Bear Brook's Last Unnamed Victim Is Identified as Rea Rasmussen, Terry Rasmussen's Daughter
Genetic genealogy named the girl found in a New Hampshire barrel in 2000 and led investigators to her mother, Pepper Reed, unseen since the late 1970s.
Published
For twenty-five years the girl in the second barrel had no name. Investigators called her the middle child: she was estimated to be about three years old, younger than one of the other two girls in the barrels, who was about nine, and older than the other, who was about two. On Sunday, September 7, 2025, the New Hampshire Attorney General's office announced who she was. Her name was Rea Rasmussen, and she was born in Orange County, California, in 1976.
Attorney General John M. Formella and Colonel Mark B. Hall of the New Hampshire State Police made the announcement on behalf of the state's Cold Case Unit. Rea was the biological daughter of Terry Peder Rasmussen, whom the state calls the man responsible for all four Bear Brook murders, and of Pepper Reed, who was born in 1952, came originally from Texas and has not been seen since the late 1970s. "With Rea Rasmussen's identification, all four victims now have their names back," Formella said.
The first barrel was found in 1985 and held the remains of a woman and a young girl. The second, holding two more girls, was not found until 2000, 300 feet away, near Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown. The state says the four were killed in the late 1970s or early 1980s. DNA linked one of the children to Rasmussen in 2017, seven years after he died in prison, where he was serving a sentence for another murder. In 2019 three of the victims were named as Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters, Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters, last seen in California in 1978. Rasmussen was not biologically related to them. The child who was his own daughter remained unnamed.
In early 2024 the State Police Cold Case Unit brought her case to the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer genetic genealogy group, after Firebird Forensics had worked on it for years. A new DNA profile gave the genealogists a fresh list of matches, but useful matches were scarce and several family lines held misattributed parentage, so the team had to work many generations back, eventually building a tree of 25,000 people. Detective Sergeant Christopher Elphick told NHPR that investigators finally "got lucky" in June 2025, when a key match in that tree led them toward the girl's mother.
The thread ran through a 2005 obituary for a great-great-great-granddaughter of a couple the genealogists had placed among the child's likely ancestors. It said she was survived by a daughter named Pepper Reed. Pepper came from Houston, where Rasmussen was known to be living in the 1970s, and she disappeared from the records in that decade. Within half an hour of identifying her as the child's mother, the team found a 1976 Orange County birth record for a girl named Rea Rasmussen whose mother's maiden name was Reed. A team member drove to Orange County for a copy of the certificate, which named the parents as Terry Rasmussen and Pepper Reed. Investigators then found a family member and tested that person's DNA, and the identification was confirmed on Friday, September 5, through documentary records and DNA testing.
"It took us almost 18 months to identify Pepper Reed, but once we knew her name, it led us right to her daughter," said Matthew Waterfield, who led the DNA Doe Project team.
Naming the daughter opened a question about the mother. Authorities said the investigation into Pepper Reed's disappearance remains active and that they believe she may also have been one of Rasmussen's victims. NHPR noted that Denise Beaudin, last seen with Rasmussen in Manchester in 1981, has never been accounted for either and is presumed to be another. Investigators asked for information about Reed's whereabouts and fate, and about Rasmussen's movements between 1974 and 1985, particularly in New Hampshire, California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon and Virginia.
Reed's family, in a statement shared by the state Office of Victim Assistance, said Pepper "is deeply loved and missed every single day" and asked for privacy. Two of Rea's paternal half-siblings asked for the same. "We never forgot Rea. We never stopped looking," Elphick said in the state's announcement.
The New Hampshire Department of Justice page carrying the announcement would not open; its full text, with the DNA Doe Project's own release, was read as InDepthNH.org republished it on September 7, 2025, alongside NHPR's report by Jason Moon. The two releases disagree on one date: the Attorney General says Rasmussen died in prison in 2010, the DNA Doe Project says 2011, and the state's year is used here. NHPR places the ancestral couple at the top of the tree in the 1870s and the DNA Doe Project in the 1780s, so no date is given for them. Rasmussen was never charged in the Bear Brook killings; he had been dead for years when DNA first tied him to them.
Sources
- Final Victim of the Bear Brook Murders Identified Decades Later, InDepthNH.org, republishing the New Hampshire Attorney General's release and the DNA Doe Project's release
- Investigators identify last remaining Bear Brook murder victim, but a new mystery emerges, New Hampshire Public Radio (Jason Moon)