Bloodline: Part 2

Podcast: Bear Brook
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 1422s
URL: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/0bDcdoop59bdTYSfajQW/stitcher.simplecastaudio.com/bc53232d-d115-4799-937b-75b732433fa2/episodes/a1e0dc56-f3a3-4b67-9b40-4894ef758741/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=bc53232d-d115-4799-937b-75b732433fa2&awEpisodeId=a1e0dc56-f3a3-4b67-9b40-4894ef758741&feed=RGpV1rjX
Fetched: 2026-03-03 05:15:30

This is part 2 of Bearbrook Episode 5, Bloodlines. If you missed the first part, go back to your feed and listen to it now. In January of 2017, something happened that, to be honest, I didn't think ever would. I was sitting in the New Hampshire Public Radio newsroom when I got an email from the New Hampshire Attorney General's office announcing that there would be a press conference, the next day to discuss new information in the Bearbrook case. The email cryptically mentioned something about a missing person's case from New Hampshire, a murder case from California, and how they were both connected to the Bearbrook murders. At that point, in 2017, I've been working on a story about the Bearbrook murders for about a year and a half. All I knew was that one child was not related and the results of the isotope testing. The name's Unsung Jun and Lisa didn't mean anything to me yet. As far as I could tell, the Bearbrook investigation didn't really seem to be going anywhere. I figured whether I finished my story in a month or in six months, the facts of the case would probably be the same. Then I got this email. The press conference was scheduled to take place in an auditorium at the New Hampshire DMV office. I think it was the largest space for a press conference they could come up with. Assigned that they were expecting a lot of reporters, and that we might be there for a while. In other words, that this was something big. The morning of the press conference, I arrived early and found that maybe 40 people already there, reporters and cops milling about, talking in low voices, close to a dozen TV cameras lined the back of the room, which felt a lot like a high school auditorium. I scanned the crowd for faces I knew. There was retired trooper John Cody, who found the second barrel, speaking with a handful of other police officers. And sitting about five rows back from the stage, I spotted Rhonda Randall and her brother Scott Maxwell, the amateur investigators, who had invested so much of themselves in the case. I'm just curious, I don't even know how to feel about it because I don't know what the information is. How early did you guys have to wake up to that? Well, actually, I came down from Maine last night and slept in Manchester, so I could be here good and early, but you know, pretty hopeful that this is it, and yeah, I'm nervous, I was imagining it. That's one word for it. We're going to start our presentation by going through a PowerPoint this morning. Come up on the auditorium stage, Jeff Strelson, a prosecutor with the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office, began the press conference. We're here today because in almost every homicide case that we work on, probably the most important starting point that we have is the identity of the victim or the victims. It's that information that usually leads you to the killer. And in the case involving the four murder victims in Allent's Town, we believe we've identified their killer. Over the next hour and a half, investigators laid out four stories. The Bearbrook murders in Allent's Town at New Hampshire, the murder of Oonson Jun in Richmond, California, the abandonment of five-year-old Lisa in Scotts Valley, California. In the last story, the one that would tie them all together, the disappearance of a woman named Denise Bowden from Manchester, New Hampshire. Denise was Lisa's mother. She was last seen in 1981 with Curtis Kimball, though she knew him by a different name, Bob Evans. This man Bob Evans is not only connected to Denise Bowden's disappearance and the California murder of Oonson Jun, he's also connected to the four Allent's Town murder victims. Through DNA testing, we've determined that this man, this killer, Bob Evans, is the father of the middle child victim in Allent's Town, this young girl. He is not the father or related to the other victims, but he is in fact the father of this middle child victim. The middle child, the three-year-old girl who wasn't related to the other victims, whose isotope results showed she'd lived the majority of her life in a different climate. She was the daughter of Bob Evans, of Curtis Kimball, of the man police now believed killed all four of the Bearbrook victims. So how? After so many years, did police finally figure it all out? A few weeks after that big press conference, I met with prosecutor Jeff Straelsen and a New Hampshire state police detective named Mike Kakoski to talk about how all the pieces finally came together. Straelsen has been with the New Hampshire AG's office since 2001. He's handled some of the more high-profile murder cases in the state over the last 15 years. Remember the Danny Pockett case that pulled resources away from the Bearbrook investigation? Straelsen prosecuted the murderer after the case was reopened. Straelsen is slender, with dark, close-cropped hair and facial features that make it hard to guess his age. He told me he first learned about the Bearbrook murders as he was getting ready to leave the office one day to go mountain biking. A colleague asked him where he'd like to ride. He said Bearbrook stayed part. And she said, oh, be on the lookout for some barrels of bodies in them. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And she told me the story. I'd never heard it before, ever. And I've looked into the Hampshire my whole life. The breakthrough in the Bearbrook case ultimately came from forensics, from the genetic genealogy work that Barbara Ray Ventor and Detective Peter Hadley had done on the Lisa case. In 2016, when they found out that Lisa's mother, Denise Bowden, was from New Hampshire, they contacted New Hampshire State Police. New Hampshire detectives then interviewed some of Denise Bowden's relatives. The one's Barbara Ray Ventor had found with genetic genealogy. One of them was Denise Bowden's grandfather. He said he had last seen Denise on Thanksgiving in 1981 in Manchester, New Hampshire. She was 23 at the time. She had a six-month-old daughter, that's Don, slash Lisa, and an older boyfriend, named Bob Evans. When detectives showed the grandfather a mugshot of Curtis Kimball, he recognized him as Bob Evans. No one in Denise Bowden's family ever saw her again after that Thanksgiving. But despite that, they never reported her missing to police. After the Lisa case was connected to New Hampshire in 2016, a missing person's case on Denise Bowden was finally opened more than 30 years after she disappeared. In January of 2017, police went to the house where Denise Bowden and Bob Evans had lived together in Manchester. With the murder of Unsungun in mind, they did a thorough search of the basement. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us here on the web, Manchester Police, along with State Police, are searching a home on Hayward Street in relation to a woman who was last seen decades ago. It was just last month, December 28th, that investigators announced a new investigation in the search for Denise Bowden. She has not been seen or heard from since 1981, but no one ever filed a missing persons report, so the search for her is less than a month old. Police didn't find Denise Bowden's body in the basement. That might sound like good news, but really, it was a disappointment. Because now it's unlikely police will ever find her remains. We're confident that he killed Denise at some point in question is where did he arrive in California with her or not, but we know he arrived up there with Lisa. We may never know exactly what happened to Denise, but her story does tell us something about the Bearbrook case. It gives us an answer to a question that's been bothering me, ever since I first learned about it. A question that's bothered a lot of people. How does an entire family go missing? What grandmother let this happen or what neighbor or what bus driver or, you know, where we're all of you. How is it for people to go missing? And we say, well, Denise Bowden did, for me, I think I've come to realize, yeah, people can go missing and nobody says a word and Denise Bowden is living proof that that can happen. People go missing and nobody says a word. It seems crazy until you think about it. A lot of people have a sibling or a cousin or a great uncle that hasn't been heard from in years. Families can become estranged, friends can lose touch, especially in the world before Facebook, before email, before cell phones. So if you, like me, couldn't help but ask, why didn't Denise Bowden's family report her missing? The answer is it's complicated. She'd had a child, she wasn't married, you know, I think her life had gone off in a little bit of a different direction than her parents expected. I think the farest way to say it is that there are different dynamics in families and there was a dynamic with this family and because of that dynamic, they never officially reported her as missing. I wasn't able to find any of Denise Bowden's family in New Hampshire who would talk to me. Maybe that had something to do with those family dynamics, prosecutor Jeff Strelson told me about, or maybe they just didn't want to talk, I don't know. But when I heard Strelson obliquely described Denise Bowden's strained relationship with her family, I couldn't help but think of Unsun Jun and her family. How Bob Evans, living then as Larry Vanner, managed to drive a wedge between Unsun and her cousin Elaine Ramms. How we wrote fake emails pretending to be Unsun. It's a tactic employed by many abusers to isolate and estranged the victim from the people who might help them. To cut them off from the outside world so the abuse seems more normal. Bob Evans excelled at this, in part because he was somehow able to present dramatically different personas depending on what he wanted from a situation. And most people who met him, Evans was repellent, he looked dirty, even threatening, so they kept their distance. But to the people he targeted, who we wanted to bring in close, Evans had another side, a side with sparkling blue eyes that spun gripping tails about his life history, who could summon tears about the woman he had murdered whose child he kept captive. Hanbert and Dino Detective Peter Headley called Bob Evans an incredibly good con man. New Hampshire prosecutor Jeff Strelson has another name for him, the chameleon. I said chameleon just in the way he's able to adopt different names and kind of conform himself around the people he's with to ingratiate himself around those people. This is a guy who was able to pick his targets and get what he wanted. And that says that that is someone of terrifying intelligence. By this point, investigators had connected three of the four mysteries with each other. Unsun Jones murder, the identity of Lisa, and the disappearance and presumed murder of Denise Bowdoin. But as far as investigators knew, that Bearbrook case was still completely unrelated to the other three. Then, a case manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploded Children in Alexandria Virginia noticed something. Neckmeck had been involved with the Lisa case. And as they learned that Lisa had been taken from New Hampshire, the case manager looked at a map, Manchester, where Denise Bowdoin was last seen, was only about 25 minutes from Bearbrook State Park, and another case that Neckmeck had worked on. The case manager checked the dates again. Denise went missing in 1981. The first Bearbrook was discovered in 1985. At first, they thought Denise Bowdoin might be the adult victim from the first Bearbrook. But after that test came back negative, they ran another test using the DNA of Bob Evans. This is when everything finally came together. When they figured out that the middle child victim was Bob Evans' daughter, and eventually concluded that Bob Evans had been behind the Bearbrook murders. By the time this DNA test came back, Bob Evans had been dead for seven years, so investigators will never be able to question him about the Bearbrook case. But the evidence connecting him to the Bearbrook murders goes beyond his relationship to one of the victims. Bob Evans arrived in New Hampshire in the late 70s. He got a job as an electrician, helping to shut down one of the old mill buildings in downtown Manchester, removing electrical equipment and cleaning out old debris. He worked on that job with the man named Ed Gallagher. Remember him? He's the owner of the property where the Bearbrook camp store used to be announced him. The property where the barrels were found. Investigators learned that Gallagher had allowed for some of the waste from the mill, including old barrels, to be dumped on his property in Alunston. Gallagher also hired Bob Evans to do some electrical work at the Bearbrook store. So there's a direct link between Bob Evans and the site where the bodies were dumped. He knew that area. He knew Alunston. That must have been familiar with the area. That must have been had been there before. He lived in the park at one time. Then there's the fact that the cause of death in the Bearbrook murders was the same as an unsuit. And perhaps the most chilling detail linking Bob Evans to the crime scene is that the plastic bags, the victims were wrapped in were tied up with electrical wire. This was the story laid out at that press conference in 2017. At finally, after all these years, we had learned who was behind the Bearbrook murders. And he was a chameleon, a serial killer, likely responsible for at least six murders. Unsun Jun, Denise Bowden, and the four victims found inside the barrels. Thank you all for coming today. Again, there are written materials all back in a disk. And if you have questions, you have my contact. It was a huge break in the case, but it wasn't everything. Rhonda Randall, the amateur investigator who'd been on the case for years, remembers how she felt that day. You know, we went to that press conference and even though it was tremendously exciting to hear the backstory and get an ID, I have to tell you I walked out of that press conference kind of feeling kicked in the stomach that we still didn't know who they were. Even though 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. After everything, decades of work by half a dozen law enforcement agencies, cutting edge, isotope testing, and a revolutionary new genetic genealogy technique. The only new information we have about the Barra Brook victims is that one of them was the daughter of a serial killer. We still don't know who they are. We have some flowers here for each of the victims. We'll start with the ones that have been... Rhonda isn't alone in trying to keep the focus on the victims. In November of 2017, several months after that press conference, and on the 32nd anniversary of the discovery of the first barrel, Rhonda and about a dozen others held a vigil at the cemetery in Allenstown where the first two victims were once buried. Their bodies were still being held by authorities, so we were standing over an empty grave. It was on a night that a cold front swept in. It was barely 20 degrees, colder when the wind blew. We didn't have anything bigger fancy planned for tonight. We just really wanted to be here to honor their memory, to think about them, to... A few lights were aimed at the headstone, and several people in the group held candles. But otherwise it was pitch black that night. It was hard to make out the faces of the people gathered in a half circle around the gravesite. Rhonda set a few words thanking people for coming out. She played a Billy Joel song on a small boombox that she said always reminded her of the young girl victims. There was really no agenda for this meeting. It was a little awkward. There were times when no one knew quite what to say, but it was earnest. During one moment of silence, a voice from somewhere in the group asked if it was okay to pray. 15 minutes in, we were all shivering from the cold, and the group decided it was time to go. As the gathering broke up, I turned to the man who'd been standing next to me in the half circle. Paul Chevrat. When did you live in Alexandria? I did. He did. I lived in the late 70s, I lived about 300 yards from where the first barrel was found. In Bearbrook Gardens? Yes. And then in 2000, when the second one was found, I lived about a quarter mile up the road in the farmhouse. I imagine what that was to felt like at the subclose. Yeah, because early teenagers, we all played in the woods there, and never saw anything. To know that they were there, it was unsettling. Why is it in the middle? No, you can have it back. Why is it important to come back here and get this vision? I have four daughters and three step daughters, and I couldn't imagine a day without any of them. And here we have this woman and these three children, and nobody knows who they are. It's just, like I said, unsettling, it's a small town. Back in the day, everybody knew everybody, everybody knew what everybody was doing. When this happened, it was a shock. It made me think of all the theories people had about the case. How those theories either seemed to hinge on the idea that the crime was so heinous, it couldn't possibly have been someone from Allenstown, or that because of where the barrels were dumped, it had to be someone local. In the end, it was kind of both. Bob Evans only arrived in New Hampshire in the late 70s, as far as investigators can tell, and in so many ways he was an outsider, using a fake name, a fake history, and disappearing a few years after he arrived. But on the other hand, he knew people in Allenstown. He worked at the convenience store, a short walk from where the barrels were found. Remember when Anne Morgan, who lived in the Trava Park, talked about two worlds, the one before, and the one after the first barrel was found, Bob Evans lived in both. As it turns out, he lived in a lot of other worlds too. In places like Virginia, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, and more. As investigators tried to piece together a timeline of Evans life, they began to suspect that there could be even more beginnings to this story, more murders that bore the fingerprints of a chameleon. To help solve them, and to learn who Bob Evans really was, authorities turned to genealogist Barbara Raeventer. When she identified Lisa, she had accomplished what seemed impossible. Now police wanted her to do it again. And within a matter of months, she did. And in doing so, she brought us as close as we've ever been to the Barbaric victims, to meeting one of their living relatives. They weren't only telling you about your father, but also that you had this half-sister who was one of the victims, and I just wonder how that hit you. I don't know what her name is. I'm sorry, but so satisfied. That's alright. You know, take your time. Lisa, the artist rendering, she looks a lot like my little girl, but she was at age. The chameleon's true identity is revealed, next time on Barbrook. Barbrook is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon. Taylor Coombie is senior producer, editing help from Corey Prinsel, Todd Bookman, Lauren Chulchin, Sam Evans Brown, Breedagreen, and Annie Ropeek. The executive producer is Eric Ejaneck, Dan Barrick is NHPR's news director, director of content is Marine McMurray, NHPR's digital director is Rebecca LeVoy, photography and video by Ali Gutierrez, graphics and interactives by Sarah Port. Original music for this show was composed by me, Jason Moon, and Taylor Coombie, additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Lee Rosevere, Daniel Birch, Joe and Reoli, and I am this big black cloud. Barbrook is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.