The Moment a 4-Year-Old Girl Finally Got to Step Inside Her Own Home

The Moment a 4-Year-Old Girl Finally Got to Step Inside Her Own Home

In November 1985, a hunter walking through Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire, found a 55-gallon steel drum in the woods near a burned-out store at the edge of a trailer park. Inside were the remains of a woman and a young girl. Both had been beaten to death. 15 years later, in May 2000, a state police investigator retracing the original crime scene found a second barrel roughly 300 ft away.

Two more girls inside. It had been sitting there since the first one was found. Four bodies in two steel drums and no names on any of them. It took 40 years to identify the last one. The woman in the first barrel was white, somewhere between 23 and 27 years old when she died. The girl found with her was between 6 and 10.

 The two girls in the second barrel were much younger. One was a toddler, estimated between 1 and 4 years old, and the other was older than the toddler but younger than the 6-year-old. Investigators called her the middle child. All four had been dead for years before the first barrel surfaced. The best estimates put the deaths somewhere in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

 The cause was the same across all four, blunt force trauma to the head. For 15 years, from 1985 to 2000, investigators had only the first two victims. They released composite sketches and circulated them across New England. Yet, they ran dental records through every database they had and cross-checked missing persons reports from across the region.

Flyers went to police departments, dental offices, and hospitals across New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The second barrel changed the scope of the case. When it surfaced in 2000, investigators realized the original crime scene had been incomplete the whole time. The second drum had been sitting near the first one for 15 years through searches, evidence sweeps, and repeated visits to the site by investigators and reporters.

 The area around the burned-out store was overgrown and dense, but the barrel wasn’t buried. It was sitting in the brush, rusted and partially covered by leaves and undergrowth. After the second barrel surfaced, the case became a quadruple homicide with no suspect and no identification on any of the four victims. The New Hampshire State Police and the Attorney General’s Office in Concord worked the case for years, reaching out to law enforcement across the country and entering profiles into national databases. CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA

database, launched in the late 1990s. When someone gets convicted of a qualifying crime, their DNA goes in and the system checks it automatically against unsolved cases. But CODIS requires a match on the other end, and the degraded remains produced limited DNA. Whatever profiles they could extract didn’t match anyone in the system.

 The Attorney General’s cold case unit ran them periodically as the database grew, checking every few years for new entries that might connect to the remains. Each time, the result came back empty, without names, and they couldn’t trace the victims to anyone. There were no families to interview, no locations to canvass, no starting point.

 For more than 20 years, the barrels sat open with no suspect and no victim identities. Then the case broke from the other side of the country through two separate events that had nothing to do with Bear Brook. In November 1981, a 24-year-old woman named Denise Bodan disappeared from Manchester, New Hampshire. She’d been living with a man who went by Bob Evans in a rented apartment on Merrimack Street on the west side of the city.

She told her family she was going away with him. After that, nobody heard from her again. Her family reported her missing to the Manchester Police Department but got nowhere. Bodan seemed to have vanished completely and nobody could find any trace of where she’d gone. Evans kept her 6-month-old daughter and raised the girl as his own.

 He told her that her mother had died. He called her Lisa, and over the next 5 years, he moved her through Arizona, Texas, and northern California, changing locations every year or two, never staying long enough for anyone to know them well. He enrolled her in schools under different last names.

 In 1986, he left her at an RV park in Scotts Valley, California, a small town in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He told the park owners he’d be back and never returned. She was 6 years old. A local couple at the park took her in, eventually adopted her through the Santa Cruz County court system, and raised her as their own.

 She grew up in the Bay Area not knowing her real name, her real mother’s name, or what happened to either of them. 16 years later, in 2002, a 45-year-old chemist named UnSuhnn June disappeared from her home in Richmond, California. Well, her husband, going by the name Larry Vanner, reported her missing to the Richmond Police Department.

 Weeks later, during a follow-up interview at the station, he confessed. June’s body was buried under cat litter in the basement of the home they shared on Belmont Drive. Contra Costa County prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder. He went to trial in Martinez, the county seat, was convicted in 2003, and sentenced to 15 years to life in the California state prison system.

 Fingerprint comparisons connected Bob Evans and Larry Vanner as the same man. They also connected him to two more names he’d used, Curtis Kimball in New Hampshire and Gordon Jensen in California. All four aliases linked through prints from criminal arrests spanning decades. Every name was stolen from a real person who died or gone missing.

He’d been using dead men’s identities his entire adult life. No one he lived with, married, or worked alongside knew who he actually was. Employment records and utility accounts placed him in southern New Hampshire in the early 1980s when the barrel victims were killed. He’d worked odd jobs under various aliases >> >> and rented rooms in the towns around Bear Brook State Park, including Allenstown, Hooksett, and Manchester.

 In January 2017, New Hampshire authorities named him as the prime suspect in the four murders and in the disappearance of Denise Bodan. He died 7 years earlier on December 28th, 2010 in a California prison hospital at age 67. The state listed him as Larry Vanner. Nobody knew his real name.

 He was buried under that alias in a prison cemetery. In 2015, a genetic genealogist named Barbara Rae-Venter began working with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and the FBI to figure out who this man actually was. Rae-Venter was a retired patent attorney with a PhD in biology who had turned to forensic genealogy as a second career.

 She uploaded his DNA to GEDmatch, a database where people share their ancestry test results to learn about their family history. The idea behind genetic genealogy is straightforward. >> >> Even if the suspect never took a test himself, a distant relative might have, and from those matches, you can build a family tree and trace it back to the person you’re looking for.

 The technique was still new in 2015. Her work on this case was one of the first public uses of genetic genealogy in a criminal investigation, a months before the Golden State Killer arrest brought the method into the national spotlight. She found distant cousins in the database and began building the tree outward from there, working through birth certificates, marriage records, census data, and obituaries across Colorado and surrounding states.

 The process took months of cross-referencing public records with DNA connections. The tree pointed to one man from Denver. He was born in 1943. He enlisted in the Navy in 1961 at 18, served as an electrician aboard ships in the Pacific, and received an honorable discharge in 1967 after 6 years of active duty.

 He married a woman in Colorado Springs and had four children with her over the next several years. In 1975, he burned one of his sons with cigarettes and was arrested for aggravated assault. His wife took the children and left the state. After that, he dropped his real name entirely and never used it again for the rest of his life.

 Every identity from that point forward was stolen from dead men or men who’d gone missing. He became Bob Evans, Curtis Kimball, Gordon Jensen, Larry Vanner, a different name for every state. Meanwhile, Rae-Venter’s DNA work also confirmed that the child abandoned at the RV park in California wasn’t his biological daughter. Genealogical research traced the girl’s real family back to Manchester, New Hampshire.

 Her name was Dawn Bodan. Her mother was Denise, the woman who’d vanished with a man calling himself Bob Evans in 1981. Dawn had spent her entire life believing her mother was dead and that the man who left her at an RV park when she was 6 was her real father. She’d been raised by an adoptive family in California and built a life there.

 By the time investigators showed up with DNA results and told her the truth, the man had been dead for years. With the suspect identified and placed in New Hampshire during the right timeframe, investigators turned back to the barrels. DNA from the victims had been extracted over multiple rounds of testing.

 Genetic genealogy analysis and independent research by a librarian named Rebecca Heath converged on the same answers at almost the same time. Heath worked at the Wiggin Memorial Library in Stratham, New Hampshire. After her shifts, she’d go home and spend evenings at her computer working the case on her own time, unpaid. She searched ancestry databases, genealogy message boards, and online forums for anyone looking for missing relatives who matched the barrel victims’ approximate ages and physical descriptions.

She cross-referenced birth dates, family locations, and disappearance timelines from public records. Most nights led nowhere. In October 2018, after months of searching, she found a message on an ancestry forum. A woman in California was looking for a family member named Sarah McWaters, born in 1977. The age and timeline matched the youngest victim in the second barrel.

Heath’s research and Ram Venters’ forensic genealogy work reached the same conclusion independently within weeks of each other. In June 2019, New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald announced the names publicly for the first time, 34 years after the first barrel was found. Members of the victims’ families sat in the front row, wiping away tears as the names were read.

“When you know the faces, when you know their names,” she said afterward, “they’re not strangers anymore.” The woman was Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, born in 1954 in Fairfield, Connecticut. She she’d grown up in the Northeast before moving to Southern California and settling in La Puente, a city east of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley.

She was 24 when last seen alive. She had two daughters from two different fathers. Marie Elizabeth Vaughn, born December 1971, was about six when she died. Sarah Lynn McWaters, born December 1977, was between one and three. All three were last seen around Thanksgiving 1978, when Marlyse left her apartment in La Puente with a man her family didn’t know.

He was described as someone she’d met recently through mutual acquaintances. Marlyse’s family called her apartment after the holiday, wrote letters, and never heard from her again. They had no forwarding address and no way to reach her. They contacted local police in California, but Marlyse was an adult who had left on her own, so there was nothing to investigate.

 For 40 years, they didn’t know what happened to her or to the girls. They didn’t know she’d been killed. Three of the four victims now had names, but the middle child, found in the second barrel alongside Sarah, was still unidentified. DNA testing confirmed she wasn’t Marlyse’s biological daughter. She was a different child from a different family, and no missing persons report anywhere in the country matched her.

 In January 2024, the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit partnered with the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization that uses genetic genealogy to identify unidentified remains. The organization was founded in 2017 and has worked on dozens of cold cases across the country. For the Bear Brook case, they assembled a team of more than 40 genealogists, professionals, and experienced DNA researchers, all volunteering their time to trace the middle child’s family.

The DNA work was difficult. Remains sealed in a steel drum for 40 years degrade from bacteria, moisture, and chemical breakdown. Specialized labs, including the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, ran multiple rounds of extractions. Standard methods failed on the first several attempts.

 A modified protocol eventually produced enough genetic material to work with, but the profile was partial and degraded. The lab uploaded the profile to ancestry databases. Distant matches appeared, relatives with varying degrees of kinship to the remains. The genealogists began building the family tree outward, verifying every connection through public records, birth and death certificates, obituaries, and family registrations in county courthouses across the country.

 Over more than a year of work, they compiled a tree of roughly 25,000 people spanning multiple generations and states. Texas, California, Colorado, the Pacific Northwest. In June 2025, the tree led to a family in East Texas. The connection traced back to a woman named Pepper Reed, born in 1952 in Orange County, Texas.

 A Reed had been in a relationship with the suspect in California in the mid-1970s. Her family last saw her around Christmas 1975, when she visited them in Orange, a small city on the Louisiana border in the southeastern corner of the state. She was pregnant at the time. Her family knew she was expecting, but didn’t know who the father was or where she went after that holiday visit.

 They assumed she’d chosen to walk away from the family on her own. A birth certificate from Orange County, California confirmed a girl was born there in 1976. The father listed on the certificate was the real name of the man behind all four aliases, the man who died in a California prison in 2010 and been buried under someone else’s name.

 His name was Terry Peter Rasmussen. All the child on the birth certificate was Reya Rasmussen, his daughter. DNA from the middle child was compared to a sample from one of Rasmussen’s known biological relatives. The match confirmed it. A Y-DNA test using a sample from Rasmussen’s 2010 autopsy confirmed he was Reya’s biological father.

 She was between two and four years old when she was killed by her own father. He sealed her in a steel drum with Marlyse Honeychurch and Marie Vaughn, two people she wasn’t related to, and left her in the woods in New Hampshire. She had been in that barrel for roughly 40 years before anyone knew her name. On September 5th, 2025, Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Agati announced the identification at a press conference at the Attorney General’s offices in Concord.

 And he named Reya Rasmussen as the fourth and final victim of the Bear Brook murders. Detective Sergeant Christopher Elfic, who had worked the case for years, said they never forgot Reya and they never stopped looking. 40 years after the first barrel was found in the woods behind a burned-out store in Allenstown, all four victims finally had names.

 Reya’s identification raised a new question about her mother. Pepper Reed has been missing since the mid-1970s. She was last confirmed alive by her family in Texas around Christmas 1975, when she was pregnant with the child who would be found in a barrel 10 years later. Rasmussen was the last person known to have been with her before she disappeared.

 New Hampshire investigators and the FBI have searched property records and land parcels associated with Rasmussen’s known aliases across multiple states, >> >> but found nothing. Pepper Reed’s body has never been recovered. She’s been missing for roughly 50 years. Denise Boden, who vanished from Manchester with Rasmussen in 1981, has also never been found.

 Her daughter Dawn grew up in the Bay Area not knowing the man who raised her for the first five years of her life wasn’t her biological father, not knowing her real name, and not knowing what happened to her mother. By the time she learned the truth, Rasmussen had been dead for years, buried under a stolen name in a prison cemetery in California.

Rasmussen’s confirmed victims, number five, Marlyse Honeychurch, Marie Vaughn, Sarah McWaters, Reya Rasmussen, and Eunsoon Jun in Richmond, California. Denise Boden and Pepper Reed are both presumed dead. Investigators believe the real number is higher. He lived in at least six states under at least four stolen identities over three decades.

A podcast by New Hampshire Public Radio called Bear Brook, reported by Jason Moon, uncovered the case from the forensic dead ends through the genealogy breakthroughs and the volunteers who spent years building family trees without pay. It was downloaded more than 20 million times and brought the case national attention. Pepper Reed is still missing.

Her family in East Texas has waited since the mid-1970s for any word about what happened to her. At the press conference, a victim witness specialist read a statement from Reed’s family. “Pepper is deeply loved and missed every single day. Though we did not have an opportunity to meet Reya, she is cherished just as much in our hearts.

 No remains have ever been found.” Rasmussen died in prison on December 28th, 2010, at 67. He never confessed to the Bear Brook killings or told anyone where Pepper Reed or Denise Boden were buried. Reya Rasmussen was between two and four years old. Her father put her in a steel drum in the woods in Allenstown.

 It took more than 40 genealogists and a family tree of 25,000 names to find out who she was.