Three of the four victims of the so-called ‘Bear Brook Murders‘ have been identified by authorities in the US state of New Hampshire, following a tip-off from a librarian and researcher who listened to a podcast concerning the case.
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Associate Attorney General Jeffrey Strelzin yesterday said authorities have confirmed the identities of Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, who was in her 20s at the time of her death, along with her two young daughters, Marie Elizabeth Vaugh and Sara Lynn McWaters.
Those three victims, along with a fourth victim who is yet to be identified, were found in barrels dumped in New Hampshire’s Bear Brook State Park between 1985 and 2000.
Prosecutors previously accused Terry Peder Rasmussen, aka Bob Evans, of killing the ‘Allenstown Four‘, but had been unable to identify the victims.
Strelzin said a breakthrough in the case came when Connecticut researcher Becky Heath contacted authorities last year regarding a potential link to the 1978 disappearance of Honeychurch and her daughters.
“Based on information from the woman’s family and the work of a researcher, as well as DNA testing and genealogical research, we’ve identified three of the Allenstown murder victims,” Strelzin told reporters.
Heath had listened to the New Hampshire Public Radio podcast Bear Brook, which discussed the murders. She made a link between those three victims and a missing-person post made on Ancestry.com by a woman claiming to be Honeychurch’s half-sister.
Heath contacted the woman who made the post. A family member then told Heath she recalled Honeychurch dated a man with the surname Rasmussen.
“I was like, ‘there is no way – there is no way that’s a coincidence,’” Heath told NHPR.
“This is huge.”
A librarian from Connecticut provided the key tip that led to the identification of three victims found in barrels near NH’s #BearBrook state park, the case at the center of the podcast Bear Brook. Here’s the story: https://t.co/maLcYuvSSq pic.twitter.com/xWz0X5h3Oj
— NH Public Radio (@nhpr) June 6, 2019
Investigators had already determined the victims were killed between 1977 and 1985, but had been unable to identify them.
Work continues to identify the fourth victim – another young girl who was found, via DNA analysis, to be Rasmussen’s daughter.
Rasmussen, who in 2002 admitted to the separate killing his wife Eunsoon Jun, died in prison in 2010.
