Terry Peder Rasmussen

Rasmussen was born on December 23, 1943[1] in Denver, Colorado.[2] He grew up and attended school in Arizona.[3] In 1961, he dropped out of school to join the United States Navy,[4] and served throughout the decade.[5] He married in 1969, had four children, and lived with his family in Phoenix, Arizona and Redwood City, California.[6] His wife left him and took the children in 1975 after he was arrested for aggravated assault.[5] They last saw Rasmussen around December 1975 or 1976, when he showed up with an unidentified woman.[5] The divorce was finalized in 1978.[5]

Rasmussen lived in a number of states, including: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii and California. He settled in New Hampshire sometime in the late 1970s. It was reported that he was known to travel with women and children.[2] He often worked as an electrician for oil and gas companies. While living in Manchester, New Hampshire, Rasmussen lived under the alias "Robert 'Bob' Evans" and worked at the Waumbec Mill.[6] A woman named "Elizabeth Evans" was listed as his wife during his time in New Hampshire; this woman has never been identified.[7]

By 1978, Rasmussen was dating Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch. Honeychurch was last seen in La Puente, California on Thanksgiving day that year. After an argument with her family, she left with Rasmussen and her two daughters, 6-year-old Marie Elizabeth Vaughn and 1-year-old Sarah Lynn McWaters. In November 1985, the bodies of Honeychurch and Vaughn were found in a barrel in Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire.[3] They were found to have died of blunt force trauma to their heads.[8]

A second barrel was found about 100 yards from the first one in 2000 containing the body of McWaters and a still unidentified child aged between two and four years old. The identities of Honeychurch and her two children were not known until they were confirmed by DNA testing in 2019. Although the third child remains unidentified, authorities were able to confirm through DNA testing that Rasmussen was her biological father.[3]

While known as Bob Evans, Rasmussen dated Denise Beaudin, who disappeared from Manchester, New Hampshire after Thanksgiving of 1981 with her 6-month-old daughter.[8] Authorities believe that Rasmussen killed Beaudin somewhere in California, although her body has never been found.[9] Beaudin was not reported missing at the time as her family believed she left town due to financial reasons.[10]

Throughout the early 1980s, Rasmussen remained in possession of Beaudin’s daughter, whom he called Lisa, and posed as her father.[5] He was arrested in Cypress, California in 1985 under the name Curtis Kimball for charges of driving under the influence and endangering the welfare of a child but failed to appear in court. He then took on the alias Gordon Jenson and abandoned the child at an RV park in Scotts Valley, California in 1986.[4] Rasmussen was arrested under another alias, Gerry Mockerman, in 1988 for driving a stolen vehicle.[6] In 1989, he received a three year prison sentence for child abandonment. Under a plea deal, an additional charge of child abuse was dropped.[5] He was paroled in 1990 and subsequently absconded.[10]

Rasmussen resurfaced in December 1999 under the pseudonym Larry Vanner when California-based chemist Eunsoon Jun introduced him to her family.[5] The two were married in an unofficial ceremony in 2001.[10] Jun disappeared in June 2002 and her body was found buried in cat litter after having died from blunt force trauma to the head.[8] He was arrested that November and pleaded no contest in 2003[11] to charges relating to her murder and dismemberment. He was sentenced to 15 years to life in jail.[6]

The guilty plea came as a surprise to the court and Contra Costa County homicide detective Roxane Gruenheid believed he pleaded guilty after hearing her tell another investigator that she was going to request a paternity test for Lisa.[5] A fingerprint match had confirmed that along with Vanner, he had previously used the aliases Jenson and Kimball,[6] linking him to the child abandonment case. In 2003, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department opened a case to find Lisa's biological family.[8] DNA evidence eventually found that he was not Lisa's father and the case spent years without any significant developments.[11][5] Rasmussen died while imprisoned at High Desert State Prison[6] on December 28, 2010.[7] His cause of death was a combination of lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia.[4]

Reconstructions of the four victims found in Allenstown. The child pictured at the far right, who was Rasmussen's biological daughter, remains unidentified.

San Bernardino detective Peter Headley got Lisa's case in 2013 and genealogy website databases had grown since the case had started.[5] Aided by genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter in 2015, Beaudin's daughter discovered her mother's identity and that the man she once thought had been her father was her kidnapper. This linked him to the New Hampshire in the same timeframe as the Bear Brooks murders, when he was known as Robert Evans.[11] On January 26, 2017, authorities publicly announced that Evans was a suspect in the disappearance of Denise Beaudin and the Bear Brook murders.[12] Additionally, they announced that DNA confirmed that he was the father of the middle child found in Allenstown but that Evans was a pseudonym and his legal identity was not known.[12]

Police released a video of a police interview of Evans in June 2017 in hopes of finding his true identity.[6] Two months later, he was confirmed to be Rasmussen, through Y-DNA testing from a DNA sample contributed by one of his children from what is believed to be his first marriage.[1] The techniques used to identify Rasmussen changed forensic investigations with its use of genetic genealogy.[5] These techniques have since been used in other high profile cases, including the Golden State Killer case, leading to the arrest of suspect Joseph James DeAngelo in April 2018.[11]

New Hampshire investigators announced that the identities of Honeychurch, Vaughn and McWaters were confirmed through DNA testing in June 2019.[3] The identities of the middle child, who Rasmussen fathered, and her mother remain unknown. Investigators believe that the mother of the child was also killed by Rasmussen.[3]

Criminologist Jack Levin has stated that Rasmussen is unlike any serial killer he has ever studied, stating: "What distinguishes Rasmussen from most serial killers, is that he targeted people with whom he had a relationship. Most serial killers would never do that; it's the last thing they would do. Instead, they focus on complete strangers."[13] He has been dubbed "The Chameleon Killer" due to his use of various aliases and his crime spree which stretched across the country.[14]

Rasmussen lived a mile and a half away from 14-year-old Laureen Rahn when she disappeared from Manchester, New Hampshire in April 1980.[13] Denise Daneault, a 25-year-old woman who lived two blocks from the Rahn residence, went missing from a bar in June 1980.[9][13] Daneault had been living on the same street as Rasmussen. Police and FBI conducted a search in Manchester after receiving an anonymous tip regarding Daneault in November 2017, after Rasmussen was announced as the Bear Brook killer. A second search was conducted in May 2018.[9]

Elizabeth Lamotte was 17-years-old when she disappeared from Manchester in 1984. She was not reported missing until police were seeking more information on Rasmussen in 2017 and one tipster speculated that she could have been the "Elizabeth Evans" that had been listed as his wife during his time in Manchester.[15] However, DNA from Lamotte's relatives later proved that she was one of the victims in the Redhead murders. Lamotte had been found in Tennessee in 1985, killed about four months after her disappearance.[14]

When Lisa was interviewed by detectives in 1986, they asked her if she had any siblings. She said that she did but "they died eating ‘grass mushrooms’ when they were out camping". Her answer led police to believe that Rasmussen killed them too.[8]

San Joaquin County, California Assistant Sheriff John Huber speculated that Rasmussen may have been responsible for killing the San Joaquin County Jane Doe. In 1995, the unidentified woman's body was discovered by scavengers inside of a refrigerator which had been dumped in a canal. Like Rasmussen's other victims, she had died of blunt force trauma to the head.[8]

• List of serial killers in the United States