For forty years, they were known only as the Allenstown Four—four skeletons sealed in industrial drums, their identities erased by a killer who wore names like disguises. On September 5, 2025, the final ghost was given a name: Rhea Rasmuson, the biological daughter of the man who murdered her. The announcement by New Hampshire authorities closes the darkest chapter in the state’s criminal history, a case that took four decades, a revolutionary forensic technique, and a Connecticut librarian’s midnight obsession to solve.
The nightmare began on a crisp November morning in 1985, when a hunter traversing the dense woods near Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown stumbled upon a 55-gallon metal drum. Inside, wrapped in black plastic and bound with industrial electrical wire, were the skeletal remains of a woman and a young girl. Both had been dismembered, their skulls crushed by blunt force trauma.
The wire traced back to the Carol Cable Factory, a New England manufacturer, but the clue led nowhere. Composite sketches were circulated across New England; no missing person report matched. The two victims were buried in St.
John Baptist Cemetery under a headstone that read only “Unknown.”
Fifteen years of silence passed before the case exploded into a nightmare. In May 2000, a land clearer working less than 100 meters from the original discovery site found a second drum, hidden behind a thicket that had grown into a natural green wall. Inside were the bodies of two more young girls, estimated ages two to four and one to three, disposed of with the same chilling precision—plastic wrapping, electrical wire, blunt force trauma.
The discovery transformed a double homicide into a serial killer investigation. The FBI joined, DNA was entered into the CODIS database, and America’s Most Wanted aired a segment. Still, nothing.
The victims had been stripped not only of life but of existence itself, their identities so thoroughly erased that no one even knew to look for them.
While investigators hit dead end after dead end, the killer was living an ordinary life just 20 miles away. In the late 1970s, a man calling himself Bob Evans arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire, and was hired as chief electrician at the Wombeck Mills. He was arrested three times in eight months for bad checks and electricity theft, but no one ever ran his fingerprints or questioned his name.
This was the pre-digital era, a time when a man could vanish from one life and materialize in another without a trace. Terry Peter Rasmuson, born in Denver in 1943, a Navy-trained electrician and father of four, had walked away from his family in Arizona in the mid-1970s and never looked back. Over the next three decades, he would cycle through identities—Bob Evans, Curtis Mayo Kimble, Gordon Jensen, Jerry Mockerman, Lawrence William Vanner—each one a new shell, a new hunting ground.
Rasmuson’s pattern was uniquely terrifying. Unlike most serial killers who stalk strangers, he targeted women who trusted him, women who brought him into their homes and their lives. Marla Elizabeth Honeycutt, 24, vanished with her two daughters—Marie Elizabeth Vaughn, six, and Sarah Lynn McWaters, one—in November 1978.
They were the last people to see him alive. Another girlfriend, Pepper Reed, gave birth to his daughter Rhea in 1976, then disappeared without a trace, her entire existence evaporating from every administrative record. Denise Beaudin, 23, vanished with her six-month-old daughter on Thanksgiving 1981; her body has never been found, but her daughter was later discovered abandoned at a California RV park, kept by Rasmuson for years before he discarded her.
In 2002, he killed his live-in girlfriend Yun Jun in Richmond, California, bludgeoning her and burying her body under hundreds of pounds of cat litter. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years to life.
Rasmuson died of lung cancer in a California prison on December 28, 2010, under the name Curtis Kimble. He took his secrets to the grave. For six more years, the Allenstown Four remained nameless, their killer unidentified and unpunished for their deaths.
Then, in July 2016, a routine background check by San Bernardino County detectives on the deceased inmate revealed a connection to New Hampshire. The call to state police was the first crack in the wall. But the true breakthrough came from a field that barely existed: genetic genealogy.
Barbara Rae-Venter, a retired patent attorney turned genetic genealogist, had been working on the case for months. She uploaded DNA from the victims and from Rasmuson’s abandoned daughter Lisa to public genealogy databases like GEDmatch, where millions of ordinary people had voluntarily submitted their DNA. The technique does not seek a perfect match; it seeks partial matches, distant cousins who share common ancestors.
From those fragments, Rae-Venter built a reverse family tree, tracing branches through birth certificates, obituaries, and marriage records. In 2017, she identified the killer as Terry Peter Rasmuson, stripping away more than half a dozen false identities. It was the first time genetic genealogy had ever solved a cold case, a technique that would later crack the Golden State Killer case and revolutionize forensic science worldwide.
But identifying the killer did not identify his victims. The four skeletons in the drums still had no names. In October 2018, New Hampshire Public Radio released “Bear Brook,” a six-episode podcast by reporter Jason Moon that turned the case into a national obsession.
Among the millions who listened was Rebecca Heath, a librarian in Connecticut who had stumbled upon a family forum post a year earlier. A woman was searching for a half-sister named Sarah McWaters, describing a young mother with two daughters who had vanished in the late 1970s. Heath had felt a chill of recognition but had not acted.
The podcast changed that. “I thought, listening to this podcast made me believe these were those people,” she later said. She contacted the family, verified details, and passed the lead to law enforcement.
On June 6, 2019, New Hampshire’s Deputy Attorney General Jeff Strelzin stood before microphones and announced three names: Marla Elizabeth Honeycutt, Marie Elizabeth Vaughn, and Sarah Lynn McWaters. Marla’s siblings, some of whom had not known where their sister was for over 40 years, wept in the front row. But the fourth victim, the middle child, remained unidentified.
DNA had proven she was Rasmuson’s biological daughter, but her mother was a mystery. The DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit specializing in identifying remains, took up the challenge. Researcher Matthew Waterfield and genetic genealogist Giana Fiorentino built a family tree of approximately 25,000 people, following distant matches through generations.
They found a key match leading to a couple born in the 1870s, then traced descendants to a 2005 obituary that mentioned a daughter named Pepper Reed. Within 30 minutes of identifying Reed as the mother, they found the birth certificate of Rhea Rasmuson, born in 1976 in Orange County, California, father Terry Rasmuson. On September 5, 2025, DNA testing confirmed the identity.
The middle child, approximately three years old when her father beat her to death, had a name.
The case is not closed. Pepper Reed and Denise Beaudin remain missing, their fates unknown but almost certainly sealed by the same hand. Investigators continue to probe gaps in Rasmuson’s timeline, particularly the four years between his disappearance from Arizona and his reappearance as Bob Evans in New Hampshire.
They urge anyone with information to contact the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit. But for the families of the Allenstown Four, a measure of justice has finally arrived. The headstone at St.
John Baptist Cemetery now bears names. Marla, Marie, Sarah, and Rhea are no longer the unknown dead. They have been reclaimed from the anonymity their killer imposed, their stories told after four decades of silence.
The man who erased them died unpunished for their murders, but the ordinary people who refused to let them be forgotten—a retired attorney, a librarian, a social worker, a journalist, and a volunteer team of genealogists—ensured that their names would outlast his.
