Note: episode transcripts are radio scripts - please keep that in mind as you come across notations and errors in the text.
[Jason Moon] Here lies the mortal remains only to God…
[Montplaisir] I would hope that in my lifetime that this case was solved… I’d like to see that.
[Jason] Their slain bodies were found on November 10th, 1985 in Bear Brook State Park.
[Morgans] Before I die, I’d like to find out who those girls are.
[Cody] You have to know that it’s an uphill climb. A steep uphill climb.
[Taylor Quimby] Previously on Bear Brook.
[Kamenov] What we saw twas that the 3 victims related by DNA… They kind of have the same oxygen isotopic signal. Which tells us that they were all living together.
[Presser] And in the case involving the four murder victims in Allenstown, we believe we’ve identified their killer
[Ronda] It was fascinating about Lisa. and to know his other life, but to still not know who they were and know so much was difficult.
[Peter Headley] I’ll work every lead that I can… until I’ve tapped everything out.
-
[Becky] “Ok. I’m Rebekah Heath. I usually go by Becky. And I work in a research library in the financial services industry.”
[JM] “Ok. So research is -- that’s your wheelhouse.”
[Becky] “Yes.”
Becky Heath is in her early thirties. She lives in Connecticut, in a carefully organized condo. It almost looks like a magazine cover. Becky chooses her words carefully, too. When she speaks it’s almost like she’s tiptoeing from one word to the next.
[Becky] “I...do….love…mysteries. Any type of real life... murder mysteries.”
Becky is what you might call a websleuth. An amatuer investigator who looks into those real life murder mysteries in her free time.
One of the cases that Becky follows is the Bear Brook murders. She first came across it about 10 years ago, when she was looking through newspaper archives at work. Becky saw an old article from 1985 and realized that the first barrel was found just three days before she was born.
[Becky] “I was like, ‘Oh that’s interesting. I gotta check that out later.’ And little by little, I would look more into it.”
Little by little became more and more -- and by the time police announced in 2017 that they knew who the killer was behind the Bear Brook murders but not the victims, Becky was obsessed.
[Becky] “Oh, that’s when I got a little crazy with it. I would spend...this is kind of embarrassing. I would go to work and I’d come home and I would just research and research and research.”
A lot of that research -- the actual work of web-sleuthing, happens on online forums. Message boards where people are looking for people they’ve lost touch with. Websleuths will pore over these posts to see if one might be connected to a case they’re looking into to.
One of the most popular of these message boards is on ancestry.com. It’s a forum called “Lost Family and Friends.” It has over 30,000 posts in it.
/”I am looking for the daughter of a Nancy LeJohn Warden. She was born Monica Jeanne Pettersson, and her birthday was Feb.4,1973. Her name might have been changed by her mothers mom,who had remarried a Thompson. I am her Aunt and would love to be reunited with her. I have not seen her since she was two.”
/”CHRISTOPHER LEE ELLINGBURG/ BRENDA JEAN GILCHREST/ WILLIAM DAWSEN ELLINGBURG JR.--VVERRRRY IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!!
I AM LOOKING FOR MY HALF-BROTHER CHRISTOPHER.--HE SHOULD BE ABOUT 17-18 YEARS OLD NOW.--HIS MOTHER IS BRENDA JEAN GILCHREST, ONCE MARRIED TO MY FATHER WILLIAM DAWSEN ELLINGBURG JR.--CHRIS WAS HIS SENCOND CHILD BY ANOTHER WOMAN(BRENDA G.)---IF ANYONE IS RELATED IN ANY WAY PLEASE E-MAIL ME ---THANX!!!!!!!!”
/”Looking for half brother Jason Wayne Hale. Jason, I am your brother Howard if you read this or anybody out there knows this person please contact me..The only picture I even have of you is when you were a month and a half old and I think one about when you were between 2-5. Would love to meet you someday in the near future.”
/”Looking for my brothers Curtis and Dale Prosise. Please reply with any information that might help my search. Thank You!”
/”Looking for my sister. im looking for Elsa De Jesus, she is my older sister, shes been missing for almost 20 yrs. our fathers name is Eugenio, mother Jesusa, brothers Ramon, Daniel, Robert and me Raul, sisters Lucy who is deaf, and Margarita. Elsa has three children, who miss her dearly. as we do. we used to call her Elsie. any help in locating her would be a blessing. please feel free to e-mail me.
Scrolling through all the posts at once is overwhelming. It’s like a bulletin board for people missing after a natural disaster, only there was no disaster. Just time passing. People being separated by divorce, by letting a grudge go too far, by just losing touch. What’s so heartbreaking about these posts is that they’re all so unexceptional.
[pause]
Forums like this are kind of the unofficial version of the missing persons reports that police generally rely on. The difference is that the information in the posts isn’t standardized. Some have a lot of info, some have very little. Some are inaccurate and a lot of them are just out of date.
[Becky] “And that’s kind of the tricky part, because you could find a listing and when you follow up on it, it could be like, ‘oh no, no, we found them.’ Or a lot of times with the older ones there are just broken email addresses.”
[JM] “So it’s messier.”
[Becky] “Mmhmm. It’s like the inbetween.”
The inbetween. It’s a space that’s too convoluted, or tedious, or frankly, bleak for most of us to look through.
But Becky did look through it. She combed through thousands of posts -- spent nearly every waking hour outside of her job on it.
And after months of slogging through the uncertainty of the inbetween, she found something. Three names, that we now know belong to the Bear Brook victims.
Today, authorities in New Hampshire made Becky Heath’s discovery official. You may have heard about it on the news. At a press conference in Concord, New Hampshire, detectives described how DNA tests were finally able to confirm the tip that Becky first submitted back in October of 2018.
We’re going to take you to that press conference and tell you everything we learned from it. But first, I want to walk you through how Becky did it. Because just like every other story about the Bear Brook murders, it does not go the way you think it does.
This is Bear Brook. I’m Jason Moon.
Before Becky set out for her search on the message boards of the inbetween, she looked for things that might guide her.
A date range, for instance. Becky studied what we know of the timeline of the serial killer Terry Rasmussen and the estimated ages of the Bear Brook victims. She settled the late 1970’s. That’s the period right after Rasmussen separated from his wife and kids. And it’s also likely when the two youngest Bear Brook victims were born based on the age estimates.
Next, Becky thought about who would be searching for them. When I think about who might be looking for the victims, I usually think of close family, like the the adult victim’s parents. But if we’ve learned anything through this case, it’s that families are complicated. Becky understood this - so she didn’t limit her thinking that way.
The parents could be dead, or estranged… Instead, it could be a cousin, or step-sibling that’s searching for a long-lost relative… And who knows? They might not be searching for the whole family… maybe they only knew the adult victim, or one of the girls.
[Becky] “So there’s certain terms that I’ll use: step-daughter, step-sister, half-sister, nieces.”
Finally, Becky kept an eye out for posts about missing people from California. That’s an area Rasmussen knew well, and police suspect that he spent some time there just before he came to New Hampshire.
So, with these three stars to guide her, Becky started searching through the posts. Each time she came across a name that fit those three criteria, she would try to rule them out.
[Becky] “I’ll try and look through public records, birth certificates, through different websites and see, ‘ok, can I find a record of this person. And is it recent?’”
If there’s a record of that person from later than 1985, Becky moved on. She did this over and over and over again.
[JM] “So how many of these did you look through?”
[Becky] “[laughs] ...lots. Lots.”
Then finally in the fall of 2017, Becky comes across a post that she can’t easily rule out.
The post is dated February 11, 2000. It’s written by someone searching for their long-lost half-sister. They say the half-sister was born in California in the mid-1970’s.
The person says both of the half-sister’s parents are dead. And that the mother died in a car accident.
Now you might not make much of that, I probably wouldn’t have, but this detail triggered something for Becky. She remembered that a car accident was one of the lies Rasmussen had told about one of his other victims: Lisa’s mother, Denise Beaudin. Becky decided to fact check that story of the mother dying in a car accident. She searched the mother’s name in California death records.
[Becky] “I started looking. I said, ‘ok, if they passed away, they’re going to be in the death index. Hers, there is none.”
Death records are generally pretty easy to find. Pulling up nothing got Becky even more interested. She went back to the post and she keeps reading.
In 2003 there’s a reply. It’s from a man who is looking for his sister - a woman who fits the age range for the adult victim. And his sister, the man writes, had two children when they lost touch.
So, now we’re talking about three missing people from California, a mother who supposedly died in a car accident, and her two daughters.
In 2013 - a decade later - someone posts the marriage records of the missing mother.
Then, in 2014 there’s another reply. This time, it’s from someone who thinks the missing mother might be her sister. She says she’s been looking for her for years.
Three separate people, rooting around on the internet for someone they’d lost - each of them helping to outline the silhouette of a missing family.
Becky was able to find the dates of birth for each member of the missing family. And they all fit within the estimated age-ranges for the three-related victims: the adult, the oldest child, and the youngest child.
Becky started to think this might be something. Things just kept lining up. Or at least, nothing was ruling it out. So in the fall of 2017 she shared all this with some of her fellow websleuths in a Facebook group. And then...nothing happened.
[Becky] “I don’t know why I didn’t pursue it more. I didn’t really get feedback from anyone so I didn’t pursue it more.”
The post about the half-sister just kind of fizzled. Either the community was focused on something else, or maybe other websleuths just didn’t think it was a very good lead.
So Becky went back to searching the message boards for other posts that might line up with the Bear Brook case. And for almost a year she didn’t think too much about it.
Then just a few months ago, Becky heard about something that got her thinking about that post again. Becky started listening to Bear Brook.
[EP1] [JMorgan] “When we knocked the barrel over, the top came open a little more but we didn’t see into it or anything...”
Becky knew most of the twists and turns in the case already. But she listened anyway. Listened closely. For any tiny details she didn’t already know that could help her refine her search. She even kept notes of each episode.
[Becky] ...this is the last podcast, it’s in here somewhere...
And it was Episode 3 - the episode about the isotopic testing, and the updated composite images released by state police… that’s the episode that triggered something.
[Becky] “I remember stopping the podcast, going back, listening to what he said again, writing it down again.”
[EP3] [Agati] “Our first child victim, also found in the same barrel with her, her age is closer to nine to ten years old.”
[Becky] “Stop. Go over it again.”
[EP3] [Agati] “Her age is closer to 9 to 10 years old.”
She remembered the post - the one that had fizzled out. The more she listened, the more she remembered - the ages had lined up. The location had lined up. All the little details fit.
[Becky] “Wait did I hear that right?”
[EP3] [Agati] “9 to 10 years old.”
It was almost as if she was getting the feedback she hadn’t gotten a couple of years before - and what it was saying, was that she just might have a lead.
[Becky] “And then after that one I was like, ‘you know what? Listening to this podcast makes me think it is this person, these girls.’ Just -- it fits, it just fits.”
Becky still had that small specter of doubt - that it would be another dead end. But in the end, she just couldn’t shake the feeling that she was right.
Becky decided to contact the family.
She found someone who she thought might be related to one of the missing children.
She showed me how the conversation played out on her phone.
[Becky] “So here it says ‘9:04 PM on October 10th,’ a Wednesday night. I came home from class and I looked her up. And I said ‘I’m trying to track down this post, could this be you? And almost instantly, she responded back and said she was the person and she said ‘you have my heart pounding.’ And it was kind of a little sad to me because I’m like ‘oh no,
As in, “Oh no, I’m not the person you’re looking for.”
Becky quickly explains a bit about who she is. That she sometimes helps search for missing persons as a sort of hobby. What she doesn’t explain, is her theory. Because if she’s right - if she is speaking to the half-sister of the one of the Bear Brook girls… well, it’s not good news.
The family member tells Becky they’ve wondered for years about what happened to their half-sister, but were never able to find any answers.
Then Becky asks if they had any more information about the mother of the missing girl.
[Becky] “And - this is where you can see it, right there. She says, ‘she married again to a man, last name Rasmussen.’”
[JM] “Oh my god.”
[Becky] “That right there. When they say your stomach just like -- like something just hits. And I was like, ‘There is no way, there is no way that’s a coincidence.’ And I was like ‘this is huge.’”
[JM] “Wow.”
[Becky] “I was shaking. I was like oh my god, oh my god, what!?
Becky quickly tracked down the siblings of the missing mother online. She asked them if they knew anything about their sister’s husband.
[Becky] “And of the sisters was like, ‘I think his name was Terry.’ And it was just like, ok there’s no way, like she remembers Terry, this side remembers Rasmussen. That’s too crazy.”
...
[Becky] “So that happened on Wednesday night. And by Friday I was talking with Detective Headley from San Bernardino. And he was saying he wants to retire and the last thing he wants to do is get this case solved. And I as I was talking to him I said, ‘you probably get this all the time, but I truly think that this is the break.’”
Becky spoke to Detective Headley on October 12th. I started hearing rumors about a new tip in the case a few days later and called up Detective Headley myself. I was surprised when he told me that the tip looked pretty good. But he also told me to be cautious. He had been down this road before. Had seen a lot of promising tips go nowhere. For my part, having not heard Becky’s story in full, I couldn’t really bring myself to believe it.
It seemed like nobody wanted to say that this was the one - only to find out that it was another false lead. Some impossible coincidence.
The only way to be sure of this was to wait for a DNA test between the people who posted in that thread and the Bear Brook victims. And so that’s what we did. We waited until we could be sure. Today, we finally are.
Today, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office officially announced that Becky was right.
That after thirty-three years of searching, we now know the identities of three related Bear Brook victims.
The adult name is Marlyse Honeychurch.
The oldest child name is Marie Vaughn.
The youngest child name is Sara McWaters.
...
After she submitted the tip, Becky stayed in touch with the family of the victims. If she had any doubts about whether these were the correct identities, she says they disappeared once the family sent her some photos.
[Becky] “I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for that. It’s really heartbreaking. And seeing pictures of the girls, and how, like...how they look, like that’s -- you just know. It’s insane how close the composites were.”
Becky’s right. The photos of Marlyse and her two daughters bear a stunning resemblance to the composite images released in 2015.
And she’s also right about how heartbreaking it is to see those photos -- to see Marie at her birthday party, ready to blow out candles on the cake. To see Sara as baby, in a diaper and a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. To see their mom Marlyse, with a big smile as she get ready to lick the batter off of a mixing spoon.
[Becky] “It makes it really real.”
[JM] “Really real is a really good way to put it. I’d never imagined. I’d never thought about the day that, ‘oh one day I might see actual photos of them. And now seeing them, it’s like a lot.”
[Becky] “It’s really heartbreaking. I’ve, you know, had this high feeling of ‘oh my goodness, this is going to get solved, there’s going to be closure.’ And the reality is...like what the family is going to have endure....it’s not going to be easy. It’s not a happy ending.”
...
Amazingly, Becky Heath wasn’t the only person to identify the victims. Only one month after Becky spoke to detective Peter Headley on the phone, Barbara Rae-Venter independently identified Marlyse Honeychurch as the adult victim with genetic genealogy. The technique to extract autosomal DNA out of rootless hair had worked.
But as important and powerful as it is to finally know the identities of three of the Bear Brook victims, Becky says the work is not over yet.
[JM] ”So what do you do now, now that you’re not researching. Do you feel like there’s a big hole in your daily routine?”
[Becky] “I cannot stop focusing on the bio-child. That is...she deserves her name back too.”
The bio-child. That’s Rasmussen’s daughter, found in the second barrel. She and her mother are still out there somewhere - at least two more victims whose names we still don’t know.