We tend to think of New Hampshire as a safe place where neighbors look out for one another, and for the most part that’s true – after all, we have one of the lowest murder rates in the country. But real psychopaths can pop up anywhere, and even our haven of the Granite State is not immune. In the late 70s and early 80s, a serial killer was walking among us and nobody knew it until the grisly evidence of his crime turned up and horrified one small town.

Allenstown is a sleepy haven in Merrimack county – with just 4,300 residents, it's not the kind of town that's usually in the news.
Wikimedia Commons/John Phelan
That all changed in 1985 when a hunter made a grisly discovery in the massive Bear Brook State Park - a 55-gallon drum containing the remains of an adult woman and a young girl wrapped in plastic. Autopsies revealed that they had both died of blunt force trauma.
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15 years later, in 2000, a separate metal drum was found near the first – this one contained the remains of two young girls. Like the first bodies discovered, they were estimated to have died between 1977 and 1985. DNA profiling showed that the woman and two of the girls were related, but provided no leads on their identities.
Flickr/Janet R.
In 2017, a new development in the case arose. Authorities announced that Manchester resident Denise Beaudin, who had been missing since 1981, was connected to the Bear Brook murders. She had last been seen with her then boyfriend Robert Evans, who was determined to be the father of the one child unrelated to the woman found at Bear Brook. Evans had died in prison in 2010 after murdering his wife, but authorities knew that his name was a pseudonym and his real identity had not been found.
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In June 2017 the mystery of the killer's identity was finally solved when police released video footage of Evans and his family stepped forward - it turned out that his name was Terrence Rasmussen. However, the identities of his New Hampshire victims have never been identified, and authorities have no leads, despite releasing several composite images of their suspected appearance over the years.
Flickr/K2Parn Photography

Allenstown residents may not know the identities of the four murdered women, but they will always remember their tragic story.

As horrifying as these murders were, at least Allenstown residents can rest easy knowing that the killer is long dead. That’s not the case in the story of the Connecticut River Killer, who is still unidentified.

 

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