Bear Brook Barrel Victims Named as a Mother and Her Two Daughters
Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters were identified decades after their bodies were found near Allenstown. A fourth girl remained unnamed.
Published
For more than three decades they had no names. On June 6, 2019, New Hampshire officials gave three of them back. The woman and the child found in a barrel near Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown in November 1985 were Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch and her daughter Marie Elizabeth Vaughn. A second barrel, found about 100 yards away in May 2000, held another of Honeychurch's daughters, Sarah Lynn McWaters.
Jeffery Strelzin of the state attorney general's office announced the identifications alongside state police and the FBI. DNA testing and genetic genealogy had finally confirmed who they were. Honeychurch was born in Connecticut in January 1954, the second oldest of five girls, and had been divorced twice. Marie was born in California in 1971, and Sarah in Hawaiian Gardens, California, in 1977. The girls had different fathers.
The man officials say killed all four was Terry Peder Rasmussen, a drifter of many names whom investigators called a chameleon. DNA had tied him to the Allenstown killings in 2017, years after his death in a California prison in 2010, where he was serving time for murdering his partner, Eunsoon Jun, whose body was found under cat litter in the basement of their home.
The breakthrough began with an amateur. Rebekah Heath, a Connecticut librarian with a hobby for missing persons cases, had spotted a post on a genealogy message board about a missing woman named Marlyse McWaters and her daughter Sarah. Her reply went unanswered. A year later, listening to the New Hampshire Public Radio podcast Bear Brook, she remembered it and tracked down the person who had written it. A relative told her that Rasmussen had been the last person in contact with Honeychurch. The relative did not know who Rasmussen was. Heath did, and she called in the tip.
Investigators then pieced together the family's last days with them. Around Thanksgiving 1978, according to a timeline the attorney general's office released, Honeychurch took her daughters to her mother's house in La Puente, California, with a man she introduced as Rasmussen. She argued with her mother over what State Police Sgt. Matthew Koehler called a trivial matter and left with the girls and Rasmussen. Her family never saw any of them again. Police believe the couple went to New Hampshire, where Rasmussen, calling himself Bob Evans, worked as an electrician at a mill in Manchester.
The fourth victim, a young girl, was still unnamed. DNA showed that Rasmussen was her father and that she was not related to Honeychurch's family. Strelzin said investigators were hopeful of an answer. Who her mother was, and what happened to Denise Beaudin, a Goffstown woman who vanished with Rasmussen and her baby daughter in 1981, remained open questions. Police believe both women are dead.
"We know what he was, we know what he did and now we know who his victims were," Strelzin said. Photographs shown at the news conference returned the victims to the room as people: Honeychurch playfully licking the beaters of a hand mixer, Marie blowing out the candles at a birthday party. Relatives sat in a reserved section and left without speaking to reporters, but Strelzin read their statement. "Marlyse, Marie and Sarah were so loved by our families and they are greatly missed," it said. "We take solace in finally having the answers we have longed for."
Sources
- Officials identify 3 of 4 victims discovered in barrels near Bear Brook State Park, Concord Monitor
- 3 bodies hidden in barrels remained unidentified for decades. Then a Conn. librarian listened to a podcast., Boston.com (The Washington Post)
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- September 7, 2025: Bear Brook's Last Unnamed Victim Is Identified as Rea Rasmussen, Terry Rasmussen's Daughter