Bear Brook Murders
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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Bear Brook State Park is a picturesque 10,000-acre state park located in the wonderful state of New Hampshire.

The ideal place for families to hike, swim, laugh, and enjoy life. But on November 19th, 1985, the laughter would end forever. A 55-gallon metal barrel was discovered with two butchered bodies still inside. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 83, The Bear Brook Murders. ♪♪

Thank you.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

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In July 1985, 11-year-old Jesse Morgan and his friends were playing hide-and-seek in Bear Brook State Park. While playing in an area just off one of the main hiking trails, the group of kids came across a barrel. The barrel's location was a little odd because it seemed so out of place just to be sitting there in the woods off the main trail. Bear Brook State Park isn't a place that's been known to be a dumping ground.

Jesse Morgan and his group of friends decided to do what most kids their ages would do. They wanted to see what was inside the barrel or at the very least figure out what it was doing deep in the woods. But when they lifted the lid, they were hit with a smell that later on Jesse Morgan described as, quote, rotten milk.

The group of boys quickly closed the barrel's lid, and one of the boys decided to kick the barrel over onto its side. Other than the smell that was coming from inside, the group of boys didn't see or hear anything coming from inside. At first, they thought that maybe there was just a dead animal trapped inside. They are, of course, in the middle of the woods, so it wouldn't be entirely out of question to come across a dead animal.

But how could a dead animal get inside a barrel with the lid closed? Jesse Morgan and his group of friends didn't have a good feeling. The barrel just gave them the creeps, so they decided to get out of there.

They made their way back to the main hiking trail where they jumped on the four-wheeler they had with them. They drove away thinking that something just wasn't right about that barrel. But they had absolutely no idea what was really inside. Four months later, on November 10th, 1985, New Hampshire police received a disturbing phone call from a local hunter in the area.

Ron Montplaisir from the Allentown, New Hampshire Police Department took the report that afternoon. The call came in about a suspicious barrel found in Bear Brook State Park. Bear Brook State Park is 10,000 acres and is one of New Hampshire's largest state parks.

There's a ton of things to do at Bear Brook. You can go camping. There are over 40 miles of hiking trails. You can go out for a swim. You can go fishing. Basically, there's no shortage of activities at Bear Brook State Park, making it a popular spot in Allentown. Unfortunately, after November 10th, 1985, the park is known for something far more sinister.

When authorities made their way out to the woods to investigate, they were shocked by what they found. Inside a metal 55-gallon barrel, the police found the bodies of two badly decomposed females. One of the bodies appeared to be a young adult, while the other was just a small child.

This barrel was the same blue metal barrel that Jesse Morgan and his group of friends stumbled upon four months earlier. The one that smelled like rotten milk. Both bodies were wrapped in plastic and based on the decomposition, the police knew that the victims had been dead for quite some time. These victims didn't just die a couple months earlier. They looked like they had been dead for at least a couple years.

Because the victims had been found wrapped in plastic, stuffed inside the barrel, the case was immediately recorded as a homicide. And the first step in the investigation would be to identify the two victims. Decomposition plays an important role when attempting to identify a victim. The more time that passes, the harder it will be for a forensic pathologist to identify the bodies.

In this particular case, both bodies were in the last stage of decomposition, which is the stage known as skeletalization. At this point in the process, only bones and maybe some human hair remained from the victim. Other than that, the bodies would be unrecognizable and would make identification difficult for investigators.

Based on what the forensic pathologist was able to recover from the barrel, he made a couple of determinations. First, we knew that both of the victims were female. One was a young adult, most likely in her 20s or 30s at the time she died. And then the other was a child, somewhere between the ages of maybe 8, 9, or even 10 years old.

Both victims had died from some sort of blunt force trauma, but that's really all the forensic pathologist could determine. They weren't able to figure out what type of weapon was used, and more importantly in a case like this, they couldn't figure out who these two female victims even were. Local media in the area quickly became aware that the police discovered the bodies of two females inside of Bear Brook State Park.

And the news was shocking. Bear Brook had never seen anything like this before. It's certainly not a place known for homicides to occur. And before this incident, it wasn't known to be a place for criminals to dump homicide victims. But what was even more troubling than the discovery of the bodies themselves was that nobody knew who these two people were.

All anyone really knew was that one of them was a young adult and that the other was just a small child. Surely, you would think that these victims are daughters, they're friends, sisters. Maybe the adult victim was even a mother herself. There had to be someone out there who was looking for them, or at the very least, they would have been reported missing months or years earlier.

But during the course of the investigation, nothing turned up. Without a solid way to positively identify the two victims, the police couldn't say who they were or where they disappeared from. Several months after the bodies were discovered, they were buried in an Allentown cemetery without names.

When they were buried, they had no funerals. There weren't any loved ones there. They were Jane Doe number one and Jane Doe number two. So when it came time for their bodies to be buried in the cemetery, well, investigators didn't have their names to print on top of their tombstones. Instead, they were buried with a tombstone that read, quote,

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. End quote. And that's how the case remained for years.

I think many people thought that the police would be able to identify these victims, but that just didn't happen. The police weren't able to match any missing persons report back to those two victims in Bear Brook. And as the years went by, it seemed less and less likely that we would ever know who these two people were or what happened to them.

Fifteen years later, on May 9, 2000, two more female bodies were found not too far from where the two previous victims were found in Bear Brook State Park. Just like the two earlier victims, both were females, and both of the victims were found in a similar-looking 55-gallon metal blue barrel.

Both of the female victims appeared to be young children. Right away, investigators knew that the two cases had to be connected. Too many similarities existed between what they found in 1985 and now in 2000 in the same part of Bear Brook. And just like in 1985, the police had no idea who these two additional victims were.

What was interesting was the fact that all four bodies were in the same condition, meaning all four were practically just bones. This detail meant that even though the first barrel was discovered 15 years earlier in 1985, the police believed that all four victims were killed around the same time.

It could only be described as lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it, that the police found the first barrel in 1985 and that it took 15 years to find the other one. Investigators were confident that not only were all four victims killed at the same time, but they believed the same person was behind all four murders.

This connection meant that they were looking for a serial killer in Bear Brook State Park. This episode of Forensic Tales is sponsored by Scary Time. I know you've heard me talk about Scary Time podcast before. Prepare yourself for the scariest, creepiest, and most haunting stories and conversations from the best independent creators.

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Scary Time Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. Subscribe today and give them a listen. That's Scary Time Podcast. The discovery of two additional victims took this case to a whole new level. If residents of Allentown forgot about the first two victims back in 1985, they sure knew all about this case after this new discovery in 2000.

The media dubbed the case as the Bear Brook murders and the Allentown Four. Everyone wondered if there was a serial killer on the loose and would there be more victims? Based on the little amount of forensics the investigators had in the case, the police theorized that the three of the four bodies were in fact related.

DNA tests revealed through mitochondrial DNA that the adult female discovered in 1985 and the youngest and oldest girls were maternally related, meaning the adult female was either the biological mother, aunt, or older sister of the two younger female victims.

Advanced DNA tests also revealed that the adult female was believed to be anywhere from 23 years old to about 33 years old. And her two daughters or nieces were around 2 years old and 10 years old. But the bigger mystery was who the other child victim was.

Based on the forensics, the third child was not a biological child of the adult female victim, and investigators believed she was around four years old.

But even though the third child wasn't biologically related to the other victims, investigators theorized that it's possible that maybe this fourth victim is a stepchild to the adult female or is somehow connected to the rest of this family.

But then there was also the possibility that the middle child wasn't connected to the other three victims. It's entirely possible that this killer targeted the mother and two of her children and then just dumped this third unknown child with the others.

In 2000 into 2001, investigators turned their attention to a nearby trailer park located not too far from where the bodies were found, hoping that they would find possible suspects. The police wanted to search here because many of the trailer park residents were either ex-cons from a nearby New Hampshire state prison or they were transients. Some were even both.

Even though the trailer park only had 100 lots, over 450 people had temporarily passed through the park during the times the murders would have taken place. But finding a potential suspect from the trailer park would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And after weeks and months of digging, the police didn't come up with any credible suspects.

One thing that investigators did over the years was to employ the use of forensic sketch artists to try and identify the victims. In June 2013, forensic sketch artists employed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children created 3D facial recognition renderings of all four victims. The hope was that these 3D renderings would jog someone's memory about who these people were.

The renderings incorporated the victims' dental impressions showing how their teeth would have looked and how their teeth would have influenced their entire facial appearance. The forensic artist created 3D rendering images in black and white.

Because investigators had no idea what race or ethnicity these victims were. There was no way of telling whether they were black, white, or any other race. So the images back in 2013 were created in black and white just to simply get their images out there in front of the public. But unfortunately, the forensic sketches didn't seem to generate any solid leads.

And after that, everyone was still left wondering who the Allentown Four were in 2013. Towards the end of 2013, additional forensic testing was conducted by the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, private labs, and the Florida Institute of Forensic Anthropology.

These tests revealed that the adult female, the youngest child, and the oldest child were not only related, but they were all from the same geographic region, most likely somewhere in New Hampshire. The middle, unrelated child was raised somewhere farther north. Another couple of years go by in the investigation with very few answers.

By November 2015, forensic sketch artists released another set of 3D facial reconstruction images of all four victims. This time around, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released the photos at a news conference at the New Hampshire State Attorney General's office. But just like back in 2013, the images in 2015 didn't generate any substantial leads.

The case continued to remain cold, but in 2017, there was a massive break in the investigation that came from across the country in Northern California. New Hampshire police learned about a 2002 case. Back in 2002, Captain Roxanne Grunheim from the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department and her team worked on a missing person case.

The department received a phone call about a missing woman by the name of Usun June. June, who worked as a biotech employee, was reported missing to the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department after a friend of hers told the police that she hadn't heard or seen June in months, which, of course, was entirely out of character for her.

One of the first people the police wanted to speak to during the investigation is June's live-in boyfriend, Lawrence Vanner. After a couple days of searching for Lawrence Vanner, the police finally tracked him down in Richmond, California, where he worked as a convenience store worker. After the police speak with him for a couple minutes at the store and ask him some questions about his missing girlfriend,

Vanner agrees with police to go back with them to the station. On their way to the police station, Lawrence Vanner and Captain Grunheim sit in the back of the patrol car and just strike up a conversation. She starts asking him things like what he does at the convenience store for work, where is he from, just typical small talk type questions.

But after she starts asking a few more probing questions, Vanner seems to get annoyed. He doesn't like that this cop is asking him all these questions. And he eventually turns to the police captain and says, that's none of your damn business. Once at the police station, Vanner tells authorities that his full name is Lawrence William Vanner. And then he goes by Larry.

Now, one of the first things that Contra Costa police do is run his name and date of birth in their system to check and see if he has any type of criminal record or if there's anything in his background that they should be aware of. All pretty much standard police protocol in a situation like this. But when they run his name, date of birth, and driver's license through their system, nothing comes up.

There is no Lawrence Vanner with his date of birth and his license plate number. He's essentially a ghost in the system. Detectives ask Vanner if he would be willing to submit a record of his fingerprints, and he agrees. So authorities escort him down to the Records Bureau for fingerprinting, and he submits his prints. When the police run his prints through the fingerprint system, this time there's a match.

But the fingerprints don't match a Lawrence or Larry Vanner. The prints match a guy named Curtis Mayo Kimball. The police quickly learned that Curtis Kimball had absconded from parole approximately 12 years earlier and that he was considered a fugitive of the law. And once they read this, once this came up in the report, they

Contra Costa police immediately placed him under arrest for the parole violation, completely unrelated to the disappearance of his live-in girlfriend, June, the case they were initially questioning him about. Once Vanner, who is now actually Kimball, is under arrest and in police custody, the police obtain a search warrant to search the house he shared with June.

Detectives were hopeful that searching the home would at least provide them with some sort of clue about where she could be. But when authorities arrive at the home, June is nowhere to be found. What they do find inside the home is a large pile of kitty litter.

There was a massive pile of kitty litter about three feet high and about four to five feet across just inside the garage. So we're not just talking about some litter that maybe somehow was dumped out of a litter box or something. This was a massive pile of kitty litter.

As detectives got closer to this pile, they saw something sticking out from the inside. It was a mummified human foot. Investigators started to dig through the pile of kitty litter and discover the rest of a badly decomposed and dismembered female body. The body was transported to the coroner's office for an autopsy to be performed.

The forensic pathologist determined that besides being dismembered, the female victim had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. A couple of weeks after the autopsy, DNA test results confirmed that the female victim inside of Curtis Kimball's home, inside of the pile of kitty litter, was his missing girlfriend, June.

Lawrence Vanner, a.k.a. Curtis Kimball, was arrested and charged with killing June and holding her body in the home under kitty litter. After pleading not guilty to the murder, a jury convicted Kimball of second-degree murder and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Even after Curtis Kimball was sentenced and sent to prison,

Detectives in Northern California just felt like there was something more to this guy. And even though the police were certain that they had the right guy in June's case, they weren't certain they knew exactly who this guy really was.

So after digging through multiple databases, the police learned that Curtis Kimball had dozens of AKAs and aliases that he had been using over the years. And one of these aliases was Jordan Jensen.

Kimball began using the name and alias Gordon Jensen after he fled from his parole officer, which, by the way, he was on parole for abandoning a child under the age of 14 years old. The child who he was on parole for abandoning was a five-year-old girl named Lisa.

Lisa and Gordon Jensen lived together in a trailer park in Santa Cruz, California. Everyone in the neighborhood where Gordon Jensen and Lisa lived believed that Jensen was Lisa's father. That's because whenever someone asked them what their relationship was or if it just came up in conversation, Jensen would tell them that this was his biological daughter.

After Jensen abandoned Lisa, she was put into the foster care system where, thankfully, she was eventually adopted by a family. But after the police learned that Jensen abandoned his so-called daughter, he was arrested and convicted, and that's what he was on parole for. Something about five-year-old Lisa's story didn't seem right.

Contra Costa police, who investigated June's disappearance and ultimate murder, worried that Gordon Jensen, this man with multiple aliases, multiple AKAs and identities, may not be Lisa's father. And instead, he may have abducted her.

Contra Costa police decided to report their findings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as well as the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. Authorities in Southern California tracked down Lisa and her adoptive family, where they obtained a DNA sample from Lisa.

They wanted to find out if Gordon Jensen, a.k.a. Lawrence, a.k.a. Curtis, told the truth about being her biological father. The report came back with conclusive results. Lawrence William Vanner, Gordon Jensen, Curtis Mayo Kimball was not the biological father of Lisa. In fact, he wasn't biologically related to her at all.

The authorities sent out Lisa's ancestry DNA for further testing. If she wasn't related to Kimball, the police needed to find out who her birth parents were. When they submitted her DNA, it came back with a hit. She was from New Hampshire. Authorities tracked down Lisa's grandfather, who still lives in New Hampshire, and they quickly learned that he had a daughter, a woman named Denise Boudin.

According to Lisa's grandfather, his daughter Denise left New Hampshire back in 1981 with her then live-in boyfriend and six-month-old daughter Lisa. Shortly after leaving New Hampshire, the grandfather says that his daughter Denise and granddaughter Lisa were never seen or heard of ever again. It was like they vanished after 1981.

Now, I think we're all wondering, well, if Lisa had a real name and had a family back in New Hampshire, why didn't anyone report her or her mom missing? Well, it turns out Denise's live-in boyfriend was somehow able to convince the family that they were leaving New Hampshire because they owed a lot of money to many different people.

And according to Denise's family, they didn't report Denise or her six-month-old daughter Lisa missing because they believed the three of them were simply on the run to avoid paying off their personal debts. Okay, so who is Denise's boyfriend in all of this? Well, his name is Bob Evans.

New Hampshire police decided to compare Bob Evans' photograph with Curtis Kimball, Gordon Jensen, and Lawrence Vanner from California. And when they compared the photographs, without question, without a doubt, it was the same exact guy.

This confirmation meant that Lisa wasn't his biological daughter, as confirmed by the DNA test, but Lisa was the daughter of his missing girlfriend, Denise. The detectives' next concern in all of this wasn't that Denise was just missing after all these years. They now believed that she was probably dead.

This is where the story ties back into the Bear Brook murders. Investigators compared Denise's DNA with the adult female found in the barrels with the three young girls. They needed to find out if Denise was one of the Allentown Four. But when the DNA test results came back, Denise's DNA did not match. She wasn't the victim.

So next, the detectives decided to test Bob Evans' DNA against the bodies in the barrel. This time, they did get a hit. The DNA test results revealed that Evans was the father of one of the children found in the barrels, but wasn't related to the other three victims.

Authorities confirmed that he lived in New Hampshire from 1977 to around 1981. Then he moved across the country to California and lived there from about 1984 up until 2002 when he was arrested for his girlfriend June's murder, making him a possible suspect in the Bear Brook murders.

But before authorities could find out from this guy directly if he was the serial killer they had been hunting all of these years, Evans died in prison in December 2010. But this is not where the story ends. This is only the beginning.

One person who couldn't stop thinking about the Bear Brook murders and the Allentown Four was a research librarian named Rebecca Heath.

Rebecca, like many people, had become so obsessed with identifying the woman and the children. And like many people, Rebecca started to research and started digging into the case on her own, essentially going from a research librarian in the daytime to becoming a true crime Internet sleuth at night.

One night on an online message board while digging into the case, Rebecca Heath contacted and got connected with a woman who was searching for missing family members. The person was looking for a woman and her two daughters who just so happened to be around the same age and from the same location where the barrels were discovered.

After chatting a little bit online, the woman told Rebecca that her missing family members had once been married to a man with the last name of Rasmussen. At the same time Rebecca started looking into this woman's story, an investigative genetic genealogist, Barbara Rae Venter, was also working on the case.

She was trying to uncover the victim's identity by using a new test that involved extracting DNA from the shaft of a strand of human hair. Finally, this new DNA test led to an identity.

On June 6, 2019, the young adult female found in the first barrel from 1985 was finally identified through DNA as Marlise Elizabeth Honeychurch. And her daughter, Marie Vaughn, was identified as being the young child found inside of the barrel with her. Marlise Honeychurch was born in 1954 in Connecticut.

Over the years, she had been married twice and had one daughter with each of her husbands. Marie Vaughn was born in 1971, and Sarah McWatters was born a few years later in 1977. Honeychurch was last seen at her mother's home in La Puente, California on Thanksgiving 1978. It was there that she introduced her family to her new boyfriend.

a guy named Terry Rasmussen. After Thanksgiving in 1978 with her family, Honeychurch, who was 24 years old, was never seen or heard from again, and neither were her two daughters, Marie and Sarah. The second and youngest child, found in the barrel in 2000, was also identified using this new DNA test.

The child was identified as Sarah McWatters, Honey Church's other daughter and half-sibling to Marie. Sarah was also last seen when she was only 11 months old at the Thanksgiving gathering back in 1978. By June of 2019, three out of the four Allentown Four victims had finally been identified.

The only victim's identity to remain a mystery today is the middle child found with Sarah's remains in 2000.

The only hint we have about this child's identity is that she is Bob Evans, a.k.a. Curtis Kimball, a.k.a. Gordon Jensen, and a.k.a. Lawrence Vanner, and now a.k.a. Terry Rasmussen's biological daughter.

Authorities have now named Terry Rasmussen as the true man and identity behind all those AKAs and aliases. Terry Rasmussen is believed to be the serial killer behind the Bear Brook murders and is also responsible for the murder of Usun June.

bringing the death count to at least five. But authorities believe that there could be many more victims spread all across this country. Terry Rasmussen was a chameleon-like killer who used a series of aliases to get away with his crimes over the years. His crime and murder spree spans from New Hampshire across the country to California.

He preyed upon single mothers and young adult females. He killed mothers and he killed children. There are so many unanswered questions about the Bear Brook murders in Allentown 4, but the biggest unanswered question is the identity of the fourth victim, the middle child. That still remains a mystery even to this day. Who is the fourth young victim?

The New Hampshire police and the public remain hopeful that someday they will be able to identify her. They remain hopeful that even after all of these years, they will solve the case that has haunted New Hampshire since the mid-1980s.

Anyone with information about this young girl's identity is urged to call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST. You can also contact the New Hampshire State Cold Case Unit at coldcaseunit at dos.nh.gov with any information.

If it wasn't for advancements in DNA testing, the police may have never uncovered the identities of three out of the four victims. And without the persistence of law enforcement, we might have never been able to identify the serial killer behind it all.

To this day, the exact number of victims killed by Terry Rasmussen, a.k.a. Robert Bob Evans, a.k.a. Curtis Kimball, a.k.a. Larry Vanner, remains a mystery.

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