was what had happened to my father. They had all these other pictures from all the times that he'd been arrested under all these different names. And these state troopers just unfurl this sprawling tale. And at the end of the story, the guy at the center of it who did all of that is your father. It was him.

The last time they saw him was decades ago. My father's been out of my life since I was like six or seven. My mother and my father got married in 1968 in Hawaii. She just told me that he was the most handsome man that she had ever seen and he was charming and he swept her off her feet. We have his eyes. I do, my sister does, and my brother does.

They feel that they're responsible, that they're embarrassed about Terry Rasmussen being their father. My father has killed many people repeatedly, so he does fall into the definition of a serial killer. So he's a serial killer. Oh my God. Do you... That's the first time I've said that. I do know that my mother tells me, "My father burned my brother with cigarettes."

Normal people don't do that. It's very hard on Diane, as it would be on anybody, to learn something like this. I don't know if my mother knew his capacity for violence, but I don't believe that she knew about this. When you say "this," what do you mean? His ability to kill women and children. If my mother wouldn't have left, my father could have been me. Would have been me.

You want evil to look evil. And when I saw his face, he didn't look evil at all. He just looked in that picture like any other bearded New Hampshire woodsman. Authorities say they now know Rasmussen was born in Denver in 1943, went to high school in Arizona.

He dropped out of high school after his sophomore year and joined the Navy in 1961. He was trained as an electrician and served for six years at bases around the West Coast and at Okinawa. Terry Rasmussen got the title of the Chameleon Killer. When he certainly does have different looks,

The way that he repeatedly changed his name, moved on to the next town or state. When he showed up in a new location, he was usually clean-shaven and then he'd grow a beard. Chameleon is a word that fits. He didn't even look healthy. His face was gray. He smoked constantly. Here's the type of serial killer Terry Rasmussen was.

He would go after vulnerable women with young children. He would separate them from their family. He was able to insert himself into families, tear those families apart, kill the members that came with him, and then do it all over again, you know, in a couple years with a different name and a different family. These weren't just random strangers he crossed paths with at a truck stop and picked up and killed. These are people he lived with. This was his own child in one case.

Rasmussen's victims were intimately known to him, and he spent months or years with them at times before murdering them. My guess is they never realized who he was or what he was capable of until it was far too late. So now we have the identity of the killer. We still don't know the identities of the four victims.

It was around mid-October that I received information that we had a credible tip that may be able to identify at least three of the victims of the barrels.

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Thirty years after the discovery of the bodies of a woman and three children in New Hampshire, authorities think they have finally found their killer. But finding the true identity of Terry Rasmussen, a man they have come to call the Chameleon, doesn't mean this case is over. Slain bodies were found on November 10th, 1985 in Bear Brook State Park. Police say the hunter discovered the bodies wrapped in plastic in a barrel.

The barrel on the left was found on November 10th, 1985. This is the barrel found by the hunter in the woods. And then to the right of that is the barrel that we found in 2000. No one has been able to identify the bodies of Mystery Fathers residents today. The one thing in this case that will always stick in my mind till the day I die is we don't have Terry Rasmussen around today to talk to.

Rasmussen died in prison in 2010 where he was serving time for killing his common-law wife in California. I guess dying serves him right. I wish he'd lived longer so he would have suffered longer in prison. A lot of people ask that question. You find out who your killer is, your killer is dead, why are you still working on the case? We knew who he was, but who are these victims? We still, first and foremost, do not know the identities of the four Bear Brook victims.

Sometimes when people go missing, it's obvious. There's another way that people go missing, where they fade slowly from the lives of the people around them. One of the interesting dynamics of this case as we went along was private citizens taking an intense interest in this one case. When citizens get involved in a law enforcement investigation, it can often hinder the case. In this case, the outside influences here made the difference in this case.

Becky Heath is a librarian. She's also someone who loves to investigate things. Each night I would get home and go on to these message boards and just go through them.

Looking for my brothers Curtis and Dale. I'm looking for Elsa de Jesus. Looking for half-brother Jason Wayne Hale. These forums that Becky Heath was looking through, they sort of exist in this, what Becky called, an in-between space where people are looking for people, but it's not necessarily an official missing persons report. She's poring through searching for anybody that has been looking for a missing woman and two children.

And she stumbles upon something. Becky thinks it could potentially be the Bear Brook victims. There was a bunch of different family members that were all looking for this woman and her two children. The ages fitting and then the locations also fitting. Like, oh my goodness, you know what? I think that this could be them. Becky sends a text message.

I've been trying to track down this post. Could this be you? And she responded back to me, "Yes, you have my heart pounding." And she starts to ask them, you know, "When's the last time you saw this person?" And, "Who was she last with?" And the message she gets back is chilling. She just throws in, "Oh, and by the way, she married a guy with the last name Rasmussen." I can't, I stopped. And my response was, "Oh my God, this is real."

Meanwhile, Barbara Rae Venter, genetic genealogist, had also been honing in on the identities of the victims. She reads an article about a new forensic technique that's able to extract autosomal DNA from rootless hair. Quite often.

One of the things that is found at crime scenes is hair. A criminal may have been very careful to wipe things down or to wear gloves or whatever, but you shed hair all the time. The light bulb goes on. I had the folks in New Hampshire send hair from the victims to Dr. Green.

I'm Ed Green, I'm an associate professor of biomolecular engineering here at UC Santa Cruz and we do DNA technology development. They're using a new technique to extract DNA from a strand of hair that no longer has the DNA rich root attached. He was able to extract autosomal DNA from the hair shaft.

She was able to get a profile to put into the databases and actually helped confirm through genealogy research. All of a sudden you have two people are solving the Bear Brook case at almost the exact same moment. It's unbelievable, but that's what happened. After decades of silence and mystery, officials announced today that they've identified three murder victims found in metal barrels in the woods of Allentown. Good afternoon.

In 2017, we knew the identity of the Allentown killer, but his victim's identities remained a mystery. We're here to report that for three of the four Allentown victims, that's now changed. Specifically, we've identified the victims we've referred to over the years as the mother, the oldest child, and the youngest child. And here they are. We learned that the adult victim's name is Marlise Honeychurch.

that the oldest child who was found in the first barrel with her, her name is Marie Vaughan. And we learn that the name of the youngest child victim, her name was Sarah McWatters. At the time this woman and her two children were missing, she had a boyfriend named Terry Rasmussen. The same man we eventually learned was in fact a killer.

Today we've returned the identities and the dignity to Marilys, Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn, and Sarah McWatters. Questions remain. Who is the fourth victim? Who was her mother? The fourth victim found in those barrels remains unidentified, but Rasmussen is that child's biological father. You know, people ask me why I do these interviews. There's still one victim out there.

There is one girl who we don't know who she is. That's why I do these, to get her identified and so that there's closure for the families involved here. That's the only reason. Can you introduce who you are, how you are part of this story? I am Paula, Marlise's sister. I'm the brother of Marlise and the uncle of Sarah and Marie. Through the years, my mother always said, "Something's not right."

Where is she? Authorities have named three of the four people found in those Allenstown barrels in 1985 and 2000 as a mother and her two children. Based on information from the woman's family and the work of a researcher, as well as DNA testing and genealogical research, we've identified three of the Allenstown murder victims.

The woman was Marlise Honeychurch. Two of the three girls were identified as her daughters, Marie and Sarah, last seen in California in 1978. Investigators say they may have moved to New Hampshire with serial killer Terry Rasmussen, who went by the name Bob Evans, here. She was bubbly and quirky.

Yeah, she had a good sense of humor. Marlise was born in Stamford, Connecticut in 1954. She later married and gave birth to her daughter, Marie, in 1971. After Marlise married her second husband, she gave birth to her daughter, Sarah, in 1977. We were at the hospital when she had Sarah. She was excited because she had another baby. Marlise was excited to be a mom.

She loved her kids dearly. Marlise and her second husband separated in 1978 and ultimately divorced. Marlise Honeychurch is in her early 20s, in the late 70s, when she meets Terry Rasmussen. The most chilling aspect is that her boyfriend at the time was Terry Rasmussen. The person we learned was Bob Evans, the person we know is a serial killer. Marlise was last seen around Thanksgiving in 1978.

And she was with Terry. She came to our mother's in La Puente. She came with this man and introduced him as Terry. Yeah, Terry Rasmussen. I don't remember exactly what happened. I just heard that they had an argument, Marlies and my mom. There was a fight, and Marlies just said, I'm leaving with Terry.

I'll see you guys later. And we don't know what the argument was about. No. My mom might have said something to her as, he's too old for you, why are you with him, or something like that. It made her mad, and she might have just took off. Our mom was very outspoken. We don't know.

She went with Terry and they left. Never called, never contacted nobody, just disappeared. You almost know what's going to happen. You almost expect it because that is what Rasmussen was doing in all these cases, was finding a way to wedge himself in between a single mom in many cases and her family.

I had always said one day they're going to come walking through the door or my nieces will come looking for their grandmother or something. Man, that never happened. But it tore my mom up. She took the blame for her leaving. It just hurts that she doesn't know that it wasn't her fault, that she left with somebody that was going to be horrible.

We know that Marlise and the girls left California during this time and somehow, someway, sometime made their way up to New Hampshire. We don't know why he killed her. One of the theories is that he'd been sexually assaulting the children. It's possible their mother found out about it and confronted him. One of the just troubling and lingering questions of the case is how did the victim's absence go unreported for so long? How did they just fall off the radar? It really

makes you think about Denise Bowden's leaving Manchester, New Hampshire in late 1981, some three years after Terry was with Marlies. And in both cases, no missing persons report was filed. And years would go by, and I think the families just assumed that they were out there somewhere. We did search. We did search. And we searched a lot. It was just a situation where

Every time we searched, came to a dead end, came to a dead end, came to a dead end. I remember seeing a photograph. A birthday photograph of Marie Vaughn blowing out some birthday candles. We believe it could be just a few months before Marlise went missing with her two children. One of the sad things about that photograph is it possibly could have been the last birthday that Marie Vaughn had.

To finally put a human face and a human story, to see the real people behind that story was very moving. Together we've been able to uncover the identity of the Allentown Killer, a murderer who tried to erase his victims and hide in the process. We know what he was, we know what he did, and now we know who his victims were. It felt good to be a part of giving them that measure of justice and giving the family some answers.

The big lesson and takeaway in this case is that people are never truly forgotten. Just because somebody goes missing and maybe because of whatever issues in the family, they aren't immediately reported missing doesn't mean that they weren't loved and aren't missed. Luckily this case was big enough that a lot of people never gave up on them either. The community just never gave up hope. Because if they would have gave up and not followed the case and not pursued it, we would still not know where my sister and nieces were.

So that's who we truly need to thank is those people. It's kind of bittersweet. You know, they do have their names back. Everybody knows who they are now. The first thought is, we can finally put the names on the gravestone. The dignity of providing these victims with a name and have them rest in peace. So November of 2019, we finally get an actual funeral. They are...

laying Marlise and Marie to rest. And I feel it's my responsibility to be here. Here you have the family members of the murder victims and the daughter of the murderer. It's just a really powerful moment. My father killed your sister and your nieces by an earth, would you want to talk to me? Diane? You must be Diane. I am Diane. Hi. I'm Michelle.

We're here today to bury my sister and my nieces. The community has offered to put them to rest, and we're fortunate enough to be here for it. I don't know that I ever could make up for my father's sins. How do you ever make up for something like that? I don't know. My father killed your sister and your nieces. Why on earth would you want to talk to me? Diane? You must be Diane. I am Diane. Hi. I'm Michelle. Hi. Hi.

They all said the same thing, that it wasn't my fault. But because of my father, they lost their sister and their nieces. It has to be rough on her and her brother to know that their dad did such brutal things. But you also got to be thankful that-- It wasn't them. They're still alive. All the people that had seen this thing through

We're able to have this moment of... I don't know if closure is the right word, but something close to it. It's a day of sorrow, yes, and a sadness. But it is also a day of great joy. What was lost has now been found. The fact that you have, you know, sitting around the gravesite, the members of the Honeychurch family sitting next to the daughter of the man who murdered them, I think it's a powerful...

The thing that binds us together is this horrible thing that has happened here. But they treated me just like I was their sister. We as a family would like to thank the community for caring and loving our sister Marlise and our nieces Marie, Sarah. They can rest in peace. Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. There are still, of course, loose ends with this case. Not every question has been answered yet.

There's still one victim out there. There is one girl who we don't know who she is. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to identify who the fourth victim is fairly soon, but with these kind of cases it's difficult to predict how long it's going to take. Today was very hard. I hope the next time I come here it's because my sister is her name. I cannot let that just be okay to never find out.

what her name is and where's the rest of her family. We call that other little child, we named her Angel. And the focus from this day forward should be to find the family of that little girl. Diane, the Honey Churches, they're all victims of Terry Rasmussen in one way or another. And the fact that they could share that moment in Allentown back where it began, it was a special moment.

The funeral was held so close to Bear Brook State Park, it really did feel like we were back at the beginning. This is Deborah Roberts. The search continues for the identity of the middle child known as Angel. Using modern DNA technology, authorities have found that Angel and her mother are likely descendants of a family from Pearl River County, Mississippi.

You've been listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. Join us Friday nights at 9 for all new broadcast episodes of 2020. For all of us here at ABC, thanks for listening. ♪

Hi all, Kate Gibson here of The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson. This week we talked to Whoopi Goldberg about lots of things. But one of the things we talked to her about is how as a science fiction and graphic novel fan, she never saw herself on those screens or on those pages growing up. I mean, I didn't realize that part of me until I watched Star Trek. And I saw it because I love sci-fi.

And for some reason, it never occurred to me that I was missing until I was present. You're not going to want to miss this episode of The Bookcase from ABC News.