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"I still can not believe it," Heath said Friday.
Officials revealed that they had identified three of the four victims found in barrels in 1985 and 2000 in Allenstown, New Hampshire. The woman, Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch, aged 24, also went to Marlyse McWaters. Two of the three girls were Marie Elizabeth Vaughn, 6, and Sarah Lynn McWaters, a year old, both girls from Honeychurch.
His first track did not work
In January 2017, investigators announced that a man named Bob Evans had probably killed the four female victims found in Bear Brook State Park. In August of the same year, they announced that "Bob Evans" was a pseudonym for Terrence "Terry" Rasmussen.
Rasmussen has had several names over the years. He was linked to the disappearance of a woman in New Hampshire in 1981, with whom he was dating and who was serving a prison sentence for the murder of his wife in California, when he died of natural causes in 2010.
Although the investigators identified Rasmussen as the man who probably killed the four victims of Bear Brook in 2017, the identity of these victims remained a mystery.
For years, helping people find their missing loved ones was a hobby for Heath. Combined with her interest in the Rasmussen case, she began trying to find potential matches for the victims in November 2017.
She looked in ancestral bulletin boards for terms such as "California", where Rasmussen had been arrested, or "sister gone" in the hope of finding a family member of the victim. Then she started compiling a list of names.
"I would just go through that list, and then I would start looking to see if they had public records, if the person was alive, if I could find records of their existence," Heath said. "If that's not the case, I'll pursue it a little further and reach out to the person who originally posted messages in search of their loved ones."
Heath said that he found an advertisement dating back to around 1999 about a relative looking for Sarah McWaters and her mother Marlyse McWaters. While she was doing other research for Marlyse McWaters, Heath met other members of her family in search of the same woman. It turned out that McWaters was also the mother of a daughter named Marie Vaughn.
In a Facebook group on the Rasmussen affair, Heath asked if these missing persons might be the victims found in Allenstown, but she did not get much answer. So, she dropped it.
She followed a year later
About a year later, Heath, who lives in Connecticut, was listening to a New Hampshire public radio podcast about the Bear Brook murders when news of the victims reminded him again of the woman who was looking for Sarah McWaters on this message board. .
"At that time, I was like, I needed to reach out to this woman," Heath said.
The list contained an email address. She tried to match the address to a Facebook profile. Heath contacted a woman to ask if she was the same person who had been posted to the ancestry.
In a few minutes, Heath received an answer. It was her.
Heath asked the parent if she had more information about Sarah and Marlyse McWaters. The woman began to share more details, including that Marlyse had married a man with the surname Rasmussen.
"Right there, my stomach jumped," said Heath. "It flipped in. I knew it right away.It's impossible for a woman to disappear with these kids with a guy bearing that last name, Rasmussen – it's just a coincidence far too simple."
Heath has yet to tell Sarah McWaters' relative about Rasmussen's criminal background, but she added that she had started contacting Marie Vaughn's relatives. Vaughn's parents told Heath that Vaughn's mother had left California with a man named Terry.
Everything came together in the same week
In less than two hours, Heath said she was on the phone with the police in San Bernardino, California. These authorities quickly relayed the information to investigators in New Hampshire, who were already examining DNA searches based on information from Marie Vaughn's family and other genetic databases.
Thanks to advances in DNA technology, investigators were able to obtain DNA profiles of degraded remains in barrels. Barbara Rae-Venter, a genealogy genealogist who also helped solve the Golden State Killer case, was able to confirm the identity of victims by researching genetic databases, according to New Assistant Attorney General Hampshire, Jeffrey Strelzin.
This, coupled with information provided by Heath and DNA samples from Sarah McWaters' family, allowed them to make the final decision.
"Her work and our work converged and it turned out she was right," Strelzin told CNN. "She did an excellent job in this case and an excellent search."
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