Chameleon Killer

In 1978, Marlyse Honeychurch and her two young daughters vanished into thin air. The last person to see Marlyse was her boyfriend, Terry Rasmussen, who spent time with her and her family on Thanksgiving. During the holiday, Marlyse got into a disagreement with some of her relatives. She and Terry decided to leave early, bringing her two daughters with them.

There was no sign of Marlyse or her children until 1985, when two men out hunting in Bear Brook State Park noticed an overturned oil barrel that had been left in the forest, with the skeletal remains of a human foot visible in the opening. The men called the police who searched the barrel, finding two complete human skeletons inside. One belonged to an adult woman, but the other belonged to a young girl. The cause of death for both victims was blunt force trauma, and, for years, neither of them were positively identified. The search of the area around the oil barrel had been patchy at best, and two more skeletons were eventually found inside a second oil barrel, only 100 yards away from the first.

After Marlyse’s disappearance, Terry had quickly started dating again. His new girlfriend was another young mother, Denise Beaudin. However, Denise didn’t know that her boyfriend’s real name was Terry - he introduced himself to her using the pseudonym “Bob Evans”.

In 1981, Denise disappeared, and to this day, her remains have not been found. The investigation into her disappearance was delayed, because her family believed she’d left town because of money troubles, so they never reported her missing.

Terry kidnapped Denise’s baby, calling the child Lisa, and caring for her for several years. He claimed to be Lisa’s biological father, and repeatedly molested her throughout her early childhood. Immediately after the kidnapping of Lisa, he took on a new pseudonym… one that wasn’t connected with Denise Beaudin. Calling himself Curtis Kimball, he was arrested for drunk driving and child endangerment in 1985, but never showed up to his court date.

Instead, he changed his name once again, becoming Gordon Jenson - and he got rid of Lisa by leaving her alone at a Californian RV park. Two years later, he was arrested for stealing a car. By now, his name was Gerry Mockerman, but his past still managed to catch up with him, and he was eventually imprisoned for child abandonment. After his release, he vanished for almost a decade.

In late 1999, Terry re-appeared - now, he was calling himself Larry Vanner, and once again, he had a new girlfriend. Two years after he and Eunsoon Jun started dating, they got married - and the following year, Eunsoon also vanished. Her dismembered remains were found shortly afterwards, covered with cat litter to hide the smell of decomposition. Just like the bodies in the barrels, the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Terry was arrested in 2002 and received a minimum sentence of 15 years for Eunsoon’s murder.

Initially, the police thought they were just dealing with a guy who had murdered and dismembered his wife. During the investigation, Terry’s past lives began to resurface, and the officers discovered that “Larry Vanner” had also been Curtis Kimball and Gordon Jenson. Fingerprints connected him to “Curtis Kimball’s” arrest for child endangerment, and revealed that he had once been the guardian of a young child. Later on, a detective revealed that she believed Terry had only decided to plead guilty for Eunsoon’s murder after he found out that there were plans to order a paternity test for Lisa, the girl Terry claimed was his biological daughter.

After Lisa’s paternity tests came back negative, the mystery of Lisa’s biological parents continued - but Terry didn’t live to see his crimes become public knowledge. In 2010, at the age of 67, he died from lung disease in jail.

Lisa’s case was passed on to detective Peter Headley of the San Bernardino police department in 2013. Genetic testing had advanced, and genealogy databases could now be used to trace family trees. With the help of a genetic genealogist, Lisa discovered that her mother was missing woman Denise Beaudin. When Denise’s father was shown one of Terry’s mugshots - from the time when he had been arrested under the name “Curtis Kimball.” - he identified him as Bob Evans, his daughter’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance.

In August 2017, investigators were finally able to reveal the real name of the killer to the public. They had confirmed Terry’s real identity by matching his DNA to a sample of one of his living biological children. Two years later, testing of the four skeletons in the oil barrels was completed, and revealed their connection to Terry. The adult skeleton in the first barrel was identified as Marlyse Honeychurch, Terry’s missing girlfriend from 1978. The juvenile skeleton was her oldest daughter, 6-year-old Marie Elizabeth. Her baby daughter, 1-year-old Sarah Lynn had been disposed of in the second barrel, along with another unidentified female toddler. 

Although the toddler wasn’t related to Marlyse or her daughters, she was related to Marlyse’s boyfriend, and the last person who had seen the young family alive. In the barrel, next to Sarah Lynn, was the biological daughter of Terry Rasmussen. It appeared that Terry had killed one of his own children and disposed of the body alongside his other victims. While the identity of the third child in the barrels has never been discovered, detectives believe that Terry also killed the child’s biological mother, and disposed of her remains in another location.

In the years that Lisa was under Terry’s care, he had no confirmed victims…but shortly after Lisa was abandoned in 1986, she told detectives that she had had several siblings. When asked where her siblings were now, she told them, “They died eating grass mushrooms when they were out camping.” At the time, the detectives didn’t realize the sinister implications of Lisa’s answer. Now, with the knowledge that Lisa’s ‘guardian’ was a serial killer who murdered her mother, police believed that Terry had murdered several other people throughout the 1980s.

Because of his numerous aliases, Terry became known as ‘the Chameleon killer.”
Dr Jack Levin, a criminologist who analyzed Terry’s crimes, acknowledged that Terry had been very different from most of the other serial killers he had studied.
“What distinguishes [Terry] Rasmussen from most serial killers,” Dr Levin said, “Is that he targeted people with whom he had a relationship. Most serial killers would never do that. It’s the last thing they would do! Instead, they focus on complete strangers.”

Terry had repeatedly done the one thing that most serial killers try to avoid - choosing victims who could be easily connected to him. One of the most alarming things about Terry’s case was the amount of time that he was unaccounted for - and the number of potential identities he might have gone by during those periods of time. Throughout his adult life, he spent time living in at least nine different states, before he settled in New Hampshire and killed Marlyse Honeychurch. Although he only ever had 6 confirmed victims, he was suspected of killing several more. In 1980, Terry had lived only a few miles away from Laureen Rahn, a 14-year-old girl who went missing in April that year. 

Her body was never found. Only a few months after Laureen’s disappearance, 25-year-old Denise Deneault was reported missing after leaving a bar in the area. Denise didn’t just live close to Terry - she lived on the same street as him. 

San Joaquin County law enforcement believed that Terry might have been the murderer of Amanda Schumann Deza, whose body was found in a California canal in 1995. Her remains had been shut inside an old refrigerator, and she had died in the same way as all of Terry’s victims - severe blunt force trauma to the head. After more than two decades as a Jane Doe who was called, “the Lady in the Fridge”, Amanda’s real identity was confirmed in 2023…but the identity of her killer has never been discovered.

There were multiple factors that allowed Terry to continue his crime spree and make his aliases convincing to other people. He committed his crimes in different states, traveling the country and changing his identity every time he had a brush with the law or killed another victim. His commitment to his other identities was so polished that it took the authorities decades to connect several of his aliases together and reveal his real name. Investigation into the rest of Terry’s victims - including the unidentified child in the oil barrel - is still underway.