The Middle Child

September 9, 2025·50 min·4 clips

The Bear Brook killer used a different alias in every state: Bob Evans, Larry Vanner, Curtis Kimball.

1. This Bear Brook episode, titled The Middle Child, reveals the identification of the fourth and final unnamed victim in the decades-old New Hampshire case. 2. Host and reporter Jason Moon narrates; volunteer investigators Rhonda Randall and Becky Heath, and genetic genealogist Matthew Waterfield of the DNA Doe Project, all play central roles. 3. The episode's core question is whether a name surfaced from a stranger's tip, Pepper Reed, is the mother of the unidentified child victim. 4. In 1985, two sets of remains were found in a barrel near Bear Brook State Park; a second barrel with two more bodies wasn't found until 2000. 5. Genetic genealogy eventually revealed the killer's real name was Terry Peter Rasmussen, who had used aliases including Bob Evans, Larry Vanner, and Curtis Kimball. 6. By 2019, three of the four victims were named: Marlise Honeychurch and her children Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters. 7. The fourth victim, a girl about three years old, remained known only as "the middle child" for years. 8. In July 2025, Rhonda Randall received an unsolicited text from a stranger in Texas mentioning a woman named Pepper Reed who dated Terry Rasmussen and vanished. 9. Rhonda and Becky built a family tree using public records and searched California's Ancestry.com birth index for a Rasmussen-Reed match. 10. They found one matching birth record from 1976 in Orange County, California, and requested the redacted birth certificate from California's health department. 11. The certificate listed Terry Peter Rasmussen as the father, with his middle name spelled the same unusual way, at age 32, matching his known age that year. 12. Separately, official investigator Matthew Waterfield's DNA Doe Project team had already reached Pepper Reed's name months earlier via genetic genealogy and a family tree of over 25,000 people. 13. Waterfield's team found Pepper's mother's 2005 obituary in the Houston Chronicle listed no location for Pepper, a red flag suggesting she was missing. 14. New Hampshire State Police detective Chris Elphick confirmed the official identification and said DNA testing with Pepper's next of kin in Texas finalized the match. 15. A press conference on September 8, 2025, in New Hampshire announced that all four Bear Brook victims, including the newly named Rhea Rasmussen, had been identified. 16. Prosecutor Ben Agade said the announcement ended years of frustration for investigators who had worked the case since it was reopened. 17. Diane Klopfer, Terry Rasmussen's daughter and Rhea's half-sister, expressed conflicted, cautious feelings about the news before it was confirmed. 18. The episode blends true-crime investigative narration with first-person interview tape from volunteer genealogists, police, and family members. 19. Listeners who follow long-running true-crime and cold-case genealogy stories would find this satisfying. 20. Listeners uncomfortable with descriptions of child victims and unresolved missing-persons cases might want to skip it.

As heard by us

A birth record makes the cold case hit with painful clarity.

Bear Brook finds its cold-case turn in something almost disarmingly plain: a daughter, her mother, and a birth certificate that points Terry Peter Rasmussen back to the unidentified child.

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Why you'd press play

A birth certificate becomes the sharpest twist in a long cold-case search.

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