The Missing and the Theories

The Barrels:
The two barrels in Allenstown were one hundred yards apart and yet the barrel found in 2000 was beside the footpath that investigators in 1985 would have walked past every day. We considered the possibility that the little girls were NOT in that barrel in November 1985, that their remains were deposited there at a later time.

The Property: 
We were told by one of his relatives that Robert Callahan "took in a woman who had nowhere to go." As Callahan lived on the Allenstown property where the barrels were found during the years in question, we found this information disturbing but were never able to identify who this woman was. Callahan was incarcerated at the NH State Prison from 1991 to 1996 after being convicted for sexual assault of a minor. His court transcripts  reveal that he admitted molesting both boys and girls over a period of many years. Callahan died in NH in 2011.

                                                                Robert Callahan   

The Neighbor: 

Robert Steffen lived on Edgewood Drive in Bear Brook Gardens and went to prison in 1985 for molesting children. He used multiple aliases (Richard Holmes, Bob Stone, Bob Holmes, and Joe Howard) and died in prison in 1988. He was a man of rage and of secrets, once running his own obituary in a local paper. He frequently went on long, unexplained trips- to CA and TN. 

Robert Steffen

The Other Allenstown Case: 

Older people in Allenstown still remember the winter of 1969 when 11 yr old Debra Lee Horn disappeared from her home and was found the following summer in the trunk of a car in Sandown, nude and with probable head trauma, just like the girl found in the barrel fifteen years later. Is it just a coincidence that this tiny rural town has two similar unsolved murders?

Possible Victims:

"Woodlawn Jane Doe." She was thought to have been from the Boston area and was found in 1976. Could she have had a child with Rasmussen, a child who outlived her mother by four years or so?
                                                 

                                                                        

It seemed likely that the unrelated child's mother never reported her daughter missing because she had been killed as well. We considered this unidentified woman who died or was killed in 1985 and whose isotope testing shows likely New England residence. 

 

We considered two women missing out of Massachusetts in the 1970s- Rory Kesinger and Doris Tetreault. Both a little on the old end of the age estimates but geography and lack of information about their lives suggest they would be wise to rule out.

                                                                           

Another man who came to our attention during this research project was Pembroke NH child-pornographer Brian Schultz. 

"In an affidavit summarizing the results of a four-month investigation, FBI agents alleged that the defendants produced and distributed films depicting young women engaged in sexual activity with animals, children urinating on each other, children ingesting human feces and various bizarre sex acts involving children apparently as young as 6 years old ...Howard said he is "hoping against hope" that the investigation does not reveal that many local children were used in making these films.  But the affidavit quotes Schultz saying he filmed "several 13-year-old girls from Lowell, Massachusetts." Howard also said some of the children "were abducted from other parts of the country." We wondered if all of the children in Schultz's films were identified or whether some could have wound up discarded in barrels in the neighboring town.

And speaking of predators, this child sex trafficker came from or has lived in NH apparently. Anyone know where? 

Nicknamed "The Beast," Joshua David Brown has been accused of facilitating a child sex trafficking ring in Peru and some articles about him state that he has also been accused of killing two of his victims. 



This New Hampshire man has some disturbing convictions on his record and his native american roots caught our eye in light of information that has been discussed about the victims having shovel shape dentition (a trait sometimes found in those with first nation heritage, among others).

                                                  Edward C. Paul
                                Aliases: Paul Big Eagle, Charles Edward, Big Eagle Paul, etc.

AND then there were the theories about a situation like the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping, a captor fathering children with a girl he abducted years earlier. Implausible but the strange story of Suzanne Marie Sevakis comes to mind. We wondered about missing New England children such as Lisa Joy White and Debra Lee Spickler, both out of Tolland County, CT.

We looked at the New England runaways such as Maria Florence Anjiras who was once thought to be associated with a motorcycle club (later found to be a case of mistaken identity).

Thinking about motorcycle clubs brought us to the Die Hards, a group who held their annual barbecues in Allenstown. Freddie Comtois, one of their most notorious members, supposedly lived with a girlfriend in Bear Brook Gardens at one time although we never learned who she was. 

Jan 1982 Telegraph article:

 Comtois was hardly a model inmate. May 1983:

Apparently NH Dept of Corrections has a short memory because Comtois made it back to the NH State Prison and was reunited with his partner in crime, Raymond Glidden, before his death in the prison.

 

People familiar with the biker clubs of the day assured us that they would not have sanctioned the killing of children. Their treatment of women certainly was brutal.

And we wondered about a NH couple who went on a grisly killing spree in the 1980s. They killed at least three people, including the woman's child and dismembered her husband, so we wondered what other atrocities they might have committed.