On September 5, 2025, DNA testing confirmed the name of the last unnamed victim in the Bear Brook case in New Hampshire. She was Rea Rasmussen, born in 1976 in Orange County, California, and the daughter of the man to whom investigators attribute her death. The name did not come from a direct hit on the child. It came from her mother. "To figure out the identity of our Jane Doe, we first had to find her mother," said Matthew Waterfield, the team leader at the DNA Doe Project, the volunteer group that did the work. Once the volunteers had the mother’s name, a 1976 Orange County birth record for a girl named Rea Rasmussen turned up in about half an hour.
That is the pattern in most of the cases that follow. A coroner or a sheriff holds an unnamed victim, sometimes for forty years. A volunteer group of genealogists, working without pay on a case the office has handed over, builds family trees out of a DNA profile until a name appears. A laboratory may build or compare the profile. The family is then told by the office that holds the case, often in a news conference and often after a call that begins with a question about whether the relative wants to know. These are three different kinds of institution, and the cases below show each one at work: volunteers such as the DNA Doe Project and the adoption researchers who first opened the Bear Brook case; laboratories such as Othram in Texas, Parabon NanoLabs and the University of North Texas; and the official offices, from county coroners to a state attorney general’s cold case unit, that own the cases and announce the names.
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 the killing of Eunsoon Jun, a woman he had lived with and called his wife. He died in prison in December 2010 without the authorities who held him knowing his real name.
The rest came afterward, and it came through a woman he had left behind. In 1986, when she was a girl, she was left in California by the man, and a paternity test showed he was not her father. 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. He agreed to a test and proved to be the woman’s maternal grandfather. She was told, 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 of Manchester, New Hampshire. 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 report that year, and New Hampshire opened a criminal investigation. The state’s Attorney General’s office has since said the woman is safe and wished to stay anonymous. The state later described the man it knew as Robert "Bob" Evans as responsible for Beaudin’s death, which it called a likely murder, and Beaudin herself has never been located.
There was a second link. For years the New Hampshire Attorney General’s homicide unit had four unnamed victims in the Allenstown case: a woman and an older girl, and two younger girls. The DNA of the man known as Curtis Kimball was compared with the profiles of those four. In October 2016 the result showed that he was the biological father of the middle child, a girl estimated at 2 to 4 years old. Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin, chief of New Hampshire’s homicide unit, called the man "a chameleon" at the first announcement in January 2017 and said he fit the criteria for a serial offender. In August 2017 the office named him as Terry Peder Rasmussen, born in Colorado in 1943. He was never charged with the Allenstown deaths, and he had been dead for years.
Two years later the work passed to a volunteer with no official standing. Rebekah Heath, a Connecticut librarian with an interest in missing persons, had listened to the Bear Brook podcast produced by New Hampshire Public Radio and remembered an old message on a genealogy website from someone looking for a girl named Sarah McWaters. She contacted the person who had posted it. Investigators then used mitochondrial DNA to confirm the family link and genealogy work, including 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, a ceremony was held at the cemetery in Allenstown, where a flat stone bearing the names of Marlyse Honeychurch and Marie Vaughn was set beside the old stone 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, stayed unnamed for six more years. 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. The project’s genealogists built a family tree of about 25,000 people. In June 2025 they reached 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 turned up after the 1970s. Reed was born in 1952 and came from Texas; the DNA Doe Project said she was from Houston, where Rasmussen was reportedly living at that time. A birth certificate, located only in 2025, lists Terry Peder Rasmussen and Pepper Reed as the parents of Rea. Two volunteers working with the podcast reached the same birth record independently. Detective Sergeant Christopher Elphick of the State Police traveled to Texas to meet Reed’s relatives, and DNA testing confirmed the identification on September 5, 2025. Investigators have said they believe Pepper Reed is likely another of his victims. The inquiries into her case and into Beaudin’s stayed open as of September 2025.
Three things are visible in Bear Brook that recur elsewhere. The first volunteer group worked on someone else’s identity and, by accident, opened a homicide case. A listener to a public radio podcast supplied the link that official investigators had not. And the final name was reached by finding the parent first.
John Wayne Gacy was convicted in March 1980 of 33 murders of young men and boys in the Chicago area. For three decades eight of the dead had no names. Five still have none.
The naming began with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, not with volunteers. In October 2011 Sheriff Dart’s office began DNA work on the eight unnamed victims, and in November William Bundy, 19, was named. The next name came in July 2017. James Haakenson was 16, from St. Paul, Minnesota; his mother had gone to Chicago in 1978 to ask whether he was among the dead, but without dental records there was no answer, and she died two decades later. Years afterward Haakenson’s nephew saw the sheriff’s public appeal for DNA from families on the internet, and persuaded his father and aunt to give samples. There was, Dart said, an immediate hit. His sister said the family still wanted him back, and that resolution would never mean closure.
The third came in October 2021, when the sheriff’s office, working with the DNA Doe Project and forensic genetic genealogy, named the victim known as Victim 5 as Francis Wayne Alexander. He was born in North Carolina and had moved to Chicago by way of New York. He was about 21 and was killed between early 1976 and early 1977. His family had never filed a missing person report, which is why no match could ever have come from the usual route of a relative’s sample. A volunteer group built the tree that did what a database of relatives who were looking could not.
The sheriff’s DNA appeal did good outside the Gacy case. In 2015 a sample given by a woman who was looking for her brother Andre Drath, a 16-year-old, matched an unidentified homicide victim in San Francisco, a connection that no one had been looking for when the appeal began. Gacy’s case shows both halves of the system: the sheriff’s invitation to relatives, which produced two names, and the volunteer genealogists, who produced one the relatives could not.
Larry Eyler was a house painter from Indiana who, by his lawyer’s account, killed 21 young men and teenage boys in Indiana and Illinois between 1982 and 1984. He was convicted of two of those deaths. A Cook County jury convicted him in July 1986 of the murder of Danny Bridges, 15, together with kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint and concealment of a homicidal death, and a judge sentenced him to death. In December 1990 he pleaded guilty in Indiana to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan, 23, of Terre Haute, and received 60 years. The rest of the killings attributed to him were never tried. They rest on his own written account, which his lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, released in March 1994, two days after he died of complications from AIDS on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center, aged 41.
In October 1983 the deaths of four young men came to light in Newton County, Indiana. Two were identified early in the investigation: Michael Bauer, 22, and John Bartlett, 19. The other two went unnamed for almost 40 years. The Newton County coroner, Scott McCord, called them Adam and Brad. Also in October 1983 the death of a young man came to light in rural Jasper County, near Rensselaer, and he too stayed unnamed until 2021. On December 7, 1983, the deaths of two more young men came to light in Hendricks County, Indiana; only one, Richard Wayne, 21, of Indianapolis, was ever named. The other has never been, according to a 2012 report in the Banner Graphic.
The coroners were the ones who did not let the cases go. In 2010 CBS Chicago reported a new effort to identify three young men who had been in the care of coroners in Newton and Jasper counties for nearly 30 years: two from Newton County and one from Jasper County. In 2012 McCord worked with a volunteer group on flyers describing Adam Doe, a young Black man of 15 to 20 with cropped hair, and Brad Doe, a young white man of 17 to 22 with red hair and a homemade cross tattoo on his right forearm. "There has to be a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, somebody out there looking for these kids," McCord told Reveal in 2015. Reveal reported then that as many as six of Eyler’s victims were unidentified, four of them in Indiana, and that DNA from the Newton County cases had been sent to a University of North Texas laboratory and to the national CODIS database.
Neither the flyers nor the databases produced a name. Dan Colin, a former Lake County, Illinois, sheriff’s investigator on the Eyler task force, told Reveal why Eyler himself could not help: "He knew the cases, but he didn’t know the names." McCord told WRTV in 2023 that Eyler had confessed to the Newton County killings but did not remember the victims' names.
Genetic genealogy changed that. In April 2021 the Newton County Coroner’s Office, working with the DNA Doe Project, identified Brad Doe as John Ingram Brandenburg Jr. of Chicago, according to the Associated Press. WRTV gave his age as 19. His mother had called him Johnny. "While my heart breaks for this family," said Rebecca Goddard, a Newton County prosecutor, "I hope this brings them peace." In December 2021 the Jasper County victim was identified as William Joseph Lewis, 19, of Peru, Indiana. His nephew told the Associated Press that Lewis’s grandmother had never stopped hoping he was alive until she died, the year before the identification. In July 2023 Adam Doe was identified as a Chicago teenager, and in September 2023 WRTV reported the coroner’s confirmation. Eyler’s own two convictions had never required those names. What the names did was return three of the dead to families that had waited more than thirty years.
Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty in King County, Washington, on November 5, 2003, to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder, and a judge sentenced him to 48 consecutive life terms. In February 2011 he pleaded guilty to a 49th count. Four of the 48 counts were entered for women whose names were then unknown, as Jane Does B-10, B-16, B-17 and B-20. For years they stayed that way. Then, between 2021 and 2024, three of the four were named, each by a different combination of people, and the three announcements are a useful side-by-side of who does what.
The first came in January 2021. The King County Sheriff’s Office announced that genetic genealogy, worked on with the forensic anthropologist Katherine Taylor and the volunteer DNA Doe Project, had identified one of the unidentified victims as Wendy Stephens, a 14-year-old from Denver. She is believed to be the youngest of his victims. Here the volunteers did the genealogy and the sheriff’s office made the announcement.
The second came in December 2023, and no volunteer group was part of it. Parabon NanoLabs built a new DNA profile from the victim entered as Jane Doe B-17, the University of North Texas compared it with a saliva sample from her mother, and the sheriff’s office named Lori Anne Razpotnik, 15, of Lewis County, Washington.
The third came on January 22, 2024. The sheriff’s office announced that Othram, the Texas laboratory, working with the University of North Texas and a DNA sample from her mother, had identified the victim entered as Jane Doe B-20 as Tammie Liles, 16, of Everett. Reports at the time called her the last unidentified victim of the case. In both of the 2023 and 2024 announcements, a mother’s sample made the match possible; in the 2021 announcement the DNA Doe Project had to build outward through a tree. Three names, one sheriff’s office, and three arrangements: volunteers and a forensic anthropologist, a company and a university, and a laboratory and a university.
Richard J. Fox pleaded guilty to three murders in western New York. In Erie County Court in September 2025 he admitted killing two Buffalo women, Cassandra Watson, who died between 2003 and 2004, and Marquita Mull, 50, in late June 2021. He was sentenced in November 2025 to 20 years to life on each count, consecutive, 40 years to life in all. In Niagara County Court in January 2026 he pleaded guilty to the murder of Crystal Curthoys, 32, of Lockport, in Niagara Falls in January 2023, and in April 2026 he was sentenced to 25 years to life, consecutive to the first term.
The case began in September 2021, when the deaths of two women came to light in the Town of Portland, in rural Chautauqua County. One was identified within weeks. On October 7, 2021, Sheriff James Quattrone announced at a news conference in Mayville that one of them was Marquita Mull of Buffalo. "We’re going to stick with the facts rather than speculate," he said. The sheriff’s office would not say whether the two deaths were connected.
For Mull’s family the months afterward brought few answers. "You took a part of our heart, our soul, when you took that girl," her sister said that October. In September 2024, three years on, her sister returned to Portland with members of a western New York volunteer group for missing and unidentified people who had helped the family.
The second woman had no name for more than three years. In the fall of 2021 investigators ruled out two women from earlier Chautauqua County cases. In November 2022 the sheriff’s office released what it knew: she was estimated to have been between 15 and 35 years old and between 4 feet 11 inches and 5 feet 7 inches tall, she had died in 2011 or earlier, and she might have come from the Erie County area. The office asked anyone who knew of a woman who might match to call Investigator Jacob Stahley.
The name came through forensic genetic genealogy. Prosecutors said her identity was confirmed in December 2024, and in February 2025 it was made public: she was Cassandra Watson, born in 1963. WKBW reported in April 2025 on how a Texas DNA lab helped solve the case, and Othram’s own case page, posted on February 18, 2025, set the date of her death between 2002 and 2004. Investigators went back to her life at the time and learned that she had been living with Fox. "Once they made that connection between Richard Fox, obviously, this case came to a head very quickly," Keane, speaking for the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, said.
The Fox case is the plainest example among these cases of the commercial laboratory route. A volunteer group stood with the family of the first woman, but the second woman’s name was reached by a laboratory working with a sheriff’s office and a prosecutor, and the result was announced by the prosecutor, not by the laboratory.
Between September 1935 and August 1938, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the deaths of at least 12 people, about seven men and five women, were tied to Kingsbury Run, a ravine of tracks cutting through the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio. Only two were identified with certainty and a third tentatively. Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo were named by fingerprints; Rose Wallace, about 40, tentatively, by dental work. Most of the dead were poor and transient, people who lived in the shantytowns of the Great Depression or drifted through the city by train, and no one came forward to claim them. Time magazine counted 13 in July 1939. No one was ever convicted. Frank Dolezal, a bricklayer, was arrested by county sheriff’s deputies in July 1939 and charged in the death of Florence Polillo; he confessed, retracted and died in jail in August 1939, before any trial.
Nearly 90 years later the DNA Doe Project is working on the oldest unnamed cases among these. In July 2024 Cleveland 19 News reported that unidentified victims would be tested for DNA with the county medical examiner’s office, and a team of investigative genetic genealogists was named to work on their identities. By August 9, 2024, the work was under way, and on August 21 the DNA Doe Project posted its first two case pages, Kingsbury Run John Doe #4 and Kingsbury Run John Doe #6. CBS News reported the effort the next day. As of October 2026, two of the victims were still undergoing testing and had not been identified. The numbering used by the project and the medical examiner does not always match the numbering in news reports of the 1930s.
The project’s pages for these cases carry something the original investigators gave out in 1936: a description of a man, with tattoos. A white man in his early twenties (the DNA Doe Project estimates 20 to 23; Cleveland Magazine said about 25) had six tattoos, which police photographed and circulated in the hope that someone would recognize them. The DNA Doe Project lists them: a bird and band with the names "Helen and Paul" on the inner left forearm, a heart and anchor on the outer right forearm, a flag and the initials "W.C.G." on the inner right forearm, a butterfly on the left shoulder, the comic strip character Jiggs on the left ankle, and a Cupid on the right ankle. His clothing carried a laundry mark with the initials "J.D." Nobody in 1936 matched those details to a name. The question for the volunteers is whether a DNA profile can now reach people whose families, after nine decades, may not know there is a relative to find.
The Houston case is the one here in which volunteers play no part, and it is useful for that reason. Between 1970 and the summer of 1973, at least 28 boys and young men, most of them from the Houston Heights, were attributed to Dean Arnold Corll, an electrician. He was never charged or tried. On August 8, 1973, a 17-year-old named Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. telephoned the Pasadena police and said he had killed Corll, and authorities ruled the death a justifiable homicide. Within a week 27 boys and young men had been recovered. Police named Corll as the leader. Henley was convicted of six murders and David Owen Brooks of one, and Brooks was sentenced to life in March 1975.
The naming of the dead was done by the Harris County medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, with dental records and with descriptions that families brought to the morgue. Some boys were identified from Social Security cards or driver’s licenses. The Glass family recognized Jimmy by his leather jacket. The method produced errors almost at once. Two of the dead were released as Jerry and Donald Waldrop on the strength of their father’s description of clothing, height and teeth, and sent to Georgia. In September 1973, after dental records arrived, Jachimczyk announced that the boys sent to Georgia were in fact David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle, and that the Waldrop brothers were still in the Houston morgue. Everett Waldrop said he had not misidentified anyone. The county commissioners argued over who should pay to bring the two boys back, and County Judge Bill Elliott refused to authorize public money until fault was settled. By mid September 1973, 18 of the 27 had names.
The corrections did not stop there. KHOU 11 reported in 2010 that one of the 28 victims in the case had been misidentified, and in 2011 the families of the victims met. A forensic anthropologist working with the Harris County material later determined that some of the dead had been given the wrong names, and that the count was almost certainly higher than 27.
One of the 27 is still unnamed. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children carries him as John Houston Doe 1973 (case 1109009), and in August 2023 the center and ABC13 circulated an updated sketch. The journalist Lise Olsen’s 2025 book, The Scientist and the Serial Killer, follows the identification effort.
Robert Yale Shulman worked nights as a mail handler at the post office in Hicksville, on Long Island. A Suffolk County jury convicted him of first-degree murder under a provision of New York’s 1995 death penalty law that covers a person who kills three or more people in separate events committed in a similar fashion, and a second jury voted unanimously that he should be executed. On October 25, 2005, the New York Court of Appeals upheld his convictions and vacated the death sentence.
One of the three women in the Suffolk County case has still not been identified. She is known as Jane Doe Medford, after the Suffolk County town where her death came to light on December 7, 1994. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Cold Case Task Force describes her as a white woman between about 20 and 30 years old, about five feet one inch tall and about 135 pounds, with a tattoo bearing the name "Adrian" on her upper left shoulder. Genetic genealogy work has shown that her ancestry is Western European, with at least 75 percent of it traced to England, Scotland and Wales. To mark National Missing Persons Day, the task force released a clay facial reconstruction of her, an updated composite sketch, and a drawing of how the tattoo probably looked during her life, and asked the public for help in putting a name to her.
District Attorney Ray Tierney set up the office’s first Cold Case Unit to work unsolved homicides with the county police Homicide Squad, using techniques that include genetic genealogy. The office has offered a reward of up to $2,000 for information that identifies unknown victims, and accepts anonymous tips. It is a contrast with the DNA Doe Project: the Suffolk office has paid staff, a task force and a reward, and the genealogy is part of a prosecutor’s own unit.
Eight cases do not add up to one pattern. In Bear Brook, volunteers began with a woman who needed her own name, and their work led the state to a suspect it had never identified; a podcast listener and a library volunteer opened the way, and a team of volunteers closed it. In the Gacy case, a sheriff’s office did most of the work and one volunteer partner took the case no relative’s sample could reach. In the Eyler case, a county coroner worked with a volunteer group on flyers and then waited a decade for a different volunteer group to identify the victims. In the Ridgway case, three names came through three arrangements, and only one involved the volunteers. In the Fox case, a laboratory and prosecutors named a woman whose link to Fox was the household she shared with him. In Cleveland, the oldest unnamed victims are being tested in 2026 by a volunteer group working beside a county medical examiner. In Houston, a nonprofit and a medical examiner keep carrying a case that the first identifications got wrong. In Suffolk County, a prosecutor’s own unit asks the public for a name.
The word volunteer covers a narrower group than it first suggests. Across these cases it describes the DNA Doe Project, an adoption research group, a library volunteer, two podcast-linked volunteers, and a western New York group for missing and unidentified people. The laboratories are named separately in every case where they worked, and the offices that hold the cases are the ones that issue the names and tell the families.
• 1943: Terry Peder Rasmussen born in Colorado.
• 1973, August 8: Dean Corll killed; Henley telephones the Pasadena police.
• 1973, September: Harris County medical examiner announces that the two boys sent to Georgia were David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle, not the Waldrop brothers.
• 1980, March: John Wayne Gacy convicted of 33 murders.
• 1986, July: Larry Eyler convicted of the murder of Danny Bridges.
• 1990, December: Eyler pleads guilty in Indiana to the murder of Steven Agan.
• 1994, March: Eyler’s lawyer releases his confession to 21 killings.
• 2003, November 5: Gary Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
• 2003: Rasmussen sentenced in California to 15 years to life for the murder of Eunsoon Jun.
• 2010, December: Rasmussen dies in a California prison.
• 2011, October to November: Cook County Sheriff’s Office begins DNA work on Gacy’s unnamed victims; William Bundy named.
• 2012: Newton County coroner works with a volunteer group on flyers for Adam Doe and Brad Doe.
• 2015: Barbara Rae-Venter begins genealogy work with the woman later connected to Denise Beaudin.
• 2016, October: Rasmussen’s DNA matched as father of the middle child in the Allenstown case.
• 2017, January: New Hampshire makes its first announcement about the suspect.
• 2017, July: James Haakenson identified in the Gacy case.
• 2017, August: New Hampshire names the suspect as Terry Peder Rasmussen.
• 2019, June 6: Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters named; November 9 ceremony in Allenstown.
• 2021, January: Wendy Stephens identified in the Ridgway case with the DNA Doe Project.
• 2021, April: John Ingram Brandenburg Jr. identified in the Eyler case with the DNA Doe Project.
• 2021, October: Francis Wayne Alexander identified in the Gacy case with the DNA Doe Project.
• 2021, December: William Joseph Lewis identified.
• 2023, July and September: Adam Doe identified as a Chicago teenager.
• 2023, December: Lori Anne Razpotnik identified.
• 2024, January 22: Tammie Liles identified through Othram.
• 2024, August: DNA Doe Project and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner begin work on Kingsbury Run cases.
• 2025, February: Cassandra Watson identified and named in the Fox case.
• 2025, September 5: Rea Rasmussen identified.
• 2025, November 20, and 2026, April 15: Richard Fox sentenced in Erie County and Niagara County.