Terry Peder Rasmussen was born in Denver on December 23, 1943, to Peder Rasmussen, the son of Danish immigrants, and Anita Berwick, and grew up in Arizona. He dropped out of North High School in Phoenix in 1960, enlisted in the Navy the next year, trained as an electrician and was discharged in 1967. He married in 1968 and lived with his wife and four children in Phoenix and in Redwood City, California. His family remembered him as violent; he burned one of his sons with cigarettes. His wife left with the children in 1975 after he was arrested for aggravated assault, and the divorce was final in 1978.
After that he drifted, through Arizona, Colorado, California, Idaho, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Oregon and Hawaii, often working as an electrician for oil and gas companies and known to travel with women and children, and he did it under a succession of names: Bob Evans, Curtis Kimball, Gordon Jenson, Gerry Mockerman, Larry Vanner. That is why he is called the chameleon killer, and it is also why the case took as long as it did. In the late 1970s he settled in Manchester, New Hampshire, as Bob Evans, worked at the Waumbec Mill, and was arrested three times in 1980, for a bad check, theft and diverting electric current. A woman named Elizabeth Evans was listed as his wife there.
Pepper Reed, born in 1952, was last seen by her family in Houston at Christmas 1975, pregnant with his child. Their daughter, Rea, was born in Orange County, California, in 1976. Both disappeared from the records later in the decade. In 1978 he was with Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, twenty-four, born in Connecticut in 1954, who had a daughter from each of two marriages. She was last seen at a family Thanksgiving gathering in La Puente, California, that year; after an argument she left with Rasmussen and the girls, Marie Elizabeth Vaughn, six, and Sarah Lynn McWaters, one, and the family never saw them again.
On November 10, 1985, a barrel was found in woodland near Bear Brook State Park at Allenstown, New Hampshire, with the remains of a woman and a girl in it. On May 9, 2000, a second barrel was found about a hundred yards away with two more girls; investigators believe it had been there all along and was missed. All four had died of blunt trauma to the head, probably at around the same time, between about 1978 and 1981. Nobody knew who they were. The woman and the older girl were buried together in a local cemetery under a donated headstone saying that here lay the mortal remains, known only to God, of a woman and a girl child whose slain bodies had been found in Bear Brook State Park. In June 2000 they were exhumed for DNA testing.
As Bob Evans he took up with Denise Beaudin, twenty-three, a Goffstown High School graduate who had worked at General Cable and at a nursing home in Manchester. They spent Thanksgiving, November 26, 1981, with her family in Goffstown and said nothing about leaving; when her family called at her home on Hayward Street on December 1, she, Evans and her six-month-old daughter were gone. The attorney general's office said later that the couple had been having money problems at the time and that the family assumed they had left to get away from them, so no one reported her missing until 2016. She has never been found, and investigators presume she was another of his victims. He kept the child, called her Lisa and passed as her father. In 1985, as Curtis Kimball, he was arrested in Cypress, California, for drunk driving and endangering a child, and failed to appear in court. In 1986, as Gordon Jenson, he abandoned the girl at an RV park in Scotts Valley. Asked then whether she had brothers or sisters, she said she had, but that they had died eating grass mushrooms while camping. Arrested in 1988 as Gerry Mockerman for driving a stolen car, he was fingerprinted back to Kimball, and in 1989 he got three years for child abandonment. Paroled in 1990, he absconded almost at once and was a fugitive for more than a decade.
He resurfaced in December 1999 as Larry Vanner, when Eunsoon Jun, a chemist in California, introduced him to her family. They married in an unofficial ceremony in 2001. She disappeared in June 2002, and her body was found buried in cat litter in their home; she had died of blunt force trauma to the head. He was arrested that November and in 2003 pleaded no contest to her murder, to the surprise of the court; the Contra Costa County detective on the case, Roxane Gruenheid, believed he did it after overhearing her say she would ask for a paternity test on Lisa. He was sentenced to fifteen years to life, the only murder he was ever convicted of. He died at High Desert State Prison on December 28, 2010, aged sixty-seven, of lung cancer, lung disease and pneumonia.
DNA showed that he was not Lisa's father, and the San Bernardino County sheriff's department spent years trying to find her family. In 2015, with the help of the genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter, she learned who her mother was and that the man she had once thought her father had kidnapped her. Beaudin's father identified a mugshot of Curtis Kimball as Bob Evans, placing him in New Hampshire at the time of the barrels. On January 26, 2017, the authorities announced that Bob Evans was a suspect in Beaudin's disappearance and the Bear Brook murders, and that DNA showed he was the father of one of the children in the barrels. That August, Y-DNA from one of his children by his marriage confirmed that he was Terry Rasmussen.
In June 2019 three of the four were named: Honeychurch and her daughters. The fourth, the child investigators had called the middle child for decades, was his own. On September 5, 2025, she was identified as Rea Rasmussen, who had been between about two and four when she was killed; a California birth certificate and genetic testing named her mother as Pepper Reed. The New Hampshire Attorney General said that with the identification all four victims had their names back. The state's cold case unit had worked with the DNA Doe Project on it from 2024. Reed is presumed to be a further victim, as is Beaudin; neither has been found.
The case is cited as one of the first to show what genetic genealogy could do, for naming the dead and for finding who killed them, and the same methods were used the next year to catch Joseph James DeAngelo. The criminologist Jack Levin said that what set Rasmussen apart was that he targeted people with whom he had a relationship, the last thing most serial killers would do. New Hampshire Public Radio's podcast Bear Brook covered the case in 2018.
Investigators are still asking about his movements, particularly between 1974 and 1985. A detective sergeant with the New Hampshire State Police, Christopher Elphick, said it was highly unlikely that he had stopped. He lived about a mile and a half from Laureen Rahn, fourteen, when she disappeared from Manchester in April 1980, and on the same street as Denise Daneault, twenty-five, who went missing from a bar that June; searches followed in 2017 and 2018, and by 2020 the state said there was no evidentiary connection to Daneault. Elizabeth Lamotte, once suggested as the Elizabeth Evans listed as his wife, was later found to be a victim of an unrelated series. A San Joaquin County assistant sheriff has also speculated that he killed Amanda Schumann Deza, found in a refrigerator in a canal at Holt, California, in 1995 and identified in 2023. He was convicted of one murder; the state attributes four more to him; two women who disappeared with him are presumed dead.