New England siblings investigating Bear Brook murders learned of 'Bob Evans' name before police
Amateur investigators seen as 'invaluable' in Allenstown case
Amateur investigators seen as 'invaluable' in Allenstown case
Amateur investigators seen as 'invaluable' in Allenstown case
Since the first Bear Brook victims were discovered in a barrel in 1985, law enforcement agencies across the country have collaborated on this case, but amateur investigators — ordinary citizens — also felt compelled to look for answers, and that work led to critical breakthroughs.
“A very important part of this is the interest of the community,” senior assistant attorney general Susan Morrell said during a past news conference about updates in the case. “The tips that this interest brings in are invaluable. And the efforts between the press and the public, our volunteer genealogists and individuals who are simply just interested in cold case investigations, their efforts are to be applauded.”
Today, it’s known that Terry Rasmussen killed the victims, including three identified as his former girlfriend Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters, Sarah McWaters and Marie Vaughn. The fourth victim, his biological daughter, has not been identified. But before recent years, details in the case were scarce.
Scott Maxwell estimates that he and his sister, Ronda Randall, of Oak Hill Research, have spent 10,000 hours investigating the case.
“It became every evening we'd work on it, every weekend. We were talking on the phone constantly about it,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell said Ronda has been working on helping adoptees find their parents since the 1980s but took an interest in the Allenstown murders, as four victims remained unidentified for decades.
>> Timeline: Terry Rasmussen case
“Her kids got a little older and were starting to move out of the house, and she wanted to do something a little bit different,” Maxwell said. “Somehow she came across the New Hampshire's cold case website and saw this case and just became fascinated with it.”
Maxwell has a background in carpentry and said he never really had an interest in cold cases, but when his sister introduced him to the mystery around Memorial Day of 2011, he was intrigued.
“She read up on it. She called me and said, ‘Hey I want to go down there. Do you want to go with me?’ I figured I would just go along for the ride. Little did I know,” Maxwell said.
Their shared knowledge of the case was limited at first, Maxwell said.
“We knew a barrel had been found by a hunter in 1985. And we knew that another one had been found in 2000. But we didn't know much more than that,” Maxwell said.
The pair visited Bear Brook State Park but didn’t know what direction to take at first.
“At the time, there was only a handful of articles we could find about the case. We came out here and walked the property, not knowing really where we were going or anything,” Maxwell said.
Soon, the siblings homed in on births in Allenstown.
“We tracked down every female that had lived there that fit the profile for the oldest victim. And none of them, none of them were missing. That's where we started, and it just grew from there,” Maxwell said.
After that dead-end, the pair shifted to a grassroots level of investigations – knocking on doors.
“I'd say probably for the first 20 or 30 visits I didn't say a word,” Maxwell said. “I let her do all the talking.”
They determined that about 400 families lived in a trailer park adjacent to Bear Brook State Park from 1977 to 1985. Maxwell said they were able to locate and communicate with members of every one of those families.
They also spoke with retired members of law enforcement and anyone they saw mentioned in old newspaper articles about the case.
“(We spoke to) just anybody we could talk to about it. We went up and down this road, just knocking on every single door, for probably a mile that way and half a mile this way,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell said his sister flew to Florida to speak with Norman Connors, who was Allenstown police chief in 1985.
“He had a suspect that he always thought that he liked for it. And we had also looked at him pretty heavily. Since have found out that that was, that was a rabbit hole we shouldn't have gone down,” Maxwell said. “But we spent about two years researching that guy and that family and got to know everything about him.”
“You have to be a little bit OCD I think to work on something like this. Because after, after a year or two, it gets very frustrating when you're not finding anything new. But whenever we did turn over anything new, it was always more questions than answers. We just kept going and kept going.”
Maxwell said the pair was driven to continue their investigation because the victims remained unidentified for dozens of years and the case was ice cold.
“There wasn't any victims' family that was advocating for them. Advocating for them. So that's what, kind of what we did. We tried to draw media attention to it and then kind of took them on as, I guess, as our family, which I didn't even realize had happened until we'd been on it for 3 or 4 years,” Maxwell said.
‘(BOB EVANS) WAS A STRANGE GUY’
A few years into their investigation in July 2014, they heard a name they did not recognize: Bob Evans.
“We'd been talking to (the property owner) for three years. After him telling us he had no idea who might have done this,” Maxwell said. “One day he just said, I think, I think you might want to look at Bob Evans. He called him Bob. Bobby Evans. Immediately we were like, ‘Well, why should we look at him?' And he said, ‘Well, because he was a strange. He was a strange guy, and he dumped trash on my property. I think as soon as we got off the phone we went to the library and looked up city directories and looked everywhere for any Bob, Robert Evans.”
“The Bob Evans name actually had popped up for the very first time in some of the research that Ronda Randall, the civilian researcher, had done,” Lt. Michael Kokoski, of New Hampshire State Police’s cold case unit, said.
Maxwell and his sister ran into another dead end, initially, with the name “Bob Evans.”
“Unfortunately, there (were) three Bob Evans that were electricians that lived in Manchester,” Maxwell said.
Evans was later confirmed to be Rasmussen. He also had several other aliases and lived in several parts of the country before he was convicted of a separate murder in 2002.
‘A ONE-WAY STREET’
At one point during their investigation, Maxwell and Randall were scanning aerial images of Bear Brook State Park and noticed an area of disturbed dirt where a barrel, separate from the two that contained victims, sat.
“There was kind of an indent in the ground and it just looked different than the area around it. And so, we were interested,” Maxwell said.
The siblings passed the information over to police and after not hearing about the information for years, they notified police they had permission to dig in the area of disturbed dirt. Police gave them the go-ahead with the caveat that if they find anything, they must notify law enforcement.
“We rented a small excavator and dug up that area. We didn't find anything. Just a lot of trash. There wasn't a barrel there anymore, but there was a lot of trash in that area,” Maxwell said. “We provided them with a lot of information. We obviously got nothing in return because we're just civilians and they're not going to share anything with us.”
“Any civilian researcher wants to help, it's often a bit of a one-way street, where we take in information and try to make use of it as best we can. But there's often not a whole lot that we can share back. And again, certainly, Ronda and I had that discussion many times,” Kokoski said.
“I think what the last decade has shown is that there is a place for that kind of work if it's done correctly,” Kokoski added.
‘I NEED TO APOLOGIZE TO THE FAMILY’
When three of the four Allenstown victims were identified in 2019, Randall and Maxwell initially took a break investigating.
“Ronda I think felt pretty relieved and she stopped researching it. I didn't even go to that press conference. And I didn't, I didn't put it together until months later that I kind of shut down on that,” Maxwell said.
“And I think it was because for so long they were kind of like our family,” he continued. “And then to all of a sudden find out that they had names, they had people that cared about them and loved them, that was hard to, that was hard to accept. It was hard to release them to the family. And I just backed off the case and stopped, probably for three or four months I didn't do anything at all on it.”
Maxwell said his initial feelings about the victims’ family have morphed over time.
“I need to apologize to the family, because I said the same thing a lot of other people said, and that was, ‘How can they go missing? How come no one's missing them? Where's their family?’ You know? And that was upsetting for Marlyse's siblings to hear that. Because they were looking. They were loved and there were people looking for them,” Maxwell said.
Of course, there’s a fourth victim, Rasmussen’s child, who has never been identified. And the pair again picked up their investigation.
“We're still working on that,” said. “I think (the mother’s identity is) going to come from the right person giving, taking a DNA test and being a close match, and I think that's how they'll identify who she is.”