AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In the summer of 1985, a couple of kids kick over a barrel in the woods near Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire. That barrel and a second one nearby contained the remains of one woman and three children. After their discovery, the identities of the Bear Brook murder victims remained a mystery for decades.
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JASON MOON, BYLINE: And finally, in 2019, we learned the identities of three of the four Bear Brook victims - Marlyse Honeychurch and her two children, Marie Vaughn and Sarah McWaters.
RASCOE: Jason Moon is a reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio and host of the true crime podcast about the case, Bear Brook.
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MOON: But that left one more, one last victim, whose name we never learned, the one investigators often called the middle child, another little girl, estimated to be just 3 years old when she was killed. Who was she?
RASCOE: This past week, Bear Brook released a new episode. Update, it said, the last remaining Bear Brook victim is identified. Jason Moon joins us now. Welcome to the program.
MOON: Thank you so much for having me.
RASCOE: For those who haven't listened to the podcast, I want to take a step back because this case spans 40 years. Can you give a brief background?
MOON: Yeah. You know, really the story for a long time was that we just didn't know who these people were. And then about 10 years ago, there started to be some breaks in the case thanks to what was then a novel investigative technique called genetic genealogy. This is an investigative technique that relies on genealogical websites that people might recognize, like ancestry.com, or I guess formally 23andMe, where you can send in a DNA sample and have it compared to other people, and you can find relatives that maybe you didn't know you had. Investigators realized they could use that same technique to identify human remains.
By 2019, we knew, thanks to that technique, three of the Bear Brook victims' names and also the name of the man who police believe was responsible for their murders, Terry Peder Rasmussen. He died in prison in 2010 before this discovery was made, but that left one victim who was still unidentified, a little girl about 3 years old when she was killed, who, for a long time, investigators just referred to as the middle child.
RASCOE: So who was the middle child? And why was she so difficult to identify?
MOON: We recently learned that her name was Rea Rasmussen. For a long time, all we knew about her was that she was a biological daughter to Terry Rasmussen. You know, what made it so hard to identify her - part of it was just luck. When you put DNA samples into these online DNA databases, you don't know if you're going to get a match that's your brother or, like, a fifth cousin. And obviously, the more distant the relatives, the harder it is to make an identification.
A group called the DNA Doe Project spent, you know, hundreds of hours building a family tree that included more than 25,000 people, and they ultimately were able to find her mother, a woman named Pepper Reed. From there, they were able to find a birth certificate with Rea's name on it, and it listed, as the father, Terry Peder Rasmussen.
RASCOE: This show clearly struck a nerve for listeners. "Bear Brook" has been downloaded more than 20 million times. Stephen King is a fan. But New Hampshire Public Radio is set to lose about 6% of its annual budget after the vote in Congress to defund public broadcasting. How will that affect the work you do, especially when it comes to stories like this one?
MOON: Public media has turned out to be one of the more stable business models, and it's allowed local journalists to make a living and make a career out of this type of work, and that allows someone to spend 10 years following a story. I would hate to see that kind of stability and longevity that public media can offer communities threatened, and, of course, you know, we're trying to do everything we can to make sure it doesn't. But the loss of federal funding is hard on stations like us, as I know it is even harder for many other stations around the country.
RASCOE: At the end of the latest episode, you wonder out loud, why spend all this time, why go to all the effort just to find a name? - just two words, as you say. Do you feel like you got an answer?
MOON: Yeah, I talked with this investigator with the DNA Doe project who led the team, and we talked about what it meant to know her name was Rea Rasmussen. A name can help us recognize a person's humanity and sort of grant them personhood so that they don't have to remain unidentified victim or Bear Brook Jane Doe or the middle child. And I think for so many of the people who worked on this case, that felt worth it to them.
RASCOE: That's Jason Moon. He's a reporter and producer at New Hampshire Public Radio and host of the podcast Bear Brook. Thank you so much for joining us.
MOON: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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