Terry Peder Rasmussen

Terry Peder Rasmussen (December 23, 1943 – December 28, 2010) was an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who was convicted of one murder, and linked to at least six more in a series of crimes that stretched across the contiguous United States between 1978 and 2002. Due to his use of many aliases, most notably "Bob Evans", Rasmussen is known as the Chameleon Killer.

Rasmussen is the prime suspect in the Bear Brook murders, which took place in New Hampshire sometime between 1978 and 1980. During this period, he was in a relationship with Marlyse Honeychurch. The bodies of Honeychurch, her two daughters, and his own daughter were discovered in two barrels in the Allenstown area between 1985 and 2000. Although the Allenstown barrels were discovered during his lifetime, Rasmussen was not linked until 2017, when DNA profiling connected him to the crime. Subsequent investigations led to three of the Bear Brook victims being identified in 2019; the identity of the fourth victim, Rasmussen's daughter, was confirmed in 2025 as Rea Rasmussen. Rea's mother, Pepper Reed, disappeared from California in the late 1970s and is also suspected to be a victim of Rasmussen.

Rasmussen left New Hampshire in 1981 with girlfriend Denise Beaudin, who subsequently disappeared and is presumed dead. He abducted Beaudin's daughter and took her to California, later abandoning her in 1986, for which he was imprisoned on child abandonment charges. Following his parole in 1990, he absconded and remained a fugitive for more than a decade. In 2002, Rasmussen murdered another girlfriend, Eunsoon Jun; he was convicted of her murder and sentenced to 15 years to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 2010.

Early life Terry Peder Rasmussen was born on December 23, 1943, to Peder Rasmussen, the son of Danish immigrants, and Anita Berwick, a 7th-generation descendant of an English immigrant. Growing up in Arizona, he attended North High School in Phoenix until dropping out during his sophomore year in 1960. The family last saw Rasmussen around December 1975 or 1976, when he showed up at their home with an unidentified woman. Reed and Rasmussen's daughter, Rea, was born in 1976. Reed subsequently disappeared from public records later in the 1970s and was considered a missing person. On May 9, 2000, a second barrel was found about 100 yards from the location of the first, containing the body of McWaters and Rea Rasmussen. Investigators believe all four victims were killed at around the same time, and that the second barrel was already there in 1985 but was overlooked due to its distance from the first. The identities of Honeychurch and her two children were not known until they were confirmed by DNA profiling in 2019.

Denise Beaudin and Lisa While using the pseudonym Bob Evans, Rasmussen dated Denise Beaudin, who disappeared from Manchester, New Hampshire, after Thanksgiving 1981 with her six-month-old daughter. Beaudin was not reported missing at the time as her family believed she left town due to financial reasons.

Throughout the early 1980s, Rasmussen remained in possession of Beaudin's daughter, whom he called Lisa, and posed as her father. His cause of death was a combination of lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia.

Posthumous findings

San Bernardino detective Peter Headley was assigned to Lisa's case in 2013, by which time genealogy website databases had grown substantially. Additionally, they announced that DNA confirmed that he was the father of the middle child found in Allenstown but that Evans was a pseudonym and his legal identity was not known. The use of genetic genealogy to identify Rasmussen represented new possibilities in forensic investigations. He has been dubbed the "Chameleon Killer" due to his use of various aliases and his crime spree which stretched across the country.

Elizabeth Lamotte was seventeen years old when she disappeared from the Youth Development Center in Manchester in 1984. She left the group home after receiving a furlough, so she was not reported missing until police were seeking more information on Rasmussen in 2017. At that time, a tipster speculated that she could have been the "Elizabeth Evans" that had been listed as Rasmussen's wife during his time in Manchester. However, DNA from Lamotte's relatives later proved that she was one of the victims in the Redhead murders, a series of unsolved homicides across the U.S. which are unrelated to Rasmussen. Lamotte had been found in Tennessee in 1985, killed about four months after her disappearance.

When Lisa was interviewed by detectives in 1986, they asked her if she had any siblings. She said that she did but "they died eating 'grass mushrooms' when they were out camping". As Rasmussen did not have any known victims during the five years between Beaudin's disappearance and Lisa's abandonment, her answer led police to believe that he may have had more unknown victims.