The Chameleon Killer: Tracking Terry Rasmussen's Trail of Victims

0:00So welcome to today's Deep Dive. And I just want to warn you right up front, you might need to brace yourself for this one. Yeah, it is, it's a genuinely dark and just completely labyrinthine story. It really is. Today our mission is to unravel this horrifying web spun by a man named Terry Peter Resmison. Right, who the media eventually dubbed the chameleon killer. Exactly. And we're using a really comprehensive ABC News investigative report to guide us through this. Because we really want to understand how, you know, shifting identities allowed this predator to just evade capture for so long. Yeah, and how the relentless determination of families and like amateur sleuths and scientists finally brought his secrets out into the open. It's definitely not just a story about a killer's methods. I mean, it's a master class in how friends, science evolved. Oh, absolutely. And it also really highlights the devastating psychological ripple effect on all these families who were just left with a dead end for decades. Right, which is why for anyone who is fascinated by how

1:02the truth eventually surfaces no matter how deeply it's buried, this deep dive is for you. It's proof that secrets basically have an expiration date. OK, let's unpack this. Because the sheer scale of Resmison's aliases is wild. I mean, Curtis Kimball, Gordon Jensen, Larry van or Bob Evans. It's just an endless list of ghosts. Yeah. But to really get a grip on how this all unraveled, we aren't going to start chronologically back in the 1970s. No, that wouldn't make sense because he was basically invisible back then. Right. We are starting where his web finally started to tear apart, which is Richmond, California in 2002. Yeah, that's one authorities first officially tied a victim to him. So we have this woman, Unsunjune. She's a chemist mid 40s really established in her life. Very professional, well liked in her community. Exactly. And in the year 2000, she introduces her family and friends to her new boyfriend, this guy calling himself Larry Vanner, who we now know was Terry Rasmussen. Right. And you know, you think of a serial predator

2:04and you picture this swav charming guy who can just blend in anywhere. Like a literal chameleon. Yeah. But Vanner was the exact opposite of that. Unsunjune's friend, Renee Rose, had this viscerally awful reaction to him. Oh, her descriptions of him are just, they're actively repulsive. She said he had this gray pasty face. He chained smoked constantly. And this is a quote, he would grab and gobble up everything on the table and belch and eat more. And they just pass out on the couch. Yes. It's like he's not even trying to hide his nature. He's like this parasite. So how does someone with those outwardly repulsive habits infiltrate the life of a professional chemist? Well, it seems completely counterintuitive, right. But if you look at predators who have survived as long as Rasmussen and by 2000, they don't waste energy trying to be universally charming. That just too much work. Exactly. It's too much work. And it draws too much attention. So instead, they scan for very specific vulnerabilities. Like they're looking for a crack in the foundation.

3:04Right. We don't know Unsunjune's exact emotional state at the time. But a predator like him is looking for a void to fill. So it could be loneliness or maybe a desire to take care of someone? Yeah, they don't need to be Prince Charming. They just offer this highly specific emotional anchor that somehow outweighs the gross surface level stuff. And once he's in, that repulsive behavior actually works to his advantage, doesn't it? It really does. It becomes a tool for isolation. Because if he's that unpleasant to be around, her friends are naturally going to pull away. He doesn't even have to tell her not to see them. Right. He just makes the environment so incredibly toxic that the friends self-select out of her life. That is so insidious. But in June, 2002, Unsunjune disappears. And Renee Rose, the friend who hated the belching and the gray skin, she refuses to self-select out. She knew something was catastrophically wrong. Yeah, she did. And Vander starts throwing out all these excuses. First, he tells Rose that Unsunjune is taking care of her sick mother.

4:06Which is a classic stalling tactic. You don't pry when someone's dealing with a sick parent. Right. Then the story changes. And he says she's getting therapeutic help. Another boundary, you don't normally push. But then he gets really aggressive with it. He tells Rose that Unsunjune just, she decided she didn't like Rose anymore. That is such a calculated strike at her ego. He's totally betting that Rose will just be embarrassed and walk away out of pride. He's trying to be the sole gatekeeper of Unsunjune's life. Yeah. But he completely misjudged Renee Rose. He really did. She just flat out tells him, I want Unsunjune to tell me that herself. Or I'm getting the sheriff involved. Her loyalty is incredible. She basically calls his bluff. And she actually does it. She calls the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office. Which brings in Detective Roxanne Grunhide. And this interaction between the detective and vanner is just a masterclass in how psychopaths operate. Because Rose saw this belching slaw, but with the detective, vanner is suddenly this polite, soft-spoken older guy. Right. He deploys these twinkly blue eyes to foster trust.

5:07It's like a totally different person. What's fascinating here is how the detective's spot of the red flag. He's acting deferential, but his narrative structure is completely collapsing. Because he told too many different lies to too many different people. Exactly. When a story keeps changing, they're either making things up, forgetting their lies, or usually a bit of both. The cognitive load is just too heavy. And that buckling story gives them the probable cause to search his house, which leads us to the crawlspace. And the sheer chilling practicality of what they found. It's horrifying. They go in and see this massive mound of fresh cat litter, like four to five feet wide, two to three feet high. Right there on the floor. Yeah, just taking up the space with an axe, casually leaning against the wall right next to it. And the most disturbing part, there was absolutely no odor. Which is why the cat litter was so brilliant in a deeply sick way. Right. Because he went out, bought 10 massive bags of cat litter and built a DIY tomb.

6:07Because cat litter neutralizes ammonia and stops bacterial growth. He basically halted the decomposition process. So it resulted in mummification. And he's just living right above her, sitting on his couch, smoking. It shows a total detachment from human empathy. To him, her body was just a logistical nuisance. They dig into this litter and find unsunstimified foot wearing a flip flop. She died from blunt force trauma to the head. So they arrest him in November 2002. And because the physical evidence is so overwhelming, he pleads guilty in 2003. He gets 15 years to life. And to the California Justice System, that was a closed loop. They caught Larry Vanner. Oh, yeah. He goes to prison. He ages. And then in 2010, he just dies of natural causes in a prison hospital. And incredibly unceremonious death. When A. Rose had this really bittersweet reaction, she remembered the beautiful sunny day she found out unsumed was murdered, you know, seeing seagulls and blue skies while her world collapsed.

7:07That cognitive dissonance is so hard to process. And when she heard Vanner die, she said she wished he had lived longer just so he could suffer more. You really hear the desire for proportional justice there? Because a quiet death just feels so inadequate. But the craziest part is when he died in 2010, his identity was still a secret. He died as Larry Vanner. He took an absolute abyss of secrets to the grave. It wasn't until 2017 that authorities finally revealed Larry Vanner was Terry Peter Rasmussen. Which means to understand the magnitude of that revelation, we have to rewind completely. Yeah, we have to leave California in the early 2000s and jump back to 1985 to bear Brooke State Park in New Hampshire. We're talking about an entirely different era of law enforcement here. No national digital databases, no cell phones. It's 1985. There's this 11 year old kid, Jesse Margin, playing hide and seek with his friends in the woods near their trailer park. And they stumble onto something just utterly wrong for that environment. They find this rusted, dark blue, 55 gallons

8:08of skill, drums sitting off the trail. And kids being kids, they mess with it, they lift the top. And the sensory horror of that moment is just its permanent trauma. Jesse Margin said the smell was absolutely putrid. They literally pushed the barrel over, jumped on a four wheeler and fled in terror. Because the human ol' factory system is hardwired to detect the K. It triggers an immediate flight response. But here's the part that is just so hard to wrap my vet around. They run away and then four entire months pass. Yeah, a whole third of the year. Four months. It takes four months before a hunter happens to walk by, spots the barrel, sees bones and calls the police. How does a barrel of human remains sit there unchecked for that long? Well, you have to look at the psychology of kids in a rural area. Admitting they found something terrifying means admitting they were playing way out where they probably weren't supposed to be. So they were scared of getting in trouble? Right. And in the woods, fighting a dead deer or raccoon is normal. Yeah. They probably convinced themselves

9:08it was just an animal to cope with the fear. But what does that say about how easily evidence can vanish in the wilderness? Four months of New Hampshire weather. Exactly. Leaves, falls, snow freezes the ground, scavengers come. The forest basically absorbs the crime scene. So finally, the hunter calls it in. Officer Ron Mom plays there meets him. And he says the hunter was just very pale, totally in shock. And when they open the drum, they find a young woman and a little girl. Both killed by blunt force trauma. But in 1985, if there isn't a local missing persons report, the trail goes cold instantly. The databases just couldn't talk to each other across state lines. So they become the bearbrook jane does. And 15 years pass, it's now the year 2000. 15 years of just a static nightmare for that community. A detective named John Cody is looking around the area again on private property right next to the state park. And they find a second barrel, which totally shifts the profile. It means this wasn't a one-off panic dump. It was a calculated dumping ground.

10:08Inside this one, there are two more little girls, same blunt force trauma, same disposal method. Former detective John Cody had this quote that really stuck with me. He said the victims were disposed of like common trash. That phrase really emphasizes the sheer indignity of the crime. He wasn't just killing them. He was erasing their humanity, turning them into refuse. But the community in Alance Town, they refused to let that happen. They donated a grave stone for the victims of the first barrel. It's such a powerful act of empathy. The stone read, here lies the mortal remains known only to God with their estimated ages. Because the tragedy of unidentified victims places this massive psychological weight on the town, they became surrogate family for these nameless people. So for decades, these victims were just jane does. The killer is out there, eventually becoming Larry Vanner. And these victims have no names. Which brings us to the convergence of sleuthing and science. Yes. Because how do you solve a case like this? You apparently need a librarian and a genetic genealogist.

11:09It's the only way to bridge a 30-year gap. Let's talk about the amateur sleuth first, Rebecca Heath. She's a research librarian who just became completely obsessed with this cold case. And a librarian's skill set is perfect for this. They don't look for suspects. They look for anomalies in massive data sets. She's combing through these online message boards, and she finds this woman desperately searching for her missing relatives, a mother and two young daughters. And the timeline in ages matched the bearbrook victims perfectly. But the chilling detail, the thing that blew it wide open, was that the missing woman had once been married to a man named Rasmussen. That is the tripwire. That's the moment the digital footprint connects to the rusted barrels. Right. And while she's doing that Barbara Raeventer, a genetic genealogist, is working the science angle. If we connect this to the bigger picture, the science she was using was revolutionary. Right. Because normally you need the root of a hair for DNA, right? Exactly. For decades, legacy DNA testing required the root bulb, because that's where the intact nuclear DNA is.

12:11Like pulling a weed, you need the root. Right. The shaft of the hair is just dead, heavily carried in the cells. The DNA inside is totally shattered by UV light and time. So it's basically useless. It was until the next generation sequencing came along. Raeventer was able to extract these microscopic, fragmented pieces of DNA directly from the shaft and use massive computational power to reassemble the profile. That is insane. They taped a shredded document back together. Exactly. And then she uploads it to open source genealogy databases like GED match to build family trees backward. Here's where it gets really interesting. You have an amateur librarian calling in a tip from a message board. At the exact same time, this cutting-edge scientist is piecing together the DNA puzzle from a dead piece of hair. And they both point to the exact same truth in 2019. Which was only possible because back in June 2000, investigators decided to exume the bodies for DNA testing, even though the tech wasn't ready yet. They made a bet on the future and it paid off.

13:12So we have this press conference in June 2019. After decades, they aren't the bearbrook victims anymore. They have names. And we really need to shift the focus back to their humanity here. Who were the people in those barrels? First, we have Marliese Elizabeth Honey Church. She was born in 1954. Her sisters remembered her as this bubbly, quirky person. Very vibrant. She really loved her kids. She had two daughters, Marie von Born in 1971. And Sarah McWaters born in 1977. So Marliese is 24. Marliese rounds seven. And Baby Sarah is barely one. Now set the scene. Thanksgiving, 1978, in La Puente, California. Marliese brings her older boyfriend to meet her family. He introduces himself as Terry Rasmussen. And Marliese's mom immediately gets a bad feeling. There's this fateful argument where the mom says, he's too old for you. Why are you with him? It's that tragic parental intuition kicking in. But Marliese is an adult, so she gets defensive. She does. She grabs Marie and Sarah, leaves with Terry Rasmussen. And they are literally never seen again. She was 24 years old.

14:13And the family's agony for the next four decades is just it's unimaginable. Marliese's brother David Salomon and her sister Paula Hodges, they just spent years searching. It's what psychologists call ambiguous loss. It's the most traumatic type of grief because your brain can't process the trauma without proof of death. David described it as repetitive trauma. He said they just came to a dead end, came to a dead end, over and over. You can't grieve properly because grieving feels like giving up hope. But finally, in November, 2019, they got closure. They held a funeral in Allenstown. Marie and Marliese were buried together, finally, with their names on the stone. And baby Sarah was buried in Connecticut, near her father's family. David Salomon said, although this moment is bittersweet, they had their names back on this day. Having their names back is the ultimate victory over a killer who tried to erase them. It really feels like the end of the story, right? You want to tie a neat bow on it. The victims are named, the killer is dead. But this is where the story just drops out from under you. Yeah, because we have to pause the narrative here.

15:15Authorities fear there are more victims. Because remember, there were four bodies in those barrels. Right. We identified Marliese, Marie, and Sarah, who's the fourth victim. They called her the middle child. She was the second child in the 2000 barrel, aged between two and four. And for years, they assumed she was related to Marliese. But the DNA confirmed she is not related to Marliese, Marie, or Sarah, at all. Which completely shatters the profile of the crime. He introduced an outside child into this. And then in 2016 came the real bombshell. DNA confirmed this little girl was Terry Rasmussen's biological daughter. The psychological implications of that are just staggering. He murdered his own toddler and stuffed her in a barrel with strangers. It means he had absolutely zero paternal attachment. She was just as disposable as anyone else. But it raises the obvious question, who is her mother? Right. Barbara Raeventer has been working on this. And her timeline suggests the little girl was born in Texas, maybe around the Gulf Coast. Rasmussen might have been working on an oil rig down there

16:16at the time. And the mother's relatives might be from Pearl River County, Mississippi. But they still don't know who she is. They are essentially looking for a ghost. But the Salomon family, Marliese's family, they lovingly call this little girl Angel. They've kind of adopted her in their hearts. Detective Cody said the only reason he keeps doing interviews is to get Angel identified. But Angel's existence means there is almost certainly another victim out there, her mother. And that expands the map of terror even further. Because if we look at late 1981, another woman goes missing. Yes, Denise Bowden. She disappears with her six-month-old daughter and her boyfriend, Robert Yevons. Who was, of course, Rasmussen? Denise has never been found. But the story of her baby, Dawn, is wild. Rasmussen kept her. He renamed her Lisa. He claimed her is his own biological daughter for years. Until he just abandoned her at an RV park in 1986, and she was taken into protective custody, DNA

17:16proved he wasn't her dad. He used this kidnap baby as a prop for his new alias. But the most chilling detail to me is what happened when the police asked Little Lisa if she had any siblings. Oh, this part is so dark. She told them yes, but that they died eating grass mushrooms while they were out camping. Grass mushrooms. It's like a grim fairy tale. He casually explained a way murder to a toddler in a way she would repeat to authorities without raising immediate suspicion of foul play. It's a lie perfectly calibrated for a child's brain, accident on poisoning instead of murder. It shows how duply he understood manipulation. So we have Denise Bowden missing and Angel's mother missing. And that brings us to 1995 Sam Joaquin County, California. Where scavengers find a dump refrigerator in a muddy canal. Inside is an unidentified woman in advanced decomposition, blunt force trauma. Wrapped in a sleeping bag, a pillow, and blankets. This raises an important question about geographic profiling, because how do you connect a Jane Doe to a transient killer?

18:19They found a clue inside the fridge, a unique regional brand of milk. And the distribution area for that specific milk matched exactly where Rasmussen was living under an alias at that time. It's a brilliant piece of spatial and temporal reasoning. But she's still Jane Doe. We don't know if she's Denise Bowden or Angel's mother or someone else entirely. The map just keeps expanding from New Hampshire to California. So synthesizing all these takeaways. We saw how this man manipulated identities, Kimball, Jensen, Vanneur, Evans, Rasmussen, to slip through the cracks of a pre-digital society, leaving just absolute devastation everywhere he went. But we also saw how the persistence of friends like René Rose, the haunting memories of families, and the unstoppable march of genetic genealogy eventually caught up to him. The fingerprint of his identity was smudged, but science brought it back into focus. So what does this all mean? It means that while evil can hide behind a polite smile and an assumed name, it cannot outrun the combined forces of science and human memory. Secrets demand to be known eventually.

19:21And I want to leave you with a final, provocative thought to mull over in a world where we leave a digital footprint with every single step we take, our phones tracking us, our faces on doorbells. It's almost impossible to imagine a chameleon killer operating today. The modern world just wouldn't allow it. Right. But Terry Rasmussen's story forces us to look backward and wonder how many other shifting shadows from the 1970s and 80s are still out there, men who exploited the analog world to commit atrocities. How many are locked away and rested barrels or muddy canals, just waiting for a dog-id librarian or a scientist with a single strand of hair to finally give them their names back?