The Woman Who Left With Bob Evans: The Disappearance of Denise Beaudin

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 23, 2026

Denise Beaudin was 23 years old, and for thirty-five years, almost nobody treated her disappearance as a mystery at all. She left her Manchester, New Hampshire apartment in late November 1981 with her boyfriend and her infant daughter, and her family, believing the couple had simply moved on somewhere else amid financial troubles, did not file a missing persons report until 2016. By the time they did, investigators around the country had spent decades trying to identify a set of unrelated human remains found stuffed inside barrels in the woods of Bear Brook State Park, and a genetic breakthrough was only a few months away from revealing that Denise's boyfriend, a man she knew as Bob Evans, was one of the most elusive suspected serial killers ever identified in the United States.

An Ordinary Disappearance, or So It Seemed

On Thanksgiving Day, 1981, Denise had dinner with her family in Goffstown, New Hampshire, alongside her boyfriend, a man who went by the name Robert T. "Bob" Evans. When Denise's parents stopped by her Manchester home just days later, on December 1, no one answered the door. Rather than treating the silence as alarming, her family assumed the couple had likely relocated due to money troubles, a plausible enough explanation at the time that it kept anyone from formally reporting Denise missing for the next three and a half decades.

What none of them knew was that the man calling himself Bob Evans was not who he claimed to be at all. He was, in reality, Terrance Peder Rasmussen, born in Colorado in 1943, a man who had spent years constructing an ever-shifting series of false identities, birth dates, and life histories as he moved through different states and different relationships. Rasmussen had served in the Navy as an electrician from 1961 to 1967, later worked on oil rigs in Texas, and eventually settled in New Hampshire around 1978 or 1979, taking a job as an electrician at Waumbec Mills in Manchester, the same city where he met Denise.

Barrels in the Woods

Four years after Denise vanished, on November 10, 1985, a hunter walking through Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire, came across a 55 gallon drum near the site of a burned down store. Inside, investigators found the skeletal remains of an adult woman and a young girl, both wrapped in plastic and showing signs of blunt force trauma. The remains sat unidentified for fifteen years, until May 9, 2000, when a second barrel was discovered nearby containing the remains of two more young children. All four victims, it would eventually become clear, had died sometime between 1977 and 1981, wrapped and disposed of using strikingly similar methods.

For decades, no one could say who any of the four victims were, or how they were connected to each other, or to the case of a missing New Hampshire woman named Denise Beaudin. Investigators tried facial reconstructions, produced through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2013 and updated again in 2015, and pursued whatever DNA analysis technology allowed at the time, all without success.

A Librarian, a Genealogist, and a Break in the Case

The eventual breakthrough came not from law enforcement directly, but from an amateur researcher named Rebekah Heath, a librarian who had been quietly digging through old online genealogy postings related to the case. She found a 1999 message on Ancestry.com, posted by the younger half brother of one of the unidentified victims, searching for information about his missing sister. Following that thread, Heath traced the family back to a woman named Marlyse Honeychurch and noticed a marriage connection to someone with the surname Rasmussen. She brought her findings to a detective working the case, Peter Headley, and from there, the investigation accelerated dramatically.

In June 2019, using modern genetic genealogy techniques, authorities formally identified three of the four Bear Brook victims as a family unit: Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, 24 years old, and her two daughters, seven year old Marie Elizabeth Vaughn and eleven month old Sarah Lynn McWaters. The three of them had disappeared from La Puente, California, around Thanksgiving of 1978, at a time when Marlyse had been dating a man going by the name Robert "Bob" Evans, the very same alias Denise Beaudin's boyfriend had used in New Hampshire three years later.

Investigators went further still, working with genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter to identify Y-DNA samples collected from children Rasmussen had fathered in an earlier marriage. By August 2017, that testing confirmed definitively that the man calling himself Bob Evans, Robert Evans, and eventually Curtis Kimball across different states and decades, was in fact Terrance Peder Rasmussen. It marked one of the first major criminal cases in the country to be solved through the same genetic genealogy methods that would soon become widely used across cold case investigations nationally.

The Girl Abandoned at a Campground

The path connecting all of this back to Denise Beaudin ran through a child. Between 1984 and 1986, Rasmussen lived in California under yet another alias, Curtis Mayo Kimball, presenting himself as the caretaker of a young girl he called Lisa. In 1986, he abandoned her at a California campground, and she was subsequently placed into foster care, growing up without any confirmed identity of her own, a mystery child connected to a man whose own identity was, at the time, equally unknown.

In 2016, DNA database matching finally revealed the truth: the girl known only as Lisa was, in fact, Dawn Beaudin, Denise's own daughter, the same infant Denise had been raising at the time she disappeared with Rasmussen in 1981. That identification was the critical link connecting Rasmussen definitively to Denise's disappearance, five years after her family had finally filed a missing persons report and thirty five years after they had last seen her at that Thanksgiving dinner in Goffstown.

A Trail That Kept Growing

As investigators pieced together more of Rasmussen's movements over the years, the scope of his suspected crimes kept expanding. In 1988, he was arrested in San Luis Obispo, California, for driving a stolen vehicle, and faced additional charges of child abandonment and molestation connected to the girl he had left at the campground two years earlier. He pleaded guilty to abandonment and served roughly a year of a three year sentence before being paroled in 1990.

He resurfaced under yet another identity in 2001, marrying a woman named Eunsoon Jun in Richmond, California, using the name Lawrence William "Larry" Vanner. Within roughly a year, he murdered her, partially dismembered her remains, and buried them beneath her own basement. He eventually pleaded guilty to that murder in 2003 and received a sentence of fifteen years to life. He died in prison in December 2010, having never been formally charged in connection with Denise Beaudin's disappearance or the deaths of the Bear Brook victims, despite investigators' strong belief that he was responsible for all of it.

The Last Barrel Victim

The most recent chapter in this sprawling case arrived in September 2025, when investigators finally identified the fourth and final Bear Brook victim, a young girl who had been referred to for years simply as the middle child, since her DNA showed she was not maternally related to Marlyse Honeychurch or her daughters. Working with the DNA Doe Project, investigators built out a family tree containing roughly 25,000 people before finally connecting her to a mother named Pepper Reed, born in Texas in 1952. The girl was identified as Rea Rasmussen, Terrance Rasmussen's own biological daughter, born in Orange County, California, in 1976, and killed sometime between 1978 and 1981 when she was only around three years old.

That identification opened yet another unresolved thread. Rea's mother, Pepper Reed, has never been found either, and authorities now believe she was very likely another of Rasmussen's victims, last seen in the late 1970s with no confirmed record of her whereabouts afterward. Her family has said publicly that she remains deeply loved and missed. Investigators working the case, including Detective Sergeant Chris Elphick, have expressed concern that Rasmussen, described as extremely skilled at evading detection, may be responsible for even more victims across multiple states between 1974 and 1985, a period during which his movements remain only partially documented.

What Remains

Denise Beaudin has never been found. Her presumed killer died in prison in 2010 without ever facing charges specifically tied to her case or to any of the four victims recovered from the barrels at Bear Brook. Her daughter, raised for years under a false identity as an abandoned child with no confirmed name, eventually got her own identity back through DNA testing, even as her mother's remains remain missing. The investigation into Denise's disappearance continues through the Manchester Police Department, run alongside the broader, still active inquiry into exactly how many people Terrance Rasmussen killed across a criminal career that spanned decades, multiple states, and at least five different constructed identities.

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