Bob Evans/Larry Vanner (let’s call him Vanner for now) emerged suddenly as a suspect in the Bear Brook murders for several reasons. We knew Vanner had lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, just fourteen miles south of Bear Brook Park. We knew he was capable of murder—he was imprisoned for brutally slaying his wife Eunsoon Jun. And we knew there were similarities between the killing of Jun and the murders in Bear Brook Park (the victims were dismembered, wrapped in plastic, and tied with electrical tape). All of this led investigators like Deputy Headley to begin looking much more closely at Vanner as a suspect.
Headley reached out to Michael Kokoski, the New Hampshire State Police detective working on cold cases at the time, and “together,” says Headley, “we began connecting the dots.”
It was about this time that Headley called me and filled me in on the case. He wanted to know if the methodology we used to identify Lisa could now help us identify not only the four Bear Brook murder victims, but also who Bob Evans really was.
This was exciting. I was working on other criminal cases at the time, but none were like this one. For one thing, the Bear Brook case had now been cold for forty years, making it seem all but unsolvable and presenting quite a challenge. For another, it was looking more and more likely that Detective Headley had a serial killer on his hands. I simply could not pass up the chance to help him solve the case and find the murderer. “Yes, I believe it is possible to identify the Bear Brook victims,” I told Deputy Headley in our first call about the case, “but I’m going to need autosomal DNA from each of the four victims, and from Vanner in order to identify him.”
There was, however, one big problem: at the time no such DNA was available, either from the four victims or from Vanner.
A DNA sample had been taken from Vanner while he was under arrest for drunk driving as Curtis Kimball, but not enough DNA extract from that sample remained to be of any use. Unfortunately, when he died in prison in 2010, no relatives had emerged to claim his remains, and he was cremated. Vanner’s ashes were tossed into the sea, eliminating any chance of retrieving usable DNA from his body.
This initially seemed like an insurmountable hurdle—without his DNA, we had nothing.
But then I remembered something I had once read, a stray fact that for some reason stuck with me and now pushed its way forward. I remembered that when California prisoners die, they are automatically autopsied, and some of their blood is drawn and put on specialized absorbent filters. Once the blood is dry, the sample can be safely stored away. It is called a blood card.
Was it possible Larry Vanner had been autopsied and a source of his DNA remained? Deputy Headley said he would look into it.
Sure enough, he discovered that Vanner had been autopsied, and a hair sample and a blood card had been generated.
But there was no guarantee the California penal system still had the hair sample and the blood card in storage. Deputy Headley had to fill out form after form just to get someone to look for the autopsy items. Eventually, he learned that the California blood card and Vanner’s hair sample were stored in a facility in Nevada. More forms and signatures were required in order to obtain them.
Finally, Headley learned that after a certain number of years the blood cards are routinely destroyed. When a staffer dug through the card files, he found that Vanner’s card was officially slated for destruction.
But it had not been destroyed yet.
Headley succeeded in getting the card, and with that lucky break we were able to have Vanner’s DNA extracted and tested. Before long I went to work building out a speculative family tree from his matches that we could use to identify him. As with the Lisa Jensen case, all I had to work with was his DNA. I had no idea where he was from or how old he was—all his aliases came with different ages and birth dates. One possible clue: he spoke several languages (including French), and he had possible connections to Quebec. I enlisted Junel Davidsen to help me unearth his true identity.
We did both Y-DNA and autosomal DNA testing. Vanner had hardly any Y-DNA matches, and his autosomal DNA matches were not particularly close, suggesting that his ancestors were probably fairly recent immigrants. It took us a long time to find a most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a set of Vanner’s autosomal DNA matches. Eventually, we did find an MRCA, allowing us to build down all of the MRCA’s descendant lines and identify ten of the MRCA’s male descendants who roughly fit Vanner’s age criteria.
One of them, in theory, was Larry Vanner.
Junel and I, each at our own laptops, scoured public records for information about these ten men, looking for photos or anything else that might help us narrow down the list and possibly hit on the person who Vanner really was.
We assumed that someone who had for years been using aliases would have a sketchy or even nonexistent trail of records, as was the case with Denise Beaudin, who was presumably deceased. In other words, he would at some point early in his life have stopped generating contemporary records, such as a driver’s license, marriage records, divorce records, and birth records of his children. We also knew that he was an electrician by training and had continued to work in that field. While researching the ten men, we found that one of them—a man named Terry Rasmussen—had a document trail that went cold in 1978 after he was divorced in San Mateo County, California. Junel obtained a copy of his divorce papers, which listed Terry Rasmussen’s occupation.
He was an electrician, just like Larry Vanner.
We needed more. We needed some kind of confirmation. Then we found it: an old high school photo of Terry Rasmussen. The man in the photo looked familiar—extremely familiar. In fact he looked a whole lot like Bob Evans/Larry Vanner.
Had we finally discovered this man’s true identity?
More research into the man in the photo revealed his full name: Terry Peder Rasmussen. The divorce papers indicated Rasmussen had a son, and as final proof that we had identified the correct person Y-DNA testing was done on the son. The son’s Y-DNA matched with the Y-DNA that had been extracted from Vanner’s blood card.
Bob Evans, Gordon Jensen, Larry Vanner, Curtis Kimball, Gerry Mockerman—they were all Terry Peder Rasmussen.
With that name in hand, Deputy Headley found employment records and other data that allowed him to piece together some of Rasmussen’s past. He had many aliases Headley had not known about, including Jerry Gorman, Don Vannerson, Ulos Jensen. He had so many aliases and identities that the press eventually nicknamed him the Chameleon Killer. Rasmussen was, apparently, unusually intelligent, capable of retaining the swaths of information that helped him appropriate other people’s identities.
“All the aliases he used came from real people he met,” says Deputy Headley. “In 1988 he got arrested with a stolen car and came up with the name Gerry Mockerman. He knew this man’s date of birth and Social Security numbers. I later spoke with the real Gerry Mockerman and he said his ID papers were stolen out of his truck eighteen months before Rasmussen’s 1988 arrest. Rasmussen was a smart guy with an incredible memory.”
For Rasmussen, outsmarting investigators was a game he seemed to enjoy.
“I’ve always tried to live by the motto that there’s no defense against the truth,” he told one prison interrogator. “But sometimes it’s hard to find what the truth is.”
Rasmussen’s DNA, however, did not lie.
Employment records showed that Rasmussen, as Bob Evans, worked briefly as a handyman for a New Hampshire company called Carol Cable.
Carol Cable, it turned out, was located very near the Bear Brook Park murders crime scene.
But that was not all. It also turned out that Denise Beaudin had worked briefly at Carol Cable Company at the same time Rasmussen worked there.
This was simply one too many connections to be a coincidence, and, sure enough, the evidence kept piling up. Further research revealed that the electrical cables used to tie up the four Bear Brook Park victims were manufactured by the Carol Cable Company. Then, analysis of Rasmussen’s DNA matched traces of DNA found in one of the rusted metal drums, further implicating him.
The Chameleon Killer, it seemed, was the Bear Brook Park killer, too.
Deputy Headley sent all our findings to the New Hampshire State Police cold-case detective, and Rasmussen was officially identified as the suspected killer behind the Allenstown murders.
What remained unknown were the identities of the victims. Was the adult woman Lisa Jensen’s mother, Denise Beaudin? And who were the three children? Denise Beaudin was ruled out as the adult female but, shockingly, a DNA comparison of the four Bear Brook Park victims and Terry Rasmussen revealed that he was the biological father of one of the child victims. Furthermore, it determined that the child was not maternally related to the other three victims. This raised the question as to whether the mother of this child was another of Rasmussen’s victims.
Unfortunately, the contaminated DNA subsequently isolated from the victims was not useful for the kinds of tests we needed to perform to determine their identities. Technically, the human DNA in the contaminated samples could be amplified, but the process would have been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Sadly, it appeared we had reached a dead end.
“At this point in time, we are almost at our full—if not, we are at the final line—of what science can do to help us based upon their remains to identify where they came from and who they were,” New Hampshire’s senior assistant attorney general Benjamin Agati announced decisively at a 2015 press conference.
As far as I knew, he was right.
But I also knew that, in the exploding field of genetic genealogy, what is true one minute might not be true the next.
