Terry Peder Rasmussen was convicted of one murder. In 2003, under the name Curtis Kimball, he was sentenced in Contra Costa County, California, to 15 years to life for killing Eunsoon Jun, a chemist he had lived with and called his wife. He died in prison in December 2010. At the time, the authorities who held him did not know his real name.
The rest of what is known about him was pieced together after his death. In 2017 the New Hampshire Attorney General's office named the man it had known as Robert "Bob" Evans as the suspect in the killings of a woman and three girls whose remains had been found in two steel drums near Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, and in the 1981 disappearance of a Manchester woman, Denise Beaudin, which it called a likely murder. DNA showed that one of the girls in the barrels was his daughter. Later in 2017, investigators established that Evans was Terry Peder Rasmussen, born in Colorado in 1943. By September 2025 all four people in the barrels had been identified. He was never charged with any of those deaths.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin, then chief of New Hampshire's homicide unit, described him at the first announcement in January 2017 as "a chameleon," and said he fit the criteria for a serial killer. The case is also remembered as one of the first in which genetic genealogy was used both to identify unknown victims and to identify the man investigators believe killed them.
According to a revised timeline published by the New Hampshire Attorney General's office in November 2017, Rasmussen was born in Colorado on December 23, 1943; the office's August 2017 release gives Denver as the city. His family lived in Phoenix, Arizona, from July 1958 to April 1961. He went to Whittier Elementary School in Phoenix from 1954 to 1958 and to North High School in 1959 and 1960, leaving after his sophomore year.
In April 1961 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He was discharged in July 1967. He moved to Hawaii and worked in his parents' shoe shop there, and on July 20, 1968, he married in Hawaii.
In 1969 the couple moved to Phoenix, where twin daughters were born, and Rasmussen worked as an electrician. In 1970 the family moved to Redwood City, California, where he did electrical work in Palo Alto and a son was born. A fourth child, a daughter, was born in 1972, the year he and his wife separated for a time. By about 1973 they were back in Phoenix, where he again worked as an electrician and in a shoe shop.
He had his first recorded arrests in those years. On April 30, 1973, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office arrested him in Phoenix as a "fugitive from justice"; the Attorney General's office said the underlying charge was unclear. On June 11, 1975, Phoenix police arrested him for aggravated assault. The official timeline says his wife and children probably left him shortly after.
His former wife and four children were alive and accounted for, the Attorney General's office said in 2017. The family last saw him when he arrived unexpectedly at their home in Payson, Arizona, around Christmas, accompanied by a woman they did not know. He told them he was living in Ingleside, Texas. The August 2017 release dated that visit to Christmas 1974; by November 2017 investigators believed it might have been Christmas 1975 or 1976, and they suggested that the woman with him might be the mother of the daughter later found in the second barrel at Allenstown. The divorce became final on September 28, 1978, when, according to the timeline, his whereabouts were unknown.
Pepper Reed was born in 1952 and came from Texas. Investigators who identified her in 2025 said her records stop in the 1970s. The DNA Doe Project, the volunteer group that found her name, said she was from Houston, where Rasmussen was reportedly living at that time. In a 2025 episode of New Hampshire Public Radio's Bear Brook podcast, a woman who had known her in Houston described her as a friend who went missing in the 1970s and said she had been dating Rasmussen and was pregnant when the two moved away.
Their daughter, Rea Rasmussen, was born in 1976 in Orange County, California. Her birth certificate, found only in 2025, lists Terry Peder Rasmussen and Pepper Reed as her parents. Pepper Reed has not been seen since the late 1970s. Investigators have said she was last seen in California, and they believe she is likely another of his victims. Her body has never been found.
In June 1978, a work record shows, Rasmussen was employed by a large engineering contractor in Houston, under his own name; the record said he "quit to work elsewhere." The same year he asked a friend in Arizona for money, saying he was working on an oil rig in Texas.
Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch was born in 1954. She had two daughters, Marie Elizabeth Vaughn, born in 1971, and Sarah Lynn McWaters, who had a different father. In 1978 she was in her twenties, living in California, and Rasmussen was her boyfriend.
On Thanksgiving 1978 she and her daughters were at a family gathering at her mother's home in La Puente, California. She left abruptly with Rasmussen and the two girls, and her family never saw any of them again. Associated Press reports in 2019 gave the ages of the three when they were last seen as 24, 6 and 1. Strelzin later explained why the disappearance drew little official attention: she was an adult missing from California, he said, and there was not much the authorities there could do.
Marlyse's youngest brother was 6 when she left. Her siblings, who lived in California, Oklahoma and Oregon by 2019, did not learn what had happened to her for more than 40 years.
By about 1978 or 1979, Rasmussen was in Manchester, New Hampshire, working as the head electrician at a mill complex under the name Bob Evans. In 1980 he was arrested three times in Manchester under the name Robert T. Evans: in February, for a bad check written in December 1979; in May, for theft of electrical services; and in October, for diverting electric current.
Investigators believe Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters were with him in New Hampshire. A 2019 Concord Monitor account of their reburial said he had brought them to Manchester. The barrels in which their remains were later found were near a site where a store had stood before it was torn down; according to a 2017 CBS Boston report, Evans had done electrical work there, and he knew the owner of the land from the mill where both had worked.
Denise Beaudin graduated from Goffstown High School. In 1981 she was 23 and lived in an apartment in Manchester with her infant daughter and her boyfriend, the man she knew as Robert "Bob" Evans.
On Thanksgiving, November 26, 1981, the three had dinner with her family in Goffstown. Neither she nor Evans said anything about leaving. A few days later relatives went to the apartment and found that she, Evans and the baby had gone. The couple had been having money problems, and the family assumed they had left town to get away from them. No one reported her missing. The Attorney General's office said in 2017 that the family had not contacted police at the time, and that relatives filed a missing person report only in late 2016, more than 35 years later.
The state's cold case unit lists her disappearance as suspicious and records that a suspect has been identified. Her daughter has been found and is not missing. Denise Beaudin herself has never been found. The Attorney General's office has said it believes the man it had known as Bob Evans was responsible for her disappearance and likely murder.
After 1981, Rasmussen kept Denise Beaudin's daughter with him and presented himself as her father. He called her Lisa.
From March 1984 to May 1985 he worked for an electrical company in Los Alamitos, California, under the name Curtis Kimball. In May 1985, as Curtis Mayo Kimball, he was arrested for drunk driving in Cypress, California, after a crash with the girl in the car. He was charged with driving under the influence and with endangering a child, and he failed to appear in court.
By January 1986 he was living and working as a handyman at an RV park in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz County, under the name Gordon Jenson. An older couple at the park helped look after the girl and grew concerned about her. In June 1986 he left the park without her. Rasmussen had told people that her mother was dead.
The girl went into the child protective system in San Bernardino County and was later adopted. She grew up believing that the man she knew as Gordon Jenson was her father. In September 1986 fingerprints showed that Gordon Jenson and Curtis Mayo Kimball were the same man.
In November 1988, using the name Gerry Mockerman, he was stopped in San Luis Obispo, California, driving a vehicle that had been stolen in Preston, Idaho. In March 1989 he was arrested on child abandonment warrants, under the Kimball name. He pleaded guilty two months later and was sentenced to three years in prison. He served less than two years and was paroled in October 1990. According to the Attorney General's timeline, he absconded the next day.
For most of the next decade there is almost no record of him. In June 1998 he was stopped in California as Lawrence William Vanner and cited for driving without insurance or a license.
On November 10, 1985, a hunter found a 55-gallon steel drum in the woods near Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire. Inside were the remains of a woman and a girl. The medical examiner's estimate, as listed in the Attorney General's timeline, put the woman between 23 and 33 and the girl between 5 and 11. Both had been beaten. No one could identify them.
On May 9, 2000, a second drum was found nearby. The New Hampshire Public Radio report of 2025 put it about 300 feet from the first. It held the remains of two young girls, estimated at 2 to 4 and 1 to 3.
For years investigators knew little about the four. Forensic work established that the woman was probably in her mid-20s, the older girl about 9 or 10, the middle child about 3 or 4 and the youngest about 2 or 3. Testing showed that the woman and the oldest and youngest girls were related through their mothers, so the woman was most likely their mother; the middle child was not related to them. Testing of hair, bone and teeth suggested all four were born in the United States and had spent most of their lives in a few areas, including the Northeast. In late 2015 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released computer images of their faces. Officials at the time estimated they had been killed sometime between 1980 and 1984.
The woman and the older girl were buried in a cemetery in Allenstown under a stone reading "known only to God." For decades they were the only unidentified victims known to the Attorney General's homicide unit. Shaun Mulholland, a retired Allenstown police chief, called the case an open wound in the town.
Eunsoon Jun was born in Korea and came to the United States with her family when she was young. She earned a master's degree and worked as a chemist at a biotechnology company near Richmond, California. She made pottery and was interested in Buddhism. A cousin described her to NBC News as "a free spirit."
She met the man who called himself Larry Vanner in late 1999; NBC News reported that she had placed an advertisement for a handyman and he answered it. On New Year's Eve 1999 she brought him to a party at her cousin's home in Monterey, according to the cousin's account on the Bear Brook podcast. He told the family he was a retired army colonel, had worked for the CIA and owned property on the West Coast. When the cousin questioned him, Eunsoon was angry, and the cousin later said that was the last conversation they had. Afterward, family members received emails in her name telling them to leave her alone. Investigators later concluded that Vanner had written them.
By 2001 he had moved into her house. That year the two held a backyard wedding ceremony. It had no legal standing, and there was no marriage certificate.
In the spring of 2002, a friend of Eunsoon's tried to confirm plans for a trip, and Eunsoon did not appear. Vanner offered changing explanations, at one point saying her mother was dying in Virginia and at another that she was in Oregon. The friend pressed him and then went to the police. The Attorney General's timeline dates her disappearance to June 2002.
Detective Roxane Gruenheid of the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office took the case. Fingerprints showed that Larry Vanner was Curtis Mayo Kimball, the man who had absconded from parole in 1990 after his child abandonment sentence. Investigators also learned the names Gerry Mockerman and Gordon Jenson. On the strength of his record and his inconsistent answers, they obtained a search warrant for the house. A purchase made with Eunsoon's bank card led them to a pet store, and from there back to the house. Her body was found hidden beneath the house. Investigators determined that she had been killed months earlier by a blow. She was 44, according to ABC News; NBC News gave her age as 45.
He was arrested in November 2002 for her murder and for violating his parole. He was charged under the Kimball name. ABC News reported that he first entered a plea of no contest to second-degree murder; at a hearing in 2003 he stood up and said he wanted to plead guilty to murdering her. The prosecutor, Joe Motta, later said on the Bear Brook podcast that the plea, entered against his lawyer's advice, was highly unusual. In June 2003 he was convicted of Eunsoon Jun's murder and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
Gruenheid later described him as "very smart, very intelligent, very calculated." When she asked about his past, she said, he stopped talking, leaned toward her and made clear that it was none of her business. She came to believe that the guilty plea was meant to end her inquiry. "He wanted me to stop my investigation," she said.
The man she had arrested had written in letters about a daughter he had given away in 1986. Gruenheid obtained a blood sample through the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and ordered a paternity test. In August 2003, a few weeks after his plea, the result came back: he was not the girl's biological father. "This guy's a ghost," Gruenheid told ABC News. "He doesn't exist prior to his arrest in Cypress."
Who the girl was, and where she had come from, remained unknown for another 12 years.
Rasmussen died in a California prison in December 2010, of natural causes, while serving his sentence for Eunsoon Jun's murder. The New Hampshire Attorney General's office and news reports give the year of his death as 2010; the DNA Doe Project's case page gives 2011.
In 2013 the case of the abandoned girl was assigned to Detective Peter Headley of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office. At the end of 2014 she raised it with him again, and he agreed to take another look, since DNA databases had grown. Her own search through a consumer DNA service had turned up only distant cousins.
In 2015 the genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter began working with her, through a volunteer adoption research group. "All we had was her DNA," Rae-Venter told ABC News. She estimated the woman's age, used a consumer DNA test to narrow her ancestry to the United States and Canada, and uploaded her profile to genealogy databases that allow comparisons. From more than 200 genetic cousins she built family trees that pointed to a man in New Hampshire, who agreed to a test and proved to be the woman's maternal grandfather. Headley then called her and asked whether she wanted to know her name. She said she did.
She learned that she had been born in 1981 and that her mother was Denise Beaudin. In July 2016 the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office contacted New Hampshire authorities about the man's connection to the state. Beaudin's family filed a missing person report that year, and New Hampshire opened a criminal investigation. The Attorney General's office has said she is safe and wished to remain anonymous.
The DNA of the man known as Curtis Kimball was compared with the profiles of the four unidentified victims from Bear Brook. In October 2016 the result showed that he was the biological father of the middle child, the girl estimated at 2 to 4 found in the second barrel in 2000.
On January 17, 2017, investigators, with help from the FBI, searched the house in Manchester where Denise Beaudin had lived with Evans and her daughter. Strelzin said it had never before been searched by police.
On January 26, 2017, the Attorney General's office, the New Hampshire State Police and Manchester police held a news conference. They released photographs of the man and the names he had used, and said they believed he had killed the woman and three girls found at Bear Brook and was responsible for Denise Beaudin's disappearance. They said he was the father of one of the girls in the barrels and believed the woman was the mother of the other two. The killings, they then believed, had happened between 1980 and 1984. They did not know his real name. Authorities said "Evans" was not believed to be his real name.
That summer, investigators obtained DNA from an adult believed to be one of the man's children from his marriage. In July 2017 the test confirmed the relationship. On August 18, 2017, Attorney General Gordon MacDonald announced that Bob Evans had been Terry Peder Rasmussen, born in Denver in 1943, a Navy veteran discharged in 1967. Strelzin said he "certainly fits the profile of a serial killer."
In November 2017 the office published a revised timeline of Rasmussen's life, with a 1973 booking photograph, and asked for help identifying the woman who had visited his family with him in Payson, whom investigators thought might be the mother of his daughter in the barrel.
Two years later three of the victims were identified. A Connecticut librarian with an interest in missing persons, Rebekah Heath, had heard the Bear Brook podcast and remembered an old message on a genealogy website from someone looking for a missing girl named Sarah McWaters. She contacted the person who had posted it. Investigators then used mitochondrial DNA to confirm a family link and genealogy work, including Barbara Rae-Venter's, for final confirmation.
On June 6, 2019, at the Department of Safety in Concord, officials named the woman as Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch and the two related girls as her daughters, Marie Elizabeth Vaughn and Sarah Lynn McWaters. "We know what he was," Strelzin said. "We know what he did and now we know who his victims were." State Police Colonel Christopher Wagner said the identification restored dignity to people who had lost their voices more than 33 years earlier. The family said in a statement that they took solace in finally having the answers they had long wanted.
On November 9, 2019, Marlyse Honeychurch and Marie Vaughn were reburied in the cemetery in Allenstown, under a flat stone bearing their names beside the old one that read "known only to God." At least 150 people came. Marlyse's siblings attended, and so did one of Rasmussen's daughters from his marriage, who met them that morning. She told the Concord Monitor that they did not blame her. One of Marlyse's sisters said she felt no bitterness. "That is just who I am," she said. "I reach out."
The fourth victim, Rasmussen's own daughter, remained unnamed. In January 2024 the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit took the case to the DNA Doe Project, after another forensic genealogy firm had worked on it for years. Genealogists built a family tree of about 25,000 people. In June 2025 they found a key match, which led them to a 2005 obituary of an older relative that listed a daughter named Pepper Reed. No records for Pepper Reed could be found after the 1970s. "To figure out the identity of our Jane Doe, we first had to find her mother," said Matthew Waterfield, the project's team leader. Within about half an hour of finding Reed's name, researchers found a 1976 Orange County birth record for a girl named Rea Rasmussen, whose mother's maiden name was Reed. Two volunteer researchers working with the podcast reached the same record independently. Detective Sergeant Christopher Elphick of the State Police traveled to Texas to meet Pepper Reed's relatives, and DNA testing confirmed the identification on September 5, 2025.
On September 7, Attorney General John Formella and State Police Colonel Mark Hall announced that the middle child was Rea Rasmussen. "With Rea Rasmussen's identification, all four victims now have their names back," Formella said. Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Agati, head of the homicide unit, said at a news conference the next day that it felt like "a promise kept." Pepper Reed's family asked for privacy and said in a statement that she was "deeply loved and missed every single day."
Investigators now estimate that Rea was about 3 years old when she died, and they place the killings between about 1978 and 1981. Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters rest in the Allenstown cemetery.
New Hampshire investigators have said repeatedly that they do not believe the known cases are the whole story. "These large gaps in time, it's highly unlikely that he stopped doing what he was doing," Elphick said in September 2025. Investigators have asked for information about Rasmussen's movements from 1974 to 1985, particularly in New Hampshire, California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon and Virginia. News reports have described him as suspected in the deaths of at least six, and by 2025 at least seven, people. Those figures are investigators' assessments; no court has examined them.
One case that drew attention was that of Denise Daneault, a 25-year-old divorced mother of two who went out to a private social club in Manchester on June 8, 1980, and never came back. She had lived on the same street as Denise Beaudin. In November 2017 investigators searched woods in Manchester after an anonymous tip, and they searched again in 2018. Strelzin said at the time that Rasmussen had not been ruled out but that investigators did not see a connection. No evidence linking him to her disappearance has been made public.
Elphick has said Rasmussen "had a type": he sought out vulnerable people and appeared to cut them off from their families, so that no one would report them missing. He has also said Rasmussen was one of the only serial offenders who killed people he actually knew and had relationships with. The criminologist Jack Levin made a similar point in 2018, saying that what set Rasmussen apart from most serial killers was that he targeted people with whom he had a relationship.
The pattern shows in the record. Marlyse Honeychurch left her family after an argument, and as an adult who had chosen to go, there was little the California authorities could do. Denise Beaudin's family believed she had left to escape debts. Pepper Reed's records simply stop. Eunsoon Jun's relatives received emails, written by Vanner, asking them to leave her alone. Only Jun's case, in which a friend refused to accept his explanations, reached a courtroom.
The Rasmussen case became a reference point for investigative genetic genealogy. Senior Assistant Attorney General R. Christopher Knowles, chair of New Hampshire's cold case unit, called the Bear Brook case one of the first major demonstrations of what genetic genealogy could do.
New Hampshire Public Radio's podcast Bear Brook returned with new episodes after the 2025 identification. It played a direct part in the case: the librarian whose tip led to the 2019 identifications had heard it, and volunteer researchers associated with it independently found Rea Rasmussen's birth record in 2025. ABC News's 20/20 covered the case and the 2019 reburial.
As of September 2025 the New Hampshire investigation remained active, focused on finding Pepper Reed and Denise Beaudin. "This investigation is not over," said Detective Sergeant Mallory Littman, commander of the Cold Case Unit. Elphick said investigators would not stop until they found out what had happened to both women.
Proven in court: the murder of Eunsoon Jun (Contra Costa County, 2003, 15 years to life) and child abandonment (California, 1989, three years). Both are final.
Attributed by investigators, never charged: the deaths of Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn, Sarah McWaters and Rea Rasmussen. The New Hampshire Attorney General's office and State Police say they believe Rasmussen killed all four. The evidence they have described publicly is his paternity of Rea, his relationship with Honeychurch, his presence in New Hampshire and his work near the site. He died before any of this was known, so no court has tested it.
Suspected, never charged, bodies never found: Denise Beaudin, whose disappearance the Attorney General calls a likely murder, and Pepper Reed, whom investigators believe is likely another victim.
Examined and not linked: Denise Daneault (1980). Investigators said in 2018 they saw no connection.
Details that vary between accounts: the year of the last family visit in Payson (1974, then possibly 1975 or 1976); the ages of Marie Vaughn (6 when last seen, per the 2019 identification; about 9 in some later reports, which reflects the estimated age at death) and Eunsoon Jun (44 or 45); the dating of the Bear Brook killings (1980 to 1984 in 2017; about 1978 to 1981 by 2025); the form of his plea in the Jun case (first no contest, then guilty, according to ABC News; the Attorney General's timeline says only that he was convicted); and the year of his death (2010 in official and news sources; 2011 on one DNA Doe Project page).
December 23, 1943: Terry Peder Rasmussen is born in Colorado.
1958 to 1961: lives with his family in Phoenix; leaves North High School after his sophomore year.
April 1961 to July 1967: serves in the U.S. Navy.
July 20, 1968: marries in Hawaii.
1969 to 1973: works as an electrician in Phoenix and in the Palo Alto area; four children are born.
April 30, 1973: arrested in Phoenix as a fugitive from justice.
June 11, 1975: arrested in Phoenix for aggravated assault; his wife and children probably leave soon after.
Mid-1970s: Christmas visit to his family in Payson, Arizona, with an unidentified woman; their last sight of him.
1976: his daughter Rea is born in Orange County, California; her mother is Pepper Reed.
Late 1970s: Pepper Reed is last seen.
June 1978: works for a contractor in Houston.
September 28, 1978: his divorce becomes final.
Thanksgiving 1978: Marlyse Honeychurch leaves her family in La Puente, California, with Rasmussen and her daughters Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters.
About 1978 to 1979: working in Manchester, New Hampshire, as Bob Evans.
1980: three arrests in Manchester as Robert T. Evans.
November 26, 1981: Denise Beaudin is last seen by her family; she, Evans and her infant daughter leave Manchester days later.
May 1985: arrested in Cypress, California, as Curtis Mayo Kimball.
November 10, 1985: first barrel found near Bear Brook State Park, Allenstown.
June 1986: abandons the girl he calls Lisa at an RV park in Scotts Valley, California.
March 1989: arrested on child abandonment warrants; sentenced to three years.
October 1990: paroled; absconds the next day.
1999: as Larry Vanner, meets Eunsoon Jun.
May 9, 2000: second barrel found near the first.
June 2002: Eunsoon Jun disappears; her body is later found at her home.
November 2002: arrested for her murder.
June 2003: convicted of her murder; sentenced to 15 years to life.
August 2003: paternity test shows he is not Lisa's father.
December 2010: dies in a California prison.
2015 to 2016: genetic genealogy traces Lisa to the Beaudin family in New Hampshire.
October 2016: DNA shows he fathered the middle child found at Bear Brook.
January 26, 2017: New Hampshire names "Bob Evans" as the suspect.
August 18, 2017: officials announce that Evans was Terry Peder Rasmussen.
June 6, 2019: Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters are identified.
November 9, 2019: Honeychurch and Vaughn are reburied in Allenstown.
September 5 to 7, 2025: the middle child is identified and announced as Rea Rasmussen.