In 1985, a hunter walking through the woods near Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire found a steel drum hidden in the brush. Inside were the remains of a woman and a child. Fifteen years later, barely a hundred yards away, a second barrel was found — holding two more children. For decades, no one knew who the four victims were, or who had killed them. When the answer finally came, it arrived not from a detective but from a DNA database, and it unmasked a killer who had spent his life hiding behind a dozen names.

Two Barrels in the Woods

The first barrel, found in 1985 in Allenstown, held the remains of an adult woman and a young girl. It was not until 2000 that searchers returned to the area and found a second drum close by, containing two more young girls. The four became known as the Bear Brook victims, and for years they were a heartbreaking blank: no names, no missing-persons reports that matched, no clear idea of who could have killed them or when.

A Killer With No Name

The breakthrough came through genetic genealogy. In 2017, investigators announced that the man responsible was Terry Rasmussen — a drifter who had moved through the country for decades under a string of false identities, most famously “Bob Evans,” earning him the nickname the Chameleon Killer. By the time he was identified, Rasmussen was already dead; he had died in a California prison in 2010 while serving time for a separate murder. He had hidden so completely that even his real name was a mystery until years after his death.

Names at Last

In 2019, three of the four victims were finally identified through DNA and genealogical research as Marlyse Honeychurch and her two daughters, Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters, a young mother and her children who had dropped out of contact with their family around 1980. After decades as anonymous remains, they had their names and their story back — a family that had vanished and that no one had known to look for.

The Last Child

One victim remained nameless far longer than the others: a young girl who, strikingly, was not biologically related to the mother and two daughters in the barrels. For years investigators could not place her. Then, in September 2025, advanced genetic genealogy finally identified her as Rea Rasmussen — the killer’s own daughter. Her identification closed one of the last open questions in the case and opened a new one, pointing toward her mother, another woman in Rasmussen’s life who is believed to have disappeared.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Bear Brook murders are a landmark in the rise of forensic genealogy — the same family-tree DNA method that has cracked some of the most stubborn cold cases of the past decade. It gave names back to four people who had spent thirty years as unidentified remains, and it unmasked a serial killer long after he was beyond the reach of any court.

But the case is also a warning about how invisible a victim can be. Terry Rasmussen could kill a woman and her children and simply move on under a new name, because the people he targeted were ones the world had lost track of. The science that finally named them is extraordinary. The fact that it took thirty years is the tragedy.

One by one, DNA gave the dead in those barrels their identities back — the last of them, a little girl, only in 2025. But the closer the science gets, the more it suggests there are other women and children Terry Rasmussen left behind, still unaccounted for. So how many names are still missing from his list?