Terry Peder Rasmussen was born on December 23, 1943 and grew up in Phoenix. He served six years in the Navy, married in 1968 and had four children. His wife left him in 1975. After that he drifted, and he did it under a succession of names: Bob Evans, Robert Evans, Gordon Jenson, and others. That is why he is called the chameleon killer, and it is also the reason the case took as long as it did.
On November 10, 1985 a barrel was found in woodland near Bear Brook State Park at Allenstown, New Hampshire, with the remains of an adult woman and a girl in it. In May 2000, fifteen years later, a second barrel was found close by with two more girls in it. All four were skeletonised or nearly so. All four had died of blunt trauma, between about 1977 and 1981.
Nobody knew who they were. The woman and the older girl were buried together in a local cemetery under a donated headstone which said that here lay the mortal remains, known only to God, of a woman aged twenty-three to thirty-three and a girl child aged eight to ten, whose slain bodies had been found in Bear Brook State Park. In June 2000 they were exhumed again for DNA testing.
The first real break came in 2016, when investigators connected a girl called Lisa Jenson to one of the aliases a dead prisoner had used. In 2017 DNA linked Rasmussen to one of the children in the barrels.
In 2019 three of the four were named: Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, born in Connecticut in 1954, and her daughters Marie Elizabeth Vaughn and Sarah Lynn McWaters. Honeychurch was twenty-four. Marie was about six and Sarah was an infant. They had last been seen at a family Thanksgiving gathering in California in 1978, after which Honeychurch left with Rasmussen for New Hampshire.
The fourth was a child investigators had called the middle child for decades, and she was his own. On September 5, 2025 she was identified as Rea Rasmussen, born in Orange County, California in 1976, his biological daughter by a woman named Pepper Reed. Reed was born in 1952, came from Texas, and has not been seen since the late 1970s. 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 from 2024 to get it.
Reed is one of two women presumed to be further victims. The other is Denise Beaudin, who was living with him in Manchester and was last seen there in 1981. He left New Hampshire that year with Beaudin's small daughter and took her to California. Neither woman has ever been found.
He abandoned the child in 1986 and went to prison for it. He was paroled in 1990, absconded, and remained a fugitive for more than ten years.
He surfaced in 2002 when police in California found a dismembered body in the basement of his house. It was Eunsoon Jun, the woman he was living with and had unofficially married. He pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to fifteen years to life. That is the only murder he was ever convicted of. He died in prison in 2010.
The Bear Brook case is now cited by investigators as one of the first to show what genetic genealogy could do, both for naming the dead and for finding who killed them. It took nearly forty years, and it was finished fifteen years after the man responsible had died.
Investigators are still asking about his movements between 1974 and 1985, in New Hampshire, California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon and Virginia. The count here is the one conviction, the four the state has attributed to him, and the two women presumed dead, kept separate because they are three different kinds of fact.